Still, Wilkins had made up his mind about the colours, sketched in the outlines on the canvas with charcoal, and was ready when the first teasing but cooling puffs of wind had come. First of all there had been an excited hail from a lookout at the masthead - a man perched in what looked like an open-sided tent with strips of canvas to protect him from the rays of the sun. 'Wind shadow on the larboard quarter!' he had shouted. A couple of minutes later he reported it was approaching, but, just as suddenly, it vanished. Five minutes later another, also on the larboard quarter, reached the ship, a wind shadow that danced across the surface of the sea like a swarm of gnats on the edge of a pond. Suddenly they all had a teasing breath of cool air, but then it was gone.
Yet Mr Ramage was quite confident the wind would set in: topmen swarmed aloft to drop the sails - 'let fall', rather. And by then more wind shadows were being reported, the men becoming excited, and he was hurriedly mixing paints on his palette, the sudden breeze blowing away the lethargy. Now they were at last in the southeast trade winds which Southwick said started off down towards the Cape of Good Hope.
Crossing the Equator a few days later was best forgotten as far as Wilkins was concerned: Neptune had dozens of victims because the Calypso had spent most of her time in the Caribbean or Mediterranean, and few men had crossed the Line. So the unlucky ones were given stiff 'tonics' of soap and water, shaved, ducked and five men, who had objected violently, were ordered by King Neptune to be tarred and feathered. Three others had their faces and backsides given a liberal coating of black gun lacquer.
Wilkins found it hard to get used to the sun's position. It was sufficiently late in the year and they were far enough south for the sun to be almost vertically overhead, so his shadow at noon was tiny, extending only a few inches from his feet, as though he was standing in a small puddle. Flying fish skimming just above the waves like great dragonflies had been commonplace for a long time and although the Calypso was now almost midway between West Africa and South America, he was surprised by how many sea birds they saw. He had painted some of them, putting the date and position on the back of the canvas. He enjoyed painting birds in flight because it gave him good practice at painting the sea - surely the most challenging of all subjects. It was never the same, varying with the wind, cloud, sun, or rain, and, according to the captain, with the depth of the ocean and the latitude. At Trinidade, their destination, the captain promised that if there were reefs, he would see three or four different colours in as many hundreds of yards. For the moment, though, everyone was relieved that they were now in the southeast trades.
Now Southwick, legs astride and balancing himself against the gentle roll, flipped down one more shade of his quadrant because he found the sun bright, once again 'brought the sun down to the horizon', rocked the quadrant slightly to make sure that the lower edge of the sun was precisely on the horizon, made a slight adjustment and a moment later saw the sun had moved. He read the figures on the ivory scale of the quadrant. The ritual of the noon sight was, as far as the sun was concerned, now over: he had measured the highest angle that it made with the horizon, and that was that: only the angle mattered, not the time: if he had measured its highest angle, then that was the angle at noon local time, and he did not have to bother to turn a half-minute glass, bellow at Orsini to note the chronometer . . . Now he had to apply some corrections, add or subtract figures from the almanac, and the answer would be the Calypso's latitude. It was the simplest thing to do in celestial navigation; it was how the navigators from the oldest times crossed oceans - they knew the latitude of their destination and sailed along it until they arrived. The only danger was running into the land at night. Longitude was a different problem; without an accurate chronometer there was no way of being sure of one's exact distance east or west of the Greenwich meridian.
Young Orsini was working out his answer using the top of the binnacle box. Kenton and Martin were sitting on the breeches of guns. Southwick could see Mr Ramage walking up and down on the windward side of the quarterdeck, having his spell of exercise before his meal. And waiting to hear the latitude ... Normally Mr Ramage left the navigation to him, but for the last three days he had been taking a close interest. The reason was not hard to guess - the Calypso's latitude and longitude were almost the same as the figures they had been given for Trinidade.
In fact, according to Southwick's reckoning, they were within a hundred miles of it. Allowing for the chronometerbeing a bit out, he was sure that putting the point of a pair of compasses down on Trinidade and drawing a circle with a radius of fifty miles would enclose the Calypso, but therewas a high haze, so it was impossible to guess whether they could see ten miles or sixty.
This was always the difficult time when making a landfalclass="underline" did one set more canvas to increase speed in the hope of sighting land before nightfall, or go slowly and cautiously and hope to sight it at dawn? Martin Vaz should be on the larboard bow and Trinidade dead ahead. If one left Martin Vaz too far to larboard - thus making absolutely certain of not hitting it - there was a risk of passing Trinidade out of sight to larboard. The life of a master in the Royal Navy, Southwick thought to himself, could be summed up by that situation: trying to find one rock in the middle of an ocean without hitting another . . .
He wrote the final row of figures, 20° 01' 50". And that, he knew without looking it up, was within thirty miles of the latitude of Trinidade.
A cast of the log half an hour ago had given just over six knots and they were able to lay the course. By five o'clock they might be there; it should be in sight at the latest in an hour or two - if it was as high as reported and the chronometer was anywhere near passing for correct.
Southwick walked across the quarterdeck and reported to Ramage, who grimaced and nodded ahead. 'A thousand or fifteen hundred feet high? We should be seeing it by now.'
'It's hazier than it looks, sir,' Southwick said confidently. 'Had you given any thought about who might ...'
'All right, all right, pass the word through the bosun. Though why I should always pay up a guinea to the first man to sight such a place, I don't know!'
'It's the trickiest landfall we've ever made, sir. The Atlantic is 2,500 miles wide here, from Trinidade to the nearest tip of West Africa, and we're looking for somewhere two or three miles long.'
'That's a fine argument to impress old ladies,' Ramage said unsympathetically, 'and it'd impress me if I thought Trinidade could lie anywhere along that gap of 2,500 miles. But you have a quadrant, almanac, tables and a chronometer that allow you to be rather more precise.'
'Well, yes sir,' Southwick agreed and added with a grin, 'but I can't make it seem too easy!'
He walked back to the binnacle to inspect the calculations made by the two young lieutenants and midshipman.
He looked first at Orsini's slate and his brow furrowed. 'I can assure you, Mr Orsini, that the Calypso is about seven hundred and fifty miles from Rio de Janeiro; in other words, about four-fifths of the way across the South Atlantic between the Cape of Good Hope and South America, not far from the tropic of Capricorn. But you, Mr Orsini, seem to be not only north of the Equator, almost on the far side of the Torrid Zone, but close to the Cape Verde Islands, which the rest of us left thousands of miles away some weeks ago...'
Orsini, his face crimson, hurriedly rubbed out some writing on his slate and corrected it. 'The latitude is north, not south. I'm sorry, I mean, I should have named it south, not north.'