The Ramage Touch (10 page)

His eldest brother, in a burst of enthusiasm, had said he could borrow his gun and have some heavy shot so that he could try for a duck or two. Early on Sunday, the Medway still misty and the sun not yet up, he had rowed out, passing the old and new ships of the line, frigates and transports lying on moorings, and the ancient forts of red brick and of grey stone. He had planned to start off just before the top of the tide and carry the ebb all the way, resting to eat his bread and cheese at slack water, and start back with the first of the flood. And that was what he had done. He had rowed along the high-banked channels of the saltings and often let the ebb drift the boat along – so that it slowly grounded a few yards from some ducks dabbling away, tails in the air, in their eternal hunt for food. Slowly he had collected his trophies – the banks seemed to muffle the heavy blam of the gun firing, so that within fifteen minutes or so ducks had settled again. By the time the flood took him back to Hoo he had seven plump duck lying on the bottom boards, and a heap of fresh sea kale to go with them. His eldest brother’s only comment as he took the gun back was that he might have plucked the birds while he waited for the tide to turn…

Although he had enjoyed rowing his skiff, he had found equal pleasure in going over the slight rise of hill to Hoo church on a Thursday afternoon to hear the organist practising for the Sunday service: there he had discovered his love for music. The organist, at first surprised and then pleased to find the young boy always sitting quietly at the back of the church, had taught him to read music and, guessing he would go to sea as soon as he was old enough, suggested that the flute was the instrument for him to learn. They had discussed the violin – but varying climates and long voyages, humidity and high temperatures would warp the wood and snap the strings, and he would never be able to carry enough as spares. The flute was small, easily carried, durable and, more important, it made pleasing music. So he had learned the flute and he had gone to sea…and here he was standing on the quarterdeck of a French bomb ketch, a commission officer by the age of twenty-three.

More important was the fact that he was one of Captain Ramage’s officers. Few captains had had more of their actions described in the
London Gazette
, and in his imagination Martin saw himself back in the old house at Hoo, his father listening to his exploits, and he would be able to say casually, for the benefit of his brothers, and with an airy wave of the hand: ‘But you probably read about that in the
Gazette
…’

Martin glanced round the
Brutus
’s deck and saw that his half-dozen men had done everything possible to tidy up the ketch, given that the first-lieutenant had forbidden any scrubbing or polishing of the corroded brasswork with brick dust. That was a clear indication that Captain Ramage intended to scuttle or burn both ships, and although it was disappointing for a young lieutenant who could reasonably have expected to be given the command if the
Brutus
was being sent back to Gibraltar as a prize, it made sense. There were so many French ships about these days that they would be lucky to cover five hundred miles before being captured…

On the other side of the
Calypso
, whose gunport lids were still closed and whose guns had their muzzles sealed by tompions with canvas covers, or aprons, over the flintlocks to keep out the damp of the night, the
Fructidor
was a ship of frustration as far as Paolo Orsini, a midshipman in the Navy of His Britannic Majesty, was concerned. His half-dozen men, working under Thomas Jackson, had sluiced the decks with the only deckwash pump in the ship, one whose leathers were shrunk and splitting from disuse and needed wiping carefully with tallow before they could be induced to suck, let alone pump. They had coiled all the falls of the halyards and then whipped some ropes’ ends. More tallow had been wiped into the pawls of the windlass; a bored William Stafford had worked a couple of Turk’s heads on the tiller using line he had found in the French bosun’s store. That was all Mr Aitken would allow; he said it was a waste of time and effort to do anything else with the ships.

Paolo put down his telescope by the binnacle and walked to the forward mortar. It was a strange weapon – so stubby, like a cannon with most of the barrel sawn off, and the trunnions at the breech. The inside of the barrel, the bore (the first section in which the shell was slid), was like the inside of a bottle with its bottom knocked off to form the muzzle. The gunner said the gun was the equivalent of the British 10-inch sea service mortar, and certainly with a muzzle ten inches in diameter it was a formidable-looking weapon. He peered down the bore and could just see where it narrowed into the chamber at the bottom, like the neck of a bottle. That held the gunpowder charge which would launch the mortar shell into the great parabola that should end on the enemy’s head.

