Ramage and the Freebooters (25 page)

‘However, to answer your question. The slaves – in
La Merlette
, anyway, and she is typical – get three meals a day, and the food is what they’re used to. Once we’re at sea they spend at least five hours a day on deck. True, each pair of men is shackled together with leg irons, but they get plenty of exercise – they even manage to dance. Their accommodation is cleaned out while they’re on deck, and we give them brandy each day.’

Ramage grunted. For all the talk – and Marais was sincere and the logic of some of his arguments was inescapable even if you disagreed with him – it didn’t change Ramage’s views on slavery. That chiefs of tribes would sell their own youth into slavery didn’t justify slavers buying them. Nor did it justify plantation owners buying them from the slavers.

Marais obviously guessed his thoughts.

‘What’s the Royal Navy’s bounty for seamen now, M’sieur Ramage?’

‘That’s hardly relevant.’

‘No? Your country’s Navy and mine are manned in the same way. Prisons are emptied and men herded on board ships of war in which they stay for years, usually without shore leave and for wages hardly worthy of the name. Or a starving man is offered a pitifully small crust of bread – a bounty – to join. To stay alive he accepts – and at once becomes a slave of your King or, in the French ships, the Directory.

‘Perhaps not even a starving man. A farm labourer gets drunk – and wakes up to find himself in a boat on his way to a ship of war, having been knocked on the head by a press-gang. He’s left a wife and children at home to starve,’ Marais continued.

‘In France and in Britain the price of bread and potatoes goes up every few weeks. Staple foods, M’sieur Ramage: foods that town-dwellers cannot grow, nor can many of the country folk. So, the poor are almost starving. Can you imagine a plantation-owner who’s paid more than fifty guineas for a slave letting him starve?’

‘Slavery is for life,’ Bowen pointed out. ‘A seaman serves only for the war.’

‘And when the war ends? Why, he’s thrown out – along with thousands of other seamen, and soldiers too – and can’t find work. All he knows is seamanship. He doesn’t know where his next meal will come from; he may have lost a limb; his constitution is probably ruined through hard service in bad climates. Scurvy will have lost him his teeth; malignant fevers will plague him always. Yes, a slave’s a slave all his life – and that means regular meals all his life, too.

‘Your M’sieur Wilberforce means well, and so do you gentlemen. But shouldn’t we look at the starving people living lives little removed from slavery in the narrow streets of our towns, or in hovels in our villages, before we condemn slavery? Only cheap gin or wine to keep them warm in winter: no fires, no fuel, very little food?’

‘I’m sorry, M’sieur Marais,’ Ramage said abruptly, ‘nothing can be achieved by talking about it. Are you by any chance a chess player?’

Marais’ eyes lit up. ‘Ah – chess! How I wish for a good game. When I choose my officers, always I ask if they play chess. But never…’

Ramage glanced at Bowen. ‘I think you’ll have time for a few games before we reach Barbados. I’ll have the steward take the chess set to your cabin, Bowen. Oh, by the way, M’sieur Marais, to save you the embarrassment of playing chess with a sentry standing behind you, if you gave your parole…’

‘Gladly,’ said Marais. ‘If I escape I have to swim to Guadeloupe. If I give my parole I can play chess in comfort. Thank you for a pleasant evening.’

Bowen led the way out of the cabin and Ramage looked round for his hat to go up on deck. Two more nights in the Trades, and then Barbados, and under the orders of the Admiral… He realized he’d be more than happy if the Atlantic crossing lasted another couple of months. He was happy with his own little floating world. It had been a challenge to change a mutinous crew into a loyal one, and he wasn’t the slightest bit ashamed of his pride in having achieved it.

With Barbados only a few score miles to the westward, Ramage sat on the aftermost starboard carronade – his favourite spot since it was sheltered from the scorching sun by a small awning – and reflected how few days had passed since Southwick had persuaded him to deal with the problem of Bowen.

The voyage was nearly over; Bowen may or may not be cured permanently but certainly had not touched a drink for more than a week. He could now watch others drinking without becoming soaked with perspiration as he silently fought himself to avoid reaching for a glass.

