Ramage's Signal Read online

  “We’re trying to stop the action,” Ramage explained. “Within a day or so, the Spanish naval authorities at somewhere like Cartagena are going to get word from a fishing boat or a coastal vessel that a French convoy of six ships is sailing westward. They’ll know that any convoy that far west can only be intended for Cartagena: there’d be no point in sending it to Almeria or Málaga because, militarily, Spain stops at Cartagena. Yet the reports will say the convoy is well to the westward of Cartagena and still steering west.

  “So obviously the Spanish Admiral at Cartagena will make a signal to the French Admiral at Toulon, using the semaphore, asking him what it is all about, because almost certainly he would be the person to send off such a convoy and the only one who could explain why it is passing (has passed, I hope) Cartagena.

  “The semaphores rattle and crash, and the Admiral in Toulon reads the signal, realizes he has not sent off any convoy to the westward, and sends back a signal to Cartagena ordering the convoy to be intercepted.

  “The Admiral in Cartagena sends two or three frigates to sea and they chase poor old Aitken and the rest of them, and they end up dead or prisoners.”

  “Unless,” Southwick said with one of his cheerful sniffs, “the Admiral in Cartagena can neither send nor receive a signal by semaphore for two or three days, by which time Aitken will be rounding Europa Point.”

  “Exactly,” Ramage said. “I’m gambling that the Spanish Admiral is too lazy or too nervous of the French to send out frigates without orders. He may not have any—that’s more than likely—and expects the Admiral at Toulon to order ships out from Alicante or Barcelona. It will take time for him to discover that Collioure’s tower is out of action. Messengers on horseback will need a day to take a message from Port Vendres to station 27, and with luck semaphore replies will by then be held up by darkness between here and Toulon. With the French and Spanish benighted, Aitken has an excellent chance.”

  “Everyone in that convoy will owe us a lot,” the Marine corporal said happily, sucking his teeth at the prospect.

  “We’ll see about that,” Ramage said, “but in the meantime this is what we do, starting at sunset. First, we need half a dozen pairs of handcuffs …”

  CHAPTER TWENTY - ONE

  THE CONVOY was making good time and Aitken was pleased that his noon sight put them about twenty miles south of Cabo de Gata while dead reckoning had them forty miles short of it. Here, off the south-eastern tip of Spain, Europa Point was a clear run of a little under two hundred miles to the westward. In fact they would have to sail more than that “through the water” to overcome the eastgoing current constantly flowing into the Mediterranean from the Atlantic, but Aitken knew that it was more important that Cartagena, the last of the big naval ports, was now well behind them.

  Almeria, just west of Cabo de Gata, was more of a commercial port, unlikely to hold any ships of war. From there to Europa Point and the safety of Gibraltar was only Málaga, again a commercial and not a naval port.

  It was a miracle that the convoy had sailed so far without meeting a French ship-of-war that, as a matter of routine, would ask why the convoy was without an escort and, because it was so far west, whither it was bound. Until the last few hours, Aitken could always (using Orsini as his “voice”) claim to be bound for Cartagena, and accept the scorn of a French frigate captain at being so bad a navigator to get so far south. Now he was too far into the channel between Spain and the Barbary coast to use that story.

  He was well satisfied with the way his ships were being handled. He had divided the six of them into two columns of three and knowing the difficulty of sailing at night in the wake of a ship showing only a dim stern lantern, he led the larboard column with the bosun following him in the Rosette schooner and Rennick bringing up the rear in the Matilda. The starboard column was led by Kenton and the Golondrina, followed by Orsini in the Caroline brig, and then Martin with the Bergère. This left Orsini conveniently placed should his French or Spanish be needed—but also kept him safely between Kenton and Martin in case his station-keeping was erratic.

  Aitken was surprised that the Calypso had not joined them. Not that Mr Ramage had said he would, but both he and Southwick would soon get exhausted standing watch and watch about, and they were deprived of most of their good petty officers. It was typical of the Captain’s fairness that he had made sure the six ships of the convoy were well manned, although if they did not get through or anything happened to the Calypso, their Lordships would put Mr Ramage on the beach for the rest of his life. Still, there—Aitken’s thoughts were interrupted by a hail from the foremasthead.

