Ramage and the Dido Read online

And, Ramage admitted to himself, Southwick was quite right. He had summed up what war really was. Whether you served in a sloop, a brig, a frigate or a ship of the line, in the end it all boiled down to that one phrase: it’s either them or us.

  Yes, Southwick was quite right, but Ramage knew that as far as he was concerned he still had a guilty feeling about being the cause of the death of more than six hundred Frenchmen. Yet another part of him knew that if he had not been able to take the Junon like that, it might have been the Dido blowing up. He found he was getting confused.

  ‘What about the Sylphe?’ he asked Southwick, determined to break the train of thought.

  ‘The Heron’s hove to close to her. She seems to be well down by the bow. If you want my opinion, she’s sinking, and there’s not a chance of holding on with the pump.’

  ‘Well, I told Eames that if he didn’t think she could be saved he should take off the men and set fire to her.’

  Southwick sniffed and said: ‘We don’t have much choice. And good riddance to her: the Heron will have her work cut out getting the Requin back to England.’

  ‘Her share of the prize money should make up for it,’ Ramage said.

  ‘Yes, Eames is a lucky fellow. Or he will be, if he gets the Requin home safely.’

  ‘We’ll have to let him have some Marines,’ Ramage said. ‘He’ll have nearly five hundred prisoners to guard from the two Frenchmen.’

  ‘As long as we don’t have to take any to the West Indies with us,’ Southwick said. ‘Eames realises the problem?’

  ‘Yes, but I think he’ll be glad of some extra Marines.’

  Eames returned in the Heron an hour later to report that he had taken all the French off the Sylphe because in his opinion she would sink of her own accord within a couple of hours, and for that reason he had not set fire to her. Ramage could not see why the fact that she was going to sink should prevent him from setting fire to her, but he decided to say nothing.

  The more immediate problem was that the Heron had 211 Frenchmen from the Sylphe, and there were still 186 on board the Requin. How many men were needed to guard 397 Frenchmen? Plus nineteen from the Juno.

  When Eames came across to the Dido again, Ramage proposed dividing the prisoners into two sections, half in each frigate. The Heron’s Marines could guard the ones she had on board, and Ramage would provide twenty-five Marines from the Dido to guard those left on board the Requin.

  ‘I’ll let you have my fifth lieutenant and two midshipmen to handle the prize,’ Ramage said. ‘Fifteen of your seamen should be enough to sail her. Can you spare them?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll get ‘em back as soon as we get to Plymouth. ‘Fraid you’ll be losing your people permanently.’

  Ramage shrugged his shoulders. ‘That’s the problem with prizes taken when you are outward bound. If I meet many more people like you, I’ll arrive in the West Indies with a skeleton crew!’

  Two hours later, as Ramage watched, the Sylphe finally sank, as Eames had predicted.

  Southwick said: ‘That makes two out of two. We’ve attacked two ships and both have sunk. Or rather one blew up and the other sank. Either way they’re destroyed.’

  ‘Regard it as a precedent,’ Ramage said. ‘We must make a habit of it.’

  To Ramage’s surprise Southwick shook his head and took his hat off, running his fingers through his hair in a familiar gesture. ‘I can never get used to watching a ship sinking or blowing up. One minute she’s a beautiful object, floating and pleasing to the eye. The next minute, nothing. No, I’ll never get used to it. Not,’ he added hastily, ‘that that isn’t the way we should deal with the French. It’s just that I love the sight of ships, whatever nationality they are, and I hate to see them destroyed.’

  Ramage nodded his head in agreement. ‘I feel the same way, but while there’s a war on we must get used to it.’

  Ramage had to admit that the Reverend Benjamin Brewster was handling the funerals well, and he was thankful that the Dido carried a chaplain: he hated reading the funeral service, though he had done so all too often in the Calypso.

  Looking at the bodies lying on the deck, sewn up in their hammocks, Ramage could hardly believe how lucky the Dido had been. Bowen had eight wounded that he was treating down below, but only five men had been killed. Five, and he thought of the more than six hundred who had perished in the Junon.

