The Island

by Peter Benchley

  “I have no other.”

  “There is more . . .” Maynard gestured at the vague beyond.

  “We are taught that more is worse, not better.”

  “I could tell you . . .”

  “Aye,” she interrupted, “and I could listen, and time would pass, and work would not be done, and my reward would be the wrath of l’Ollonois. As Jean-David Nau, he is a man as God made him; as l’Ollonois, he is the creation of the lord of darkness.” She gathered a wicker basket, a short-handled iron hoe, and a crude machete, and she left the hut.

  When she had gone, Maynard sat on the dirt floor and listened. He heard the whisper of breeze in the dry leaves, the clicking and chattering of bugs, and raucous complaints of sea birds and, far away, sounds of hammering and sawing and men’s voices.

  He examined the lock that joined the ends of the chain. It bore no scratches, no signs of tarnish; it was still coated with a film of silicone. He judged that the lock had never been used. Probably, it had been taken from a recently captured boat and stored in its original plastic-and-cardboard container.

  The lock mechanism contained a thousand possible combinations. The only one Maynard could surely eliminate was the one Beth had left: 6,4,8. He spun the wheels until the numbers read 1,1,1. Then he tried 1,2,1, then 1,3,1 then 1,4,1. It was inevitable that eventually he would find the combination but the search might take days, or weeks, for he could fiddle with the lock only when he was alone, and he had no way of knowing how often, or for how long, he would be left alone.

  As he tugged on the shackle after dialing 1,9,1 he noticed a tiny hole on the side of the lock. At first, the hole made no sense to him; what purpose could it serve? Then an image crept into his mind, of Justin squirreling away his birthday money in a strongbox. He secured the strongbox with a combination lock. Unlike the locks Maynard was familiar with—on which the combinations were set permanently by the manufacturer—this one could be set, and changed, by the owner. Maynard recalled Justin poking a slim stylus into a hole on the lock and dialing the last three digits of their phone number. When he removed the stylus, the combination was set at those numbers.

  Maynard let suppositions tumble in his head: Suppose this lock had changeable combinations; suppose it was, in fact, new, unused, when it was taken from a boat; suppose that these people had found the instructions on the card too complicated to follow and had not bothered to reset the combination.

  Still, the manufacturer would have to set some combination of numbers. What was the simplest, the most logical? He dialed 0,0,0 and tugged at the shackle.

  The lock popped open.

  Maynard smiled to himself, pleased by his resourcefulness. He wanted to take off the chain and leave the hut and prowl around the island in search of a vessel on which to escape. No, he told himself. It was too early; he knew too little about where and with whom he was; the risk of capture was too great, the punishment for attempting escape unknown. He didn’t know where Justin was. His new knowledge was an advantage, but he should husband it until it could be played for greater value.

  He snapped the lock closed and returned the combination to 6,4,8.

  He crawled over to the chest Nau had left and opened it. It was packed with papers—some old and frayed and yellowed, some joined in packets by twine woven from plant fibers, some crumpled and torn. All were handwritten, and on many the ink had faded to a shadow.

  He crawled to the doorway, pulled back the skin, and blocked it with a rock. Dragging the chest into the shaft of light that streamed through the doorway, he sunk his hand into the chest and pulled out a paper. It was a coarse, grainy vellum, brittle and cracked with age. The ink was brown and faint.

  It seemed to be an entry from a log or diary, scribbled in haste. But the writer had taken care to observe certain proprieties: “An account of the events of the day of September the 7th, 1797, writ in the blood of a quadroon due to the carelessness of the quartermaster, who knocked to bits the inkwell.

  “At first light spied a two-masted barkentine and pursued her. Too swift for our sickly vessel. Planking started well at sea, caulked it with beef. Damn nigh sank, but made shore.

  “Rum all out. Our company unhappy, somewhat sober, too sober. A damn’d confusion among us! Rogues a plotting—great talk of separation—so I looked sharp for a prize, any prize with liquor on her. Took one, a trader with a quantity of rum on board, so kept the company hot, damn’d hot, then all things well again.”

  The paper was signed, with a bold flourish, “l’O. V.”