  “Deck there! The Bergère has just hoisted a signal, sir.” Aitken picked up his glass and took his copy of the French signals from the binnacle box drawer.

  Orsini had written a translation beside each of them and Aitken read the two hoists of flags without difficulty. The first said, “Strange sail in sight” and the second gave the direction, “In the north-east quadrant.”

  “Acknowledge that signal,” Aitken told the bosun’s mate and shouted to the lookout aloft: “Keep your eyes open; there’ll be more signals soon.”

  Aitken’s first reaction as a naval officer had been to detach one of his ships to investigate, and when he realized it he grinned to himself. Habits were hard to break. For the last two days he had been the master of a French merchant ship and, as senior of the other French masters, the commodore of the convoy. And an unescorted convoy, unless attacked by a squadron of Algerine pirates—the only danger along this coast—maintained its course, particularly with a good southerly wind and fine weather, minding its own business.

  North-east quadrant. So the strange ship was on the convoy’s starboard quarter and well down to leeward—too far away to be seen from the Sarazine but just close enough for her topsails to appear over the horizon and be sighted, tiny white specks, by the masthead lookout in the Bergère, the nearest ship. Merchant ships did not have lookouts at the masthead; ships of war, and prizes, did.

  Martin would be pleased at being the first ship to spot the stranger, but they had sighted many strange sail in the last day or so, most of them small trading vessels, the larger ones preferring to sail in convoy.

  What mattered now was whether or not the bearing of this strange sail remained the same. If it changed, then she was merely another ship on passage somewhere; if it stayed the same, then the ship must be beating her way up towards the convoy, and that could mean only trouble, because sailing on that course would otherwise take a ship to the Barbary coast, an unlikely destination.

  He hoped Martin would have the sense to keep signals flying for as little time as possible. They had to use French signals and flags to keep up the pretence of a French convoy, but a French ship-of-war might get suspicious if too many signals were made across the convoy simply because all merchant ships, whatever their nationality, were as loath to make signals as small boys to wash behind their ears.

  He picked up the slate and after a glance at his watch noted down the time of the signal. The “strange sail” could be an Algerine pirate. If she was, would she attack the convoy? Probably not as such but instead would try to cut out a single ship at the rear, Martin’s Bergère or Rennick’s Matilda most likely, because any of the other four going to help would then have to beat back to windward. The Algerine would know enough to guess that in the event of an attack the convoy would in fact most probably panic and scatter and leave the victim to her fate …

  More than ten minutes elapsed before the Bergère’s next signal, which the French system forced Martin to make in three parts:

  “Strange sail in sight … In the north-east quadrant … Is a frigate.”

  “Acknowledge,” snapped Aitken. He was both annoyed and pleased. Martin was being sensible in repeating the signal “In the north-east quadrant” because that was obviously intended to tell Aitken that the vessel was deliberately steering for the convoy, not passing by. By identifying the ship as a frigate, Martin mad
e it almost certain that the frigate was the Calypso. Yet … yet … Martin would himself have gone aloft with a telescope and had a good look. A ship identifiable as a frigate should also be recognizable as the Calypso because of the cut of her sails, even though her hull might still be below the horizon.

  Aitken then cursed at his own slowness: Martin would have done all that and not have recognized the masts and sails as the

  Calypso, so his signal meant just what it said—that the vessel was a “strange sail” and “a frigate,” but not the Calypso.

  Even then Aitken’s Scottish caution made him think again. Supposing the frigate was the Calypso? How, using the French signal book, could Martin signal the fact? Aitken picked up his handwritten copy and looked at the last few pages, which gave in alphabetical order the names of all the ships of war in the French Navy, and the three-figure numbers of each of them so that by hoisting the three flags representing the numbers they could identify themselves. As he had guessed, the Calypso was still in the list under her original French name, although a neat ink line had crossed it out along with a dozen others—ships which had been sunk or captured. Yes, Martin was a bright lad; he would have thought of that and he would have given the three figures as the fourth part of his signal, knowing that it would be enough of a clue to set Aitken looking in the back of the signal book.

