Without the Spanish charts Ramage could not have risked the passage between Vieques and the cays, but he guessed La Perla would use that channel on her way to Ponce, and to pass south of Vieques might arouse suspicion.
The sun, climbing high now, would be almost directly overhead in a couple of hours. Streaks of pale green, and brown marks in the sea - like dirty fingermarks on a bright-blue enamel dish - showed where reefs lay just below the surface waiting to rip the bottom out of an unwary ship. Some of the shoals rose above the surface to expose coral whitening in the sun, making islets for the dozens of solemn and dignified pelicans soaring, diving lazily, or watching indifferently as La Perla passed within a few hundred yards.
"Feels strange, doesn't it?" Ramage commented to Yorke, nodding towards the Spanish ensign.
"It certainly does. A trifle florid, isn't it?"
The horizontal stripes of red, gold and red were rarely seen at sea by British eyes.
"It's legal, I assume?" Yorke asked. "I mean, if we get taken by a Spanish ship of the line, we won't be hanged as freebooters or pirates or anything?"
"Perfectly legal," Ramage said. "You have to hoist your own flag before you open fire on someone, that's all."
"Barbarous!" Yorke said with a shudder.
"You're looking at it only from the point of view of a potential victim."
"True enough; I was born a potential victim!"
"It looks different if you use it as a trick to capture a prize."
"I'm a peace-loving man," Yorke said. "With an inborn respect for flags."
"So am I," Ramage said blandly. "I just don't believe everything I see!"
By late afternoon La Perla was passing through the channel between Vieques and the south-east corner of Puerto Rico. Punta Tuna on the starboard bow was the last piece of high land they would see until they had passed westward along the length of Puerto Rico and crossed the Mona Passage to sight the eastern end of Hispaniola.
Just before darkness Ramage searched the horizon with his telescope. There were no sails in sight. Lookouts along the coast should be quite happy: La Perla had left Snake Island according to schedule, making for Ponce. What they would not know was that the schooner would pass Ponce in the darkness, and unless the wind dropped away in the night, would be beyond Puerto Rico and out of sight by sunrise.
Chapter Eighteen
Ramage always found Jamaica one of the most exciting of tropical landfalls, with the peaks of the aptly named Blue Mountains showing up fifty miles away. They were sighted low on the western horizon just before sunset on the fifth day.
Responsibility for the safety of a small schooner with important passengers and laden with a king's ransom in treasure meant that Ramage, Southwick and Yorke did not have more than two hours' uninterrupted sleep after leaving Snake Island. Once across the Mona Passage, with Hispaniola a few miles on the starboard beam, the lookouts had done little else than hail "Deck there!" and report a sail in sight.
Each time Ramage had to thrust aside his training as a naval officer and try to think with the mind of the fictitious Spanish captain that he had become. If anyone boarded them he had to remember that he was ostensibly on passage from Puerto Rico to Havana, Cuba, with provisions for Havana's garrison and seamen intended for a frigate being commissioned there. It sounded likely, and only four ships had inquired - one Spanish and two French privateers, and a French national sloop. Ramage was thankful not to have sighted a British frigate; he was in no mood to be delayed while he tried to persuade some sceptical post captain of the truth of his improbable story.
He had ordered Southwick to reduce sail for the rest of the night to ensure that they arrived off Morant Point, at the eastern end of Jamaica, soon after dawn.
The St Brieucs were on deck at sunrise, eager for their first good look at the island they had many times despaired of ever seeing, and Maxine's excitement was catching. "It is so green - and so mountainous!" she exclaimed to Ramage.
"When Columbus was describing it to Queen Isabella, he crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it on the table."
"Where is Port Royal?" she asked.
"Just to the right of the highest peak. But there's not much of it left after an earthquake and a hurricane. Kingston is the main harbour now."
By nine o'clock, Southwick came down to Ramage's cabin to report that he could just distinguish the eastern end of the Palisadoes, and Ramage went on deck to find Yorke helping Maxine with a telescope and trying to tell her what to look for.
"You see how the land runs east and then curves south?" Ramage said. "Well, Kingston is in the elbow. The Palisadoes is a long spit running parallel with the land like a trigger, with Port Royal and the entrance to Kingston Harbour at the tip."
"Towns!" Maxine said contemptuously. "You talk of towns, with all this to look at? Just look at those mountains! And the mist in the valleys. It's magical!"
Yorke grimaced at Ramage as Maxine moved the telescope to range over the rest of the island.
"Just look!" Maxine said excitedly. "All the little ships - and canoes close to the beach."
"Local fishermen," Yorke murmured.
"All the houses with pointed roofs!"
"Cattle mills," Ramage said. "They use cattle to work the machinery to make sugar."
"And tall chimneys with smoke coming out of them!"
"The chimneys of the boiling houses," Ramage said.
"What are they boiling?"
"The sugar cane. Extracting the molasses."
"Tell me how they make sugar," she demanded.
"I don't know," Ramage said firmly. "All I do know is it makes a terrible smell."
"Excuse me, sir," said Southwick, "but I can't make out the pilot schooner - permission to fire a gun?"
Ramage nodded: both inshore and ahead of La Perla there were now a dozen or more vessels, ranging from small droggers bringing cargoes of sugar, molasses and rum into Kingston from a dozen coves and bays round the coast, to large schooners arriving from many different countries.
As soon as the gun boomed out, they saw a schooner close inshore suddenly making sail and then heading towards them.
"Ha! They take their time," Southwick grumbled.
"Don't forget La Perla isn't one of the King's ships," Ramage said. "As far as they're concerned she's just another little schooner with heavily-patched sails."
"Wait till they see that!" Southwick said, gesturing to the British flag that now streamed out above the Spanish, indicating that she was a prize.
"The pilot won't be impressed," Ramage said. "He'll have seen too many captured ships of the line brought in."
Ten minutes later both La Perla and the pilot schooner were lying hove-to as a small canoe brought the pilot on board. As he watched, Ramage thought for the first time in many hours of the problems that probably awaited him in Kingston.
First, the hunt for the treasure, then the reception of La Perla, and finally the voyage itself, had given him other things to think about. Now he had to face the fact that Rear-Admiral Goddard was probably in Kingston. A ship of the line like the Lion, if properly handled, should survive a hurricane. By now, though, the Admiral might well have given up hope that Ramage had survived to face whatever had been prepared for him.
The pilot scrambling nimbly on board was a muscular young Negro dressed in white canvas trousers, a gaudy blue and yellow shirt and a narrow-brimmed straw hat which many coats of black varnish had made as a rigid as a cast-iron cooking pot.