  A plank had been fitted to the bulwarks by the mainchains, hinged so that the inboard end could be lifted up, and at the moment a body rested on it, covered by a Union Flag. Brewster read the service in a low, even voice and most of the Didos were gathered round him, bareheaded and listening attentively.

  The body belonged to one of the new Didos: Ramage did not recognise the name, except as an entry in the Muster Book, and he was relieved that it was not a Calypso. In fact, not one of the men killed had been a Calypso, a piece of chance which gave him grim satisfaction. Yet he felt it was wrong: he should not favour the former Calypsos; he now commanded the Dido, and every man on board should have an equal status.

  Now Brewster was saying that the men had lost a shipmate, and that somewhere a family had lost a son or a father, and a woman had probably been left a widow. The good thing was, Ramage realised, that Brewster sounded as though he cared. Ramage was reminded of a line by John Donne – something to the effect that ‘Each man’s death diminishes me’. Brewster gave the impression of being diminished, and Ramage guessed that the men sensed it.

  Then Brewster reached the end of the brief service and a couple of burly seamen up-ended the plank while a third held on to the Union Flag. The body in its hammock slid into the sea and vanished, the body weighted down by a couple of roundshot placed at the man’s feet before the hammock was finally sewn up.

  Brewster stood still, Prayer Book in hand, his vestments tugged by the wind, while the next body was placed under the flag on the plank. Once again he read the funeral service, and he had a happy knack of making it sound fresh; there was no sense that he was repeating parrot-fashion a service that he would have to repeat five times.

  Finally the plank tilted for the fifth and last time and Brewster led the men in a hymn. He had chosen one which was a favourite. The men sang it with gusto, and Ramage realised that as soon as they dispersed they would be chattering among themselves, happily, the last few grim minutes forgotten. It was not that these men were cold-blooded or hard-hearted: death was something they had to take in their stride. Dwelling on it would probably drive a man mad, so he mourned at the funeral, sang a hymn and meant it, and then went about his business, ready to go into action again.

  Chapter Ten

  Ramage took his Journal from the drawer. He noted the latitude – the Dido was now sweeping south and already down level with Guadeloupe – and the longitude, which put them about seven hundred miles short of Barbados.

  He still had to write his report on the Junon and Sylphe affair, ready for the admiral at Barbados, and he knew he must get it done quickly because the details were already fading in his memory.

  How was Eames getting on? He decided he did not envy him: getting the Heron back to Plymouth with all those prisoners on board, while shepherding the Requin, would be a constant worry. Apart from fearing that his own prisoners would rise on him, he must watch the Requin all the time, looking for signs of trouble on board. Ramage shrugged: Eames was quite content because – as he had freely admitted – he had never been lucky with prize money, and now he had head money, too, for all the prisoners he had taken from the Sylphe: head money – calculated on the number of prisoners taken – which had come without having to fire a single shot. Ramage could have made a claim for a share, but had decided against it because Eames had put up a spirited fight against the Requin.

  Distances, noon positions, wind directions and strength, courses steered: the facts required for his Journal were mundane: nowhere could he write how exciting it was to be commanding a ship of the line sweeping down to the West Indies in the Trade winds, feeling alive a
s the ship pitched and rolled her way westward and the sun was warmer every day.

  Nor, for instance, could one mention the flying fish spurting like small silver arrows out of the sea and following the crests and troughs until they vanished into the water again. Occasionally they flew high enough to land on deck – twenty or thirty feet – to flap about helplessly until snatched up by seamen who would then try to bribe the cook to boil them. They looked like fat herrings with wings and had much the same colouring and, one of the men had once told Ramage, much the same taste.

  The men liked watching the schools of dolphins which played round the ship from time to time. Play was the right word: they raced and cavorted round the ship like children playing chase in a street; they delighted in swimming fast across the Dido’s bow, as if in competition to see which could pass closest to the stem without actually touching. Their speed was amazing: they made the Dido, doing eight knots, look as though she was stopped in the water.

