Not one of the Calypso's officers approved of his plan. Ramage bad sensed that when he had explained it to them. Only Lacey was full of enthusiasm, and that was because his role was exciting. But the rest of them, from Southwick (who had been in battle dozens of times) to Kenton (who was relatively untried) had misgivings. None had said a word; to most captains they would have seemed full of enthusiasm.
Looking round at them in his cabin the previous day, when he had asked if there were any questions, he could guess how each man's mind was working. Each was reacting differently because he had a different personality. Southwick regarded it as wasting time: to him there was little wrong in getting alongside the other ship as quickly as possible and resolving the battle with his broadsides and boarding pikes. The master's strength was in his right arm, wielding a meat cleaver of a sword. Aitken, the quiet Scot, was intelligent enough to see the purpose behind Ramage's plan but he did not believe it would work, and nor did he think it necessary. Wagstaffe did not think the French would fall into the trap - that much was clear from the questions he asked - but if they did he could see the trap would then work. Young Kenton had never heard of such a plan and, because he was young, he was conservative: why fence with a foil when you could slash with a cutlass? Kenton had been at sea long enough to see that wars could not be fought without men being killed, but not long enough to try to reduce the odds. To him - and, to be fair, to the other officers, including the Marine lieutenant - one British frigate and a schooner were a match for any French frigate, and given that historic truth, proved in hundreds of actions, why monkey about ...
Aitken was a deep - thinking officer and Ramage could guess that the young Scot, wise beyond his years and almost certain to have his own command soon, was beginning to see things through the eyes of a captain, weighing risk against reward, risk against responsibility, risk against culpability. He knew that a senior officer, a commander-in-chief, Their Lordships at the Admiralty, were always reading the orders and looking at the results, rarely giving praise for success but quick to select and accuse a scapegoat if they saw failure ( even though, often enough, the original orders were too absurd to allow success).
Yet there were times when a captain trying to make the weights balance on those scales, putting the risk on one pan. the responsibility and culpability on the other, saw the responsibility and culpability pan drop with a decisive clang. So he did not take the risk because it would hazard his future. Rejecting the risky plan, he drew up a safe one. The risky plan might have saved many lives if it was successful; the safe plan was, all too often, safe only because the certainty of its success was bought with many men's lives.
As Ramage watched the lighter eastern sky push the darkness westward he felt his anger growing with the whole of the present system of command in the Royal Navy. It meant that no captain depending on his regular pay to support a wife and family dare take a risk where failure could blast his career. There were a few exceptions - very few indeed, and Rear - Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson was the only one who came to mind at the moment.
The officers who could and did take risks with their careers in order to save lives tended to be men who had private incomes. Alexander Cochrane, for instance, who was heir to the Earl of Dundonald, and although there wasn't much money in the family, it was just enough to make sure that Cocky would not starve if the Admiralty court - martialled him over one of his wilder exploits. Not that so far they had any reason to bring him to trial; he took quite fantastic chances - but he succeeded and his men worshipped him.
There were of course stupid officers, rich and poor, who took risks simply because they lacked brains; the kind of men who gambled every penny they had on the turn of a dice without realizing that, even if they won, the low winnings compared with the high stake they could lose made the risk absurd - . No, he was thinking of intelligent men; men like Aitken, who had travelled a long way from a widowed mother and that grey stone cottage in Perthshire; who had managed by sheer ability and bravery to get well up to windward in his career, but who in a very few years would be unable to risk losing it.
Which, Ramage thought bitterly, boiled down to the fact that all too often the commander-in-chief and the Admiralty judged success by the size of the butcher's bill. An action in which a French frigate was captured by a British one which lost fifty men killed and a hundred wounded was regarded as a great victory, without anyone questioning whether the casualties were necessary. After all, the French frigate was captured . . . capture the enemy and no one questions the casualties. But capture the same frigate with only half a dozen casualties and the captain was given little credit, authority shrugged its collective shoulders and commented that the French were poltroons.
Perhaps it was the right attitude: Their Lordships could not be expected to weep because a hundred men died in a battle. If they did, the Admiralty would cease to function; no one would dare give orders. No admiral could order a ship into action if he stayed awake at night thinking of all the women who would be widowed, all the children made fatherless, as a result of his order. Admirals had to have hard hearts, and in his experience most of them did anyway, as well as an appreciation of captains responsible for payments into their prize accounts.
The trouble arose when a captain knew his ship's company too well; when he knew each man's quirks and habits, recognized his accent out of a dozen others, knew of his hopes and fears, perhaps had been asked for advice concerning some wayward wife or errant son. Then the question of taking a risk and hazarding his future did not apply. The captain was involved: he was the father of a large family.
Take Jackson, for instance. The muster book merely listed him as Jackson, Thomas, American, born in Charleston, Carolina, volunteer. Then there was Stafford, William, born in London, prest, and Rossi, Alberto, born in Genoa, volunteer ... There were up to fifty other men now in the Calypso who had served with him for two or three years and sometimes more; who had been with him, for example, when the Kathleen cutter was rammed by the Spanish three - decker and reduced to kindling; had been in the Triton brig in various actions and saw her end up dismasted and wrecked on a coral reef . . . Yet men like Jackson, Thomas, had been with him when he rescued Gianna from the beach in Tuscany, with Bonaparte's cavalry galloping at them and Jackson making weird noises in the darkness which scared off the horses.
There was so much to remember; so many shared experiences with these people, men like Southwick, for instance, and more recently Aitken, Wagstaffe, Baker and young Lacey astern there in La Creole. If any one of these men was killed in battle he would mourn them like - like what, a brother, a nephew, an uncle? No, like one of his men; a curious relationship that encompassed all the others. With Southwick, for example, there was the combination of an eccentric uncle and an erratic nephew. Jackson, tall and sinewy, his sandy hair thinning, was like the most valued of family retainers. Officially he was the captain's coxswain, but over the years he had become the equivalent of bodyguard and head gamekeeper. Jackson had saved his life several times; he had saved Jackson's. There were no debits or credits, only mutual respect.
And Stafford. Not to put too fine a point on it, Will Stafford was a bright - eyed young Cockney picklock at the time the pressgang took him up, but even if his boyhood had been spent burgling, the result as a young man was a fine seaman, fearless and loyal in a way that reminded Ramage of old stories of knightly chivalry. Stafford could just about write his name with much effort and tongue protruding, but he would give his life for his friends, men like Jackson and Rossi. He had an engaging way of mispronouncing words, and Jackson patiently corrected him.