"Pope, Dudley - Nicholas Ramage 17 - Ramage and the Saracens 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pope Dudley)

When Captain Ramage is ordered to Naples, neither he nor the crew of the frigate Calypso expect to meet hostile ships in the Mediterranean so soon after the battle of Trafalgar. Yet hardly have they cleared the Straits of Gibraltar than they sight two French battleships of the Line.

Arriving in Naples, Ramage expects to be given the tedious task of escorting merchantmen. Nothing could be further from the truth. The mission he is given is one far better suited to his reputation: he is to sail to Sicily where the Barbary Coast pirates -- the Saraceni -- have been terrorizing the fishing ports.




Dudley Pope


Ramage and the Saracens



AUTHOR'S NOTE
With the exception of Sidi Rezegh, all the places mentioned in this narrative actually exist and are described as they would have been in 1806.

DUDLEY POPE
St Martin
French West Indies





Chapter One

Southwick counted the pieces of salt beef as the cook's mate lifted them out of the cask, banging each piece before he removed it to shake off the encrusted salt. Each piece of meat was as dark as old varnish and the salt was stained like muddy sand.

It would take many hours of soaking in fresh water in the steep tub to dissolve that hardened salt, the master thought to himself, and a lot of boiling afterwards before the men could get their teeth into the meat.

This cask was full of old meat: from the look of it many months had passed - even a year or more - since the carcase had been cut up in the contractor's slaughterhouse and salted down in the cask. Still, it was not as bad as some he had seen in the old days, before the Great Mutiny had led to an improvement. Then it was not unusual to find meat so hard it could be carved, looking rather like mahogany.

He continued marking the slate and looked at the side of the cask on which was stencilled the legend "54 pieces". Well, it might contain fifty-four pieces; it was not entirely unknown for the number of pieces to match what the contractor had painted on the outside, but it was rare, and the discrepancy was always on the side of the contractor.

Southwick, like every other master in the King's service doing this particular job, had to note the difference in his log, and as the cook's mate finally lifted out the last piece and Southwick looked at the tally on the slate, he could see they were fortunate: the log entry would simply say: "Opened cask of beef, marked 54 pieces, contained 52."

In theory the Navy Board claimed back from the contractor the value of the difference, but Southwick wondered if they ever did.

The seamen were cheated by the dishonest contractors, not the Navy Board: the clerks at the Navy Board had their dinner whether or not a cask was missing several pieces of meat. It was only the seamen who went without: a ship was issued with so many casks of salt beef and salt pork for a commission or voyage, and that was that: the men just had to make it last.

With the last piece taken from the cask, Southwick said: "Very well, get all this into the steep tub," gesturing at the pile of meat, most of which seemed to him to be fat or bone, and he turned to go below to make the entry in his log.

Captain Ramage, standing at the forward end of the quarterdeck, asked: "Short again?"

"Only two pieces, sir," Southwick said, adding gloomily: "The Navy Board seems to have been getting rid of some old stock: looked more like off-cuts of mahogany from the carpenter's shop than salt beef."

Ramage nodded and noted that they were lucky: it was usual for there to be half a dozen pieces missing, or even more, and much of the meat comprised chunks of fat which, when the meat was put in the coppers to cook, would float on top of the boiling water, to be skimmed off by the cook's mate and sold illicitly to the men as "slush", providing something to spread on their hard biscuits and giving the cook's mate the nickname of "Slushy". Did the cook demand his share of the proceeds?