Long beaches with dazzling white sand, fringed by palms and often backed by mountains covered with thick rain forests; miles of steep cliffs and fallen rocks; low-lying coasts deeply indented with bays as though rats had gnawed them and with thick mangroves lining the banks, the leaves dark green and dense, the roots growing in and out of the water like thousands of gnarled, tortured fingers grasping down to the bottom or reaching up towards the sky.
Termites, white ants, teredos ... a fallen tree was soon attacked by termites which left the outside bark apparently sound but when you touched it the trunk began to crumble; wooden houses could look well-painted but a jab with your finger might show the inside of the wood riddled by white ants. A proud ship floating at anchor in a bay whose blueness was so bright as to seem artificial, and its bottom a honeycomb where teredo had eaten up and down the grain of the wood, never breaking through the sides of the plank.
The heat ... for much of the year bearable because the Trade winds were cooling, but at other times, during the hurricane season, so humid that every movement was an effort that soaked you in perspiration. When iron rusted at a tremendous rate and cloth mildewed; when a wise captain spending any time at anchor aired sails at least every two days, and always after rain, A morning rainstorm without the sails being aired in the afternoon was asking for the black spots of mildew to speckle the sail after a warm night.
Much beauty - indeed, a man who had never seen the Caribbean could never fully understand beauty - but always it went hand in hand with violence, the violence of Nature: whether the sudden hurricane that tore down half a town, ripped up plantations like a great scythe, washed away tons of soil with torrential rain, and sank ships as though they were children's toy boats, or the sudden violence of sickness that struck a man or woman so that twelve hours after they walked into their homes, laughing and well, they were dying of yellow fever, shuddering in the grip of malaria or dying in agonizing spasms from the bloody flux. Violence, always violence, and never more so than among the planters, many of whom had lived in the islands for several generations. Sugar was the main produce and with it came rum, the cheapest of the 'hot waters', and they drank heavily, and were short-tempered, quarrelsome and often petty as those living in small communities tended to be, clannish and petulant - and hospitable, too; quick to take offence if their hospitality was not accepted.
So the West Indies were, for him, a violent contradiction: the mysterious beauty of the belle of the night alongside the ugliness of a man dying from the black vomit; the glory of a flamboyant tree contrasting with the termite-ridden log lying beside it. And over it, war, always war. That secluded bay with the sparkling beach and waving palms could be an anchorage for enemy privateers; that sail on the horizon could be a French ship of the line. Like an animal in the jungle or a fish in the sea, one always had to be on guard: against the unknown sail and the unknown cloud - for an innocent grey cloud could in five minutes become a vicious line squall which, catching a ship all aback, might send her masts crashing by the board or shred the sails from the yards. And coral reefs and shoals - one watched the colour of the sea for the hint of pale green or brown that warned of shallows, reefs or rocks, for the waters of the islands were only roughly charted, and one's own eyes were the best charts unless you wanted to rip out the ship's bottom. Many a captain's first warning of a reef was the sight of a row of pelicans apparently standing on the water - whereas in fact they had their feet firmly on rocks a few inches below the surface.
Ramage walked aft to the taffrail and looked astern, where the ship's bubbling wake was a stream of pale green fire, like a meteor's tail, phosphorescence that no one understood but which was often bright enough to read by. In a few days he would be back in the West Indies, where promotion was often fast for those that survived, and he wondered how he would find Rear-Admiral Davis. One thing was certain: he would do his best to bring the Juno into Carlisle Bay so that no one could fault her.
CHAPTER FIVE
The cry of 'Land-ho!' from one of the lookouts aloft came just after nine in the morning, and the call from the quarterdeck 'Where away?' brought the answer that it stretched from two points on the starboard bow to three on the larboard.
Ramage sent Jackson aloft with a telescope to identify the land - none of the lieutenants had ever been to the West Indies before - and three minutes later Jackson hailed that Ragged Point bore one point on the starboard bow. Southwick nodded knowingly when Ramage glanced at him: it was the eastern point of the diamond-shaped island, and a perfect landfall. They would be in Carlisle Bay by afternoon. Barbados, nearly a hundred miles out in the Atlantic to the east of the chain of other islands, was much flatter; Southwick had once commented that it 'looked like the back o' the Wight', and indeed except for the palm trees along the shore it resembled part of the Isle of Wight.
They had in fact sighted the island late; even now Southwick was taking a bearing and horizontal quadrant angle to work out the distance off, but that was one of the problems of finding Barbados: the Atlantic rollers came smashing in on the rocky eastern shore, hurling up fine spray which drifted as a thin mist, borne inshore by the Trade winds and obscuring the land from seaward.
Well, it was there and it was Barbados all right, and in a few minutes Southwick would be giving the quartermaster another course to steer, a little more to the south-west. They would run along the south-east coast until they passed South Point and then bear up to pass Needham Point and turn into Carlisle Bay, where they would be expected because the watchtower would have reported them.
Ramage had a smug feeling as he looked at the land, now beginning to show as a low, grey-blue smear on the western horizon, with a scattering of cloud lying athwart the tiny Trade wind clouds. In the canvas bag on his desk was all the paperwork for the Admiral, duly completed. The various heads of department on board the Juno had written out their 'Demands for Stores', ranging from powder for the gunner and flax, reels of thread and plugs of beeswax for the sailmaker to shirts, trousers and shoes for the purser and rope and light cordage for the bos'n, along with detailed lists of provisions. The 'Abstracts of Remains' would tell the Admiral how much was left on board the Juno, while the 'Defects of Ship' which he had drawn up with Southwick and the carpenter was fuller than that normally rendered by a captain thanks to that Monday morning inspection.
The ship herself looked smart enough; smarter than would normally be expected after a voyage of nearly four thousand miles, The paintwork was fresh, not just scrubbed. Two days of calm had allowed men to paint over the side from stagings, and the black hull and distinctive pale yellow sheer strake glistened. The figurehead, the head and shoulders of a rather florid Juno, was newly painted, and Ramage had agreed that it should be protected by canvas for the last few days. The masts had been scraped and painted; the tips of the studding-sail booms had been painted black. All the serving on the rigging had been repainted, the big quarterdeck awning had been scrubbed. The boats stowed on the booms were newly painted and once again the black was shiny, with the yellow sheer strakes giving them a distinctive touch, matching the Juno herself,