Ramage's Signal (17 page)

The man came running up the quarterdeck ladder as though answering a routine hail.

“Get the spare topsail sent up on deck from the sailroom, and a pair of slings. Leave the new foresail for the time being. I want that topsail hoisted up and bent on first. From the look of it there won't be much to save from the old one.”

“No, sir. Pity the sheets didn't part …”

The topsail sheets passed through shoulder blocks at each end of the lower yardarm so that when the yard broke and fell its weight wrenched down on the sheets, which were secured one at each lower corner of the topsail, and tore it in half as one might rip a sheet of paper by pulling on the two lower corners.

Now was the time that Ramage detested being the Captain: he would prefer to be forward there, going through the wreckage, making sure none of the men were trapped, seeing exactly what the damage was (apart from the broken yard, he would be lucky if two guns each side had not been dismounted and the carriages smashed), and assessing the best way of repairing it. Carpenters were skilled men but he found that sometimes they were narrow in their ideas.

He turned away deliberately and walked slowly aft, making sure he did not have his night vision affected by the reflection of one of the poop lanterns on a shiny section of the taffrail. With his night-glass he looked at the ships astern. No formation, not a set of masts in line to show they were on the same course. To work out which tack they were on he had to reverse in his mind what he saw with his eye, as well as visualize the ships the right way up. He shut the telescope with an impatient gesture: all the ships lacked was a drover and his dog, then they would look like ewes on their way to the market. However, he had to be fair; the three largest ships were reasonably close to the
Calypso
's wake and no doubt the rest would soon follow like children scared of the dark.

He called to the quartermaster and was told the ship was handling well under the maintopsail alone, despite the flogging remnants of the fore-topsail, and even as the man replied, Ramage heard the noise lessen and, glancing up, saw that topmen were already out on the topsail yard, cutting the lacings securing the remains of the sail, which floated down like ghostly nightshirts.

Kenton came out of the darkness and saluted.

“The First Lieutenant ordered me to report, sir. The foreyard broke in a split twelve feet long and Mr Aitken says it will be easy to fish. The foresail, as far as we can see because the gaskets still secure most of it to the pieces of the yard, can be repaired. Five guns—three to larboard and two to starboard dismounted, but only one carriage smashed.”

“The injured,” Ramage interrupted. “How many?”

“Oh, none, sir,” Kenton said, the surprise showing in his voice. “The deck is badly scored, a section of the starboard bulwark is stove in, but not a man hurt.”

“Very well, what else?”

“That's all for now, sir: the carpenter is inspecting it. He will be reporting to you in five or ten minutes, but I heard Southwick say he reckoned the heat of the Tropics had made the wood brittle, and that bad weather a few days ago …”

“Twelve feet, you say?”

“At least, sir. A nice clean split. Glue, fish and woolding …” The carpenter was the next to report. He was a small, wizened man but because he refused to wear a hat his face and forehead always had a deep tan—a colour, Southwick always maintained, halfway between oiled teak and varnished mahogany, teasing the carpenter that he was carved from a wood unknown to man.

Lewis was a Man of Kent, not a Kentish Man. He was always careful to explain that it was a matter of which side of the Medway a man was born. He had been born, in fact, within a few miles of one of Ramage's uncles: while repairing a drawer of the Captain's desk one day he had casually mentioned that as a boy he poached regularly over the uncle's estate, and even as a grown man before the war, whenever he had leave he enjoyed taking out a ferret of a night and netting a few burrows.

“Yer uncle never missed them rahbbets, sir,” he said. “Bein' as ‘ow ‘e'd have given me permission ter snare, net or shoot any rahbbets I wanted, though ‘e'd have drawn a line at pheasints or partridge. But poachin' ‘em was wot gave ‘em the aroma, sir; catchin' ‘em legal like would have taken the taste away, like bilin' ‘em too long.”

