Ramage & the Rebels Read online

  “Three months, sir?” Southwick said eagerly. “Where’s it to be—let me guess. The Gulf of Mexico? Cuba? Mosquito Coast? Surely not back to Antigua, sir?”

  “Wait for Lacey. Is that him coming on board now? Very well, pass the word for the rest of the officers—Rennick, too. He might as well know what we’re supposed to be doing, to see if his Marines can help.”

  When Lacey came into the cabin he was embarrassed because the last time he came through that door he had been the Calypso’s Fourth Lieutenant and therefore the most junior commission officer on board. The frigate had just been brought into the King’s service after having been captured by Mr Ramage’s previous command, the frigate Juno. And, Lacey remembered almost with a start, he had been Fourth Lieutenant in her, too.

  Now, he thought to himself, he was twenty-five years old and the strides from his home in Somerset in the shadow of the Quantocks were beginning to show: he had not seen Nether Stowey for four years, not since he passed for lieutenant. And in those four years, thanks almost entirely to Mr Ramage, he had progressed from the most junior officer in the Juno’s gunroom to the most junior officer in the Calypso’s gunroom and then, after that last wild voyage, command of La Créole schooner.

  His own command. Magic words and they could be as heady as a strong rum punch. He was still a lieutenant, of course; orders came to him addressed to Lieutenant William Lacey. But on board La Créole he was “the captain,” with two commissioned officers under him, second master instead of a master, and a sergeant of Marines.

  La Créole was a witch of a ship. The French could build fast vessels, and it was fitting that he should be commanding one that he had helped to capture. And he was thankful that Admiral Davis had finally left her with her original French name, instead of calling her “Diamond” after the Diamond Rock, off Martinique, where she had been captured. That had been the original intention.

  “Creole” came off the tongue nicely. Most of the Creole women he had met so far had been extraordinarily beautiful; slim and sleek like the schooner, with jutting breasts under bright dresses. “Your ship?” “Oh, I command the Créole, that black schooner over there.” “Weren’t you at the capture of Diamond Rock, and then the cutting out of the Jocasta?” And he would admit—with becoming modesty, of course—that he was. At that moment he glanced up and saw Mr Ramage was watching him, and he flushed because the Captain’s deep-set eyes seemed to bore right into him, revealing his thoughts and fears—and perhaps his hopes, too.

  When Ramage asked him if all was going well with La Créole he was thankful he could answer honestly that there were no problems.

  “How many men are you mustering?”

  “Fifty-one, sir, and ten Marines and a sergeant.”

  “And you have ten 6-pounders?”

  “And the two 12-pounder carronades they fitted at Antigua.” “She handles well?”

  “Like a witch, sir. Clean bottom, coppered—just the vessel for privateering!”

  “Which she was doing up to the time we captured her.” “Was she, sir?” Lacey was surprised. “I thought she was a French national ship.”

  “No, she was a privateer out of Fort Royal, but the French Navy took her over, and a sister ship, the day before they attacked us.”

  Lacey would never forget the night those two schooners attacked the frigate in the darkness, trying to board. But—well, although it happened only a few weeks ago, it seemed part of another life: the nervous young lieutenant who had been hard put to keep his head amid all the cracking of muskets and pistols, the yelling and screaming and the clash of cutlasses—yes, and the screams of wounded men: that had surprised him. Now that frightened young lieutenant commanded his own ship, one of the two schooners that made the attack, and he wasn’t frightened: at least, not in sailing her. It may be different when I take her into battle, he admitted to himself; but I haven’t run away when going into action with Mr Ramage these several times, and maybe I’ve learned something from him. But keeping a clear head in the middle of a battle and never being frightened—that’s what made Mr Ramage unique.

  Suddenly Lacey felt cheerful because he thought he could see why he had been called on board the Calypso: the Admiral was sending the frigate on some operation or other and La Créole was to go with her. Perhaps Mr Ramage had even asked for him …

  “You are up to establishment, then?”

  “Yes, sir; Admiral Davis was very good at English Harbour: he gave me a full complement of men and Marines, and there’s no one on the sick list.”

