He just looked round slowly at all the men, raised his right hand in a salute that suddenly reminded him absurdly of a Roman emperor's gesture, and jumped down from the main capstan amid a swelling roar of cheers: 'Three cheers and a tiger,' and apparently led by Southwick.
Well, he was back. Where was L'Espoirl
The sea now had the is-it-mauve-or-is-it-purple? of the deep ocean, with white horses stippling the tops of a few wind waves while swell waves slid beneath them. The Calypso was pitching slightly and rolling heavily, the masts and their yards creaking and the bulging sails frequently flattening and slatting as a particularly quick roll suddenly spilled the wind for a minute or two.
Astern the sun had lifted over the line of distant black cloud lying low and flat on the eastern horizon like a shadowy baulk of timber floating on the sea, and quickly the last of the stars were dazzled away and the sky overhead turned pale blue and cloudless.
In a few hours they would be crossing that invisible line of latitude 23 degrees 27 minutes North, marking the Tropic of Cancer, and, Ramage reflected thankfully, at last they seemed to have picked up the Trade winds.
For the previous few days it had been a damp and dreary ritual. During the night the wind dropped, leaving the Calypso wallowing in a confused sea which bounced her up and down like a doormat being shaken and made everything movable creak, rattle or bang. In Ramage's cabin even the wine glasses clinked in their rack as though toasting each other. Two drawers full of clothes which had not been shut properly skidded across the painted canvas that served as a carpet on the cabin sole, spilling silk and lisle stockings, handkerchiefs, stocks and shirts as though a dog was making a nest in a draper's storeroom.
Dawn each day had revealed thunderstorms building up all round them, the lower clouds foaming upwards towards a higher layer which soon cut off the sun. From time to time Ramage had stood at the quarterdeck rail, picturing L'Espoir scores of miles ahead and sailing in different weather, the Trade winds sweeping her south and west to Cayenne, sails bulging, the French captain cheerful as he marked his chart and filled in his journal to record a fast passage from Brest.
In the Calypso, Ramage, almost stifling with frustration, had looked up at the sails hanging down like heavy curtains, chafing against rigging, the foot of each one wearing against the mast since the sails of the King's ships were cut with a straight foot, not the deep curve favoured by merchant ships deliberately to avoid the chafe but reducing the area of the sail, something a ship of war could not afford.
Clew up to save some of the chafe or furl and avoid any at all? Or leave them so that he would not lose a minute once the first gust of wind arrived? But when it came (this week or next) would the wind be just a nice gust or would it be a roaring blast from one of those great thunderstorms that would send topmen hurrying to furl as courses were hastily clewed up and Aitken doubled the number of men at the wheel so that four stood a chance of preventing the overpressed frigate broaching as she raced to leeward, barely under control?
Should he risk losing a mile or so of progress, should he risk that heart-stopping bang of sail torn in half by the brute strength of the wind and then the thudding and thumping of the pieces slatting, or should he furl everything and wait for the wind to set in properly?
Eventually while he argued back and forth with himself and Southwick paced up and down, a lonely figure on the lee side of the quarterdeck, or Ramage stopped and barked at the quartermaster or chatted with the officer of the deck, in this case Martin, whiffles of wind had been spotted by the lookout at the foremasthead (a man having to hold on for dear life, and Ramage would have forgiven him if he had been too dizzy to spot anything). But the dancing shadows on the water were coming from the south. Anyway, anything was better than having the ship slat and bang herself to pieces, so they had braced up the yards and trimmed the sheets and found that, with the swell from the east and the lightness of the wind, the best they could lay and keep the sails asleep was west by north. They could pinch her to west by south but she slowed like a carriage miring itself in mud.
For the rest of each of those days they had jogged along at four and five knots, with the wind falling away at night and dawn bringing more thunderstorms. And the glass had fallen a little.
Except for this morning: while it was still dark the wind had again set in light from the south but he noticed that the glass had stopped falling and went on deck to find the sky was full of stars, already a good deal brighter than usual in northern skies. As dawn had begun to push away the dark of night the wind backed slightly - the coxswain had reported it as fluking around southeast by south, and the Calypso would just lay southwest by west. An hour later it was a steady east-southeast with the Calypso almost laying the course.
By noon it had backed another few points so that Southwick marked the slate in the binnacle box drawer and recorded the wind as northeast by east, with the ship making seven knots with all sails set to the royals and laying the course. More important, the ship's company were getting the stunsails up on deck ready for hoisting. The Trades had really set in? They could only hope. The noon sight - with Southwick, Aitken and Ramage himself on deck with quadrants and sextants measuring the sun's altitude - gave the latitude as 24 degrees 06 minutes North. Orsini had also taken a sight, which involved only turning the adjusting screw of the sextant to get the highest angle the sun made and did not depend on the accuracy of the chronometer. The young midshipman had achieved all that without difficulty but had stumbled over the simple calculations which involved the sextant angle and the sun's declination. The latitude which he finally admitted to Southwick had to be wrong, as the master pointed out with mild irony, since it placed the Calypso on the same latitude as Edinburgh.
Ramage was allowing a knot of southeast going current but previous experience showed this was too much. However, like Southwick who was a cautious navigator, he preferred that any error put the reckoning ahead of the ship: if the ship was ahead of the reckoning she could (and many did!) run on to unseen rocks and reefs guarding the destination.
As he was taking the noon sight, Ramage felt sure the Trades were setting in with their usual abruptness. At the moment only a few of the typical Trade wind clouds - small, flat-bottomed with rounded tops and reminding him of mushrooms - were moving in neat lines apparently converging on a point beyond the western horizon.
Trade wind clouds were a never-failing entertainment in the Tropics. In fact, he reflected, weather in the Trades could also be alarming for a Johnny Newcome, whether a seaman or officer fresh to the Tropics. In crossing the Atlantic, often one would find at dawn a band of low, thick cloud to the east (to windward and therefore, one would think, approaching) which would become black and menacing as the sun rose behind it: obviously, one would think, the herald of a strange tropical storm or gale, or at least a devastating squall.
The beginning of the day in the ship usually meant that for an hour or two every man was fully occupied, and then the Newcomes would suddenly remember (with more than a stab of fear) and look astern for that low, black cloud. But a quick glance to the eastward would show a clear horizon and an innocent sun rising with all the grace and smoothness of a duchess composing herself for a portrait artist.
So by nine o'clock the sky would be clear from horizon to horizon and the sun just beginning to hint that soon it would have some warmth in it. Then the parade of the mushrooms would begin.