"Speed 1½ knots, course north, wind south, fresh."
No log entry could describe seas that were no longer monstrous, clouds that no longer warned of unbelievable winds and rain the like of which few men ever saw and lived to describe. No log entry could tell how happy men were just to be alive, even though their ship was almost helpless, driven forward only by the pressure of the wind on the hull.
He looked over on the starboard quarter where the Topaz lumbered along, a great ox splashing through a muddy lane. She still looked smart, even without masts, bowsprit or jibboom. If spars suddenly went out of fashion, the Topaz would rate as an elegant ship. For that matter masts have gone out of fashion, he reminded himself, at least around here.
Landfalls were curious: one usually waited days, if not weeks; but once the low grey shape - it always was a low grey shape - was spotted, it became a matter of the greatest urgency to identify it. This was no exception: St Croix stretched for more than thirty miles athwart their course: they could pass either east or west of it to make for one of the other islands beyond. But if it was, say, Virgin Gorda, then they had to get to the westward quickly before they ran on to the reefs littering that end of the islands.
"You're smiling, sir," Southwick, who had just come on deck, said: "St Croix?"
"Virgins," Ramage said. "I was thinking that Columbus must have been in a whimsical mood when he passed through those islands and named them."
"How so?"
"Virgin Gorda, up to the east. It would have been the first of them he sighted. It means 'The Fat Virgin'!"
"He'd been at sea a long time?" Southwick suggested.
"No, not at that point, but the islands were being sighted thick and fast."
"Puerto Rico," Southwick said. 'That does mean 'Rich Port', doesn't it?"
"Yes."
"But why name a whole island 'Rich Port'?"
"He didn't - so the story goes: it was a mistake made in Madrid."
"How come, sir?"
"Because he sighted the island on St John's Day he named the island 'San Juan' after him. Then he found a deep bay on the north coast - a perfect natural harbour, and the soil was obviously rich. So he named the harbour 'Puerto Rico'."
"Ah," Southwick exclaimed, slapping his knee, "so when he reported back, some clerk got 'em mixed up!"
When Ramage nodded, the Master said: "But why have they never put it right?"
"The mistake probably arose in Court - Columbus reported directly to the King. Either the King did not notice the mistake, or would not draw attention to it later."
'"I can't see anyone pointing it out to him, either!"
"Well, whatever happened it's been that way for three hundred years!"
Southwick pulled out his watch, looked first at the grey smudge ahead and then at the Triton's wake, and sniffed disapprovingly. "Thirty minutes. Hasn't exactly leapt up over the horizon."
"We're not exactly galloping towards it!"
In an hour he'd know whether they would pass the eastern or western end. Two things could upset the calculations - a strong west-going current, and easterly winds: both would push the Triton and Topaz to the westwards. They needed the present southerly wind to continue, but it was an unusual wind. Almost certainly, once the effect of the hurricane had worn off, it would fly back to the eastern quadrant; the Trades would return.
An hour later Southwick took another bearing of the eastern end of St Croix. Even before he plotted it on the chart, Ramage knew they had no choice: they would pass the western end because the current was setting the Triton down to the west.
When he marked it on the chart, drawing in the Triton's track for the last hour, it was increasingly obvious that it was going to be a struggle even to keep up to the east enough to be sure of making St Thomas, thirty miles beyond St Croix. To the westward of St Thomas, some seventy miles away, was Puerto Rico. Ramage had no wish to spend even a few weeks, let along months or years, in a Spanish prison...
Back on deck Southwick was pacing up and down and Ramage wondered what had angered him. Before he noticed the Captain had come up the companionway, the Master bent over the compass again, his eye travelling along one of the grooves in the deck planking and over the bow to the eastern end of St Croix. Then he saw Ramage.
"Should never have lost all the spars," he said wrathfully. "Not to be able to set up any sort of jury rig. Who'd have thought we'd have nothing left?"
"We couldn't have saved anything," Ramage said mildly. "I was damned glad to see it all go. I'd no wish to see a topmast surfing itself through our hull planking like a swordfish and sinking us."
"Well, no, sir, but if only we could set a stitch of canvas now we would weather the eastern end of that damned island. As it is, we'll be hard put to have it still in sight as we pass to the westward."
"No matter what jury rig you could contrive, Mr Southwick, don't forget you'd have to make a duplicate for the Topaz..."
"By jingo, yes! We couldn't leave her!"
"Well, then," Ramage said, shrugging his shoulders.
"But it doesn't stop me wanting to keep up to the eastward," Southwick said stubbornly. "It's only natural. All my life I've been trained never to lose an inch to leeward."
"Me too," Ramage said sarcastically. "I joined the same Navy. But we aren't trying to get the weather gage of a French squadron." "True, sir. By the way, we opened another cask of salt pork today. Six pieces short."
Ramage nodded and knew Southwick's mood of depression had passed. When the Master mentioned such mundane things, all was well.
All was well, and some dishonest contractor to the Admiralty had made his usual illicit extra profit, by filling the cask with brine and a few pieces of salt pork less than the number he painted on the outside giving the alleged contents.
It was sometimes hard to think of the Navy as a fighting force, Ramage reflected; it seemed to be an enormous organization where contractors - whether supplying salt pork or beef, timber from the Baltic, rum from the West Indies, butter and dried pease, shirts for the pursers to sell or flax for the sails - made great profits selling items which were underweight or of poor quality.
If the contractors had to sell their wares in the market-place, he thought bitterly, they'd starve. As it is they wax fat, presumably quietly paying the percentages required to ensure Navy Board officials look the other way, and attend banquets where they drink bumpers to the damnation of the French. In the meantime ship after ship, week after week, recorded in the log such entries as "Opened cask of beef marked 151 pieces, contained 147."
Now the spare tiller had been shipped on top of the rudder head, steering was a good deal easier. Certainly the long tiller sweeping across the after deck cut down the space the commanding officer had to walk, but he wasn't so sure whether, for a vessel of this size, the tiller wasn't really better than the wheel anyway.
The Italian seaman, Rossi, was taking a spell at the tiller with the coloured man, Maxton.
"No luff to watch," Ramage said.
"Does make no difference, sir," Rossi said.
"How so?"
"Habit, sir. All the time I keep looking here or here" - he pointed to where the luff of the mainsail would be on either tack with the wind close hauled - "just as though the masts they still stand."
"No big t'ing, sir," Maxton said as if apologizing for Rossi's grumbling, and Ramage smiled to himself: it was a favourite West Indian expression. "But," Maxton confessed, "I keep forgetting and frightening myself when I see the masts are gone."
"You'll get used to it," Ramage said dryly.
"Do we ...' Rossi stopped, embarrassed that he'd begun to ask a question, but continued after Ramage nodded. "Are we making for that island, sir?"