and I seem to remember seeing a reference to another island with that name off Bahia Blanca, three hundred miles or so south of Buenos Aires.'
'There'll be more,' Southwick commented. 'It's like Santa Cruz. When in doubt the Dons call a place either Santa Cruz or Trinidad.'
'This one was named by the Portuguese,' Ramage said.
Southwick sniffed again. 'Not much difference, except the language. Maybe the Portuguese are better sailors.' He thought for a few moments and then amended his remark. 'They were, a couple of centuries ago, but not now. But if they named the island I presume they own it.'
'I've no idea what the legal position is except that Trinidade is not mentioned in Bonaparte's treaty. Nor are many other islands, I suppose, but Trinidade is the one that interests their Lordships. Anyway, we are to take possession and plant. The potatoes and grain will run wild, but they'll seed so that in an emergency a visiting ship will find something. If it looks a promising place it might even become a minor Ascension.'
'But anyone could seize it after we've gone, sir!' Southwick protested.
'Orders,' Ramage said. 'We obey them. I could think of worse. It's a cruise, really. But I imagine that if I return and report that Trinidade will make a good base, their Lordships - the government anyway - will send a garrison. If the batteries are built by us. a passing John Company ship on her way to India could land the guns and gunners and a battalion of infantry.'
Aitken asked, 'Do the government think of this island as a place for the Honourable East India Company ships to call for water in an emergency?'
'I don't really know,' Ramage admitted. 'It's rather far to the west for ships bound to and from the Cape of Good Hope and India. More likely their Lordships have in mind a wooding-and-watering island which a British squadron covering the South American coast could use. Somewhere they can refit, get fresh vegetables, land any sick . . . Seven hundred and fifty miles southwest to Rio, six hundred and fifty miles northwest to Bahia, and just over fifteen hundred to the mouth of the Plate.'
'And two thousand across to the West African coast,' Southwick said. 'This place begins to sound interesting. But why has no one garrisoned it before? After all, it sits astride the South Atlantic like a jockey on a nag.'
'Well, the Spanish and Portuguese don't need it because they share all the ports from one end of South America to the other,' Ramage pointed out. 'The French are really only concerned with the West Indies and India, and anyway the Dons are their allies so they can always use places like Rio - even though it is Portuguese - and the Plate for provisioning and watering. Only Britain needs bases to attack South America and cover the route to the Cape and India.'
'How big is it? How high, rather?' Southwick asked.
'No one was very sure at the Admiralty, but as far as I could discover it's roughly a couple of miles long in a northwest, southeast direction, a mile wide and with hills in the middle a thousand feet high.'
'A thousand feet, sir? We can rely on that?'
'We can't rely on anything. Mr Dalrymple at the Hydrographic Office admitted he knew nothing much about it - he just warned me not to hit Martin Vaz, which is either a tiny island or a reef of rocks a day's sailing from it.'
'Once we're through the Doldrums, we'll get a lift to the westward from the current,' Southwick commented. 'But just think of it, once we make a landfall we go on shore to plant potatoes ... I hate gardening,' he admitted, 'but it'll make a change to carry a spade and not a sword!'
The Doldrums had been empty days when the Calypso sat dead on the water, the heat haze merging sea, horizon and sky into what seemed to Wilkins a pool of molten copper. It was a time when he wanted to paint, wanted to capture on canvas the sense of the empty vastness of the ocean when there was no wind, where the sails were furled on the yards because there was no point in leaving them chafing against masts and rigging with every movement of the ship. Some days there was a slight swell, and Captain Ramage said it was caused by some distant storm, probably several thousands of miles away. He wanted to put it on canvas, but the sun was too hot. Even under the awning stretched across the quarterdeck it was an oven which sapped everyone's energy. Tempers were fraying and the sentry on the scuttlebutt watched closely as a man dropped in the dipper and took a drink.
The sheer stark simplicity of the life fascinated Wilkins. The intense heat, the lack of wind, and the fact that the Calypso was taking twice as long as expected to get through the Doldrums meant the men were twice as thirsty but had only half the water. It was interesting that the men had a basic ration, but in addition some extra was put into a butt each day and this was left by the mainmast with a Marine sentry guarding it.
And there was a dipper, a cylindrical, open-topped container, the diameter of a broom handle and about four inches long. There was a hole on each side of the top through which the line threaded, and a man was allowed to drop the dipper down through the bunghole and draw out as much water as it would hold. But because when there was a water shortage the butt was stowed on its side with chocks, the dipper usually tilted before it could fill completely. And the Marine sentry made sure that it was 'one man, one dip'.
Still, Wilkins had made up his mind about the colours, sketched in the outlines on the canvas with charcoal, and was ready when the first teasing but cooling puffs of wind had come. First of all there had been an excited hail from a lookout at the masthead - a man perched in what looked like an open-sided tent with strips of canvas to protect him from the rays of the sun. 'Wind shadow on the larboard quarter!' he had shouted. A couple of minutes later he reported it was approaching, but, just as suddenly, it vanished. Five minutes later another, also on the larboard quarter, reached the ship, a wind shadow that danced across the surface of the sea like a swarm of gnats on the edge of a pond. Suddenly they all had a teasing breath of cool air, but then it was gone.
Yet Mr Ramage was quite confident the wind would set in: topmen swarmed aloft to drop the sails - 'let fall', rather. And by then more wind shadows were being reported, the men becoming excited, and he was hurriedly mixing paints on his palette, the sudden breeze blowing away the lethargy. Now they were at last in the southeast trade winds which Southwick said started off down towards the Cape of Good Hope.
