Governor Ramage RN r-4 Page 13

  Picking up the telescope and balancing himself, Ramage looked round at the convoy. The merchantmen appeared to be taking very little notice of the flurry of signals: each one had a cluster of men working aloft. Four had topsail yards upended and being lowered to the deck; a dozen would be lowering them any moment.

  "They look odd now, don't they," Southwick said. "Like men with their heads shaved."

  "They work fast enough at a time like this," Ramage commented. "Surprising how slow they can be with routine things like keeping their position."

  "Yes, I'll be damned if I can understand it. After all, we're protecting 'em. We don't like escorting 'em any more than they like having us chase 'em up."

  "Surely that's it," Ramage said. "Sending down masts and yards because bad weather's coming on - well, that's a natural piece of seamanship: they'd be doing that pretty smartly even sailing alone in peacetime. But cramming on sail to obey an order from an escort - that's not seamanship: that's being chased about by the Navy."

  "Hadn't thought of that. Excuse me a moment, sir," he said hurriedly and lifted the speaking trumpet. "Aloft there, mainmast: Jenkins, unreeve that signal halyard. You'll have it a'foul o' everything in a moment!"

  The fact is, Ramage told himself, the Master will make a better job of all this if I'm not on deck. As Southwick turned back, Ramage said: "I've some work to do below. Call me if..."

  Chapter Nine

  The night was the worst either Ramage or Southwick could remember. By midnight the wind had increased from a fresh gale to near storm force and the Triton, down to the storm canvas that Jackson and the men had been reinforcing, was labouring and plunging like a bull trying to get out of deep thick mud. Up to now the seas were not as big as either man had expected, but they would build up within a few hours and the wind would probably increase.

  Throughout the night Ramage or Southwick had stood by the men at the wheel; down below more stood by at relieving tackles which had been clapped on the tiller. Up to now they had not been needed, but they could have the ship under control in a matter of minutes if anything happened to the wheel steering.

  Until the rain started, the convoy - judging from the pinpoints of light displayed by each ship - was holding together better than either Ramage or Southwick had dared dream. Ramage flipped up the peak of his sou'wester and looked to leeward as he spoke to the Master.

  "At least the water isn't too cold."

  " 'Bout all that can be said for it, sir," Southwick bellowed. "Just as dam' wet as the North Sea. And twice as salty - my eyes are as sore as if I had sand in 'em."

  "Mine too. Well, we haven't seen any rockets."

  "Not for want o' looking. That's why I've got so much salt in my eyes. Can hardly believe it: all those mules so close to each other - in this weather."

  "Well, they were until the rain started. Might be a different story now. Doubt if we'd see rockets with this visibility."

  "An hour or so until dawn," Southwick shouted, and then added: "Listen to that!"

  A prolonged gust seemed to pick up the Triton and shove her through the water like a goose landing clumsily.

  Ramage tapped Southwick's arm. "We'll have to hand the main trysail, otherwise we'll never find the convoy at daybreak."

  "At the speed we're making in the gusts it can only be astern!" Southwick yelled with a grim laugh, and strode off in the rain to call the watch.

  A few minutes later, with the main trysail furled and only the fore trysail pulling - just a few square feet - the brig had not slowed down appreciably, and Ramage sensed that the wind had increased considerably even in that short time.

  Southwick rejoined him, wiping the spray from his eyes, and said: "Gained nothing out of that. We'd have had to hand it anyway. If the wind pipes up any more, I reckon we'll be going too fast even under bare poles."

  "Don't forget your mules will be doing the same," Ramage reminded him. "Probably been doing it for the past couple of hours."

  "It's one way of making sure you don't get taken aback!"

  Leaving Southwick beside the men at the wheel, Ramage walked aft to the taffrail, carefully timing his movements with the violent pitch and roll. Then he looked aft. The Triton's wake in the darkness was a broad band of turbulent and phosphorescent water stretching out astern over the waves like a bumpy cart track rising and falling over rolling hills. The seas were getting big. Certainly the darkness exaggerated them, but they looked like enormous watery avalanches rushing down on the ship from astern. Yet each time it seemed she must be overwhelmed, the stern began to lift and the wave crest slipped under the brig like a hand moving beneath a sheet.