  “And your officers?”

  “Both lieutenants are excellent, sir. Young but good. The second master is steady enough—could be Southwick’s younger brother. And the Marine sergeant is one of the best. I wouldn’t change a man, sir.”

  “You’re lucky,” Ramage said soberly, looking back at some of the ships he had commanded. “A captain’s only as good as his ship’s company. When you’re considering whether or not to weed out a particular man it’s worth remembering that. One rotten apple, you know. ‘When in doubt, weed him out!’”

  Lacey sensed Ramage was waiting for something, and after a few minutes of small talk he heard several people coming down the companion-way and the sentry’s hoarse call: “The orficers, sir.”

  And suddenly they were all in the cabin—Aitken the First Lieutenant, Wagstaffe the Second, Baker the Third, and young Peter Kenton, the small and red-haired youngster who had taken his place as Fourth Lieutenant, and Southwick, white hair flowing and looking even younger, his skin taut, as though years of salt spray had never given wrinkles a chance to get a grip. And Rennick, still looking as though he had been levered into his uniform with a shoe-horn, still red-faced and still with the cheery exuberance of a fairground barker.

  This is what he missed when he sat in the captain’s cabin of La Créole. It was hardly bigger than his old cabin in the Juno (from which he could talk to the other officers without bothering to open the door), but it was solitary. The lieutenants and warrant officers ate in their gunroom; he had his meals in his own cabin. On deck the officers walked the lee side and left him the weather side, the captain’s privilege. But there was no one to whom he could chat; no one spoke to him unless first spoken to because he was the captain.

  And even now he sensed it: there was a friendly smile from Aitken, who was way above him in seniority on the lieutenants’ list, but the Scotsman’s smile had that slight remoteness about it; the remoteness he sensed always existed with his lieutenants in La Créole, as though command had slipped a pane of glass between them. And the same from Wagstaffe and Baker, while young Kenton glanced at him with something approaching awe. He sensed it and now he understood it: these men were lieutenants in the Calypso, and in the case of Aitken likely to get command of his own frigate before long. But at this particular moment they did not command their own ships while he did: he alone among them was referred to in his own ship as “the captain.” Of course, he did not have the rank of post captain, like Mr Ramage, allowing him to command a fifth-rate ship or bigger; he was still only a lieutenant, but officers in other ships would describe him as “the captain” of La Créole, referring to the job he carried out, not the actual rank he held in the Navy List.

  “The captain.” Those were the two words making that difference; they put that pane of glass between a man and those who had been his friends. Yet it had to be; this was what discipline entailed, a remoteness. A captain who tried to remain intimate with his officers or friendly with his seamen was, quite invariably, a bad officer, even though he might be a pleasant enough man. Mr Ramage never courted popularity; he was by turns surly, witty, bitter, silent, chatty—but he set the pace; he laid out the terms, as it were. The quarterdeck could be a chilly place on the hottest day if Mr Ramage was in a surly mood or angry over some incident. They weren’t frequent, but he could remember them well enough. And, for that matter, he suddenly realized there were days when he too was surly; days when La Créole’s quarterdeck must seem c
hilly, and now he thought about it he realized they were more frequent than they should be, but he was still finding his way, sometimes irritated by mistakes he made and sometimes irritated by the mistakes of others; particularly when he had deliberately left them on their own to do something, determined not to nag and interfere—and then he had found he should have interfered; that few officers and petty officers had enough confidence to work on their own. And of course his own standards were rising, the more he learned about command.

  In response to Ramage’s wave, the men sat or stood where they wanted. Southwick subsided at his usual place, the single armchair; Rennick stood by the door, head bent because of the low beams, as if his uniform was too tight for sitting. Kenton, attending his first such meeting, stood looking lost until Ramage pointed to a chair.

  Kenton was five feet four inches tall, exactly the height under the deck beams. Whereas Aitken’s face was pale but slightly tanned, Kenton’s was pink and peeling, and heavily freckled. Kenton loved the Tropics but the sun scorched him, making him pay a high price for his red hair. The son of a half-pay captain, Kenton was 21 years old and had passed for lieutenant within three months of reaching his twentieth birthday, the earliest that he could be promoted.