The tropics – still the words gave Ramage pleasure. But now, approaching the islands which stretched in a chain shaped like a new moon from the South American coast at the east end of the Spanish Main to Florida, he knew the lives of the men in the
Triton
would probably depend more on Bowen’s skill than his own.

Dozens of islands ranging from Cuba in the north, six hundred miles long, to barren rocks barely a mile wide. But all of them islands containing great extremes: great beauty and great ugliness; much peace and much violence; much pleasure and much pestilence.

One week the heat and humidity would be tempered by the fresh Trade winds into a blissful climate; another, when the wind dropped, would be damp and unbearably hot, draining every man’s energy, mildewing his clothes, sapping his spirit.

A perfectly fit and strong man could admire the frangipani, its delicate white blossom with gold centres flowering on leafless trees clinging precariously to a cliff face; he could stare at the almost unbelievably beautiful flamboyant tree covered in brilliant scarlet blossom, an enormous ball of flame. And that night the man could be struck down with some disease like the black vomit, which within twenty-four hours, would leave him dying with insects crawling wherever life oozed from his body.

Islands where moderation did not exist.

The first day of the rainy season came – and almost overnight the sun-scorched brown hills turned green with tiny shoots sprouting like down on a boy’s face. The sun nourished the plants so they grew fast and then, as they flowered, scorched them to death, and while the sun and rain rotted the remains the ants, scorpions, lizards and great buzzing swarms of flies hunted and feasted…

The trunk of a fallen tree apparently solid – until you touch it and it crumbled to powder, riddled with termites…

And beside the rotting piles there’d be scatterings of poinsettia – the Spanish
Flor de Pascuas
, the Italian
Stella di Natale
, the Flower of Christmas – growing wild and profuse, each slender stem topped by petals hanging down like leaves in a brilliant red star.

The dull green of the
lignum vitae
tree, the wood of which was so heavy it sank in water but whose tiny, gentle blue blossoms, no bigger than a small button, gave no hint of its enormous strength. And the chenille plant whose native name, Red Hot Cat Tail, aptly described its flower.

He remembered the pelicans, broad-winged and cumbersome, with long beaks, and pendulous sacks beneath, standing on a coral reef like a group of wizened sagging-jowled old men gossiping of politics and bygone days. It was such an effort for them to get into the air but, once flying they did it lazily, almost without effort. Yet when their little button eyes spotted a fish they flopped down to catch it in such a clumsy dive it seemed that flying had suddenly exhausted all their strength.

And, for comparison, the little white egret, smaller, more graceful than the European heron, high-stepping on deep, stinking mud at the edge of a mangrove swamp with all the delicacy of a little princess entering a ballroom knowing she was watched by ten score guests.

The osprey hovering on an air current in the lee of a hill and swooping on to some unwary fish in a lagoon below almost faster than the eye could follow – and gaudy parrots squawking raucously in the jungle. Tiny humming birds, like large bees; mocking birds whose shrill whistles were like human beings signalling to each other.

Memories tumbled over each other, none blurred by time. Amaryllis with its trumpet-shaped flowers; the long, silver barracuda streaking through the sea, face as ugly as a pike’s, teeth sharper than razors; sharks with blue-grey backs and white bellies, scavenging, the vultures of the sea. Papaya trees with their delicious soft orange-centred fruit growing in dusters at the top of the trunks. Tamarind with hard, coloured seeds which the natives strung together into bead necklaces. The aptly and tragically named Belle of the Night, whose buds opened as night fell to reveal white petals and a golden centre (to those with lanterns who cared to look, or who admired in the moonlight) and which closed as the sun rose, never to open again.

The coral reefs waiting to rip out a ship’s bottom, but swarming with fish so gaily coloured in such strange patterns they might have been created by an inspired artist in the last stages of a drunken frenzy. Long sandy beaches backed by many types of palm trees.

And at the back of the beaches, neat holes, the homes of land crabs which the natives caught at night, luring them with flaming torches.

Everywhere among the islands mosquitoes, whining and biting, leaving smudges of blood when you slapped them on your flesh. In the rainy season they were reinforced by sandflies, almost too small to see but which waited for the sun to dip towards the horizon before emerging to bite with the sharpness of needles, leaving angry, itching weals.

