'Very well, get your men ready. Mr Wagstaffe, a cutter if you please, and a dozen extra men with muskets. Make sure they have plenty of powder and shot for the boat gun - cavalry might arrive before Mr Rennick returns from the battery.'
Half an hour later Ramage and Southwick watched the cutter run up on the beach, having stayed out of range of the battery, wait for a few minutes as the Marines scrambled on shore and then come out again, rowing round to a small cove fifty yards west of the beach and in the lee of the mountain. There, Ramage noted, the boat would be out of sight of any cavalry galloping along the beach.
Southwick grunted in the nearest he ever came to expressing satisfaction with Marines. 'They'll be all right. Pity they can't surprise those damned Frenchmen. Well, sir, I see the men are ready to re-anchor the Surcouf to get that ten-inch cable in. I'll go over and keep an eye on them.'
Aitken was now bringing the schooner Créole in from the westward: he had seen the Juno's signal ordering him on board and Wagstaffe was waiting with a seabag ready containing his clothes and quadrant. The Second Lieutenant was obviously excited and Ramage knew that this command, however brief it might prove to be, would make up for the disappointment of seeing the Third Lieutenant go off to Barbados in La Mutine.
Ramage took a pencil and pad from his pocket and went aft with a telescope, sitting down on the breech of the aftermost gun. He spent the next half an hour examining the Diamond Rock with the telescope, occasionally making a sketch on the pad and scribbling notes.
He had already drawn the south side of the great rock while in the cutter. There it was completely vertical from sea level to within a hundred feet or so of the top; then it sloped back gently for fifty feet, and then more sharply again to the peak. His sketch resembled a tooth, the raking pack at the top being the natural shape to bring the tooth to a point.
His inspection in the cutter had confirmed what he had feared from the start: the only way of getting guns up the Diamond, to whatever height, was by jackstay. Only the gun covering the landing place was going to be straight forward - if lowering it to the sea bed from a boat and then dragging it ashore could be described as straightforward.
He turned to a fresh page and copied the sketch he had made from the cutter, drawing the tooth-shaped rock with the vertical cliff face to the left. Then from sea level he drew a diagonal line up to the top of the cliff. That would be the jackstay, secured at the top round the rocky outcrop, and at the bottom to the anchored Juno. Running up the jackstay would be a big block, and from that would hang the gun. The block and gun would be hauled up the jackstay by a purchase, one set of blocks attached to the big block, and the other to the top of the cliff. The hauling part of the rope would come down to the Juno, where it would go round the capstan.
As he pencilled in the lines showing the ropes it seemed almost alarmingly simple, though he could imagine the difficulty he was going to have describing it all in a letter to Gianna. Imagine, he would tell her, that you have to hoist a heavy weight from the garden up to a high window in a house. You take a clothes line and tie one end to the window ledge and the other to the base of a tree in the garden, so the line is taut and running down a steep angle.
You put a pulley on the line (Gianna would be furious with him for using the word 'pulley' instead of the nautical 'block' which she understood well enough), and hang the weight on it. Then you hook one more pulley on the weight, and another to the window ledge. You pass a rope from the window ledge down to the pulley on the weight, back round the pulley on the window ledge and then down to the garden. Allora, cara mia, as you stand by the tree and haul on the rope, the weight will slowly rise up the line. And that, he would add, is what we did with the guns, give or take a few blocks, several hundred feet of rope and a few tons of weight. He could see her tracing with her finger as she read the letter, working it all out . . . She could never imagine just how close the Juno would be moored to the cliff, he thought grimly; so close that the ends of the yards would almost touch the rock face. He put the pad and pencil in his pocket and turned to watch the Marines attacking the battery as the Créole came in and anchored.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Next morning Ramage returned on board the Juno after inspecting the Surcouf feeling much more cheerful. Working through the night with Aitken encouraging them, the men now had the maincourse bent on the yard and furled, and the maintopsail and topgallant were both neatly faked down in slings ready for hoisting. The fourcourse was also bent on and men were sorting out the buntlines and clewlines before furling it. The foretopsail and topgallant were being hoisted up from the sail room. How they had sorted out all that running rigging by lantern light Ramage could not imagine, but by sunset the Surcouf would be ready to go into action against her erstwhile owners.
Ramage's main worry when he first heard that the Surcouf’s sails were all on board and stowed in the sail room was that the rats would have got at them. They were so bulky (a frigate's maincourse comprised more than 3000 square feet of canvas and a whole suit totalled 14000 square feet and weighed four tons) that it was impossible to keep them inspected properly in a sail room, and even a single rat chewing a tunnel through the folds of a stowed sail could do more damage than a dozen roundshot. However, it was clear that the French had only just put the sails on board and many small patches showed they had checked them over before doing so. '
It had been a good idea to fetch Aitken back: he was in his element commissioning the Surcouf and Ramage had the impression he had been getting bored with tacking back and forth with the Créole. The young Scot was fascinated by the differences in the French and British ways of rigging ships. They were slight but often significant, and he pointed them out to Ramage with all the excitement of a collector. It was an enthusiasm Ramage shared; he recognized in the Scot another man like himself, a squirrel who collected odd and often useless items of information and stored them away in his head for mental winters.
It was a habit, Ramage knew from bitter experience, that could make you unpopular in certain company. Too many men had no real interest in anything and for practical purposes were blind to most of the things that went on around them. Ramage now kept a tight rein on his tongue, but in the past had often commented on something he found interesting, only to find the other person thought he was showing off his knowledge. The episode that had made him vow he would never again begin a conversation with anyone he did not know well concerned pelicans.
He had noticed that when these heavy birds dived at a very steep angle into the water after a fish, often from a considerable height, at the very last moment they bent their long necks close up against their bodies and, for reasons which Ramage could not work out, always surfaced facing the opposite direction. It had been a topic of conversation and observation for Ramage and Southwick for weeks the last time they had been in the Caribbean. One day Ramage had mentioned it in front of a group of captains - he had been a mere lieutenant then - and to a man the captains had stared at him as though they had suddenly found in their midst someone who had just escaped from Bedlam. All of them had served in the Caribbean for at least two years and had obviously not noticed it. Aitken, who had just arrived in the West Indies for the first time, had not only noticed it but already had several theories and, he recently told Ramage, had drawn many sketches which he intended sending to an eminent naturalist he knew in Edinburgh. Apparently he had shown the sketches to Southwick, who had been able to add to them. The two of them had settled down to try to calculate the most driving question of alclass="underline" why did such a heavy bird as a pelican, diving from such great heights, not break its neck?