Free Ramage's Diamond by Dudley Pope

ship. His lack of seamanship was revealed in the way the ship was handled; his lack of leadership in the way the officers and ship’s company behaved. His courage or lack of it would be shown the moment the ship went into action. The captain was not the tip of a pyramid, as most people thought; in fact it was just the reverse: he was the spindle on which everything else balanced.
    He looked up at the waiting Aitken. “Is the fiddler on the quarterdeck? Ah, I see him. Very well, man the capstan!”

CHAPTER THREE
    R AMAGE wiped his pen and put it away in the drawer as he waited for the ink to dry on the page of his Journal. The figures he had written in under the “Latitude In” and “Longitude Made” columns showed that the
Juno
had almost reached “The Corner,” the invisible turning point just short of the Tropic of Cancer where she would pick up the North-east Trade winds to sweep her for three thousand miles across the Atlantic in a gentle curve to the south-east that would bring her to Barbados.
    The “Journal of the Proceedings of his Majesty’s ship
Juno,
Captain Nicholas Ramage, Commander,” told the story of the voyage so far in terms of winds, courses steered, miles run from noon one day to noon the next, and apart from the column headed “Remarkable Observations and Accidents,” mercifully almost blank, told the Admiralty all it wanted to know.
    As he flicked over the earlier pages, Ramage thought that the Journal told very little of the story. His log and the Master’s faithfully recorded the time when the Lizard sank below the horizon astern, the last sight of England for many months—the last sight ever for some of the men on board. It mentioned the westerly gale that caught them off Brest and drove them into the Bay of
    Biscay, noted the three occasions when they sighted other frigates and made or answered the challenge, recorded the time that the tip of the island of Madeira was sighted and its bearing … But it made no mention of the afternoon, with the Lizard still just in sight, when he had finally lost his temper with the whole ship’s company, mustered them aft, and given them a warning.
    For the first few hours after weighing from Spithead it had seemed that the men were trying, that they realized they had grown slack under the previous Captain and were anxious to make amends. But as the
Juno
beat her way out to the Chops of the Channel they had eased off and became sullen. A topsail had been let fall with a reef point still tied so that the canvas ripped; evolutions that should have taken five minutes had taken twenty. In fact it seemed that all the work was being done by the dozen former Tritons.
    Aitken and Southwick had done their best and he could not fault the other three lieutenants. The new Marine Lieutenant, Rennick, had a firm grip on his men, who were always smartly turned out. Yet there was an insidious sullen air on the mess-deck, and that afternoon Ramage had vowed to get rid of it. With the glass falling and the
Juno
thrashing her way westward out of the Channel, he mustered them aft and, using a speaking-trumpet to make his voice heard above the howl of the wind, he had given them a solemn warning.
    The day after they reached “The Corner” he would inspect the ship from breasthook to archboard; he would exercise them aloft and at the guns with a watch in his hand. If at the end of the day he was satisfied, then the rest of the voyage to Barbados would be a routine cruise; but if he found so much as a speck of dirt in even one of the coppers, if furling a topsail took thirty seconds longer than it should, if there was any hesitation or delay over emergency procedures (and here he was warning the officers more than the seamen), then he promised them three thousand miles of misery, when they would beg for a flogging to get some relief.
    Only Southwick and the former Tritons had known he was not ruthless enough to