The Ramage Touch (22 page)

He decided as he began pacing the deck again that there was nothing, judging from the brief stay in the Pineta di Feniglia, that made him want to change a seagoing life for that of a gipsy, hunter or even a landowner: he remembered how, in a house, whether a casetta or a palazzo, there were the mosquitoes and even more vicious but much tinier flying insects called the
papatacci
, which stung like the jabs of sail needles, as well as ants that invaded furniture. Worse, if you owned a house, was the deathwatch beetle that methodically clicked its way (as though its teeth were loose) through the beams and other woodwork, turning the strongest oak to powder and tunnels. Compared with all these land noises, the creaks and groans of a ship under way was faint and agreeable music…

He pulled his boat-cloak round his shoulders. Timing… minutes, perhaps even seconds, would make all the difference between a sufficient, in other words, moderate, success and a disastrous failure. Once again he seemed to be risking too much for too small a prize. Only an ass put down a single stake of a hundred guineas for a nine-to-one chance of winning a single guinea. He seemed to have read somewhere, or heard a seasoned gambler say, that the prize should match the stake and the risk. He supposed some people did in fact find themselves in a position where they could put down a stake on the green baize table with a decent chance of winning a reasonable prize at reasonable odds, and he envied them; but that must be what made a man a professional gambler – a person who would only bet if the odds were right. How nice it must be to have a choice: yes, I will bet now; no, I’ll stay out of the game and come in again when the odds seem more favourable.

Ramage never seemed to have that choice; he had to put down his stake and watch the dice roll to a stop, or the card turn over, even when the odds against him were absurdly high. Yet he ought not to grumble; he certainly ought not pity himself, as he was doing at the moment, because in the past he had won when the odds simply did not exist; when there had seemed absolutely no way of winning. In other words, he had been lucky. Gamblers who relied too often on their luck instead of calculating the odds usually ended up ruined; captains of ships of war who relied on luck to bring victory instead of careful planning usually ended up dead, taking many of their ship’s company with them.

Steady, he told himself. He had made a plan and worked out the odds, and the odds seemed no worse than usual, perhaps even better. The only luck he needed (the element of chance that was bound to enter into even the best of plans) was that the wind should not drop. The direction mattered little; it just had to
blow
, anything from a gentle breeze to half a gale…a tramontana from across the mountains to the north, a lebeccio from the west, bringing rain, a sirocco from the south, hot and searing with thick cloud, shredding nerves and nearly always lasting three days, or a maestrale from the north-west – just let there not be a calm, which stopped any movement. With the settled conditions at the moment, a clear sky, the stars sparkling, a nip in the air, and the hint of dew, with only the very slightest occasional swell wave, there could be calm an hour after sunrise. The usual sea breeze that set in about ten o’clock in the morning might decide to have a rest for the day…

A bulky shadow loomed up beside him and Ramage recognized Southwick.

‘Just that one fishing boat still working over towards Talamone, sir. Everyone else seems to have gone to bed.’

‘Very wise,’ Ramage said cheerfully. ‘There isn’t much to stay up for, unless you’re one of the King’s officers.’

‘I hope all those dam’ French officers are staying up late in Porto Ercole,’ Southwick said, his sniff indicating that he was making a joke. ‘Let’s hope the Navy is entertaining the army and that they all drink too much, so that in the morning they all have dreadful headaches…’

Southwick always amused Ramage by making ‘dam’ French’ sound like one word. ‘If it’s up to that artillery colonel, they will. Argentario wine is rather special and the colonel was certainly drinking it like water when we met him in Orbetello and so were his officers.’

‘So they’ll introduce the Navy to it,’ Southwick said hopefully.

‘Yes. The
vino locale
might be an unexpected ally…’

Southwick took out his watch and held it to the lantern kept burning in the binnacle box so that the ship’s heading could always be checked against the compass. ‘Half an hour to go, sir. I’d better rouse out the watch below. General quarters once we’re under way?’

‘Not yet,’ Ramage said. ‘We can wait until dawn – the men will have been at the guns long enough before the day ends.’