  Southwick, who had served with Ramage for several years and was old enough to be the father of anyone in the cabin, guessed cheerfully: “The Gulf of Mexico—patrol off Veracruz to look for the Spanish treasure fleet …”

  “Of course,” Ramage said. “You can have six men and the jolly-boat, and start at dusk.”

  The other officers grinned: Southwick’s bloodthirsty attitude was well known. His round and cheerful face and white hair gave him the appearance of a gentle bishop or a benign village butcher: a man in his early sixties who could inspire confidence in old ladies and who would sit back in an armchair with a favourite grandchild on each knee. As the austere Aitken later admitted, this had been his first impression of Southwick, and one which lasted until the first time they had gone into action, when he saw the old man transformed into a formidable fighter wielding a sword of incredible size, a two-handed sword that might have come straight from a Viking legend. It was then that Aitken had christened him “the benevolent butcher.”

  “The Admiral could have sent us to Veracruz,” Ramage said, “but no doubt he thought that because we have all done very well with prize-money in the past few months, he’d better send us somewhere else.”

  The officers all smiled, realizing that Ramage was tantalizing them.

  “He’s given us an interesting operation for the Calypso—just a comfortable cruise. Lacey and the Créole will be doing all the work—and getting all the glory.”

  Everyone turned to look at Lacey, most of them more than a little envious, like members of a family at the reading of a rich uncle’s will and wondering why their youngest cousin had been given all the sugarplums.

  Southwick gave one of his famous sniffs, a great intake of air which signalled disapproval without actually putting it into words. Ramage had heard such sniffs scores of times in the past, when the old Master had disapproved of something Ramage was planning. There were in fact various grades. A loud but brief sniff meant that Southwick would not have done it that way, although it might not be entirely wrong. If he thought something was wrong, the sniff was loud and long. If it was followed by a drawn-out “Weeelll, sir,” by the rules of the game Ramage would raise his eyebrows questioningly, which Southwick then interpreted as permission to disagree, and he would speak his thoughts.

  It had taken Aitken some time to realize it was in fact a code which had evolved between the Master and Mr Ramage over a long period; they had served together from the very day that Mr Ramage received his first command as a young lieutenant. Since then the pair of them had gone into battle a dozen times or more, been dismasted in a hurricane, lost their ship on a reef, been marooned on an island, found buried treasure … It took a stranger a long while to understand the significance of the sniffs, and from the look of it only Aitken had suddenly realized that Southwick had in effect made a statement.

  Aitken reckoned that Mr Ramage was ignoring it because Southwick’s sniff was based on too little information. The fact that La Créole was going to do the work and get any glory meant that the task was one which could not be carried out by the Calypso. That much was obvious to Aitken, who was content to wait patiently.

  “While we were in Antigua you heard about the increasing privateer activity, and how they are snapping up merchant ships sailing to or from Jamaica,” Ramage said. “Well, it’s worse than we thought and, more important, the frigates patrolling the coasts of Puerto Rico, Hispaniola and Cuba are all reporting fewer French, Spanish and Dutch privateers at the big ports.”

  Southwick ran his hand through his hair and growled: “They need to keep a sharper lookout!”

  “Or look elsewhere for them,” Ramage said quietly, and everyone glanced up, realizing that those five words were not a chance remark but a clue.

  “The Main,” Southwick speculated. “Shallow water, dozens of likely bays lined with mangrove swamps—and swarming with mosquitoes, of course. Maracaibo, the Gulf of Venezuela, Riohacha, Santa Marta, Baranquilla, all the way round to Portobelo

  … Most of ‘em too shallow for us, but not for the privateers, or for the Créole …”

  Ramage nodded and turned towards Rennick. “There’s going to be plenty of boatwork for us, backing up the Créole. I shall want those Marines of yours getting in and out of boats as though they were born under the thwarts. And your men, Lacey. When a privateer escapes into water too shallow for La Créole, then you send boats in, and ours will follow when possible. I want you to exercise your men in hoisting out boats, rowing with muffled oars, using a compass in the dark, handling a boat gun, carrying pistols without them going off accidentally … And don’t anyone expect we shall be doing this only in calm weather. You know the Trades blow half a gale out of a clear blue sky, with lumpy sea …”

  “Which end of the Main do we start, sir?” Aitken asked.

