Southwick joined him, telescope under arm and judging by the contented look on his face, with a good breakfast inside him. He pointed at Curacao, now on the Calypso's starboard bow as she sailed down through the channel separating the larger island from Bonaire to the east.
'Must be the worst bargains in the Caribbean, these islands,' Southwick said. 'Just goats, cactus, aloes, salt pans, hardly any rain . .. must drive men mad to be stationed here . . .'
'Bonaire and Aruba, yes,' Ramage agreed, 'but not Curasao: Amsterdam is reckoned to be one of the finest of the smaller harbours: a tiny Port Royal.'
Southwick glanced round at Ramage. Have you ever seen it, sir?'
Ramage shook his head. 'I've only looked at the chart It seems to be a slot cut at right - angles to the coast'
'Aye, calling it a slot is right. A ship sailing in could hit either side of the channel with a pistol. I don't know why we ever let the Dutch keep it. Impossible to cut out a ship - unless you first capture the fort on each side of the entrance.'
'Perhaps we couldn't get them out, and anyway we're usually at peace with them. I'd sooner have the green of Jamaica: plenty of fruit, beef, pork, fish . . . Here, from what I read, they live on goat, an occasional baked iguana - which doesn't appeal to me - with wild duck and snipe for the good shots. Pink flamingoes on Bonaire, I'm told. Hundreds of than.'
'Aye, they're quite a sight,' Southwick agreed. 'But Amsterdam itself is just a big warehouse. Tobacco brought in from the Main, liquor smuggled out, slaves from Guinea sold in the market by the dozen, salt shipped out by the ton. They're busy enough, the "mynheers". Wherever there's a chance of trade you'll find a Dutchman.'
'You can't blame them for that,' Ramage said. The merchants in Jamaica do their best, you know.'
'That's true,' Southwick admitted grudgingly. 'But mynheer's a great smuggler, you know. To the Main.'
'But the Spanish are their allies,' Ramage pointed out 'Aye, but the duty on Dutch spirits imported into Spanish ports is very high. On all Dutch goods, in fact. Leastways, that's what I've heard. So mynheer sails over on a dark night and lands his cargo of gin and slaves quietly up a river. Saves bothering the Spanish customs with too much paperwork . . .'
They've been doing that for 150 years or more,' Ramage pointed out, 'Remember their old cry, "No peace beyond the Line", when Spain claimed that no foreigners could sail to the New World.'
'Ah, the buccaneers of the sixteen - fifties,' Southwick said wistfully. "No commander-in-chief, no signal books, no orders, no forms for the Navy Board . . . you just captured any ship that was Spanish - and raided any Spanish town that took your fancy. Choose from hundreds of miles along the Main and the Isthmus, not to mention the Moskito Coast, New Spain, Cuba and Hispaniola . . .'
'And Puerto Rico,' Ramage said. 'But don't forget what happened if the Dons captured you.'
The master looked puzzled.
The Inquisition,' Ramage reminded him. The Jesuits. All foreign prisoners were treated as heretics. The priests believed the only way to save heretics from Hellfire and damnation was to put 'em on the rack.' He glanced at Southwick's protruding stomach and plump cheeks. They'd halve your beam in half an hour. And by the time you'd spent the rest of your life digging in the salt mines, raking the salt pans or hammering rock into square rocks to build fortresses, you'd be as slim as a handspike.'
Southwick patted his stomach ruefully. That's a comfortable belly . . .'
'Well, a hundred years ago you'd have to be a Papist to keep it - or not get captured.'
'Just think of it, sir: suddenly sailing in over the horizon and holding a whole town to ransom . . .' Southwick was almost poetic. 'Putting a good price on the mayor's head - and the bishop, too,' he added, obviously recalling the rack. "Searching the merchants' houses for chests of pieces of eight . . . killing and skinning beeves to put down fresh salt meat - aye, and finding a few demijohns of Spanish wine too . . . It'd have been worth it,' Southwick said with all the wistful - ness of a worldly ecclesiastic condemning sin. 'I'd have spent the money as fast as I won it, just like the buccaneers; but the fact is, sir, forty years in the King's service hasn't left me a rich man, either.'
With that he began examining the coastline of Curacao with his telescope. 'It's even more desolate than I remember it twenty years ago,' he said.
Ramage raised his telescope. He could just see along the south coast of the island as the Calypso rounded the eastern tip and then bore away to keep about two miles offshore. Thirty - eight miles long, and varying between two and a half and seven miles wide, the land was grey and arid in the glass, the sun - now almost overhead - harsh and mottling the landscape with shadows from bushes and cacti, as though each stood on a black base. Here and there the sparse divi-divi trees, each little more than a thin trunk with a wedge of thin boughs and leaves, were pointing to the west, away from the wind, like gaunt hands. Aloes - the people credited the leaves and bitter sap with magic properties, taking the pain or irritation from insect stings, burns, cuts . . . Ah, there were some of those huge cacti that grew like organ pipes. 'Datu', a book had called them. And there, beside that apology for a hill, a dump of kadushi, another cactus that looked like the same organ pipes but with joints in them. And round the cacti and moving over the ground, looking in the distance like swarms of insects, the flocks of goats, nibbling, ripping, finding food where most animals would starve. There a tamarind tree making arches; nearby the dark green bulk of a manchineel, and he could picture the little apples on the ground below it; apples which burned a man's mouth if he bit one, and killed him if he swallowed it. A strange tree, the manchineel; slaves always made a fuss when ordered to cut one down; they claimed the sap burned their skin, like drops of acid.
'And what of the privateers? No sign of a sail, apart from some wisps of white doth dose in to the shore, little fishing boats tending pots . . .'
CHAPTER FIVE
The study of the Governor of Curacao at his residence in Amsterdam was hot The ceiling of toe white - painted room was high, the tall open windows facing west were shaded by jalousies, and the only one on the north wall was open, yet Governor van Someren's clothes were sticking to him, a thick and uncomfortable extra skin. He leaned forward in his chair to let the faint breeze in the room cool his bade, but his feet felt swollen in his boots - and they probably were, although the damned doctor said there was nothing wrong - and his breeches were suddenly tight. Was he putting on weight? More weight, rather; the tailor had only just let out the waist and knee bands of all his breeches, and had several coats to work on.
He was not fat; rather a stocky man of medium height who, now past fifty, was getting plump. He had the high cheek bones and widely spaced blue eyes that would have betrayed him as a Dutchman anywhere, and his eyebrows were white and so thin that his face had an Oriental look about it.
He put down his long - stemmed clay pipe. It was too hot to smoke or, rather, the room was too airless. And the tobacco, a sample of the first of the Main's new crop from some plantation near Riohacha, tasted earthy. Some merchant was going to lose money, judging from the sample sent along to the Governor's palace.
There was a discreet knock on the door and a young Army officer, the cut of his uniform and aiguillettes showing that he was the Governor's chief of staff, came into the room carrying a letter. The British frigate and the other ship, sir. She has sailed through the channel and is coming westward along the coast, about two miles out A messenger has just ridden in. The troop of cavalry keeping abreast the ship will send off a man every fifteen minutes to keep us informed.'