Soon the bosun’s mates – cursed by drowsy seamen as ‘Spithead Nightingales’ from the shrill sound of their calls piping through the ship – were rousing out the other half of the starboard watch. Within five minutes the bars had been slid into the capstan, John Harris, the toothless fiddler, had climbed on top, and three men stood at each chest-high bar. With the bars radiating out like spokes, the capstan now looked like a horizontal wheel. A seaman walked round hitching a line, called the swifter, to join all the ends of the bars like the rim of a wheel over the spokes.

Finally Southwick gave the order ‘Heave round’ and Harris began scraping away at his fiddle, under strict orders not to play a traditional British song because it might be recognized by some Italian or Frenchman within earshot fishing without a light. The men began pushing against the bars, and the anchor cable slowly creaked home, the strain squeezing water from the strands like a washerwoman wringing out a sheet.

Topmen were standing by the shrouds, ready to run aloft to let fall the topsails; waisters and afterguard were also standing by, the waisters amidships at the frigate’s waist, which gave them their name, and the afterguard on the poop, ready to trim the sails by hauling on the braces which controlled the great yards, or the sheets and tacks which controlled the set of the sails.

The pawls of the capstan gave their heavy but rhythmic clack, making sure that the barrel did not suddenly spin back under the strain of the anchor cable and hurl the seamen away like winnowed corn. Down below, as the anchor cable led in through the hawse, the ship’s boys secured it with short lines to the endless cable revolving from the capstan barrel on the deck below to a large block right forward. Holding the lines with which they had ‘nipped’ the two cables together until the anchor cable arrived at the hatchway leading down to the cable locker, they quickly unwound their ‘nippers’, from which they received their own nickname, and ran forward to start the same process over again.

Down below in the locker several seamen manhandled the heavy cable so that it stowed evenly in concentric rings, making sure it would run out freely when the ship next anchored. It was a hot and smelly job; when stowed in the locker the rope was a breeding ground for mildew and fungus; when in the sea it became a happy hunting ground for small crabs and various little plants that grew in the water and often had a sharp sting. It picked up sand as it scraped across the bottom and worked it into the strands so that it rasped the skin of hands like the rough bark of an old tree.

Ramage waited in the darkness with Aitken at the quarterdeck rail, the young Scotsman holding the black japanned speaking-trumpet and listening for a hail from Southwick to say that the anchor was aweigh; just off the bottom and still hanging down in the water like a great pendulum yet not securing the ship to the sea bed. Away and aweigh; Ramage mused over the two words, and how often they confused landsmen. The anchor was ‘aweigh’, meaning it was off the bottom, when in effect it was being weighed by the cable. With the anchor hoisted on board, the ship made sail and was ‘under way’ or, putting it more clearly, was on her way somewhere. She ‘weighed’ anchor and then got under ‘way’ or, if she was still moving after furling sails, or was being carried along by the wind, she had ‘way’ on.

There was Southwick’s first hail. ‘At short stay’, which meant that the anchor was still on the bottom but the anchor cable was taut, coming up at an angle as though it formed an extension of the forestay. More scraping from Harris’ fiddle, more clanking of the pawls, more encouraging calls to the men from Southwick, which Ramage could hear quite clearly, and then the master’s hail that the cable was ‘up and down’, which meant that the anchor was just about to lift off the bottom, and, a few clanks later, the report: ‘Anchor is aweigh, sir.’

The breeze was now drifting the
Calypso
slowly towards the northern causeway, but there was plenty of room; time enough for the anchor to be hoisted and catted, stowed along the bulwark. The cable, though, would be left made up to the ring of the anchor, instead of being cast off and led back through the hawse to be stowed below, the holes of the hawse (looking like great eyes) filled with the circular wooden bucklers that fitted like old Viking shields and kept out any waves.

Ramage clasped his hands behind his back and began pacing the quarterdeck. Plans were made, all the officers had been given their orders, all timepieces checked, charts compared for accuracy, and he had made sure that both Wagstaffe and Kenton had their quadrants and accurate copies of the set of tables on which the whole success of the operation depended: a table in feet and inches which gave, as its title announced, ‘The Height, above the Level of the Sea of the different Parts of French Ships of War and their Masts, according to their Rates’. In fact they had copied only the details for 36-gun frigates, and Ramage had long ago checked the table against the actual figures for the
Calypso
.

