Ramage's Mutiny by Dudley Pope Page B

safety of the ship, in good weather and bad, on passage or in battle, was only part of it. The surgeon’s job was to cure the men’s illnesses, but a good captain did his best to make sure the men did not become ill in the first place. Captain Ramage, for instance, was fanatical in going to any length to make sure there were fruit and fresh vegetables for the men whenever possible, and many a time the cook’s mate’s hands had been raw and stinging, crushing fresh limes to provide the juice issued to the men daily to ward off scurvy.
    Yet, Aitken reflected as he began dressing, the physical health of the ship’s company was also only part of the story: there was always trouble among two hundred seamen. Hot weather shortened tempers; fights occurred in a few seconds, men who had been friends for months had bitter quarrels and applied to change their mess, deciding they wanted to try their luck with a group of another six or eight men. A man received a letter from home relating some tragedy or crisis; another began hoarding his tot so that he could get blind drunk every few days. A man sulking over an actual or imagined injustice at the hands of a petty officer would slack. One man merited promotion while another ought to be demoted …
    These were the normal problems in a well-run ship, and in each case the captain had to decide what to do: he had to be a judge one minute and a father the next; a medical man and a navigator. Yet not every ship was well commanded. The pleasure—yes, that was the right word—of serving with Captain Ramage was not that he was always right (the whole ship’s company knew how uncertain his temper was before breakfast) but that he
cared.
If he was wrong then it was not likely anyone else would have been right. He treated his men as though they were his sons, though many were his age and the majority much older. Southwick, for instance, could have been his father.
    It showed in many ways. He watched their diet to keep them fit; but like a true father he made damned sure they did their work properly. He rarely flogged a man (none in Aitken’s time, and according to Southwick only twice in his whole career), but Aitken had seen seamen who would have preferred the lash of the cat to the lash of the Captain’s tongue.
    As he pulled on his stockings, smoothing out the wrinkles, Aitken realized that he was in effect assessing Captain Ramage because he had been thinking a lot about Captain Wallis and the
Jocasta.
Something had gone dreadfully wrong on board that ship, and although no one yet knew exactly what it was, Aitken was becoming more and more certain that if any one man was to blame it was Captain Wallis.
    Which is where his gloomy thoughts started: in a ship
everything
depended on the captain. Aitken knew that Admiral Davis had been surprised when he asked to be allowed to remain with Captain Ramage instead of being made post and given command of a frigate, but the reason had been simple enough: he did not think he was yet fit for command. Not that he couldn’t handle a frigate—that was easy enough—but he wanted to learn more about keeping a ship’s company well disciplined but happy. It boiled down to having a seaman call you “sir” because he regarded you as the captain, not because you were the man put in as captain and backed up by the Articles of War.
    Aitken suspected that Captain Wallis had commanded his ship by waving his commission in one hand and the Articles in the other, forever charging men with breaking an article and setting the bosun’s mates to work with the cat. With Captain Ramage the only time the men heard of the Articles of War was every fourth Sunday when, by regulation, they had to be read aloud.
    If the Navy suddenly turned republican, he thought, the men would elect Lord Ramage as their captain. Lord Ramage—it was hard to remember he was a lord and, when his father died, would become the Earl of