  He was frightened, but not by the size of the seas and the strength of the wind at the moment, even though they were higher and stronger than any he'd ever seen before. They didn't frighten him, but they gave him an idea of what the hurricane itself would be like, and that was frightening. A door opening slowly onto terror and possibly death.

  What happened when the wind went over sixty knots? Men could only guess at the strength it finally reached. A planter in Barbados who had been in a hurricane had told him that the wind seemed almost solid in its strength, scouring paint off those houses it did not destroy and snapping mature palm trees a dozen feet from the ground. If the prospect was frightening for him, Ramage tried to imagine how frightening the present storm must seem to Maxine. At least he knew from experience what a well-found ship could stand, and from that experience he could also make a guess.

  He went and stood with Appleby, who had just taken over from Southwick as officer of the watch. The young Master's mate was nervous and jumpy. Ramage talked to him for a few minutes and found he was not scared of the storm but slowly cracking up under the responsibility of handling the ship. In an emergency, Ramage realized, when a couple of seconds might make all the difference in avoiding disaster, it was unfair to leave the lives of the Tritons in Appleby's hands. On the pretext of making sure he had enough sleep for the coming day, Ramage sent the Master's mate below and took over his watch. From now on, until the hurricane blew itself out, he and Southwick would have to stand watch and watch about.

  Dawn came slowly, as if reluctant to light up the terrifying scene. The surge of the seas was flinging the Triton around as if she was a chip of wood instead of a hundred-foot-long ship of war weighing almost three hundred tons. The wind and rain seemed solid, like an invisible maniac pushing with incredible strength, screaming with almost unbelievable shrillness, and making it hard to breathe.

  As he clung on to the thick breeching of a carronade, Ramage wondered in the greyness, where the wind and spray and rain seemed one, how much of it the human mind could stand. His mind, anyway. Many men made of sterner stuff than he could probably endure a week of this; but he knew the prospect of another seven hours, let alone days, made him feel sick with anxiety.

  If only the ship would stop this blind pitching and rolling for a minute. Any moment now one or both of the masts must go by the board; any moment one of these enormous great seas rolling up astern must smash down on the taffrail, pooping the ship, sweeping the deck clear of men, guns and hatch covers. She'd broach and then, lying over on her beam ends, she'd fill and founder, like a bucket tipped over in a village pond.

  Water was pouring down Ramage's neck: the cloth he was wearing as a scarf was sodden and instead of preventing the spray on his face from trickling into his clothes, it seemed to be channelling it into torrents so that his clothes were soaked beneath the oilskins. He'd long since given up emptying his boots; he just squelched from one foot to the other. The Tropics, he thought viciously, are for pelicans and drunken planters. The former are adapted to the weather, and the latter can forget it in bottles of their own rum. And mocking-birds can just laugh it off and twitch their tails.

  Suddenly he realized that the grey of dawn was spreading and he could make out the dark bulk of the wheel and the group of shadowy men standing up at it; the seas had grey caps and he could see more detail of their
wild movements.

  Southwick lurched over to him and he could see enough of his face to be shocked by its weariness. The Master seemed to have aged ten years overnight. The ends of his white hair hung out from under his sou'wester in spiky tails, giving him the appearance of an anxious porcupine, and the eyes and cheeks were sunken.

  "Lookouts aloft, sir?"

  "No," Ramage yelled back, "there'll be nothing in sight, and even if there was, we couldn't do anything except run before this weather."

  "Aye, sir, that's my feeling."

  But both men were wrong. Within twenty minutes, when they could see several hundred yards in the grey light, a lookout came scrambling back along the larboard side, clutching on to the main rope rigged fore and aft as though he was climbing.