  And then, hundreds of miles from the nearest land, there were the birds – Mother Carey’s chickens, swooping low over the water but never seeming to eat or, for that matter, rest. And then came the – to Ramage – exciting day when they sighted their first tropic bird. All white, it always flew with strong wing beats, and was usually going east or west. The first he had seen this voyage passed eastward at eight o’clock in the morning and returned westward at six in the evening. Where had it come from? Where was it going?

  Ramage had often see colonies of them on the islands: they nested among the cliffs away from people – he remembered seeing them on the west coast of St Eustatius, the north-western side of St Martin and the south and west sides of Antigua, but one rarely sailed from one island to another without at least one of them flying overhead. The odd thing was one could never determine their destination: they never seemed to be bound for any particular island, yet they always flew in a dead straight line.

  Then there were the whales. One would suddenly become conscious of them surfacing almost alongside, silent and enormous, but occasionally one heard and saw them spouting water into the air. They, like the dolphins, were not alarmed by the sight of a ship of the line ploughing through the water: in fact the bulk seemed to attract them closer, instead of frightening them off.

  But one of the joys of a seventy-four, as far as Ramage was concerned, was ‘the captain’s walk’, the balcony built outside the cabin across the stern and stretching from one side to the other. He could pace along it, looking down at the Dido’s curling wake, and he found himself fascinated by the loops and whorls the ship left in the water. At night there was often heavy phosphorescence, when the Dido would seem to be leaving a wide trail of light in the water. At times it was light enough to read a newspaper, and once when talking to Aitken out there he had been able to see every detail of the Scotsman’s features.

  More surprising in the darkness were the antics of the fish caught in the Dido’s wake: he could see them swimming under water, leaving trails of phosphorescent light. It was ironic that one only saw them in the dark of night: in daylight the reflection from the top of the water prevented any sight of them. Then occasionally in daylight – as if to remind one that the sea was unfriendly – Ramage saw the fin of a shark cutting through the water. And from time to time there would be a sudden flurry as dozens of flying fish suddenly took to the air, or other fish leapt out of the water in a desperate attempt to escape, as some predator attacked them. The effect was the same as throwing a heavy stone into the middle of a pond – the splashes of escaping fish radiated outwards like the spokes of a wheel.

  Stafford put down his mug and pointed at Gilbert. ‘Yus, you’re going to enjoy the islands. Why, you’ll be sucking the monkey with the best of them!’

  ‘Shall I? Why should I like the islands?’

  ‘They’re so beautiful – every one different. And the sea so clear that in places you can see the bottom in ten fathoms.’

  ‘But what is this monkey?’ Gilbert inquired.

  ‘Ha, that’s a treat in store. You know what a coconut is like?’

  Gilbert shook his head, so Stafford described it.

  ‘This shell,’ he added, ‘is full o’ what they call milk, or coconut water, and it’s very refreshing to drink. You just cut off the top o’ the shell or punch an ‘ole in it.’

  ‘What’s all that got to do with monkeys?’

  ‘Well, last time I saw it done a young midshipman was taking a party of us on shore, and it was very hot. Very green, this young lad; he’d never heard of sucking the monkey. So we asked him if we could buy some of this old lady’s coconuts, so we could drink the coconut water. He agreed, so we paid up and soon all of us were sucking the monkey.’

  ‘Oh, I see: drinking the coconut water is called sucking the monkey,’ Gilbert said. ‘I don’t think that’s very funny.’

  ‘It’s not. We weren’t drinking coconut water! We were drinking rum: what the old ladies sell is not a coconut full of coconut water but a coconut filled with rum – that’s sucking the monkey! The poor midshipman never did find out why we suddenly got so cheerful.’

  ‘Drinking rum in the hot sun just gives you a headache,’ Gilbert protested.

  ‘It does,’ Stafford agreed. ‘I was a lot younger then. But you’ve come across it, haven’t you Jacko?’

  The American nodded. ‘I remember once every man in a working party had two coconuts each and got so drunk he couldn’t walk straight. Neither the midshipman nor the first lieutenant had ever heard of sucking the monkey, so they never did discover how the men got at the rum.’

  ‘Rum must be very cheap.’

