Ramage's Mutiny (27 page)

W
HEN RAMAGE saw the row of lanterns appear on Castillo San Antonio he gave a sigh of relief which brought a laugh from Southwick. “So you were worrying about Rennick, sir!”

“I was worrying about the job, not the man,” Ramage said impatiently. He glanced astern. “We're still in range of Santa Fé …”

Southwick sniffed yet again. “I still can't see the commandant ordering his gunners to open fire on the
Jocasta,
or whatever her Spanish name was. On the
Calypso,
perhaps.”

“They can't tell which is which by now—ah, there are the lights on El Pilar. Both in our hands. I hope those Marines step lively on their way back to the boats.”

Southwick stared up at each fort as the
Jocasta
passed through a line joining them. “I hope they don't make any mistake with the slow match,” he said. “I wonder how much powder they have in the magazines.”

“Plenty,” Ramage said. “Poor quality but plenty of it.”

“Let's hope there's enough to do the job. That San Antonio must have walls ten feet thick.”

The two men watched as the
Jocasta
came clear of the two headlands. Ramage brought her round to starboard a couple of points, well up to windward, so that when she was hove-to the current would slowly take her back towards the entrance. The
Santa Barbara
was still close in with the entrance but the
Calypso
was now showing up clear of the headlands.

Ramage looked at his watch. “They should be spiking the guns now.”

“Waste of time, to my way of thinking,” Southwick grumbled. “Double charge and three round shot: there's no chance of repairs, then.”

“Too risky,” Ramage said, remembering that Rennick had made the same argument. “Sixty-four guns altogether. Someone's bound to get excited and fire one gun too soon. And why rouse out the town and Santa Fé before we have to?”

Southwick shrugged his shoulders. The fact was that he agreed, but he was annoyed that his role in the night's activities had been slight. True, he had boarded the
Jocasta,
but he had expected to be given the job of taking Castillo San Antonio, and he was enjoying his grumbles.

“Take the conn, Mr Southwick,” Ramage said. “Heave-to the ship now, and make sure the
Calypso
heaves-to reasonably close. I want to go through some of those Spanish papers in my cabin.”

The Spanish Captain of the
Jocasta,
he discovered as he began reading through the papers, was Diego Velasquez, and the way the letters were kept in neat bundles tied with different coloured tapes showed that he was a careful and precise man. Red tape denoted letters and orders from the Captain-General of the province of Caracas (the bulk was due more to the thick wax seals than the amount of paper), while blue tape secured correspondence with the Mayor and
junta
of Santa Cruz.

A quick glance showed Ramage that the Mayor of Santa Cruz, although given a lot of power and acting more like a governor, was very careful when drawing up orders to make it clear that he was acting for the
junta.
If wrong orders were given, the Mayor was obviously determined that his council would at least share the blame. Every order was issued on behalf of the
junta,
and to make doubly sure the Mayor listed the members present at each meeting. They ranged from the judge to the city treasurer; ten of the city's leading citizens.

The Mayor's letters dealt mostly with routine matters—reporting that casks of provisions had arrived and were ready for Velasquez, asking about the progress being made in refitting the ship, complaining of the strain on the city's finances caused by the need to feed all the troops sent on board … Then the almost hysterical warning to Velasquez of the insurrection among the Indians in the mountains, followed by a peremptory order (in the name of the
junta
) to send the troops on shore for them to march inland and put down the insurrection.

The Mayor was clearly happiest when forwarding instructions to Velasquez which came from the capital of the province, Caracas, a few miles inland from the port of La Guaira. “His Excellency the Captain-General has honoured me with his latest orders, which the
junta
of Santa Cruz forwards to you and which I direct you to obey with all speed …” was his regular formula.

