"I intend to wait here," Ramage said. Both men noted the use of the the word "intend"; this was what Ramage was going to do, and he was telling the admiral, not suggesting (when he would have used the word "proposing"). "We can anchor off the north side if it grows too rough here. No one suspects our identity: to the garrison we are a French frigate . . ."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It wanted an hour to sunset when Ramage stood at the fore end of the quarterdeck with Aitken, Hill and Orsini. By now the wind was much stronger, with the ship pitching heavily in the swell which had come up from the south, sliding in under the wind waves. Each time the Calypso snubbed at her anchor cable she groaned as if in protest. Each jerk was felt through the whole ship: deck beams moved a fraction of an inch, bending to absorb the weight of the guns on the maindeck: each gun and its carriage meant a couple of tons pressing down on the deck planking at four points, where the four wooden wheels, or trucks, rested.
The pitching of the hull jerked the masts back and forth a distance almost imperceptible to the untrained eye but increased by the weight of the yards and the sails furled on them. However, the thick hemp rope of the standing rigging stretched naturally, giving the masts a certain amount of play. The movement of the hull and of the masts, as Paolo Orsini had learned during the first few days after joining the ship (a wide-eyed and very nervous "Johnny Newcome"), was what gave the Calypso her strength. Southwick had explained it to him quite simply: you could bend a bundle of thin sticks across your knee without breaking them, but a solid stick of the same diameter would snap.
As Paolo now watched the rigging slackening and tautening he remembered Southwick's words, and although he had sailed thousands of miles since then, he was still grateful for the old master's quiet explanation: coming when it did, it meant that a young lad yet to make his first voyage as a midshipman was never again frightened by the creaks and groans of a ship working in a seaway.
"We'll move round to the north side of the island and find a lee," Ramage told Aitken. "There's no point in waiting, and I don't want to start feeling my way round in the dark. Man the capstan, and let's have the fiddler play a few tunes: with this sea the men will need some forebitters when they set their chests to the capstan bars."
Southwick bustled up. His station was on the fo'c'sle when weighing anchor, where he could see how the cable was growing (the indication of where the anchor was lying on the sea bottom, in relation to the ship). Skilful use of topsails and the rudder meant that the ship could sail up until she was almost over the anchor, thus taking much of the weight off the cable and so making it easier for the men at the capstan, who would otherwise be hauling the ship bodily ahead.
Many captains, the master recalled, did not bother to help the men, taking the view that a seaman was a seaman, and straining at a capstan bar was part of the job.
As Southwick made his way forward to the fo'c'sle, the boatswain's mates were busy with their calls, the shrill, twittering notes interspersed with orders sending men running forward while the topmen, the most agile seamen in the ship, went to the shrouds, awaiting the orders which would send them aloft and out along the yards ready to untie the gaskets holding the sails tightly furled so that at the shouted words "Let fall" the canvas would drop like blinds.
Ramage looked up at Castello with his telescope. "Nothing," he commented to Aitken. "No one on the battlements. Still having their siesta, I expect. No hostages to guard ... sleep, eat, play cards and read the Moniteur. I wonder how many of them can actually read?"
"About the same, percentage as our seamen, I expect," Aitken said. "A few minutes' listening to someone reading from the Moniteur can't be much of an incentive to the illiterate dullards to take lessons!"
By now the men on the quarterdeck had removed the small wedge-shaped drawers which fitted into the slots round the circular top of the capstan, and which held bandages if the ship was frequently in action, or cloths for polishing brass if she was in port for any length of time. The men were now sliding the long capstan bars into the slots so that they radiated out like the spokes of the wheel of a haywain, but horizontal and at the height of a man's chest. As the last bar slid into place a boatswain's mate took a line and with it clovehitched each end to the next, as though adding the rim of the wheel to the spokes. This swifter, as it was called, made sure that none of the bars accidentally came out (an accident which could happen easily enough, without the swifter) should the men at one bar lose their footing.
Hellfire, Ramage thought to himself, the wind is coming up quickly: had it been out of a clear sky and brief, it would be called a colpo di vento, but as it is there is no doubt the captain of the Calypso has left weighing anchor so late that he is risking having to cut and run. Cutting and running to escape an enemy was all right, but telling the Board that one had to cut a cable and lose an anchor because of bad weather would bring down their wrath: not so much because of the value of the lost cable and anchor but because it revealed poor judgement and worse seamanship.
Ramage glanced at the distant stone wall partly enclosing the port, and then at the rocks at the bottom of the cliffs. "Use the topsails to get the strain off the cable as soon as you can - but you haven't much room to tack."
Aitken nodded and gave Hill an order. In a way it was amusing, Ramage thought: he was going to walk a few feet away apparently to watch the men at work at the capstan and then join Southwick, but actually he was giving Aitken the chance of handling the ship alone under what were difficult conditions. The only way Aitken would ever be absolutely confident was knowing that he could not make mistakes because the captain was not within earshot, ready to take command again. And now in turn Aitken was trying out Hill because this was the first time that the new third lieutenant had sailed with Aitken.
Ramage found the fiddler hurriedly tuning his fiddle. "Hurry up," he said, "it'll be blowing a hurricane and we'll part the cable before you've hove a strain on that blasted catgut!"
Finally Ramage said: "Come on, better flat forebitters than no forebitters at alclass="underline" up on the capstan you go!"
The man grinned, revealing three or four yellow teeth and, ducking under the swifter, squeezed past two men standing ready to start pushing on their bar and scrambled up on to the top of the capstan.
The Calypso's bow was now rising and falling a good fifteen feet as the swell waves swept in, lifting high on the crests and plunging so quickly into the troughs that Ramage knew the men there would be feeling almost weightless, hard put to stand still because as the bow dropped they would be almost forced to trot a step or two.
The fiddler stood facing outboard, his knees flexing and tensing to keep his balance. He sawed once at the fiddle and then waved the bow confidently at Ramage, who promptly ordered: "Start heaving, my lads!"
As Ramage recognized the familiar tune of one of the men's favourite forebitters, the foretopsail was let fall, the canvas flogging and almost drowning out the fiddle and the groaning of the capstan, until the yard was hoisted. Then the yard creaked as men hauled on the braces to trim it and the canvas stopped flogging as others heaved on the sheets.
"On Friday morning as we set sail . . ." the capstan men roared, pressing against the bars, each of the pawls clunking as it fell back into its slot in the barrel, preventing a sudden jerk overwhelming the men and spinning the capstan in reverse.
Further aft yet another sail began to slat, and now Ramage could hear the fiddle giving the tune, and the men bellowed the second line.