The whole mortar was fitted on to something that could be mistaken for a solid cartwheel lying on its side. He had been down below and seen how this great wheel – in effect the base – was supported by underdeck stanchions which spread the weight of the mortar and the shock of its recoil over several extra floors and stringers, and the deck beams were twice as thick as normal.

The ‘cartwheel’ had the mortar bed resting on it. This was a thick but flat rectangular wooden block with a hole in the middle of the underside. This fitted on to what would be the hub if the base had been a real wheel. A thick pintle or axle dropped down into a hole that went through the bed and into the base, so that the bed could revolve and the mortar be aimed.

The mortar was almost obscene, Paolo thought, like a fat and short pig that could only grunt. It was a stubby cast-iron pot with short, solid trunnions sticking out sideways at the bottom which acted as the axle when the gun was elevated. The trunnions were held down by metal clamps (called ‘cap squares’, although they were semi-circular) which stopped the mortar running wild when it fired.

The piece of timber which could slide back and forth in the slot under the mortar, and which had a saucer-like depression where the underside of the mortar barrel rested, was called the bed bolster. You levered up the muzzle with handspikes until it was at the right elevation, then you pulled on the two ropes and slid the bed bolster underneath until the barrel was supported. After that he was not sure what happened, so he had borrowed the gunner’s notebook, although the handwriting was very difficult to read. He sat down on the mortar bed and concentrated.

He had not been reading for more than ten minutes when Thomas Jackson came along and inspected the gun.

‘Looks as though it’d go right through the deck the first time you fired it,’ the American commented. ‘Still, there are three hundred shells for this one, and three hundred for the other–’ he gestured aft to the other mortar. ‘The French presumably had faith in it.’

Paolo looked at the sandy-haired, thin-faced American, and his jaw dropped with dismay. ‘Do you mean you wouldn’t want to fire this if the Captain gave you permission?’

‘I’d sooner he gave me a direct order, sir,’ Jackson grinned, teasing the boy. ‘I’ve never had anything to do with these things. Always fired guns that shot horizontally. This is more like tossing a grenade over a wall and hoping to hit something you can’t see.’

‘
Exactly!
’ Paolo exclaimed. ‘You can’t do
that
with an ordinary gun. If your enemy is behind the thick walls of a castle, or on the other side of the hill, you can’t attack him with a cannon because it fires straight – more or less straight, anyway. With the mortar you can hurl shells down on him.
Explosive
shells.’

‘Yes,’ Jackson agreed as Stafford and Rossi walked up to listen to the conversation, ‘but the fuse that makes the shell explode inside the enemy’s walls might also make it burst inside the mortar before you can fire it.’

Paolo shrugged his shoulders with magnificent indiff-erence. ‘You might slip and fall from a topsail yard, you might get a hernia, a roundshot
might
knock your head off the next time we go into action…’

‘Agreed, sir,’ Jackson said amiably, ‘but that’s not to say I’m going to jump off a topsail yard deliberately, get a hernia, or stand and invite the enemy to knock my head off with a roundshot. When you play around with these mortars, though, you light the fuse in the shell, and if someone’s made a mistake in the length or anything, it makes a big bang you never hear!’

‘How heavy the shell?’ Rossi enquired.

Paolo ran his finger down the page of the notebook, turned over the page and then said: ‘The gunner says this is about the same as the British 10-inch. And…’ The tip of his tongue was protruding with the concentration. ‘…Ah, yes. “Weight of shell when fired” –
Mama mia!
It is ninety-three pounds – nearly a hundredweight! That’s the hollow cast-iron ball and the powder inside.’

‘How much powder in it?’

‘Only seven pounds.’

‘Seven?’ exclaimed Rossi. ‘Why, that is nothing!’

Jackson said: ‘It doesn’t need much to blast the shell casing into thousands of pieces. It’s these splinters that do the damage.’

‘’Ow far will it toss a shell, then?’ Stafford asked, peering down the bore like a farmer inspecting a horse’s teeth.

‘Wait,’ Paolo said, consulting the notebook. ‘It depends on the amount of powder in the charge. That’s obvious, but as far as I can see, it’s easier to use more or less powder than to change the elevation of the gun.’

Stafford slapped the side of the mortar. ‘I should fink so; must weigh a ton!’

