He called them mushrooms but they really started in the distance as rows of white pinheads on a pale blue velvet pincushion. They would gradually move to the westward, keeping in neat lines but each pinhead beginning to expand like a fluffy ball of cotton growing on its bush. On and on to the westward they would move, and the sun warming the air would make the clouds blossom larger, but they would still stay in orderly and evenly-spaced lines, like columns of well drilled soldiers advancing across a plain. Sometimes the shapes would change: while the bottom stayed flat, the top would take up a grotesque shape, like a bun determined to alarm the baker's wife.
For Ramage the actual growth of the lines of cloud was the least of it. The fun came in looking at each of them. With flat bottom and bulging top, many were like recumbent effigies on the tops of tombs; with others the white vapour curved and twisted into the shape of faces staring up into the sky. In the course of fifteen minutes, ten chubby, long-faced, pug-nosed or long-nosed politicians familiar from cartoonists' broadsides, a dozen friends, and a dozen more bizarre but identifiable shapes would sail past on their way westward.
Occasionally, often in the late afternoon towards sunset, the western sky would slowly turn into the most horrifying scarlets and oranges, livid purples and ominous mauves, as though a child was being introduced to watercolour washes, and it seemed that within hours a most devastating hurricane must roar up against the wind and bring enormous seas to set them all fighting for their lives. But by nightfall the sky was usually clear again and sparkling with its full complement of stars and no hint of where the gaudy clouds had gone or why they had appeared.
The first flying fish always excited the ship's company: as soon as the ship slipped into the warmer southern seas most men would glance over the side as frequently as possible, hoping to be the first to glimpse the tiny silver dart skimming a foot or two high in a ridge and furrow flight over the waves to vanish as quickly as it appeared. What seemed the upper quadrant of a slowly turning and very thick wheel was the curving back of a dolphin, and always good for a yell, and sometimes a dozen or so of them would play games with the ship, racing to cut across the bow from side to side and so close that it seemed the cutwater must hit them.
For Ramage, though, there was a particular assignation in the Tropics, and he always felt cheated if he was not the first to sight it. It was the unusual rather than beautiful white bird which could be mistaken for a great tern, but for the fact that its tail, three times as long as its body, comprised a couple of long thin feathers trailing in a narrow V. The beak of the Tropic bird was red or yellow and the wings were narrow and pointed like those of the tern with the fast beat of a pigeon. Strangely enough it seemed to be a bird of the islands and headlands, one that was used to jinking and diving, and which would not stray far from land. And what was the purpose of that tail?
The birds in fact lived in colonies - he knew of several at St Eustatius and Nevis, in the Leeward Islands (each island, coincidentally, was easily identified because of the huge topless cone at one end revealing an old volcano). A passage between St Martin and St Barthélemy on one side and Saba, St Eustatius and St Kitts and Nevis on the other usually produced a dozen or more Tropic birds flying across the channel.
Yet Ramage had seen them here in the middle of the Atlantic, fifteen hundred miles and more from the nearest land, flying with just the same quick, almost nervous wing beats, as though due back at the nest in twenty minutes. It seemed to make little difference whether its destination was fifteen or fifty miles away. Nor fifteen hundred: that was simply the middle of the Atlantic between the Canary Islands and Barbados. To reach one from the other (or any land) the bird had to fly nearly three thousand miles. Did it just fly day and night without stopping? He had never seen one resting on the water like a seagull. And another strange thing was that all those he had seen out in the Atlantic were always flying directly east or west, never to the north or south. On the last voyage, he remembered looking up at eight o'clock in the forenoon to see his first Tropic bird of the passage flying due east, directly over the ship. Then, at four o'clock in the afternoon, he had seen one flying due west, again passing right over the ship. The same bird? His ship's destination, Barbados, had been two thousand miles to the westward. Yet, he remembered, every Tropic bird he had ever seen out in the Atlantic had passed directly over the ship: he had never seen one flying past in the distance. Nor did the bird ever dip down towards the ship, as though looking for a resting place or a tasty scrap of food.
Other species of birds often came on board, though of course they were usually much nearer land. Still, an old Barbados planter he had once spoken to said Tropic birds lived on flying fish and squid, diving down for them. The planter called it the boatswain bird, and the French had several names, different in each island - paille-en-queue, paille-en-cul, and flèche-en-cul. Straw tail, arrow tail - there were a dozen ways of translating it, but the Spanish contramaestre was the nearest to the English boatswain bird.
He waved to Aitken to cross the quarterdeck and join him.
'Horizon looks very empty, sir,' the young Scotsman commented. 'Seems you only realize how big the Western Ocean is when you're looking for someone.'
'We could have overtaken her. Or she could be to the north or south. Or ahead of us.'
'Aye, it'll be only a matter of chance if we sight her. Ten different captains have ten different routes for making this crossing.'
'So you're not very hopeful?'
'No, sir, not with the difference in time.'
Ramage nodded. 'Once she was a complete night ahead of us - ten hours of darkness - there was always the chance of us accidentally overtaking her. And with two or three hundred miles' difference in position, there's the weather, too. She could be stretching along comfortably with a northerly breeze while we are beating against a southerly. She could have a soldier's wind with stunsails set and we could be becalmed.'
'At least we're catching up now!' Aitken gestured to the stunsails, long narrow strips of sail each hanging down from its own tiny boom and hoisted by a halyard out to the end of a normal yard so each stunsail formed an extension of the sail, like an extra leaf at the end of a table.
'Catching up or outstripping?' Ramage mused. 'I can't see Frenchmen hurrying with a ship full of prisoners: they could be treating it all as a comfortable cruise and be in no rush to get back to France - it'll be winter by then, too. They've no idea they're being chased.'
The two men walked aft from the quarterdeck rail, past the companion way leading down to the captain's cabin, then abreast the great barrel of the main capstan, with the slots for the capstan bars now filled with small wedge-shaped drawers containing bandages and tourniquets, ready at hand if they should go into action. Past one black-painted gun on its carriage, and now a second. Then came the binnacle box, like an old chest of drawers with a window on each side, a pane of stone-ground glass revealing a compass which was far enough away not to affect the one on the other side but so placed that the man on either side of the wheel had a good view.
Now the double wheel. Normally the man to windward did most of the work, pulling down on the spokes, but with the ship running before the wind as she was now doing, yards almost square and stunsails drawing, each helmsman paid attention and the quartermaster's eyes never stopped a circuit which covered the luffs of the sails, the telltales streaming out from the top of the hammock nettings, and the compass.
The telltales - Ramage was thankful to see them bobbing so vigorously. Four or five corks threaded at ten-inch intervals on a length of line, with half a dozen feathers embedded in each cork, and the whole thing tied to a rod and stuck up in the hammock nettings, one each side, might not be everyone's idea of beauty, but after those days of calm and light headwinds, they were a wonderful sight.