The Ramage Touch by Dudley Pope

maiden voyage.’ The admiral looked directly at Ramage. ‘I have fresh orders for you from Their Lordships, and I know what they are. I want you to take this lad because he can learn a lot from you – if he lives long enough.’
    ‘Those sort of orders, sir?’
    ‘What? Oh no, I’m thinking of the lad. He’s too keen, if anything. You’ve learned already there are two kinds of keen officers – those who get killed in a blaze of glory, and those who survive in a blaze of glory. I see new hair growing over a pink patch on your scalp, there are a couple of scars over your right eyebrow, and you’re holding your left arm stiffly, so you’ve been wounded a few times – unless you were careless when getting out of some trollop’s bed. I’d say you haven’t made up your mind yet – or fate hasn’t, rather – exactly which of the two you are. If you survive, and young “Blower” Martin does, too, I hope he’ll go a long way with you.’
    ‘Blower’ Martin had since proved to be a very capable and popular young officer: his nickname was intended to tease because he could make a flute do almost everything except actually talk, and many an evening as the Calypso struggled eastward along the Spanish coast against light headwinds young Martin had started playing with perhaps a couple of people listening, and ended up with nearly every off-watch seaman in the ship squatting nearby, perched on guns or just lying back on the deck planking. Sometimes they danced, applauding themselves between tunes.
    Thin-faced with wavy brown hair, slightly built and nervous and jerky in manner, Martin seemed out of place in uniform – until you watched him on deck. His eyes were never still. They would run along the horizon, up to the luffs of the topsails, along sheets and braces, to the compass card…the restless eyes of a true seaman, someone unlikely ever to be caught by a white squall, a badly trimmed sail, a stuck compass card, or an enemy ship sneaking over the horizon. Now, after not more than a few days, he had his own command for a day or so.
    Like Paolo, he had to make the best of a prize at anchor, but that would be exciting enough. Ramage recalled the first time he had ever been sent off in command of a prize as a young midshipman. For a few hours he felt the greatest sense of freedom that he could ever remember – but the feeling had lasted only until sunset. Then the prospect of a long, dark night had brought doubts and fears…confidence had vanished, black clouds on the horizon looked like the outriders of the most terrible storm, the sea had suddenly become vast and the prize had shrunk. His confidence returned with daylight, and he found he had learned his first real lesson in leadership – that it was a lonely business, but no more difficult in the dark.
    Lonely, but exhilarating: here he was sitting in an armchair in the coach of a frigate he had captured and now commanded, and he was back in the Mediterranean with the kind of orders he had always dreamed of getting. They said, in effect, that for four months you sail round the Mediterranean and sink, burn or destroy everything that presents itself…
    An idea flitted across his mind and he took out his keys as he went to the desk and removed the canvas bag in the locked drawer. The neck of the bag had several brass grommets worked into it, so that the line passing through them could close it up. Inside was a small ingot of lead weighing three or four pounds – enough to sink the bag and its contents if it was thrown over the side in an emergency. Some captains preferred a wooden box suitably weighted and drilled with holes, but he liked a bag: it was easier to throw and more certain to sink. There was the story of a captain who threw the box containing all his secret papers into the sea but forgot to lock it so that the lid popped open when the lead weight sank it just as the enemy boarding party approached. The signal book, the private signals for three