Just like Mr Ramage, Southwick reflected. The Captain was a fine seaman; he could handle a ship with less effort than a skilled horseman could ride a quiet nag through a gateway, but tell him that A over B equals C and ask him how to calculate what A was and his eyes went glazed. Still, one had to be fair: Southwick knew his mathematics but Bowen nearly always beat him at chess; and the surgeon could cut off a man's leg and sew it all up, but he couldn't hold a candle to the Captain when it came to guessing how the enemy would react in a given situation. And neither Aitken nor Wagstaffe, competent enough officers though they were, could spot trouble under a distant cloud like the Captain and have the ship snugly reefed down by the time a wicked squall came out of nowhere.
"The wake looks like a snake with colic, " he growled at the quartermaster. "Don't let them use so much wheel."
The big island was approaching fast now, and with the sun lifting higher he did not like the haze that was beginning to dull the outlines of the mountains, yet the glass was steady enough. That was the trouble with this damned coast; there were so many local winds. Maracaibo, another three hundred miles along the coast, was the worst; he had a note in his reference book of the chubasco which plagued the Gulf of Venezuela between May and August, coming up in the late afternoon and blowing a full gale and sometimes more for an hour, and then dying down and leaving you half-drowning in torrential rain. Along this stretch of the coast - more towards La Guaira, rather - the calderetas came screaming down from the mountains, hot, sharp blasts which could send masts by the board. His notebook mentioned just that; it was information from another master who had sailed along this coast, but there was no reference to what warning the calderetas gave - if any.
He looked at his watch: it wanted a few minutes to eight. Aitken would be on deck shortly to relieve him, so he picked up the slate and brought the details up to date.
Course, speed, distance run ... Damnation, he was tired.
The Pearl Island. It sounded romantic enough, but he would be glad when it dropped over the horizon astern and the Saddle of Caracas came in sight. That was the one thing that made a landfall at La Guaira an easy task: the high ridge joining three peaks, the Silla de Caracas, stuck out like humps on camels, with one of them only three miles from La Guaira itself. What a ride those messengers must be having, galloping westwards to tell the Captain-General in Caracas that the English heretics had just stolen La Perla from Santa Cruz. Southwick grinned to himself as he imagined the Mayor of Santa Cruz drafting the letter.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
At daybreak the following morning the Jocasta was within fifteen miles of La Guaira, running along a jagged coast where mountain peak after mountain peak reared up only a few miles from the shore, the lower slopes covered with thick green forests. The coastline was a series of bold cliffs, looking like bastions defending the coastline from the constant battering of the sea, broken by occasional gaps where sandy beaches were backed by palm trees. Almost everywhere a heavy surf broke with a thunder that could be heard a mile offshore, spray erupting in white clouds as the waves surged along the rocks.
Ramage looked down at the chart spread on the binnacle box and then glanced up at the mountains. There were two ridges, the nearest with peaks rising to 4000 feet, the second which soared up to 9000 or more. And the three peaks that concerned him most were clear enough: the nearest was Izcaragua, nearly 8000 feet high; then six miles to the west was Pico de Naguata, the highest at 9000 feet, and joined by a long ridge which ran for seven miles to join Pico Avila, 7000 feet high and only three miles from La Guaira. Caracas, the capital of the province, was several miles inland, high among the mountains. There, thought Ramage, the Captain-General will soon be sitting down to his breakfast, blissfully unaware that horsemen are galloping over the mountains to warn him that La Perla has gone. Before they arrived, with luck, more horsemen would be galloping up the twisting road from La Guaira to tell him that La Perla was off the port.
La Guaira - he knew precious little about it. An open anchorage with deep water close to the shore, the port built on a narrow plain between two masses of rock . . . That could be almost anywhere. It was defended by the Trinchera Bastion on the eastern side and by El Vigia, a castle overlooking the port from a height of about four hundred feet. According to Southwick the anchorage was occasionally swept by enormous rollers from the north, coming two or three at a time; walls of water sometimes two miles long which wrenched ships from their anchors and tossed them up on the beach like driftwood.
And that, Ramage thought, is all we know about La Guaira, and entirely due to Southwick's habit of filling notebooks with details of places whenever he could find someone who had been there. It was the main port of the province of Caracas, and (in more peaceful times) fresh water could be obtained from a small reservoir which had been made some five hundred feet above the town by damming up a river. Southwick's notebook added that the main exports were cocoa, coffee, hides, dyewood and medicinal roots. A "particular cargo" comprising those mundane items and captured only by risking the Jocasta would make Admiral Davis explode with more flame and violence than had destroyed El Pilar . . .
Rennick was parading his Marines. They looked smart enough, and Ramage thought he detected a satisfied swagger in their bearing since they had blown up the forts. It would do no harm; they had a right to be proud of themselves and their officer. Although even Rennick did not know it yet, they would soon have to go below to take off their uniforms and put on seamen's clothing. Any sharp-eyed watcher on shore with a telescope would spot those uniforms and know they were not Spanish; moreover, some of the Jocasta's mutineers might be living in La Guaira, only too anxious to help their Spanish masters.
The Marines to wear seamen's clothes, Ramage reflected, is about all I have decided about how we are going to cut out this merchant ship. Rennick has paraded his men, the gunner has been round inspecting the guns, Southwick and the bosun have checked over the tiller ropes and are now busy making sure that they missed nothing in yesterday's examination of sheets, braces and halyards. Aitken has the conn, and every one of them, from the First Lieutenant to the cook's mate, assumes that Mr Ramage has a completely foolproof plan for cutting out the ship, just as they were now convinced that he planned the Jocasta's capture to the last detail from the first moment he sighted the Santa Barbara.
His plan at the moment was to haul down that Spanish ensign as soon as possible; the sooner the Jocasta was sailing under her proper colours the better, although for the time being, to avoid raising the alarm, because they were now rarely a mile from the shore, the red and gold flag of Spain was streaming in the wind. The frigate was still La Perla as far as the Spaniards were concerned - at least at this end of the Main.
Everyone on board was cheerful enough - except Paolo. Since the funeral services he had been taking many vertical angles of every peak that Southwick clapped eyes on and had the height noted on the chart. Ramage doubted if Paolo's book of tables had ever been used so much as it had in the past hour or two. The Master was being deliberately harsh with the boy, beginning with the way he stood as he held the quadrant. "Balance yourself as the ship rolls by swaying your body from the hips upwards, " he had growled. "Don't move your buttocks; you look like a fishwife walking down Billingsgate Hill! "
Now half a dozen seamen were hoisting up the grindstone: after the fighting across the Jocasta's decks there were many cutlasses with nicks in the blades which would have to be ground out, and Ramage shuddered at the thought of having to listen to the scraping once again. The cook would come up on deck soon, announcing to anyone who cared to listen that he had "to put a sharp" on his cleavers: cutting up salt tack always took the edge off them. He always appeared when the grindstone was set up; he always made the same announcement, and no one ever listened. But when they had boarded the Jocasta, Ramage had seen the cook join one of the boarding parties, a meat cleaver in each hand. He was a deceptive man, so thin he seemed to be starving, and normally so quiet that no one would guess he enjoyed nothing better than boarding an enemy ship.