  “Deck there! Fore-topmast lookout here!”

  “Deck here,” Aitken replied.

  “I can make out a sail on the starboard quarter of the convoy, sir. Three masts, royals flying …”

  “I’ll send someone up with a glass!”

  Aitken looked around, then decided to go himself, grabbing the telescope and making his way to the shrouds. Two minutes later, breathless, his shin muscles feeling as though they had been stretched three inches, he was standing beside the lookout. The Sarazine was surprisingly narrow below them; the mast seemed to be gyrating round the circumference of a fifty-yard circle.

  The seaman pointed, and beyond the Bergère Aitken caught sight of a fleck of white.

  “Royals set, eh?” he said doubtfully as he pulled out the eyepiece of the telescope. “You must have sharp eyes.”

  “Ah have that, sir,” the man said firmly, thinking to himself that in Cumberland they poached just as skilfully as these Scotsmen; aye and without all that funny talk and across hills just as high.

  “You’re right,” Aitken conceded after three minutes’ struggle with the telescope, trying to keep it focused. “Here,” he said, “take the glass and see if you think she’s the Calypso.”

  “Ah know that she isn’t without needing the glass, sir,” the man said, “but a bring-’em-near might tell me more.”

  Aitken thought back to his days as a midshipman, when the masthead seemed a second home, either because he had been mastheaded as a punishment or the captain wanted a ship identified. Those days, he thought ruefully, are long past. It was not the advance of old age; merely that he had lost the habit—and his nimbleness.

  “French 36-gun frigate, sir; I forget the name of the class and I couldn’t pronounce it even if I recalled it. Beating up for us, sir.”

  “Right,” Aitken said, starting down the shrouds, “keep a sharp lookout with those poacher’s eyes!”

  As soon as he reached the deck, Aitken called: “Bosun’s mate! Hands to quarters. The ship’s company may have laughed yesterday afternoon at gunnery practice with six-pounders but it might make all the difference between spending next Sunday in Gibraltar or a French jail!”

  On board the Caroline brig, the ship ahead of Martin’s Bergère and the one astern of Kenton’s Golondrina, Paolo Orsini had the slate and a copy of the signal book ready on the tiny binnacle box, and his telescope under his arm.

  He could see the strange sail coming up fast now—the convoy was making less than six knots—and had finally decided she was French. Aitken had given very precise instructions about what the convoy was to do if attacked by French, Spanish or Algerines, and Paolo was thankful that an enemy frigate had not turned up earlier.

  The reason was simple enough: the convoy was now in the narrowing channel leading to Gibraltar, so if he had to flee with the Caroline in a different direction from the rest, he would know once it was dark that by the following dawn land should be in sight to the north (Spain) or south (Africa), and as long as he steered westward he was bound to reach Gibraltar. It was not that he distrusted his celestial navigation, of course; simply that his quadrant must be damaged so that his altitudes of the sun were in error, because the latitude he calculated each noon was never quite the same as that hoisted by the Sarazine and the Golondrina. In fact his own answer that day, just over 49 degrees north, was (according to the French atlas he found in the former captain’s cabin) obviously wrong because the Caroline could not be as far north as Paris.

  Obviously Martin, by repeating the bearing, was telling Mr Aitken that the frigate was heading up to them, and Paolo knew from an inspection through his own glass that she was not the Calypso.

  Baxter, his sharpest-eyed seaman, was up the mast now and shouted down that she was a French frigate; he thought one of the 36-gun class like the Calliope, a name which at first puzzled Paolo when he looked her up in the French list because Baxter pronounced it Cally-owe-pee.

  Paolo looked round for a senior rating but apart from the man at the wheel the nearest was a Marine.

  “General quarters!” he shouted. “Leave the port-lids down, and don’t underestimate four 9-pounders. If we add up all the guns in the convoy—”

  “They don’t come to 36,” a cheerful Baxter shouted down from the masthead, “but they’ll make a lot o’ smoke, sir, an’ perhaps bring tears to the Frogs’ eyes!”