‘One and a half,’ Paolo said, having just found some details in a neatly-written table. ‘Ah, here we are. First you must understand about the shell. It is round as you know, but it is cast so that it has the two carrying handles and the filling and fuse hole at the top.’ He read on a moment and said: ‘You might well ask why the shell falls the right way up – with the fuse at the top, because it might fall upside down and break off the fuse.’

‘We might well ask, sir,’ Rossi agreed politely. ‘Why does it fall with the fuse upside down?’

‘No, no,’ Paolo said patiently. ‘Why it falls with the fuse uppermost.’

‘Yes,’ Rossi said, having lost track of the conversation, ‘that is most interesting, sir. But how lights the fuse, then?’

Paolo looked up in surprise and lost his place in the notebook as Stafford and Jackson started laughing. ‘Why the laughing?’

‘We were waiting to hear why the shell falls the right way up after it’s been fired, sir,’ Jackson said.

‘Ah, yes. Well, although the shell casing looks like a circular ball from the outside, in fact the bottom is much thicker, and therefore heavier, so it drops first.’

‘Ah,’ Rossi said. ‘I was going to ask you about that,
signor
. But supposing you fire the shell and bang, it falls in the enemy fort with the fuse at the top and burning; what stops the enemy throwing a bucket of water at it and putting out the fuse?’

‘Wait,’ Paolo said, ‘let me read more. There must be a reason why that will not work.’

‘I can fink o’ one good reason,’ Stafford said emphatically. ‘‘Oo’d be daft enough to walk up to a smoking shell with a bucket o’ water? Not me! I’d duck down art of the way.’

There were two or three minutes’ silence while Paolo read through the pages, occasionally grunting to indicate an interesting point, but saying nothing, obviously absorbed by the mental picture of a shell lying in the castle courtyard with smoking fuse.

‘Here we are,’ he exclaimed triumphantly. ‘The fuse burns at the rate of an inch in four seconds and forty-eight parts.’

‘Forty-eight parts of what?’ Stafford asked.

Paolo looked appealingly at Jackson, who shrugged his shoulders. ‘Of a second, sir? Most likely a second is divided into a hundred parts. It’s the sort of thing they do,’ he added darkly, knowing the unreliability of the Board of Ordnance.

‘Well, it’s not very long, is it…about half a second. Anyway, you know how long the shell takes to land, so you cut the fuse to the…’

‘How do you know how long it takes?’ Rossi asked.

‘
Accidente
! You have it here in the tables!’ Paolo said crossly. ‘Now just listen. Just suppose your target is 680 yards away. You elevate the mortar to forty-five degrees. Then you put in a charge, of one pound of powder; then you cut the fuse to burst ten seconds after you fire the mortar.’

‘Why ten seconds?’ Rossi persisted.

‘
Mama mia,
Rossi! Because it takes ten seconds for the shell to fly through the air and land on a target 680 yards away. That means it’s no good having a bucket of water.’

‘Who cuts the fuse?’ Jackson asked.

Paolo had just reached the page giving details of the fuse. ‘The fuse,’ he said, like a priest reading a liturgy, ‘is a conical tube made of beech, willow or some other dry wood. It is open at the top and at the pointed end. So it is filled with a mixture of sulphur, saltpetre and mealed powder – yes,’ he said quickly, anticipating Rossi’s question, ‘obviously you keep a finger over the hole in the pointed end while you’re doing it. Then each end – each hole, in other words – is covered with a composition of tallow and beeswax or pitch, to keep out the damp. When the fuse is put into the shell, the little end is cut off or opened, but the big end is left closed until just before firing.

‘So, starting at the beginning, the shell itself is loaded with powder through the fuse hole in the casing. Then the fuse is inserted so that an inch and a half comes out beyond the fuse hole. Protrudes, it means,’ he explained, proud of his English. ‘You must make sure there is nothing to prevent the fire from the fuse exploding the powder in the shell – make sure the little end is clear, in other words.

‘So there you are,’ he said proudly, closing the notebook.

‘Is all right if the enemy is 680 yards away,’ Rossi grumbled. ‘But suppose he is
più distante
? And the mortar, she is not even loaded yet.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Paolo said cheerfully, turning back to the middle pages of the notebook. ‘Now, we know about the shell and the fuse. Now we have to hurl it at the enemy so that it bursts at his feet.’ He waved a hand dramatically and slapped the wooden bed.