  As he took the papers from the chest, Maynard began to arrange them in chronological order in a circle around him. The earliest scraps, dated in the 1680s, he set on his left; the latest, some written on loose-leaf note paper and dated 1978, on his right. For the moment, he tried to see only the date on each document, but words and phrases caught his eye and compelled him to read.

  “Tempest drove a vessel ashore,” said a paper dated 1831 and signed “l’O. VI.”—Nau’s great-great-grandfather. “Bartered with the master for drink. He seemed one of the old buccaneers, a hearty brave toss-pot, a trump, a true twopenny. But he asked sly questions and had a hidden motive, so I put him to the sword and his crew as well who refused to tell their true purpose even under duress. Hizzoner washed his hands of it and said we’d all meet damnation, so I put him to the sword as well after telling him that his talk was not a friend’s talk and if he was not my friend he was my enemy, and if he was my enemy I was damn’d if he was going to draw another breath.”

  Maynard discerned a pattern to the documents: The more recently they had been written, the less detailed they were, and less careful and less literate. Accounts of ships taken in the 1920s, spoke of methods of capture (“. . . bored a hole in her bilges, packed some powder in and blew her . . .”), cargo taken, and number of people killed. By the 1950s, there were simple lists of valuables recovered and prisoners taken. And the most recent account was a small scrap of note paper on which was written: “Sporter Marita, killed 2, tok 1 aliv. Fruits, rums, etc. Scutld the bich.”

  Maynard dug deep into the chest and pulled out what appeared to be several bulky fragments of a single book, worn and thumb-stained pages held together by strips of fragile, flaky leather. He peeled back the leather strips and bent over the faded frontispiece: “THE BUCCANEERS OF AMERICA,” it said, “A True Account of the most remarkable assaults committed of late years upon the coasts of the West Indies by the Buccaneers of Jamaica and Tortuga (both English and French), by John Esquemeling (one of the buccaneers who was present at those tragedies).”

  According to a barely legible printer’s mark, this copy of the book was of the first English edition, translated from the Dutch, and published in 1684.

  Maynard had read Esquemeling in a paperback reprint years before. A friend of his, a historian, had touted it as the only comprehensible reliable text about the early days of the so-called Spanish Main, and the fact that the book existed—had ever been written—was testimony to the hardiness and great good luck of the author.

  Esquemeling had sailed to the New World in 1666 as a boy apprentice, but as soon as the ship docked in Tortuga, he was sold into slavery. He was bought by the lieutenant general of Tortuga, whom he described as “the most cruel tyrant and perfidious man that ever was born of woman.” Esquemeling was beaten and starved, and the only thing that saved him from death was his master’s realization that if the boy died, an investment of thirty pieces of eight (an able-bodied seaman’s salary was roughly two pieces of eight a month) was down the drain. Esquemeling was sold to a surgeon who fed him, treated him well, trained him in the rudiments of surgery, and, finally, freed him in return for a promise that if Esquemeling ever found himself flushed he would pay the surgeon a hundred pieces of eight.

  Esquemeling decided to become a buccaneer, and for the next few years he served on several ships as a surgeon, a position whose authority and salary were commensurate with the contemporary state of medical science—that is, he was
paid almost nothing and served beneath almost everybody. But he had a finely tuned ear and an active pen, and he took upon himself the task of chronicling the age of the buccaneers. He endured disease, battle, treachery, cruelty, and ambush and, in 1672, returned to France and wrote his book.

  The book was an immediate success, was circulated all over the known world, made Esquemeling a celebrity, and attracted lawsuits from the likes of Sir Henry Morgan, who claimed he was nothing like the brutal, opportunistic, self-dealing genius Esquemeling portrayed him to be.

  What had initially appealed to Maynard about the buccaneers, and why he had pursued the study of them, was that they were survivors—men of mediocre talent and no great aspirations who had hacked a living from a barren wilderness (a metaphor, Maynard thought, for a lot of us). They had gone on to plague the most powerful nation on earth. Many had died of natural ills, many others had been killed in battle or executed by their enemies, and a few had retired to riches, respectability, and even renown.

