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.
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.