Ramage had begun by reading the Mayor's letters on the assumption that they would give the latest orders to Velasquez, but by the time he had read a dozen it was clear that they dealt mostly with provisioning and manning. Anything of any importance from the Captain-General had been sent direct to Velasquez. He tied up the Mayor's letters again and with a sigh turned to those from the Captain-General. Letters from the Admiralty in London were usually brief to the point of being taciturn; only formal documents like commissions used archaic and flowery language. But the Spanish were different: a letter from the Mayor telling Velasquez that ten casks of rice and five of chick-peas were being sent to Santa Cruz from La Guaira meant three lines of elaborate introduction and another three to end the letter.

The first he read from the Captain-General was even worse: His Excellency referred not only to his
junta—
which dealt with the whole province “on behalf of his sacred Catholic Majesty”—but to the head of every department involved in the particular order. Hardly believing what he read, Ramage saw that the letter was telling Velasquez that an application for timber to replace some deck planking was not approved. Velasquez's request, the Captain-General wrote, had been submitted to the
junta,
which had referred it to the
Intendente,
the man who controlled the province's treasury. The
Intendente
passed it to the Commander of the Privateering Branch (apparently, Ramage noted, the
Jocasta
had been commissioned under the Spanish flag as a privateer, not taken into the Navy). The worthy commander had refused to pay for the wood, saying that “because of recent decisions” it was not now an item that could be charged against the Privateering Branch's funds, which were for operating privateers, and anyway had been exhausted.

The request, the Captain-General told Velasquez with all the relish of a bureaucrat saying no, had therefore been referred back once again to the
Intendente,
who had refused to provide the money because the
junta
had decided a year ago that the ship was not a regular ship of war but a privateer, and as such was not the concern of the Royal Treasury, whose funds (“which are for the moment exhausted”) the
Intendente
administered.

Ramage, fascinated at the way a few planks of wood could cause so much trouble, re-read the letter and several others dealing with refitting the ship. Finally he realized that the Captain-General, who was the administrative ruler of the province, was at loggerheads with the
Intendente,
who was the head of the Treasury, and that the cause of their quarrel was the control of the
Jocasta.

As a ship of the Spanish Navy she would come under the general control of the Ministry of Marine in Madrid and, if based at La Guaira, the local control of the Captain-General, with the Royal Treasury in Caracas—the
Intendente,
in other words—paying the bills. As privateer, she would still be under the general control of the Captain-General, but the commander of the Privateering Branch would decide how she operated, and would pay her expenses out of the Privateering Branch funds.

All that seemed straightforward but, Ramage discovered, the ship had recently been ordered by Madrid to sail to Havana and then on to Spain, which meant that the Privateering Branch would lose her, and obviously the commander did not want to pay for anything more, claiming that the Royal Treasury should foot the bill. But the
Intendente
would not agree—she was not a ship of the Spanish Navy (though, Ramage could see, it was clear that once she arrived in Spain she would be added to the Fleet), because she had been commissioned as a privateer.

It was hard luck for the Privateering Branch: the letters made it clear that the Branch had paid for all the refitting so far but as soon as she was ready to go to sea she was ordered to Havana, bound for Spain. It said a lot about Spanish officials that it had taken them more than a year to commission the ship, and that the chattering of clerks—people like the
Intendente
might be higher up the scale, but they still had clerks' mentalities—meant that although the
Jocasta
had been in Spanish hands for two years all they had done was move her from La Guaira to Santa Cruz. Those Spanish clerks were the best allies that Britain had, Ramage reflected. The
Calypso
frigate had winkled her out of Santa Cruz, but the clerks had quite effectively seen to it that she stayed there until the
Calypso
arrived. Did his Most Catholic Majesty realize that, albeit unwittingly, his clerks were guilty of treason?

He had just picked up the next batch of the Captain-General's letters, hoping to find the latest orders to Velasquez, when he heard someone hurrying down the companion-way, and a moment later the sentry called: “Mr Orsini, sir!”

Paolo knocked on the door and came in, his eyes glinting with excitement in the dim lantern light. “Mr Southwick's compliments, sir: he says it wants about five minutes before the castles blow up!”