  "Larboard bow, sir," he gasped. "Ship, mebbe five hundred yards; a merchantman under bare poles I reckon, but I only saw her as we came up on the crest of a wave."

  Ramage was leaning against the carronade in a daze caused partly by weariness and partly by the noise of the wind.

  "Splendid," he said automatically. "You're keeping a good lookout."

  As the man turned to go back Ramage beckoned to Jackson, whose eyes and nose could just be seen peering out from a glistening black cylinder. The American must have tarred his sou'wester and long oilskin coat very recently.

  "Up aloft," Ramage shouted. "Larboard bow, five hundred yards, probably a merchantman. And have a good look round for anyone else. There's a glass in the binnacle box drawer - if you can use it."

  In the five minutes Jackson was aloft it grew appreciably lighter, and the lighter it became the lower sank Ramage's spirits. He lurched to the taffrail, hollow-eyed and unshaven, grasped it with both hands and looked aft, forcing himself to stare at what frightened him.

  The seas were so huge he knew he'd wronged many men in the past when they'd described such weather and he'd assumed - with smug superiority - that they were exaggerating. Even allowing for how cold and tired and hungry he was, and knowing this affected his judgment, he was certain that what he looked at was worse. Those men had been describing hurricanes, and he had to face up to the fact that the Triton was now in a hurricane. This was no brief tropical storm which seemed worse than it was because the preceding weeks of balmy weather had softened a man. Some time during the night, the storm had turned into a hurricane, just as earlier the gale had increased to a storm.

  He stared at the waves, fascinated and yet fearful, like a rabbit facing a weasel. All his seagoing life he had dreaded this day. Here at last was what few sailors had experienced, and what fewer still had survived. In the Indian Ocean it was called a cyclone, in the Pacific it was a typhoon and in the Caribbean a hurricane. Like death, it went by different names in different languages, but was still the same thing.

  The seas were so enormous he did not even try to guess their height, but he had to tilt his head back to be able to look up at the crests from under the brim of his sou'wester. They came up astern like great fast-moving mountain ranges, one steeply sloping forward edge threatening to scoop up the ship, the curling, breaking crest ready to sweep the decks clear of men and equipment. It was followed by another whose forward edge seemed almost vertical, like a cliff, and so sheer the Triton's stern could never lift in time to avoid it crashing down on the ship, crushing it to matchwood. But, in a series of miracles, her stern did lift, and the crests did pass under her, producing even more prodigious pitching.

  On and on came the mountains of water, each one fearful because its power was in itself, its own enormous weight set in motion by the wind. He watched each crest, a curling, roaring, hissing jumble of bubbling white water. The Triton was making about four knots with not a stitch of canvas set and her wake showed on each wave's face as a double line of inward-spinning whorls, like the hair-springs of watches.

  Every few minutes an odd and often small wave, instead of coming up dead astern and meeting the ship squarely, ran in from a slight angle and she lifted slowly and awkwardly, the crest slapping hard on the quarter and squirting water up the space round the rudder post.

  The quarter was where the danger was: all of Southwick's efforts with the helmsmen were devoted to making sure the Triton drove off dead to leeward, so every wave arrived squarely at the transom. A heavy wave catching her on one quarter, instead of rushing beneath the ship and lifting her squarely, would push the stern with it, forcing the bow round the opposite way. In a second the ship would broach, to lie broadside and vulnerable to the seas.

  These seas were big enough, much more than big enough, to lift her up and throw her flat, so that with her heavy masts and lower yards lying in the water and acting as a weight on one end of a seesaw, she would not come up without the masts being cut away. Come up that is, providing the pathetically small shell of a hull did not fill with water...

  A moment's inattention on the part of the officer of the watch or quartermaster; a momentary mistake by the men at the wheel or one of them slipping on the streaming, sloping deck and hindering his mates as they spun the spokes one way or the other and the Triton would broach. Or the wheel ropes would part, so that the thick tiller would slam across and splinter as the waves shoved the rudder hard over.