  They had begun as runaway slaves, abused apprentices, shipwrecked mariners, and escaped convicts, all outcasts—by accident or design—from the civilized world. In the middle of the seventeenth century, they established communities on Hispaniola and Tortuga and lived as hunters. They killed wild cattle and cured and smoked the meat on racks called boucans. They were known as boucaniers, later Anglicized into “buccaneers.” They bothered no one and, in fact, contributed to the survival of countless ships’ companies, for they provided vital supplies—meat, hides, and tallow—in return for cloth, gunpowder, muskets, and liquor.

  When a man became a buccaneer, his past was erased. He took a new name, whose source might be in his country of birth (like Bartholomew Portugués or Roche Brasiliano) or in a physical peculiarity (Louis Bad-Ass, who had lost one of his buttocks in a fight, or Port Tack, whose nose had been bashed to one side). They asked no questions of one another, and of the outside world they asked only to be left alone.

  The kings of Spain, however, had decreed that all trade with the New World must be conducted by Spanish ships. Never mind that the fleets from Spain arrived only once or twice a year, and that when they did arrive they carried pitifully few provisions. Never mind that to follow the letter of the law, the colonists must condemn themselves to life without building materials, clothing, or food. Technically, the colonists were not allowed to grow agricultural produce, make their own shoes, or trade with anybody for anything.

  By existing, therefore, the buccaneers were outlaws subject to frequent assaults by the Spaniards, who slaughtered those they could catch and drove off those they could not. In their perverse wisdom, the Spaniards succeeded in depriving their colonists and mariners of a vital source of supplies, and, at the same time, in engendering in the tough, skilled, sea-savvy, and wilderness-wise buccaneers an inveterate hatred of Spain.

  Unable to survive as hunters of animals, the buccaneers became predators on Spanish shipping. They sailed small, fast vessels that could outmaneuver the bigger, slower Spanish galleons. Employing stealth more than force, they used weapons designed for speed, ease of access, and close-in efficiency: knives, short-swords, and hand axes that would find the joints in a Spaniard’s armor and dismember him while he fumbled to aim his clumsy harquebus.

  The buccaneers’ reputations spread through Spanish fleets and Spanish colonies like a virus, at first in proportion to the savageries they committed and, eventually, out of proportion to all reality. As one Spanish sailor cried on seeing his ship overrun by wild-eyed, ragtag, drunken, shrieking raiders, “Jesus bless us! Are these devils, or what are they?”

  By all accounts that Maynard had read, the worst of the buccaneers was Jean-David Nau, who took his name from his birthplace, Les Sables-d’Ollone, in France. He was a nightmare figure to the Spaniards, worse by far than Henry Morgan. From Morgan there was always the chance of clemency; he was a man of whims. A Spaniard in the hands of l’Ollonois was a man who had only yesterdays.

  Maynard flipped through the fragments of Esquemeling’s book. “It was the custom of l’Ollonois,” he read, “that, having tormented any persons and they not confessing, he would instantly cut them in pieces with his hanger, and pull out their tongues; desiring to do the same, if possible, to every Spaniard in the world.”

  Farther along in the same handful of pages, Maynard found reference to the event that had given l’Ollonois mythic stature. Nau had captured some Spaniards and was trying to extract information from them, information they did not have. And so, Maynard read, “l’Ollonois grew outrageously passionate; insomuch that he drew his cutlass, and with it cut open the breast of one of those poor Spaniards, and pulling out his heart with his sacrilegious hands, began to bite and gnaw it with his teeth, like a ravenous wolf, saying to the rest, ‘I will serve you all alike . . .’ ”

  Anathema to the Spaniards, l’Ollonois was popular with his own crews. He was reputed to be fearless and just. He adhered strictly to a code governing divisions of spoils. Most important, he was very successful. A voyage with l’Ollonois was as close as a buccaneer could come to a guarantee to ample booty, to be spent on a memorable orgy in the barrooms and brothels of Port Royal, Jamaica.

  Maynard guessed that for his chronicle Esquemeling had, perforce, drawn heavily on hearsay; what firsthand authority he had had ended with his departure for Europe in 1672. And other historians, writing from an even greater distance, were more arbitrary and less reliable. The Age of the Buccaneers was said to have ended before the beginning of the eighteenth century. By then, Spain had ceased to be a formidable power in the New World, had become a dinosaur besieged by ferrets of several nationalities. The War of the Spanish Succession, which lasted until 1714, made buccaneering unnecessary: Rather than be an outlaw, a captain could ally himself with one side or the other and plunder “enemy” shipping under the aegis of his chosen sovereign.

