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.
The sea was a fresh, deep blue, and the spray was warm. All the men new to the Tropics were keeping an eye open for their first sight of flying fish. The canvas awning was now rigged over the quarterdeck, and by ten o'clock in the morning the deck was getting hot. In a few days, another four or five degrees farther south, the deck would be uncomfortably hot by nine in the morning and no man, whether barefoot or wearing boots or shoes would want to stand still unless he was in shade. Paint would flake more quickly, the pitch in the deck seams that at Spithead had been brittle and cracking would be sticky, and long thin cracks, or shakes, would appear in the masts as the sun dried the wood out, and no amount of oiling would prevent it. Furled sails would have to be kept aired, otherwise they mildewed overnight; cold-weather clothing that had not been carefully washed before being stowed in seabags would sprout rich, remarkably coloured mildew, which seemed to flourish on food stains.
Already Bowen was treating half a dozen men for bad sunburn, men with very sensitive skin who had been affected before Ramage forbade anyone to be on deck without shirts for three hours either side of noon. Despite these problems caused by the hot sun, it was good to have the ship well-aired with scuttles, skylights and ports wide open; the sun, almost overhead at noon, penetrated parts of the Juno that had not seen sunlight since the ship was last in the Tropics.
As he dried his razor and put it away in its leather case, Ramage reflected that one of the few advantages of commanding a ship the size of a frigate was that the Captain could usually have hot water for shaving. Today was an exception, and his own fault, since he chose to get up a couple of hours before the galley fire was lit.
The Juno was bowling along in the darkness - groaning along, some might say, since her timbers creaked as she pitched in a sedate seesaw motion. The Trade wind had settled steadily from the north-east and with luck they would now carry it all the way to Barbados. With the following wind came the following seas and the pitching and rolling, so that water slopped out of a basin filled more than a third full and fiddles had to be fitted to the tables - narrow battens which were the only way of preventing plates and cutlery sliding off.
He could hear the rudder grumbling as the men at the wheel kept the frigate on course, and ropes creaked as they rendered through blocks. The pitching was just enough to make the lanthorn flicker as the flames tried to stay vertical - and enough to make him sit down as he prepared to pull his stockings on.
Monday morning and the first full day after passing 'The Corner'. Well, the ship's company knew what it meant. The silk of the first stocking was cold; they would have to be a few hundred miles farther south before clothes always felt warm at this time of the day. He smoothed out the wrinkles and reached for the second one, No, there would be few men on board who were looking forward to the approaching dawn. He had not been entirely fair to the men in those early days: he had discovered, by way of his coxswain, Jackson, that the drunken captain had not been the only cause of the Juno's condition. The one before him had been slack, had rarely made more than a cursory inspection of the ship, and his seamanship had been lamentable. Orders to reef or furl as a squall came up were usually given too late, so that men were injured and sails were ripped. As far as Ramage could make out, the men had spent most of their time repairing sails. And discipline had been almost non-existent.
This had inevitably thrown all the responsibility on to the other officers. Had they been good men they might have been able to manage, but they were poor specimens who played the game of favourites, hoping that by toadying to a few chosen seamen and petty officers they would have a nucleus who could be relied on. As a result, the rest of the men became the scapegoats for everything that went wrong. Naturally enough, the ship's company had split into two groups, one large and one small, the victimized and the favoured, and they had hated each other. Then that Captain had been replaced by the drunkard who had cared nothing for the way the ship was run and who had brought his own drunken First Lieutenant with him. Apparently this had finally proved too much for the other officers, who had begun drinking from sheer frustration.
Because they were frequently drunk, or ill-tempered next morning from the effects of it, the victimization had become worse. The majority of the ship's company had been reduced to sullen hulks of men who did not give a damn whether a single reef point was left tied so that a sail ripped when it was let fall, and the officers did not give a damn either, knowing that the Captain would not back them up if they tried to punish delinquents.
Ramage wriggled into his breeches, pulled on a shirt, tucked it in and buttoned up the flap. By the time Captain Ramage came on board and read himself in, the men had no faith in captains, no faith in officers and precious little faith in petty officers either, because many of them had taken advantage of the situation to indulge in bullying and they too had played favourites. It was easy enough for a bos'n's mate to 'start' a seaman he did not like, giving him a slash across the back with the rattan cane that was his badge of office. A 'starting' took only a second but the pain lasted for hours, and the bruise for several days.
By the time Ramage had learned all this he had been more than thankful that Lord St Vincent had let him have Southwick and the dozen Tritons and sent him Aitken. Perhaps the First Lord had known more about the situation in the Juno than Ramage realized. The Admiral was reputed to be able to see through a three-inch plank, apart from being a stern disciplinarian - very stern. As a captain he had become famous in the Navy for the fact that his ship invariably had the smallest sick list of any; he was ruthless in his determination that the ship should be kept well-aired below, that the men's bedding should always be clean and dry, that they should have fresh vegetables whenever possible (it was said that he paid for them out of his own pocket at times).