Now Lewis was reporting to the landowner's nephew and, Ramage reflected wryly, everyone in the
Calypso
was taking part in a kind of poaching …

“Larboard side, sir, startin' abowt ten feet outboard of the jeers; the yard just split like an ‘ead o' fresh celery. The split be fourteen feet three inches long, clean as a whistle, none o' the wood lorst. Glue up a treat, it will; bolt every foot, then six or eight fishes ‘bout eighteen feet long, and wooldin' over the ‘ole thing and the yard'll be stronger than afore it broke.”

“You deserve a brace of pheasants, Lewis, and I'll tell my uncle!”

“Ah, ‘ave ‘em ‘anging in the barn a week an' they'll roast up a treat.”

“When can I expect to have that yard across again?”

Lewis scratched his head and then, holding his fists out in front of him, began sticking out one finger after another. Finally he had all the fingers and thumb of his right hand and the thumb and two fingers of his left.

“What be the time now, sir, then?”

Ramage looked at his watch by the light of the binnacle lamp. “Just before midnight.”

“If I can have some men to help haul the two sections of the yard so I can true ‘em up before gluing and bolting, and then help me and my mates turn it while we's driving the bolts and then fitting the fishes—well, ten or twelve hours, sir.”

“No signs of rot?”

“None, sir; clean as a whistle.”

“Why did she go?”

“Reckon the wood just got brittle from the tropical ‘eat, sir. Sun's always beatin' on the top of the yard. And French wood, sir. Must have been an old yard from another ship, ‘cos it's in one piece. A new one at the time this ship was built would be two trees scarphed together; they'd do a vertical scarph in the middle. Short o' long timber, they are.”

“Anyway,” Ramage said thankfully, “you can glue, bolt, fish and woold without having to cut scarphs?”

“Easy, sir, just so long as the sea don't get up and set those two pieces rollin' about the deck!”

Ramage nodded and Lewis went back down the ladder. How long had it all taken? Perhaps twenty minutes. In twenty minutes, on a calm Mediterranean night, the
Calypso
had been changed suddenly from an efficient fighting machine—capable, for example, of sinking every ship in the convoy with the ease of Lewis and his ferret chasing rabbits out of the burrow and into nets, to despatch them with a sharp blow across the back of the neck—to a wretched hulk that could not work her way to windward or manoeuvre against much more than a laden merchant ship.

Well, Aitken and Southwick had been complaining that patrolling off the coast of Languedoc was a dull business but now, although they might be short on fighting, they could hardly complain there was little to do: summoning up a convoy of fifteen French ships by juggling with a giant chess board, a bout with a Gulf of Lions gale, and now the foreyard crashing down around their ears should keep them occupied for a while.

Ramage was mistaken. Southwick was back on the quarter-deck five minutes later, bustling because he tended to bustle after any unusual physical exertion, as though it wound him up like a grandfather clock.

“Shall I sway up the spare maintopsail yard in the meantime, sir, and set the spare fore-topsail on it? Just in case we meet something.”

Having thirty or forty extra seamen working round the fore-mast sending up the spare yard while Lewis and his men started on the broken yard would slow up everything.

“No, we'll replace that fore-topsail just as soon as they get the spare up from the sailroom, but after that we concentrate on Lewis and his mates. It's a case where jury-rigging is likely to delay proper repairs by twelve hours.”

“How long does Lewis want, then?”

“He says ten or twelve hours.”

“By noon, eh? Well, he's a reliable man, sir, and if that's his estimate we can rely on it.”

“I hope so. Will you keep an eye on the bosun while they bend on the new fore-topsail?”

“Set her flying, sir, once we're ready?”

Ramage looked astern at the merchant ships, found he could not make out more than one or two, and once again searched the horizon with the night-glass.

“No, leave it furled until we have the foreyard repaired and swayed up: these damned mules astern are so slow we'll probably have to put a reef or two in the maintopsail just to avoid leaving them too far astern.”

Southwick gave one of his typical sniffs. He had a dozen or more, each of which had a different tone and meaning. This one, Ramage knew, was reserved for situations of which Southwick disapproved but was powerless to change.