  ‘Yus, and easier to find than water. You’ll see the sugar growing like ‘normous grass when it’s ripe – and you’ll get fed up with the stink of molasses, which is what they make from the sugar. Strange to think that rum comes from stuff that looks like overgrown grass.’

  ‘Very overgrown,’ Jackson said. ‘It stands higher than a man when it’s ready to be cut.’

  ‘That’s what the slaves are kept for,’ Stafford explained. ‘They plant and weed and then cut the cane. Hard and hot work in the boiling sun.’

  ‘What else is there beside sucking the monkey?’ Gilbert inquired.

  ‘If you mean tricks to play on midshipmen, that’s about the only one. But to eat – there’s more fruit than you could dream of. Oranges you buy by the kitbag, then there’s bananas and pawpaw – just you wait until you go to market: the old ladies have it all spread out on the ground and you just choose what you want.’

  ‘But I hear there are things like yellow fever and blackwater which take you off in a couple of days…’

  ‘Oh yus, there’s plenty of that. I know of one frigate that lost thirty men from yellow fever in a week. Ho yus, yer got to stay alive if yer going to enjoy the West Indies.’

  ‘How do you do that?’

  Stafford shrugged his shoulders. ‘Yellow fever can strike whether you’ve just come out or you’ve been in the islands for years – so I’m told, though I reckon the longer you’ve been out, the less chance o’ getting it. But there are a lot more fevers, and bad cuts can go gangrenous very quickly, so watch out. Mr Bowen’s been out here a lot and he’s very good – about as good a surgeon as you could wish for. He won’t make much work for that parson – leastways, I don’t ‘spect so. That parson’s got a burying sort o’ voice, I must say. He let himself go when we buried those five chaps. Still,’ he added philosophically, ‘if you’re going ter go, he gives you yer money’s worth.’

  ‘I must say you make it all sound very inviting,’ Gilbert said mildly. ‘If the rum doesn’t get you, the yellow fever will, and if you cut yourself there’s always gangrene!’

  Stafford laughed and said: ‘Don’t get too depressed. The West Indies is the favourite station for Jacko and Rosey and me – better than the Mediterranean. You’ll like it – if you live long enough!’

  Barbados came up out of the haze, long and low on the western horizon, just as S
outhwick had calculated. As usual the outline of the island was faint, blurred by the spray blowing inland as the rollers crashed into the rocky shore, rollers which were uninterrupted as they swept across the Atlantic from the coast of Africa.

  Ramage’s clerk, Luckhurst, had made a fair copy of the captain’s report on the actions against the Sylphe, Junon and Requin, and Ramage had signed it. The weekly accounts were up to date and Ramage had inspected the midshipmen’s journals, which were supposed to be filled in daily and shown to the captain each week. As far as Ramage could see they were an indictment of the midshipmen’s literacy: only two of them had produced anything which could pass for a journal. On the other hand, one of them was almost outstanding: he had drawn in charts showing how the Dido had manoeuvred in the actions against the frigate and the ship of the line, and he had done a watercolour painting showing the Junon blowing up. It was what a journal should be. Ramage had rejected six others, telling Aitken to warn the owners that they must do better.

  Gradually Barbados changed from a bluish blur to a brown curve on the horizon and then, as the Dido approached, slashes of green could be seen. Through the glass these showed up as stands of palm trees and fields of sugarcane. The palms were mostly along the coast with the cane spreading inland, acre upon acre. There was no doubt where Barbados’ wealth came from.

  Southwick tucked his telescope under his arm and remarked to no one in particular: ‘Well, welcome back to the land of the sugar barons.’

  ‘Are you glad to be back?’ Ramage asked.

  ‘I am at the moment, but whether I stay that way depends on what the admiral has for us.’

  ‘It can’t be anything too bad.’

  ‘Don’t trust admirals,’ Southwick said darkly.

  ‘Well, I haven’t heard much about Rear-Admiral Samuel Cameron, so he can’t be too bad.’

  Southwick shook his head and sniffed. ‘Don’t forget we’ve been in the Mediterranean. Time flies. Trafalgar was months ago, hard as it is to believe. I didn’t get a chance to talk to anyone from the West Indies convoy that came into Spithead just before we sailed.’