A few minutes later the rain had stopped and the wind was certainly dropping: the topmen had reached the yard and were beginning to slash at the shreds of the topsail, careful that flogging reef-points did not cut them.
Ramage suddenly realized how cold he was: his boots were half-full of water, squelching and sucking as he walked, and his sodden clothes stuck to him like a soggy piecrust. Bowen was now standing up and helping Aitken to his feet. The First Lieutenant staggered for a moment or two, held by Bowen and the injured quartermaster; then he braced himself and made his way over to Ramage.
"I'm sorry, sir; I lost my footing."
"Are you all right now?"
"Yes, sir, just a bump on the head."
Aitken's hair was plastered down and sodden with blood, and he was pale. Ramage looked questioningly at Bowen, who nodded. "Very well, as you can see -" Ramage gestured aloft "- we have to get another topsail from the sail room and bend it on. Are you up to it?"
"Yes, sir, " Aitken said, his voice now firmer. "Give me half an hour and we'll have a new sail drawing! "
Ramage nodded and Aitken made his way down to the main deck. They had been very lucky, Ramage reflected, but he was resentful at losing the topsail. There was a lot of work ahead, hoisting the spare sail up on deck and then swaying it aloft in slings, securing it to the yards and fitting sheets, bowlines, clewlines, buntlines . . . there seemed to be more rope than canvas. Yet there was some 1600 square feet of canvas, a quadrilateral thirty-six feet along the head where it was secured to the yard, and fifty-six feet on the foot, and thirty-six feet deep.
As the rain stopped the wind eased down and began to back. Jackson was already watching the luff of the foretopsail and Ramage guessed that with luck they would be steering direct for La Guaira within half an hour.
Suddenly he thought of the Calypso: how far offshore did these calderetas extend? By now Wagstaffe should be a good sixty or seventy miles to the north, close to the chain of reefs and cays. Obviously the calderetas were caused by the mountains; he could only hope that they exhausted themselves within thirty miles or so. Wagstaffe was unlikely to be suspicious of the unusual light that preceded them; his first warning - if they reached that far - would be the wall of black cloud. Ramage pictured the frigate floating dismasted, utterly helpless. He cursed himself for not giving Wagstaffe definite instructions about which side of the chain of islands he was to saiclass="underline" now, if the Calypso was not at the rendezvous, he would be hunting for a hulk somewhere in at least 250 square miles. If Wagstaffe had kept south of the islands and then lost his masts he would end up among Los Roques, stranded among rocks, coral heads, reefs, cays less than twenty feet high . . . Admiral Davis might yet end up with only one frigate.
Two and a half hours after the caldereta had first hit the Jocasta, the frigate was stretching along the coast in bright sunshine under all plain sail, the wind back in the east and steady. Punta Caraballeda was abeam to the south and Ramage could see Punta el Cojo on the larboard bow with, just beyond it, Punta Mulatos, which was only two miles short of La Guaira.
The new maintopsail was losing its creases; mercifully it had not been attacked by rats in the sailroom. The reefs had been shaken out of the foretopsail and the courses had been let fall and sheeted home. Ramage had not set the topgallants or stunsails, but apart from that the Jocasta showed no sign of the assault by the caldereta. All the men were wearing fresh clothes and the hot sun had dried out the decks. Ramage, already perspiring in the scorching sun, found it hard to believe that less than three hours ago he had been shivering with cold, his teeth chattering in a howling wind.
"Six miles to La Guaira, sir, " Southwick reported.
Six miles, three quarters of an hour's sailing. Ramage looked across to Aitken: "Beat to quarters, but don't run out the guns. Load with canister."
He turned aft, to where Paolo was crouching down, slowly turning the pages of a book in the sun. "How is that coming on?"
"Nearly dry, sir; you can turn the pages without risking tearing them. The colours have run, but I can distinguish the flags."
An hour ago Ramage had wanted to look through the Spanish signal book and he had gone to the binnacle drawer to find it still half-full of rainwater and spray, the book floating like a tiny raft. He had cursed the skill of joiners who had made a watertight drawer, and set Paolo to work with a towel, drying the pages with cautious dabs and then finishing off the job with the heat of the sun. The pages were curling and the cardboard cover had warped, but the printed words had not been affected.
Paolo handed him the book and Ramage looked through the signals. What was the Spanish flag procedure? He had searched through the papers on board, but there was no record that La Perla had ever been given Spanish pendant numbers, the three-figure sequence of numeral flags used in the Royal Navy to identify ships, and which were always hoisted when going into a harbour or anchorage.
Should he fire a salute, and if so to whom? La Guaira was simply a port, not the capital of a province; the senior official would be the Mayor. Again, he had no idea how many guns a mayor rated - if any. The signal book gave him no ideas; he shut it and gave it back to Paolo. Better to ignore salutes and pendant numbers than to get them wrong; doing the wrong thing was more obvious than omitting something. Better offend the Mayor by not giving him his salute than make him suspicious by firing the number of guns reserved for someone like the Captain-General of the province. And anyway, Ramage thought to himself, there should not be much time for feelings to be ruffled or suspicions aroused.
By now the Marine drummer was striding round the main deck beating a series of ruffles. In a few moments the gunner would be hurrying below to open up the magazine and men were already getting ready to load the guns. Rammers, used to drive home cartridges and shot, the sponges which would be soaked with water to swab and cool the guns and extinguish burning debris, and the handspikes used to train the guns, were being unlashed ready for use.
Other men were putting two types of tubs beside the guns: one would be filled with water for the sponges; the other would have lengths of slow match lodged in notches cut round the top edge, the burning ends hanging inside, over the water, so they could not accidentally ignite the stray grains of gunpowder which were almost inevitably scattered over the deck in the heat of action. Unless a flintlock failed to make a spark, slow matches would not be used to fire the guns; they were merely insurance.
More men were waiting for the pumps to be rigged so they could wet the decks while others stood by with buckets of sand, ready to sprinkle it on the planking to stop the guns' crews slipping. Cutlasses and tomahawks were already hung up along the inside of the bulwarks; the boarding pikes were waiting in their racks round the masts, like Roman fasces.
Ramage, glancing up at the red and gold flag of Spain streaming out overhead, could see no reason why anyone should not think that the frigate was La Perla, carrying out the orders of His Excellency the Captain-General of the Province of Caracas, arriving when expected, on passage to Havana.
Punta Caraballeda was on the quarter and Punta el Cojo was on the beam when Aitken arrived on the quarterdeck to report the ship ready for action. A minute or two later Southwick, who had been busy with his quadrant measuring the horizontal angles between the three headlands, announced that they were just over a mile from the shore.