  It was a good question because the coast ran east and west, and the Trade winds blew regularly from east to west. Beginning at the eastern end meant that the Calypso and La Créole started up to windward, in effect starting at the top of the hill, and with luck would be able to chase the privateers to leeward, like wolves pursuing sheep downhill across a meadow, providing they did not make a bolt sideways for the shelter of the bays.

  “We start well to windward of Maracaibo,” Ramage said. “With the Dutch islands, in fact, because the Admiral has been told that the privateers are using Curaçao as a main base.”

  “Could be, could be,” Southwick muttered, half to himself. “The capital, Amsterdam, is a secure anchorage with a narrow entrance easy to defend, plenty of warehouses to store the loot, and well placed to intercept our merchant ships. Good market for prize-ships and prize-goods—those damned Hollanders are good businessmen, and wealthy, too. And a good rendezvous for all enemy privateers—the French from Guadeloupe, Martinique and Hispaniola, the Spanish from the Main only a few miles away, and from Puerto Rico and Hispaniola to the north. And of course the Dutch.”

  Wagstaffe said diffidently: “There’s an advantage there for us, too: Jamaica is to leeward, so our prize crews will have a soldier’s wind sailing back to Port Royal.”

  Southwick sniffed yet again, and Ramage guessed what was coming: “And every boarding party we send away with a prize we’ll never see again: none of the King’s ships in Port Royal will be coming to Curaçao; they’ll just press our men. We’ll end up with only fifty men left, having supplied the ships in Port Royal with two hundred well-trained men …”

  It was a problem Ramage had already considered but put off any decision because that would only arise when they actually captured prizes, and remembering the sandbanks and cays and coral reefs littering the coast, he felt it unlikely to make him lose sleep.

  He unrolled the chart on the top of his desk and weighted it
down to stop it curling up again. “Gather round,” he said, “I want you all to refresh your memories of this coast. How we carry out my instructions—which are simply to get rid of the privateers, and yours, Lacey, will put you under my orders—will depend on what we find among the islands.”

  He jabbed a finger down at the lower half of the chart. “There you have the island of Curaçao, the middle of the three lying just off the Main. There’s Bonaire to one side and Aruba the other, but Curaçao is the only one that matters. Notice how Curaçao is like the centre of a clock—the islands of St Lucia and Martinique at three o’clock, Guadeloupe, Antigua, St Barts and St Kitts at one o’clock, Puerto Rico and Hispaniola at noon, and Jamaica here way over to the north-west at ten o’clock. And the Main to the south. All British merchant ships sailing between Jamaica to the west and the Windward and Leeward Islands to the east, have to cross these lines radiating from Curaçao …”

  He took a pair of dividers from the rack and opened them up until they measured seven degrees, equal to 420 miles, against the latitude scale. Then he put one point on Curaçao and slowly swept the second leg across the chart until the other point finally rested on Grenada, the island at the southern end of the chain. “You see, only 420 miles to Grenada and the rest of them, Martinique, Antigua, Nevis, St Kitts, no more than 500 miles because of the way they curve round. Puerto Rico, most of Hispaniola—all inside the 420 miles.”

  He shut the dividers with a snap. “Our merchant ships, whether sailing alone or in convoy, are passing east or west no more than four hundred miles north of Curaçao. Four hundred miles—that’s probably no more than three days’ sailing for the dullest sailor. Sail on Sunday morning, find a prize on Wednesday, and be back in Curaçao unloading the prize by Saturday night. A prize a week at least, and no reason why one privateer should not take three prizes in a day. A hundred men on board to provide boarding parties and prize crews … All on a shares-of-the-spoils basis.”