He looked round hurriedly for a reliable messenger and saw Orsini scurrying towards him. The boy saluted and said excitedly: 'Mr Wagstaffe says the pumps are ready, sir, but Mr Southwick's compliments, sir, and he says the fire is out!'
Aitken managed to stifle a sigh of relief: obviously the Captain had given the Master instructions earlier. He saw the Captain looking at his watch and then waving for him to come to the binnacle. At that moment a horrified Aitken saw the two helmsmen spinning the wheel, bringing the ship round to starboard and up into the wind: already the fluttering of the sails was turning into thundering claps and as the First Lieutenant turned to shout at the two men, Ramage said, his voice loud to make himself heard and holding on to the binnacle box as the ship began to rolclass="underline" 'The tiller ropes seem to have parted, Mr Aitken ... I’ll take the conn.’
By dawn Aitken and the rest of the ship's company were exhausted. One party had no sooner clapped emergency tackles to the tiller as topmen furled the topsail and the great mainsail and foresail were trimmed to get the strain off the rudder, allowing Aitken to report to the Captain that the ship was under control again, than Ramage had ordered the ship to be hove-to, using the tiller tackles, and a cutter hoisted out to starboard, rowed round the ship carrying ten Marines, and recovered on the larboard side.
When that had been done - with the decks still strewn with hoses and the engine sitting by the mainmast, well lashed down and its handles resting like a seesaw - Ramage had told the Second Lieutenant to take the conn. Aitken relaxed and was thankful that while they had been working on the tiller tackles he had remembered to make sure the lookouts were sent aloft just before dawn. He watched Ramage walking forward to the companionway and envied him: no doubt his steward would soon bring him a cup of hot tea.
But at the top of the companionway Ramage paused, looked ahead and turned suddenly to the Second Lieutenant. 'Mr Wagstaffe - I see breakers ahead. Your masts have gone by the board, so youll have to anchor,' With that he disappeared down the companionway.
Wagstaffe stared helplessly at Aitken. Since they were in the middle of the Atlantic, more than a thousand miles from land in any direction, they were nowhere near ready: the anchors were secured with preventer stoppers, the cables were ranged below, bucklers closed off the hawse-holes so that seas did not sweep through them and flood into the ship.
Aitken paused a moment. It was obvious that the Captain intended that Wagstaffe should carry out the first moves to deal with this particular emergency. He shrugged his shoulders and said: 'You are the officer of the deck; we'll be on the rocks in a few minutes unless you do something!'
The moment Wagstaffe recovered from his surprise, like Aitken before him at the fire alarm, he seized a speaking trumpet and began bellowing orders. The First Lieutenant was about to take over - the normal procedure once the officer of the deck had discovered the emergency and given the preliminary orders - when Orsini came scurrying up from below. The Captain was to be informed, he told Aitken, the moment they were ready to anchor.
The next ten minutes, as far as Aitken was concerned, had been chaos or, at best, partly-controlled confusion: seamen working in almost complete darkness in the tier had wrestled with the cable, which was seventeen inches in circumference and 720 feet long, stiff and heavy - it weighed nearly four tons. The buckler closing the hawse had been removed so the end of the cable could be led out and round the bow and secured to an anchor and finally, hours later it seemed, Aitken was able to hurry below to report all was ready.
He found Ramage sitting at his desk, a pile of papers in front of him. The First Lieutenant recognized them - the routine reports that would have to be ready for the Admiral when the Juno arrived in Barbados: muster tables giving details of every man in the ship's company, slop book showing what each had bought from shirts to tobacco, sick book, returns from the bos'n, gunner and carpenter concerning their stores...
Ramage glanced at his watch as Aitken began his report and scribbled the time on a piece of paper, commenting sourly: 'I'm glad they weren't real breakers.'
‘I’m sorry, sir,' Aitken said miserably, 'but it was an unexpected - er, evolution.'
'Quite, but it's the unexpected that sinks ships,' Ramage said, his voice neutral. 'Very well, carry on: unbend the cable and ship the buckler - and you'd better get the decks cleared. The ship looks as though the men from the Westminster Fire Office have been fighting a burning street.'
Aitken went back to the quarterdeck with mixed emotions: resentment, annoyance at his own shortcomings, anxiety over what was to come ... It was still only half past six and on a normal morning the ship's company would by now have washed the decks, polished the brightwork, spread the awnings, and be waiting for the order to lash up and stow hammocks. Instead they had gone through a complete fire drill in the darkness, rigged emergency steering, and prepared to anchor. And all the Captain said was: 'You'd better get the deck cleared,' and made a sarcastic remark about one of the fire insurance companies. Of course the hoses were still all over the deck and the tackles were still rove in the tiller flat, although unhooked now and snaking all over the ward room. How the new rope in those damned blocks had twisted and kinked. That was one lesson he had learned - never use new rope in purchases for emergency steering: the men had to use handspikes to untwist them,
As he stopped by the binnacle he thought again of the Captain's words: 'It's the unexpected that sinks ships.' He had to admit there was some truth in it: those twisted purchases had wasted valuable minutes; in fact in heavy weather the ship would have been broached half a dozen times before they'd cleared them, and one bad broach could have left the Juno dismasted. And the mistake he'd made with the head pump hoses, and the delay in filling the cistern: by the time the engine was ready, flames would have reached the magazine. At least there had been no actual mistakes in preparing to anchor. Yet he had to admit that the risk of fire was present every moment of the day and night; it was the one thing that, with half a ton of powder in the magazine, could in half a minute transform the Juno into scraps of floating timber. And tiller ropes parting - that could happen unexpectedly. He could not seriously dispute that there were twenty hundredweights in the ton of truth that the Captain had just spoken: you had to keep a sharp lookout for the unexpected.
He realized that Wagstaffe was standing in front of him. 'Did the Captain say anything?' the Second Lieutenant asked nervously, keeping his voice low.
Aitken nodded warningly towards the skylight over the cabin. 'Clear away the hoses, pumps and engines, get the tackles cleared away in the tiller flat, then carry on as usual.' As he walked aft to the taffrail he wanted to add, beware of the unexpected, there's a whole day of unexpectedness ahead of us yet.
He looked astern, watching the Juno's swirling wake and, on the distant eastern horizon, a long low bank of cloud behind which the sun had risen but was not yet visible. The band of cloud looked hard and menacing, as though bringing a gale of wind that would last a week, but Aitken knew from experience that it was a trick of the Tropics; once the sun had some heat in it the cloud would melt away, leaving a clear sky. Then, slowly and steadily, the Trade wind clouds would form up like balls of white wool rolling westward in orderly lines, and the decks would get hotter as the sun rose higher and higher.
Then suddenly he understood completely what the Captain was doing. That last remark was not just a casual comment intended to spur on the ship's First Lieutenant. Everyone on board, except perhaps Southwick, had expected today's exercises to comprise sail handling and gunnery, rounded off with a thorough inspection of the ship's paint and brightwork. Now he realized that the Captain already knew how good (or bad) the men were at reefing and furling - he saw them doing it all the time. He already knew, from his regular Sunday morning inspection, the condition of the paintwork below. The Captain had known all along what Aitken had only just recognized - the real efficiency of a ship's company was not shown by the speed at which sails and guns were handled; it was the way they dealt with a completely unexpected situation that mattered. In fact, whether sailing the ship in a tropical breeze or taking her into action against the enemy, it was all that mattered. By the showing so far, Aitken reflected ruefully, the Captain must be bitterly disappointed.