Crossing the Equator a few days later was best forgotten as far as Wilkins was concerned: Neptune had dozens of victims because the Calypso had spent most of her time in the Caribbean or Mediterranean, and few men had crossed the Line. So the unlucky ones were given stiff 'tonics' of soap and water, shaved, ducked and five men, who had objected violently, were ordered by King Neptune to be tarred and feathered. Three others had their faces and backsides given a liberal coating of black gun lacquer.
Wilkins found it hard to get used to the sun's position. It was sufficiently late in the year and they were far enough south for the sun to be almost vertically overhead, so his shadow at noon was tiny, extending only a few inches from his feet, as though he was standing in a small puddle. Flying fish skimming just above the waves like great dragonflies had been commonplace for a long time and although the Calypso was now almost midway between West Africa and South America, he was surprised by how many sea birds they saw. He had painted some of them, putting the date and position on the back of the canvas. He enjoyed painting birds in flight because it gave him good practice at painting the sea - surely the most challenging of all subjects. It was never the same, varying with the wind, cloud, sun, or rain, and, according to the captain, with the depth of the ocean and the latitude. At Trinidade, their destination, the captain promised that if there were reefs, he would see three or four different colours in as many hundreds of yards. For the moment, though, everyone was relieved that they were now in the southeast trades.
Now Southwick, legs astride and balancing himself against the gentle roll, flipped down one more shade of his quadrant because he found the sun bright, once again 'brought the sun down to the horizon', rocked the quadrant slightly to make sure that the lower edge of the sun was precisely on the horizon, made a slight adjustment and a moment later saw the sun had moved. He read the figures on the ivory scale of the quadrant. The ritual of the noon sight was, as far as the sun was concerned, now over: he had measured the highest angle that it made with the horizon, and that was that: only the angle mattered, not the time: if he had measured its highest angle, then that was the angle at noon local time, and he did not have to bother to turn a half-minute glass, bellow at Orsini to note the chronometer . . . Now he had to apply some corrections, add or subtract figures from the almanac, and the answer would be the Calypso's latitude. It was the simplest thing to do in celestial navigation; it was how the navigators from the oldest times crossed oceans - they knew the latitude of their destination and sailed along it until they arrived. The only danger was running into the land at night. Longitude was a different problem; without an accurate chronometer there was no way of being sure of one's exact distance east or west of the Greenwich meridian.
Young Orsini was working out his answer using the top of the binnacle box. Kenton and Martin were sitting on the breeches of guns. Southwick could see Mr Ramage walking up and down on the windward side of the quarterdeck, having his spell of exercise before his meal. And waiting to hear the latitude ... Normally Mr Ramage left the navigation to him, but for the last three days he had been taking a close interest. The reason was not hard to guess - the Calypso's latitude and longitude were almost the same as the figures they had been given for Trinidade.
In fact, according to Southwick's reckoning, they were within a hundred miles of it. Allowing for the chronometerbeing a bit out, he was sure that putting the point of a pair of compasses down on Trinidade and drawing a circle with a radius of fifty miles would enclose the Calypso, but therewas a high haze, so it was impossible to guess whether they could see ten miles or sixty.
This was always the difficult time when making a landfall: did one set more canvas to increase speed in the hope of sighting land before nightfall, or go slowly and cautiously and hope to sight it at dawn? Martin Vaz should be on the larboard bow and Trinidade dead ahead. If one left Martin Vaz too far to larboard - thus making absolutely certain of not hitting it - there was a risk of passing Trinidade out of sight to larboard. The life of a master in the Royal Navy, Southwick thought to himself, could be summed up by that situation: trying to find one rock in the middle of an ocean without hitting another . . .
He wrote the final row of figures, 20° 01' 50'. And that, he knew without looking it up, was within thirty miles of the latitude of Trinidade.
A cast of the log half an hour ago had given just over six knots and they were able to lay the course. By five o'clock they might be there; it should be in sight at the latest in an hour or two - if it was as high as reported and the chronometer was anywhere near passing for correct.
Southwick walked across the quarterdeck and reported to Ramage, who grimaced and nodded ahead. 'A thousand or fifteen hundred feet high? We should be seeing it by now.'
'It's hazier than it looks, sir,' Southwick said confidently. 'Had you given any thought about who might ...'
'All right, all right, pass the word through the bosun. Though why I should always pay up a guinea to the first man to sight such a place, I don't know!'
'It's the trickiest landfall we've ever made, sir. The Atlantic is 2,500 miles wide here, from Trinidade to the nearest tip of West Africa, and we're looking for somewhere two or three miles long.'
'That's a fine argument to impress old ladies,' Ramage said unsympathetically, 'and it'd impress me if I thought Trinidade could lie anywhere along that gap of 2,500 miles. But you have a quadrant, almanac, tables and a chronometer that allow you to be rather more precise.'
'Well, yes sir,' Southwick agreed and added with a grin, 'but I can't make it seem too easy!'
He walked back to the binnacle to inspect the calculations made by the two young lieutenants and midshipman.
He looked first at Orsini's slate and his brow furrowed. 'I can assure you, Mr Orsini, that the Calypso is about seven hundred and fifty miles from Rio de Janeiro; in other words, about four-fifths of the way across the South Atlantic between the Cape of Good Hope and South America, not far from the tropic of Capricorn. But you, Mr Orsini, seem to be not only north of the Equator, almost on the far side of the Torrid Zone, but close to the Cape Verde Islands, which the rest of us left thousands of miles away some weeks ago...'
Orsini, his face crimson, hurriedly rubbed out some writing on his slate and corrected it. 'The latitude is north, not south. I'm sorry, I mean, I should have named
