Ramage And The Rebels (r-9) by Dudley Pope

Author:Dudley Pope [Pope, Dudley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: adv_history, adv_maritime

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Amsterdam's houses were painted in gay colours which the glaring sun emphasized without making them garish. The owners on the Punda side obviously preferred pinks and light blues while Otrabanda favoured reds, greens and white, but most of the roofs, steeply pitched and gabled in the Dutch style, had red tiles, in contrast to the wooden shingles favoured in the British islands. It was curious about the colour preferences but, Ramage thought, the explanation was probably mundane: the paint shop on one side stocked some colours; its rival the others.

The channel separating the two halves of the town was stained brown as it joined Sint Anna Baai, probably due to the slight rise and fall of tide draining out some of the water as it ebbed from the Schottegat, the inland lake.

The fort on Punda, Waterfort, seemed quiet enough; nor was there any sign of movement at Riffort on Otrabanda, 'the other side'. The Dutch flags were flying from flagpoles on both forts; it was also flying from the building that Ramage assumed was Government House.

Amsterdam, Ramage decided, was an oddly attractive and typically Dutch town set down on an arid and desolate island whose sole function was to be the main Dutch trading post in the Caribbean. The Dutch had done their best to make the town look cheerful and they had succeeded. If you forgot the heat and the bright glare, Amsterdam could be any town built along a canal in the Netherlands. Certainly the general flatness of the island (if one did not look to the west as the hills began and rolled up to Sint Christoffelberg) made you think that the average Dutchman was only happy on flat land, although from seaward small hills gave the appearance of waves in a choppy sea.

The privateers were at anchor just at the entrance to Schottegat and still had the laid - up - out - of - commission look about them. He had only a fleeting glance of them through the telescope as the Calypso tacked in towards the shore, but it was enough to show him that nothing had changed since they had passed on their way to the west end of the island.

Aitken shut his telescope with a snap. That fresh lot of smoke near Willebrordus puzzles me, sir. I'm sure it's from burning buildings. Black smoke with the white. If it was just scrub and grass burning, it would be white.'

'And I'm sure I could hear gunfire,' Wagstaffe said. No one else had heard it, but they had been almost to leeward of the smoke at the time and Ramage was quite prepared to believe the second lieutenant. Rennick, in his usual impulsive way, had wanted to be landed in Bullen Bay with a platoon of Marines to investigate, but as Ramage pointed out, gunfire and smoke in Curacao was the concern of the Dutch Governor, and the Dutch, like the French and Spanish, were the enemy . . . Fire could only mean

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