The table gave part of the answers for a whole series of right-angled triangles. To discover the range of a French 36-gun frigate it was only necessary to use a sextant or quadrant to measure the angle made by, say, the mainmasthead. The height was known from the table and became the given side of a triangle – the vertical side, whereas the base was the unknown quantity, the distance or range. With the angle which had just been measured, the base could be worked out quickly and was, of course, the range.

Measuring the height of another ship’s masts was a familiar enough exercise: when sailing in company and ordered to keep a certain distance, the officer of the deck used sextant or quadrant to measure the angle made by the mainmasthead and, knowing what it should be if they were the correct distance, could see that if the angle was too small they were too far away and if too large they were too near. And, of course, measuring the masthead angle was very useful when chasing an enemy ship: the slightest change in the angle indicated which was gaining.

This time though, providing all went according to plan, Southwick had done the sums, so that the table included the particular angles of a French 36-gun frigate like the
Calypso
for the cap of the mainmast and maintopmast, and the foreyard, the foretop and cap of the foretopmast, at a range of 2,000 yards. All the officers had worked at their tables and checked the figures. They found that the old master had not made a mistake. Ramage had not expected that he would, but he noticed from the hurried scribbling that Kenton and Orsini had made errors and then rapidly corrected them.

Two thousand yards…He considered the figure; spoke it to himself and then imagined it written down, first in his own handwriting and then in type as the figure appearing in a set of tables. The first gamble was with figures. The second gamble was that the three French frigates would be secured stern to the quay at such an angle that their broadside guns could not possibly fire through the entrance. He would win that round if they were able to fire only their bow-chase guns, one each side and no bigger than 12-pounders. Six altogether, with a range of 1,800 yards at six degrees of elevation with a 4-pound charge of powder. At that range a French gunner, or any other, for that matter, would be lucky to be able to bowl a shot through the harbour entrance if his ship was anchored 1,800 yards outside, so there was not much risk from the bow-chase guns. Or from the other guns at that range, really, unless one of the frigates managed to slew round and fire off a broadside. Then there would be eighteen roundshot ricochet-ing off the water, and some might hit, much as a sportsman (poacher, more likely) would fire a shot into the middle of a rising covey in the hope of bringing down a single bird.

No, he corrected himself, the biggest gamble, although still concerning the 2,000 yards, was on the forts. There were two of them. Monte Filippo on the north side and high up, and Santa Catarina low down at the entrance. A third one at the southern entrance was not really a fort; simply a series of gun positions at the end of a short headland known as La Rocca and protected by stonework.

There might be 32-pounders up there in Monte Filippo, and with a 10-pound charge they could fire a shot 2,900 yards. It would be plunging fire, and at extreme range. Ricochets were always wildly inaccurate with plunging fire, bouncing all over the place. When a gun was firing on an almost level plane – from one ship at another for instance – ricochets were often quite accurate; the first graze, as it was called, could be at a third of the extreme range…

How often were the crews of any guns in Monte Filippo likely to be exercised? Were the gun platforms made of wood, which might have rotted? Was there wooden planking laid over stone? Or just smooth stone? Were the French gunners up in the forts conscientious men who looked after the guns, kept the powder dry, and tended the shot, keeping them well painted and making sure they did not bulge with rust flakes? Was the ropework sound, or had it gone grey, rotting in the rain and sun, so that train tackles and breechings would be useless, parting with the recoil of the first round and letting the gun career back out of control?

Questions but no answers. Was there even a garrison in either fort? Why would the French bother, because Porto Ercole was now a port of no significance whatsoever, just a haven for fishing boats, not a port used to supply any town except perhaps Orbetello, whose wants must be slight and which probably relied on Santo Stefano. Santo Stefano – when he and Jackson had sneaked in there several years ago to rescue Gianna they had checked up on its great fort and found out the size of the guns, 32-pounders, and the fact that the gunners never fired them in practice.