  A shroud parting and a mast going by the board ... The rudder itself being smashed ... Springing the butt end of a plank below the waterline, letting tons of water pour in, or even springing one above the waterline, with these seas ... A carronade breaking adrift from its lashings and crashing from one side of the deck to the other, smashing bulwarks and killing men ... Each possibility flashed through Ramage's mind as fast as a fencer's lunge and riposte.

  Suddenly he realized that in facing aft like this he was staring not at the sea but at fear. Nothing was to be gained by it, except perhaps, after thirty seconds or so, an additional warning about broaching. Making the seamen look aft for five minutes before a spell at the wheel would not encourage them to be more careful; they'd be so damned scared they'd probably make mistakes.

  Jackson was tapping his arm to attract his attention above all the noise: that in itself was significant. Few seamen in few ships would risk doing that, however great the emergency, because they had been taught from their first day in their first ship that an unscrupulous lieutenant could turn it into "striking an officer...", an offence carrying the death penalty.

  "Four ships!" Jackson shouted.

  Ramage ducked down below the taffrail, motioning the American down beside him, where they were slightly sheltered from the howling wind.

  "Are you sure?"

  Jackson wiped his eyes with his knuckles; he too was tired, his face pinched with weariness and cold. Cold, in the Tropics...

  "Certain, sir. One fine on the larboard bow, one on the starboard beam - I think it's the Greyhound - and, two on the starboard quarter. The one on the larboard bow is close - the Topaz, sir, bare poles, and seemingly all right. Rest are maybe a mile off. Reckon there are several more ships around, but a mile's as far as I can see with this light and the rain and the spray."

  So Yorke was all right, and Maxine...

  "No sign of the Lion?"

  It was an unnecessary question, since the American would have reported if he'd seen her, but Jackson shook his head. He had been with Ramage too long, and knew too much about the responsibility that rested on the young lieutenant's shoulders, to be impatient.

  Looking at Ramage's haggard face in the half light, the American was thankful, in a curious way, for his own limitations. Leaving aside his country of birth, which legally prevented it ever happening, he knew he did not have the capacity for command. It took a type of man that he understood but was not. The man who, presented with a terrible decision to make and limited time, went off to a quiet corner - and came back inside the required time with the decision made, much as another man might go below and change his shirt. No doubts, no asking other people's opinions, no delays, no second thoughts ... and of all the leaders he'd met, Mr Ramage was the coolest of them all.
Jackson knew he sometimes had second thoughts, not about the rightness of a decision, but more often because men - his own men - might get killed or wounded as a result of it. A youth who was a father to sixty or more men, all but a couple of whom were a good deal older than him.

  That was where Mr Southwick was so good, Jackson realized: the old Master understood very well this humane aspect of Mr Ramage's personality, and the American had noticed he was usually around at the right moment - and with the right remark - whenever the situation arose. Ironical, Jackson thought to himself, that a young captain needed an older man to help him be ruthless when necessary. In Jackson's previous experience of young officers, the older men were usually trying to persuade them to be less ruthless; to be more careful of their men's lives.

  Telling Mr Ramage it was the Topaz over on the larboard bow certainly cheered him up: Jackson was pleased with the way he'd done it - and pleased he was the one to pass the word. He still wasn't sure what it was all about, but the Captain obviously thought a lot of the ship - the people in her, anyway. Must have been a bad half an hour for him when the blasted Peacock...

  When Ramage lurched over to the binnacle to discuss Jackson's report with Southwick, the American worked his way a few feet forward to the spot between the mainmast and the coaming round the wardroom companionway. There was precious little shelter anywhere on deck in this weather, he thought gloomily. Just that somehow the thickness of the mainmast, and the yard overhead, gave the impression of sheltering under a tree.

  "Move over," Jackson shouted at the crouching figure of Stafford.

  "Oh, it's you. Wotcher see up there?"

  "The Topaz on the larboard bow, the Greyhound frigate on starboard beam and a couple of mules astern."

  "The flagship?" Rossi asked. "Is sunk?"

  "Not in sight, anyway."