Ramage was tired; he was anxious to know Velasquez's orders. The castles would blow up if Rennick and his sergeant had done their work properly—and providing the slow matches burned true. But there was nothing that Nicholas Ramage, Captain, could do to help or hinder the process. For that matter, it was of no consequence as far as his orders were concerned whether the castles blew up or not. Admiral Davis would lose no sleep if both fuses went out: he would have the
Jocasta
back again, which was all that mattered. The castles were the bonus, and anyway Ramage wanted to continue reading the letters. But the cabin was hot and stuffy and Paolo was holding the door open, waiting to follow him on deck. How like Gianna the boy was; the same heart-shaped face, the same eyes.

Ramage put the papers in the top drawer, locked it, and stood up to find Paolo holding out a cutlass, but he motioned it away.

“The ship's company aren't about to mutiny, are they, Paolo?”

“No, sir,” the boy said, “but we have more than a hundred Spanish prisoners on board!”

Ramage took the cutlass and slipped the belt over his shoulder. In the excitement of sailing out of Santa Cruz he had forgotten the prisoners; seizing the ship seemed like something that had happened last week.

On deck the stars and waning moon were enough to light up the ship. Southwick, incongruous in his mutineer's garb, waved to the south: “I didn't think you'd want to miss the excitement, sir. Any minute now, taking half an hour from the time we saw the lights.”

“It should be quite a sight,” Ramage said, making an effort to sound cheerful so as not to spoil an otherwise exciting occasion: nearly every man on board except the lookouts was up in the rigging or on the hammock nettings—Southwick had obviously given permission—eagerly staring at the top of the cliffs.

The ship was lying hove-to, with the
Calypso
five hundred yards away to the east.

“Where's the
Santa Barbara?
” Ramage asked.

Southwick pointed to the west. “She's well clear of the entrance, sir. I saw her with the night-glass. Towing her boats, so she must have recovered the Marines and Spanish prisoners. She's making up for us, like you told Wagstaffe.”

“Prisoners!” Ramage said crossly. “We'll soon have more Spaniards out here than there are in Santa Cruz.”

“Don't forget the soldiers, sir.”

Ramage gave a short laugh. “No, if we'd arrived twelve hours later we'd be the prisoners.”

“I didn't mean that, sir,” Southwick protested, but Ramage felt too drained to do anything more than watch the cliffs. It was hard to believe that less than three hours earlier the
Calypso
had first approached Santa Cruz to begin a dangerous game of bluff. Certainly it had worked and he had hooked the
Jocasta
like a fisherman landing a lethargic perch, so he should be cheerful and content. Instead he felt as taut as a flying jib sheet hard on the wind. He had expected to lose half of these men who were now waiting in the shrouds and on the hammock nettings like excited starlings perched in a grove of trees. So, he told himself, he should be cheerful because only a handful had been killed.

The fact was that he was far from being a natural gambler; he had little patience with those pallid fellows crouching over the gaming tables at Buck's, terrified that the turn of a card or the tumble of a die would ruin them, yet always hoping desperately to win. Obviously all they lived for was the fear of losing and exaltation of winning, but it was sad to think that grown men hazarded their futures on the face of a card or the spots of a die. A house that had been a family seat for a couple of centuries often changed hands because a die stopped rolling to show a three instead of a four.

Yet … yet … he had just done much the same thing, except that no gambler at Buck's or one of those other elegant establishments would play against such odds: no one wagered a guinea to win a guinea, unless he was drunk or desperate, yet he had just risked a frigate, and more than two hundred lives, to win a frigate.

Castillo San Antonio suddenly exploded. A great lightning-flash radiating outwards lit the surrounding hills, the entrance channel and the
Calypso
as though it was day and then equally suddenly plunged everything into a darkness that seemed solid. A moment later a deep rumbling coming through the water made the
Jocasta
tremble, while a noise like a great clap of thunder skated across the sea, followed by echoes bouncing off the mountains and gradually fading into the distance. Then came the startled mewing of seabirds wheeling in alarm and the sudden chatter of excited men.