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 all: why did such a heavy bird as a pelican, diving from such great heights, not break its neck?

As Ramage paused on the quarterdeck, trying to switch his thoughts from the pelicans diving round the Diamond to the problems facing him over the Rock itself, he realized that the Surgeon was waiting to speak to him, and with him was Rennick, the Marine Lieutenant.

'How are the new patients, Bowen?'

'Both in good shape, I'm happy to say, sir,' he said, handing Ramage the copy of the sick list. 'The cutlass wound was a clean cut, and I can see the healing has already begun. The other man is badly bruised but I have given him another thorough examination this morning, and there are definitely no bones broken.'

'He must have fallen fifty feet, sir,' Rennick said apologetically.

'Now he knows the perils of standing near a recoiling gun,' Ramage said grimly. 'I hope you've thought about what I was telling you last night...'

'I have indeed, sir. The trouble was that I had heard of that method before - turning a gun with its breech towards the edge of a cliff and firing it. I did it because it seemed certain the recoil would run it back over the edge of the cliff.'

'And so it would have, if the platform had been level, but there you had an uneven and rocky surface. No wonder the damned gun ran round in a curve and turned over. It only needed one of the trucks to hit a bump.'

'Well, sir,' said Rennick defensively, 'at least we managed to roll it over the edge of the cliff in the end.'

'Where it now lies undamaged and ready for the French to salvage, if we give them the chance,' Ramage said sharply. ‘A brass gun, too. Worth three iron guns, as you well know.' ‘We destroyed the other two, though, sir,' Rennick said contritely.

Ramage nodded, accepting Rennick's apology. 'That's the safest way - double or triple charge, three roundshot and everyone behind some shelter when you fire. That's why you're supposed to carry an extra long trigger line when you attack a battery.'

When the lieutenant went red, Ramage asked suspiciously: 'You did carry one, didn't you?'

Rennick shook his head and clearly wished the deck would open up and swallow him. 'No, sir, but I joined up the three the French were using ...’

Ramage knew that the Marine Lieutenant had learned several lessons and he would not repeat the mistakes again. Apart from that, it had been a brave and well executed attack, and he did not want Rennick to lose confidence in himself. 'Very well, you destroyed the battery, which is what matters,' he said. ‘I’ll have a word with your men later.'

Rennick gave a relieved grin, saluted and left. Ramage looked at Bowen's sick list. 'I see you've discharged three more men.'

'Yes, sir. At least, they asked to be discharged: I'd have kept them another day, but they insisted.'

'Insisted?' Ramage asked curiously. 'I thought every man's ambition is to get on the sick list for a few days' rest!'

'It is in most ships - indeed, it was for the first couple of weeks after we left England. But all that's changed; these three men apparently heard some rumour about the Diamond -' Bowen nodded towards the Rock '- and they, well, it seemed to me they wanted to join in the fun.'

'Fun! They'll have to work so hard they'll probably end up back on the sick list suffering from heat stroke!'

'We'll see, sir,' Bowen said with a knowing look.

Ramage walked forward to the fo'c'sle, where Southwick was busy with a party of seamen. He was watching while the carpenter and bos'n worked on an enormous block of unusual shape. The big lignum vitae sheave fitted into a thick wooden shell, one side of which was longer than the other, and open at one end. Called a voyol block, it was a spare one and rarely used. Now it would ride up the jackstay with a gun slung underneath it. Like many things in a ship that are seldom used, the block had been stowed without being washed in fresh water, and the salt had made the sheave and pin seize up. Now the carpenter was driving out the pin with his maul. It would be cleaned and driven back after being smeared with tallow, and a liberal amount of tallow would be put on the sheave so that it turned freely.