A fast frigate in a stiff wind would be hard put to keep these fifteen merchantmen in any sort of formation; closing and firing shots across their bows would not hurry them up; shouted threats of putting a round shot into them would result in a shower of Gascon, Breton and Norman abuse. So, since the
Calypso
was for the moment a disabled frigate, and far from there being a stiff wind there was only a mild breeze, the only thing was to be thankful that of all times the foreyard decided to split, now was the most convenient, because the
Calypso
was hardly rolling at all, and repairs should be comparatively easy.

A
T DAWN, when the
Calypso
's ship's company were at quarters, guns loaded and run out, ready for any enemy that might emerge as the darkness vanished, Ramage slowly walked forward, stopping to talk with the guns' crews.

He found these “dawn promenades,” as Southwick called them, a useful way of communicating with the men. Sometimes a seaman had a genuine grievance which only the Captain could settle, but because he was a shy man or feared upsetting the First Lieutenant to whom he was supposed to go first, he would say nothing, and that sometimes meant he would become morose, surly or a troublemaker with a chip on his shoulder.

Ramage's habit of walking casually from one gun to another, often with some comment on the weather or the shape of a headland if they were near land, put him physically close to most of the men. He knew them well by name; he knew the family history of many of them; he had been in action with all of them.

Sometimes a hint would come from Jackson, or perhaps from Bowen, the observant Surgeon. It meant that often Ramage, pausing at a gun to ask one man if the rheumatism was now gone, would be able to talk to the actual man who had a real or imagined grievance or problem.

These usually multiplied after a sack of mail arrived on board: letters from home seemed to bring as much misery as joy: interfering neighbours relating gossip, money problems, pregnant wives, sick children, aged parents—a seaman could rarely do anything to help any of them because he was a quarter of the hemisphere away, or about to sail from Britain.

It was a chilly morning but a clear sky warned of a scorching day. Dawn was coming fast—soon they would be able “to see a grey goose at a mile,” so the lookouts would then go aloft and the rest would stand down from quarters. Ramage had not passed the mainmast before he discovered one thing: the men who had been on shore at the semaphore station for several days were still bubbling over about it: to them walking on grass once again, being able to compete with each other to see who could hurl a stone the farthest, even swimming from the beaches (though few of them could actually swim, most of them enjoyed ducking their heads under) had been like special leave.

He cursed the
mistral:
but for the need to sail for those three days he would have been able to rotate the men so that all had a chance to stay on shore.

The two guns on one side and the three on the other dismounted by the falling yard were all back on their carriages again, although two on each side were hauled up to the centreline clear of the space where Lewis and his mates were working.

Already Ramage could smell the hot glue and the yard, now lying fore and aft, was once again a continuous piece. Every foot or so there were a dozen turns of rope, each with a handspike stuck in it. Lewis had used handspikes for the Spanish windlasses of rope clamping the two pieces of yard tightly together while the glue set. There was not a man within several feet of the yard: the carpenter's mates were busy preparing long planks—Lewis would call them battens—to fish the yard. They would be laid along where it had been glued, overlapping the length of the split, and eventually completely encircling it, like many splints supporting a broken leg. The fishes or battens would sit on “flats” specially planed along the curved surface of the yard and be held in position by bolts and nails.

Lewis saw Ramage coming and, running his fingers through his hair after rubbing his hands down the sides of his trousers to remove some of the glue, stood ready to report.

Ramage eyed the repair so far. There was enough daylight now to see the runs of glue from where the two split pieces had been fitted together. Plenty of glue had dripped on to the deck planking, too, which would later need holystoning, but he could see very little damage from the spar's fall. The lifts must have held each side just long enough to make the two halves swing down like pendulums, rather than crash down as though rolled off a cliff.

The black objects, several feet long and narrow, like giant corkscrews, were augers, and after Lewis saluted he pointed to them.

“All going well, sir; so far I think we're even a bit ahead o' ourselves. Got her glued up and held by them Spanish wind-lushes and as soon as we got enough light to sight ‘em, we go in with the augers and drill for the bolts. The armourer's mate's goin' to cut a few more bolts down to size (I got almost all I need that fit; just short of six) as soon as we can get the galley fire going to give him ‘eat.”