The sentry announced the First Lieutenant again. Aitken reported that all the ship's boats had now returned and had been hoisted in and secured. The ship was trimmed correctly, and the replacement stun-sail booms had arrived from the dockyard. The guns were secured - Aitken paused a moment, thought and went on - the tiller had been checked and was moving freely, sails were ready for loosing.
It was always a good thing for the Captain to be able to remember something that the First Lieutenant had forgotten: it kept him on his toes. Ramage searched his memory: 'The sheet anchor?'
'Stowed, sir; I forgot to mention it'
Ramage nodded. 'We are ready to man the capstan?’
'Aye, aye, sir.'
It wanted an hour to high water and by some miracle the ship was ready a day early, Ramage picked up his hat and led the way on deck. Apart from some clouds sitting over the hills to the north, the sky was clear; the wind was from the north-west. When the Juno left Spithead - which she would do within the next fifteen minutes - she would leave behind the brief memory of a captain court-martialled for drunkenness, and another story to add to those told about Lord St Vincent's ruthlessness: that he had cleared all the commission officers out of the Juno frigate because the captain liked to tipple. Like most such stories it would be only partly true but it might serve as a warning.
Ramage stared for a moment at the rest of the ships at anchor nearby, and gave a shiver. The story of the Juno's drunken captain could in fact be the story of the captain of any ship: everything depended on him. Every failure on the part of a captain showed immediately in the ship. His lack of seamanship was revealed in the way the ship was handled; his lack of leadership in the way the officers and ship's company behaved. His courage or lack of it would be shown the moment the ship went into action. The captain was not the tip of a pyramid, as most people thought; in fact it was just the reverse: he was the spindle on which everything else balanced.
He looked up at the waiting Aitken. 'Is the fiddler on the quarterdeck? Ah, I see him. Very well, man the capstan!'
CHAPTER THREE
Ramage wiped his pen and put it away in the drawer as he waited for the ink to dry on the page of his Journal. The figures he had written in under the 'Latitude In' and 'Longitude Made' columns showed that the Juno had almost reached 'The Corner', the invisible turning point just short of the Tropic of Cancer where she would pick up the North-east Trade winds to sweep her for 3000 miles across the Atlantic in a gentle curve to the south-east that would bring her to Barbados.
The 'Journal of the Proceedings of his Majesty's ship Juno, Captain Nicholas Ramage, Commander', told the story of the voyage so far in terms of winds, courses steered, miles run from noon one day to noon the next, and apart from the column headed 'Remarkable Observations and Accidents', mercifully almost blank, told the Admiralty all it wanted to know.
As he flicked over the earlier pages, Ramage thought that the journal told very little of the story. His Log and the Master's faithfully recorded the time when the Lizard sank below the horizon astern, the last sight of England for many months - the last sight ever for some of the men on board. It mentioned the westerly gale that caught them off Brest and drove them into the Bay of Biscay, noted the three occasions when they sighted other frigates and made or answered the challenge, recorded the time that the tip of the island of Madeira was sighted and its bearing ... But it made no mention of the afternoon, with the Lizard still just in sight, when he had finally lost his temper with the whole ship's company, mustered them aft, and given them a warning.
For the first few hours after weighing from Spithead it had seemed that the men were trying, that they realized they had grown slack under the previous captain and were anxious to make amends. But as the Juno beat her way out to the Chops of the Channel they had eased off and became sullen. A topsail had been let fall with a reef point still tied so that the canvas ripped; evolutions that should have taken five minutes had taken twenty. In fact it seemed that all the work was being done by the dozen former Tritons.
Aitken and Southwick had done their best and he could not fault the other three lieutenants. The new Marine Lieutenant, Rennick, had a firm grip on his men, who were always smartly turned out. Yet there was an insidious sullen air on the mess deck, and that afternoon Ramage had vowed to get rid of it. With the glass falling and the Juno thrashing her way westward out of the Channel, he mustered them aft and, using a speaking trumpet to make his voice heard above the howl of the wind, he had given them a solemn warning.
The day after they reached 'The Corner' he would inspect the ship from breasthook to archboard; he would exercise them aloft and at the guns with a watch in his hand. If at the end of the day he was satisfied, then the rest of the voyage to Barbados would be a routine cruise; but if he found so much as a speck of dirt in even one of the coppers, if furling a topsail took thirty seconds longer than it should, if there was any hesitation or delay over emergency procedures (and here he was warning the officers more than the seamen), then he promised them 3000 miles of misery, when they would beg for a flogging to get some relief.
Only Southwick and the former Tritons had known he was not ruthless enough to carry out such a threat, but he could rely on them not only to warn the Junos that he was capable of doing so, but to embroider the threat that even the toughest of them would turn uneasily in their hammocks every night as the Juno made her way south-westwards to 'The Corner'.
Now 'The Corner' was less than thirty miles to the south, and unless this present calm patch lasted the Juno should pass the magic spot, twenty-five degrees north, twenty-five degrees west, during the night. Tomorrow would be the day the ship's company were dreading. Yet he was certain the threat had worked; for many days now Aitken and Southwick had been licking them into shape. They had reefed and furled in all weathers, sent sails down on the deck in half a gale and hoisted them up again, sent down yards for imaginary repairs and swayed them up again as black squalls drove down on them. The men had loaded guns, run them out, fired them and loaded them again until they were ready to drop. They had been roused in the middle of the night for fire drill, hoisting up the fire engine and rigging head pumps to fill the cistern, then roused again to repel imaginary boarders, man the chain pump or find imaginary leaks. They had been startled by orders to round up and pick up a man (a dummy the sailmaker had made out of a hammock) who had fallen over the side. That, Ramage reflected, had been a disaster; the seaman ordered to keep an eye on the 'body' had confused it with a large patch of floating seaweed, and the sailmaker had to make another 'body' which even now was waiting for the moment Ramage chose to repeat the manoeuvre.
Eventually Aitken had begun reporting much better times for sail handling, and the sullen atmosphere had gone. Perhaps the sunshine helped; they were now almost in the Tropics and the cold and damp of the Channel were but memories. Tomorrow he would know. Never before had he been forced to treat a ship's company like this - but never before had he inherited a ship from a drunken captain and first lieutenant, when the normal methods of training and leadership had proved useless.
It was ironic that this present calm patch was prolonging the agony: from what both Aitken and Southwick reported, the men viewed it with all the apprehension of a flogging through the fleet. Well, the Juno still had not reached 'The Corner' and found the Trades, although it looked as though she was going to be lucky this time. There was always an element of luck in it. Sometimes the North-east Trades arrived on time but many ships had to carry on south, down as far as the Cape Verde Islands, before picking them up. This time the wind was fitful and still mostly north, but for the past two days it had often veered north-east for an hour or two and, just as Ramage, Aitken and Southwick were congratulating each other that the Trades had arrived, it would suddenly back north and there would be a flurry of sail trimming. But they were nearly in the Tropics: the imaginary line in the heavens marking the Tropic of Cancer was almost overhead.