  After 1714, sufficient order had been established so that a man who raided anyone’s shipping could make only feeble claim to noble or political purpose: He was a pirate. And even the fabulous “golden age of piracy,” around which so much romantic fustian had been spun, was slotted into a single decade. By 1724, Edward Teach (Blackbeard), Calico Jack Rackham, Samuel Bellamy, and the others were all dead or retired to more pedestrian pursuits.

  But now, sitting naked on a dirt floor, chained to the roof of a hut, the “Trends” editor of Today realized that most historians had been egregiously sloppy.

  He put the Esquemeling pages aside, stacked the other papers according to date, and continued to read. It did not take him long to find the missing piece; it was in a log kept by the first l’Ollonois until his final voyage.

  By the early 1670s, the buccaneers had begun to attack Spanish settlements in Central and South America. They would hold the populace, or the town itself, hostage, exact what ransom they could, then flee to their island sanctuaries.

  But l’Ollonois’ welcome was already thin in most of the buccaneers’ refuges. He was a hunted man, and association with him was crime enough to warrant half a ton of rocks on the chest, a bamboo spike through the eardrums, or a dangle from the gallows. Even by the standards of his fellows, l’Ollonois’ psychopathic blood lust was considered extreme. One sanctuary was closed to him after he had, in a drunken rage, amputated the arms of a whore who had refused to drink from a fungus-covered cask of wine.

  “What they call society,” he had noted in his log, “has got too pretty for me. I’ll have my freedom. I’ll be no shopkeeper.” He set sail for an uninhabited chain of islands known vaguely as “the Caicos.”

  “God does not love this place,” he wrote, “so I shall. What God is said to love gives me grief, and what I love is sin to God. The Spaniards avow that God loves them; if that be so, then God is a fool.”

  Maynard realized that there was much about the islands to recommend them to a fugitive from society. They were barren of food, water, timber, and wildlife, so there was no reason for any ship to stop. They were visited onl
y by the shipwrecked, whose possessions and supplies could be confiscated, whose women (if there were any) could be prostituted, and whose lives could be either preserved—should the person have a useful skill—or summarily ended without fear of retribution.

  Inhospitable as they were, the islands promised an endless supply of shipwrecks, for they sat between two of the most heavily traveled deep-water passages leading from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and South America into the Atlantic.

  “We shall have visitors,” l’Ollonois wrote, “and those that Nature will not arrest, I shall.”

  He took with him twenty men—murderers whose freedom he purchased on the eve of their execution, by bribing the authorities and promising that the men would never again be seen; drunks whom he shanghaied on the docks; teenagers he seduced with assurances of romance and riches; and six kidnaped whores, two of whom turned out to be pregnant and all of whom were diseased. The whores he considered to be as important to his mission as food or gunpowder; He had to maintain a heterosexual community. He said homosexuality was like scurvy. It broke out on long voyages and wrecked the efficiency of a crew.

  “If God and I agree on one matter,” his log said, “it is that we abominate pederasty. A sodomite is worse than a plague. He forms strange alliances, pits man against man, demands favors for admission to his cavities. Such behavior is to be expected in women. In anything else it breeds confusion.”

  On July 2, 1671, l’Ollonois found an island that suited him: “It lies half way up the archipelago—a wretched islet about a league in length and half a league in width—covered with scrub that might give sustenance to hardy cattle. To the east are trackless shallow banks no vessel can traverse; to the west blue water and a fish-hook cove that will conceal us and give us ambuscade. Everywhere salt marshes and hollows to fashion into cisterns. It may be a merry life, if the whores will cease their caterwauling.”

  L’Ollonois had drawn in his log a crude map of the region, and Maynard tried to compare it to his memory of the marine charts. Navidad was missing—Maynard guessed that l’Ollonois had never seen it—and West Caicos and South Caicos were rough lumps that bordered the Caicos Banks (a field of X’s, to indicate shallow water). L’Ollonois’ island was shaped like a kidney. It was off the air routes, out of the shipping lanes, surrounded (on modern charts) by warnings to mariners to steer well clear.