  Paolo looked astern to avoid laughing: he had dreamed hundreds of times of taking his own ship into action; he had imagined himself at the quarterdeck rail in full uniform, dress sword, telescope under his arm, snapping crisp orders to quartermaster, gunner, first lieutenant, master … But the ship in his dreams had been at least a frigate with a crew of two hundred and fifty, not a bedraggled trading brig of three hundred tons with a barnacled bottom, four guns and ten men. But at least the ten men had exercised those four guns …

  At that moment Rossi appeared from below.

  “Better we fight that frigate with our tongues than our guns, sir,” he said in Italian.

  “We may not have the choice, but you have the right idea,” Paolo said, sarcastically. “We must think of the right thing to say to the French. Like ‘What a bella figura you make standing on your quarterdeck, Captain!’”

  Rossi chuckled at the thought as he went to Paolo’s cabin to get the key to the Caroline’s pitifully small magazine.

  Rennick in the Matilda had long ago identified the distant ship as French and at this moment had all his men, except for the lookout and the man at the wheel, standing in a circle round him.

  “Mr Aitken’s order, if the convoy is attacked by an enemy ship, is to disperse,” he told the men. “That means we all sail off in different directions. But one of us is bound to be caught, and if the Frogs put a prize crew on board her quickly enough they can go after another ship. In fact if they’re awake they can capture all six of us.”

  “Prison,” muttered one of the Marines. “I’ve ‘eard about them French prisons.”

  “So have I,” Rennick said grimly. “But you remember what Captain Ramage always says … Come on, now!”

  The men shuffled their feet and sucked their teeth, brows furrowed with concentration, and increasingly embarrassed at Rennick’s impatience.

  “Come on! Come on!”

  “Surprise!” the Marine corporal yelled triumphantly. “Yer gotta do somefing ter surprise the barstids!”

  “Exactly,” Rennick said, proud that it was a Marine and not a seaman who had come up with the right answer. “Do the unexpected. Now, what would that Frenchman not be expecting, eh?”

  “Us to attack ‘im,” a seaman said firmly, as if dispos
ing of that possibility once and for all.

  “Exactly!” Rennick said once again, slapping his thigh and laughing with delight. “Mr Aitken can’t give us any orders because of the signalling problems, so we must use our common sense.”

  He looked round at the eight men, the man at the wheel and the lookout aloft. Ten, led by himself as the eleventh. Well, it could not be helped. Surprise would have to provide the equivalent of the other two hundred and ninety men he would prefer to have.

  “Our common sense tells us,” Rennick said firmly, glaring round him for any sign of dissent, “that if we can save five ships of the convoy, we’ll have won.”

  There were enough “Ahs” and “S’rights” showing agreement that Rennick promptly seized the moment to tell them his plan.

  “So we ram the frigate with the Matilda.”

  Without knowing that he was repeating a tactic used by Ramage against a 74 only a few days ago, he explained: “We go for her jib-boom and bowsprit. If we can carry them away we’ll send her foremast tumbling by the board.”

  “They won’t arf be cross wiv us,” a Marine muttered gloomily. “Still,” he added, brightening up, “it’ll be quite a sight!”

  “Good, good,” Rennick said briskly. “As soon as the Frogs recover they’ll board us. We don’t fight; we surrender. There’ll be no dishonour. We’ll be outnumbered about thirty to one, and if her foremast has gone, we’ve nothing more to do. So we’ll be prisoners.

  “Now listen carefully. Being taken prisoner means marching to prison, maybe across Spain and halfway across France. So make sure you’ve got shoes or boots, and put on two pairs of socks if there’s room. And wear any thick coat you have. You’ll look dam’ silly now but later, trying to sleep alongside a mountain track in the snow, you’ll be glad of every stitch you’ve got.

  “Roll up blankets so you can put ‘em round your neck like a horse collar. The French may steal them, but if they don’t … And if you have any money, get below right now and sew the coins into a thick part of your clothing. You’ve ten minutes to do that, so dismiss!”