"Yes, sir: three were identical."

 "What happened to the fourth?"

 "I don't know, sir." There was no fooling the Master; he had sharper eyes than Uncle Nicholas.

 "So now you take the angle and the height and you look it up in the tables, eh?" "Yes, sir."

 "What was the height of San Juan?"

 Accidente! Paolo felt someone had put the evil eye on him this morning. Was it 3200 or 2300? Better too high than too low - or was it? He tried to picture which would give the furthest distance, but mathematics were a confusing subject which he learned by rote.

 "3200 feet, sir."

 "Good, it's not often you remember a figure correctly, " Southwick grumbled. "Now, off with you and work it out."

 Paolo hurried below, carefully wiped the quadrant with the oily rag kept in the box for the purpose - spray and even the damp salt air soon corroded the brass - and put it away. A pencil, a piece of paper and the tables ... He turned to the back of the tables, where he had long ago written notes. "Distance off by vertical angle" - and there was the formula. Hurriedly he worked out the sum and there was the answer. Two miles. But it couldn't be! He did the sum again - just over seven miles. He did the sum a third time and the answer was still seven, and he scurried up the ladder to report to the Master.

 But Mr Southwick seemed far from pleased with the news; Paolo saw that the bushy grey eyebrows were pulled down over his eyes like the portcullis of the castle at Volterra.

 "Just over seven miles, Mr Orsini? When was that?"

 "Well, sir, when I took the angle."

 "And have you any idea how long ago that was?" Southwick tapped his watch. "A quarter of an hour ago, Mr Orsini; fifteen whole minutes."

 "Yes, sir, " said Paolo nervously.

 "And we are making nearly ten knots, Mr Orsini, " Southwick said relentlessly. "Will you favour me by telling me how far the ship has travelled in fifteen minutes?"

 Paolo's mind went blank, then he groped in his memory. One knot was one mile in an hour, which was a quarter of a mile in a quarter of an hour. So ten knots was - what?

 "Two miles, sir?" he said hopefully, but the Master's furious expression made him think again. A quarter of a mile at one knot. So at ten knots - why, ten quarters! So simple! "One and a half miles, sir! "

 "Mr Orsini, " Southwick said firmly, "I've no doubt that you have already calculated how far the ship travels in a quarter of an hour if she is making one knot."

 "Yes, sir. A quarter of a mile."

 "So if you multiply a quarter by ten, you get one and a half?"

 "No, sir, " Paolo admitted ruefully, "two and a half."

 "Thank you, " Southwick said sarcastically. "Just bear in mind that an error of a mile in waters like these is more than enough to see the ship hit a shoal."

 "Yes, sir. It won't happen again."

 "It will, Mr Orsini, it will, " Southwick said sadly. "You can knot and splice with the best o' them, but your mathematics. . ."

 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.