The quartermaster had obviously been trying to attract his attention for some time. 'Mr Lacey hailed from the fo'c'sle, sir: we're at long stay.'
'Very well,' Aitken said, realizing that his thoughts had been miles away from the Surcouf.
'An' the schooner, sir, she 'asn't 'oisted another signal.' Aitken stared at the man. 'How long ago did she hoist the last one?'
'Five minutes or so, sir!' the startled man answered. 'Perhaps more.'
He managed to suppress a sigh of relief. There was no ship of the line with the French convoy, only four frigates against their two. He had been sentencing himself and the Surcoufs to death for the past five minutes, when with only four frigates there was a chance. Not the sort of chance many men would want to take at a gaming table, but certainly not one that would bother the Captain.
Yesterday evening Southwick had asked the Captain what he expected the French to send, and had been told that since it was an important convoy, with mostly naval and military supplies, he would expect six merchant ships or transports, with an escort of at least four or five frigates and perhaps a ship of the line. Not a new 74-gun ship but possibly an old sixty-four. If the convoy comprised a dozen ships he would expect five or six frigates and a 74-gun ship.
Southwick bad questioned the size of the escort, pointing out that a British convoy homeward bound from Jamaica would be lucky to have three frigates to escort a hundred ships. The Captain had pointed out that while we could sail large convoys with small escorts, the French could only sail small convoys with large escorts. We had many ships of war at sea, but most of the French fleet was blockaded by British squadrons at Brest and Toulon.
'Sir, the Juno's coming up to short stay,' the quartermaster reported. He seemed to have noticed that his commanding officer was preoccupied, and Aitken cursed under his breath. He must stop daydreaming. He picked up the speaking trumpet and hailed Lacey. It was going to be the very devil of an afternoon, and he was glad that the men had finished dinner before La Créole's first signal had been sighted.
In the Juno Ramage waited patiently for the first flag in the next group of signals from the schooner to give him Wagstaffe's estimate of the French convoy's speed. The one after that would tell him something of the formation they were in. Then would come the signal telling him whether the convoy was following the coast to go inside the Diamond or staying outside. Once La Créole had told him all that, only the final signal remained. That gave the moment when Wagstaffe judged that the two frigates should leave Petite Anse d'Arlet and sail down to the Diamond to appear in sight of the French and spring the trap. It was putting a lot of responsibility on Wagstaffe's shoulders but there was no choice because the alternative was to risk the French sighting the Juno and Surcouf too soon.
The capstan had been pawled and the men were resting after their spell at the bars. The pace of events was slow enough at the moment for the men to have time to feel the heat. They were unwilling to stand still in bare feet on the scorching deck and he knew that the fo'c'sle must be like a furnace. Half a dozen men had lowered the quarterdeck awning, in a few minutes it would be lashed up and stowed below out of the way.
The masthead lookout hailed the deck and Paolo trained his telescope. 'Number five, sir.' He consulted the list of signals and added: 'Convoy making five knots, sir.' There must be much more wind out there if it was making five knots. It was ten miles to the beginning of the Fours Channel, so the French would take two hours to get to the door of the trap. It would take the Juno and the Surcouf less than an hour, at the same speed, to get into position.
''La Créole's signalling again, sir,' Paolo said, beating the masthead lookout's hail. 'Number nine. Convoy in loose standard formation, sir.'
That meant that the convoy was in two or three columns, with a frigate ahead and astern and one on either beam, although they would very soon shift the frigate on the land side out to seaward. That told Ramage much of what he wanted to know: the French were not expecting trouble, otherwise the merchantmen would be bunched up. Fear was the only certain recipe for good station-keeping. The escort must be expecting one British frigate at most, and they would be confident they could drive her off. Most French frigates had thirty-six guns, four more than the majority of the British, and they rarely put to sea with a ship's company of less than 300. They might even have seen La Créole, identified her as a French privateer; and concluded that the British had lifted the blockade.
The Master came up to the quarterdeck to report that everything was ready forward and Ramage looked at his watch. 'We won't be weighing for another hour, Mr Southwick. Hoist out the boats, and then beat to quarters. We'll have time to get guns loaded and run out before we leave here. If we have enough grommets, get fifteen extra roundshot on deck for each gun. And make sure the men keep the head pumps busy, wetting the deck every few minutes, in this heat.'
He thought for a moment and remembered that all the Marines were in the Surcouf. 'Let's have every musket and pistol on board ready and loaded: stack them along the centre line if necessary, if there aren't enough hooks for them.'
'D'you want grappling irons rigged, sir?'
Ramage shook his head. 'We'll have no need of them. And,' he added, trying to make his voice sound casual, 'make sure the carpenter has a good supply of shot plugs ready . . .'
The stay tackle was hooked on and the launch was hoisted off the booms amidships, swung over the side and lowered. While it was being hauled aft, where it would tow astern, one of the cutters was being hooked on. Fifteen minutes later the Juno's four boats were astern, out of the way. Leaving them stowed on board in their normal position would have meant a grave risk of enemy shot shattering them and hurling lethal showers of splinters over the men at the guns. Splinters caused more casualties than actual shot. Towed astern the boats were out of the way and far less likely to be damaged.
While some men were hauling at the stay tackle, others were hurrying round the deck placing the grommets, thick rope rings, in which shot would rest like grotesque black eggs in a nest. Arms chests were hoisted up from below and muskets taken out and loaded, the first of them being put in the racks on the inside of the bulwarks between the guns. Loaded pistols, cutlasses and tomahawks were hung on hooks beside them, while the long boarding pikes, their ash handles well varnished, were stowed vertically in their racks round the masts, looking from a distance like bundles of steel-tipped fascines.
Now the crews of each gun were going through the loading procedure, working on their own because there were no officers to give them orders. The locks had been brought up from the magazine and secured to the breech of the guns, the flints had been checked and the trigger lines coiled up and placed on the breeches. The tompions protecting the muzzles of the guns had been taken out, the tackles overhauled so the ropes would run freely. Sponge and match tubs were being rolled into position and filled from a head pump rigged amidships which had already wetted the decks.
Down below, heavy blankets soaked with water had been hung up, surrounding the approaches to the magazine, so that no flash from an explosion could get through and detonate the powder stored there. Already the gunner was in the magazine itself, wearing felt slippers (shoes might set off loose powder), passing the cartridges through the blanket fire screens to waiting boys who slid them into the cylindrical wooden cartridge boxes, slipped the lids on and brought them up on deck, where they waited along the centre line behind their particular guns until called by the gun captains.