Shiny black scorpions, smaller than one had expected. Centipedes, lurking under stones and twigs, or hiding in the beams of a roof or ceiling and dropping on your arm to give you a bite which swelled like a Scotsman’s haggis.

Long-tailed, impertinent blackbirds, bigger than those in Europe, strutting around like young midshipmen on a flagship’s quarterdeck, lacking only a telescope tucked under a wing.

Clothing mildewed, rotted and decayed; iron rusted and flaked until nothing was left but a dull red stain. Nothing moved, yet nothing stood still. Like jagged rocks in a pool, the Windward Islands stood four-square at the southern end of the Caribbean. On them men built houses and hurricanes blew them down. Coral reefs grew, then the coral died and the seas smashed it, hurling the pieces upon the beach where, along with sea shells, the waves pounded and ground it into gleaming sand.

In the jungles trees died and fell to give life to termites; animals died, but their bodies gave life to beetles and maggots; sailors died – and, Ramage thought bitterly, gave life to clerks filling in forms at the Navy Board.

Southwick came up from below, where he had been working out his noon sight and, squinting in the bright sunlight, reported: ‘We should sight Ragged Point before noon tomorrow, if this wind holds.’

‘How much before noon?’

‘Between ten and noon.’

‘Hmm…’

Knowing the captain was thinking of the risk of running on to the island in the darkness, Southwick said: ‘I don’t think we need heave-to tonight, sir. I’m reasonably certain, and there’s been no north-going current for the past five days.’

Every captain – and master too – making the Atlantic crossing had one fear about making his landfall: that he’d be a few miles ahead of his reckoning so that in the darkness the ship would run up on the low-lying, rocky and wave-beaten east coast of Barbados. If you were too far north or south you could pass it in the night and, if to the south, run on to the rocks (some forty feet high and barely twenty wide) and tiny islands of the Grenadines beyond.

Well, Ramage knew Southwick was a good navigator but at this stage in the voyage all captains and all masters tried to outdo each other in showing confidence, yet most of them – the conscientious ones, anyway – always had a nagging doubt.

An error in the quadrant, in the chronometer, an unexpected current during the night between sights… All could land you on the beach at Barbados, where even in a calm day the swell waves thundered their way through outlying reefs and sent a fine spray drifting inland for several hundred yards, an almost invisible mist.

The lighthouse – one could never trust that a light had been lit; and even then couldn’t be sure it wasn’t put up by a wrecker in a position where it’d lead you on to rocks. More fortunes than anyone liked to admit had been made by wreckers in these islands; in Barbados alone two or three of the leading families were reputed to have a hand in it.

Soon after dawn next morning it seemed to Ramage every man in the ship was rubbing, scrubbing, polishing or painting. His own steward could hardly wait to get him out of the cabin to start pressing clothes which, for the previous three or four days had been hung up to air.

Seamen were busy with cloths and brickdust, rubbing vigorously to give all the brasswork an extra shine. The decks had already been holystoned and washed down.

The gunner’s mate and a couple of men were methodically wiping over each carronade with oily cloths. Two days ago they’d gone round with a bucket of blacking – a mysterious mixture of vinegar and lamp black – painting it on spots where rust marks had been removed, and repainting all the shot in the racks.

There was still a strong smell about the ship: for the past two days the men had been painting the standing rigging with a mixture of Stockholm tar, coal tar and salt water which had been heated up in a fish kettle (and as they wielded their brushes Southwick danced around below, cursing them for spilling drops, despite the old awnings spread over the deck which had been liberally sprinkled with sand as an added precaution).

At the bow three men were putting the finishing touches to the
Triton’s
figurehead. The wooden replica of the son of Poseidon and Amphitrite was small and well-carved and his head was bent forward slightly, as if supporting the bowsprit. His fish’s tail twisted down the stem and the outline of each scale was picked out in gold leaf. The face was – as Southwick commented many weeks ago – ‘friendly enough for one o’ those Greek chaps’ but the Triton shell which by tradition he held in his hand had been broken off at some time and replaced with one carved from green wood which the hot sun had now split.