The Pirate Story Megapack: 25 Classic and Modern Tales

by Robert E. Howard

“Is there a hatch aft?” I asked.

  “Certainly; in the lazarette.”

  “I wish I had known that,” said I; “I should have been spared a stifling scramble over the casks and raffle forwards.”

  He led the way, and coming to the trap hatch that conducted to the lazarette, he pulled it open and we descended. He held the lanthorn and threw the light around him and said, “Ay, there are plenty of stores here. We reckoned upon provisions for twelve months, and we were seventy of a crew.”

  A strange figure he looked, just touched by the yellow candle-light, and standing out upon the blackness like some vision of a distempered fancy, in his hair-cap and flaps, and with his long nose and beard and little eyes shining as he rolled them here and there. We made our way over the casks, bales, and the like, till we were right aft, and here there was a small clear space of deck in which lay a hatch. This he lifted by its ring, and down through the aperture did he drop, I following. The lazarette deck came so low that we had to squat when still or move upon our knees. At the foremost end of this division of the ship, so far as it was possible for my eyes to pierce the darkness—for it seems that this run went clear to the fore-hold bulkhead, that is to say, under the powder-room, to where the fore-hold began—were stowed the spare sails, ropes for gear, and a great variety of furniture for the equipment of a ship’s yards and masts. But immediately under the hatch stood several small chests and cases, painted black, stowed side by side so that they could not shift.

  Tassard ran his eye over them, counting. “Right!” cried he; “hold the lanthorn, Mr. Rodney.”

  I took the light from him, and, pulling the keys from his pocket, he fell to trying them at the lock of the first chest. One fitted; the bolt shot with a hard click, like cocking a trigger, and he raised the lid. The chest was full of silver money. I picked up a couple of the coins, and, bringing them to the candle, perceived them to be Spanish pieces of eight. The money was tarnished, yet it reflected a sort of dull metallic light. The Frenchman grasped a handful and dropped them, as though, like a child, he loved to hear the chink the pieces made as they fell.

  “There’s a brave pocketful there,” said I.

  “Tut!” cried he, scornfully. “’Tis a mere show of money; resolve it into gold and it becomes a lean bit of plunder. This we got from theConquistador; it was all she had in this way; destined for some monastery, I recollect; but disappointment is good for holy fathers; it makes them more earnest in their devotions and keeps their paunches from swelling.”

  He let fall the lid of the chest, which locked itself, and then, after a short trial of the keys, opened the one beside it. This was stored to the top with what I took to be pigs of lead, and when he pulled out one and bade me feel the weight of it I still thought it was lead, until he told me it was virgin silver.

  “This was good booty!” cried he, taking the lanthorn and swinging it over the blocks of metal. “It would have been missed but for me. Our men had found it in the hold of the buccaneer in a chest half as deep again as this, and thought it to be a case of marmalade, for there were two layers of boxes of marmalade stowed on top. I routed them out and found those pretty bricks of ore snug beneath. I believe Mendoza made the value of the two chests—silver though it be—to be equal to six thousand pounds of your money.”

  The next chest he opened was filled with jewellery of various kinds, the fruits, I daresay, of a dozen pillages, for not only had this pirate robbed honest traders but a picaroon as well that had also plundered in her turn another of her own kidney; so that, as I say, this chest of jewellery might represent the property of the passengers of as many as a dozen vessels. It was as if the contents of the shop of a jeweller who was at once a goldsmith and a silversmith had been emptied into this chest; you could scarce name an ornament that was not here—watches, snuff-boxes, buckles, bracelets, pounce-boxes, vinaigrettes, earrings, crucifixes, stars for the hair, necklaces—but the list grows tiresome; in silver and gold, but chiefly in gold; all shot together and lying scramble fashion, as if they had been potatoes.

  “This is a fine sight,” said Tassard, poring upon the sparkling mass with falcon nose and ravenous eyes. “Here is a dainty little watch. Fifty guineas would not purchase it in London or Paris. Where is the white breast upon which that cross there once glittered? Ha! the perfume has faded,” bringing a vinaigrette to his hawk’s bill; “the soul is gone; the body is the immortal part in this case. Now, my friend, talk to me of the patient drudgery of honourable life after this,” collecting the chests, so to say, to my view with a sweep of the hand; “men will break their hearts for a hundred livres ashore and be hanged for the price of a pinchbeck dial. When I was in London I saw five men carted to the gallows; one had forged, one was a highwayman—I forget the others’ businesses; but I recollect on inquiring the value of their baggings—that for which they were hanged—it did not amount to four guineas a man. Look at this!” He swept his great hand again over the chests. “Is not here something worth going to the scaffold for?”

  His bosom swelled, his eyes sparkled, and he made as if to strike a heroic posture, but this he could not contrive on his hams.

  I was thunder-struck, as you will suppose, by the sight of all this treasure, and looked and stared like a fool, as if I was in a dream. I had never seen so many fine things before, and indulged in the most extravagant fancies of their worth. Here and there in the glittering huddle my eye lighted on an object that was a hundred, perhaps two hundred, years old: a cup very choicely wrought, that may have been in a family for several generations; a watch of a curious figure, and the like. There might have been the pickings of the cabins, trunks, and portmanteaux of a hundred opulent men and women in this chest, and, so far as I could judge from what lay atop, the people plundered represented several nationalities.

  But there were other chests and cases to explore—ten in all: two of these were filled with silver money, a third with plate, a fourth with English, French, Spanish, and Portugal coins in gold; but the one over which Tassard hung longest in a transport that held him dumb, was the smallest of all, and this was packed with gold in bars. The stuff had the appearance of mouldy yellow soap, and having no sparkle nor variety did not affect me as the jewellery had, though in value this chest came near to being worth as much as all the others put together. The fixed transported posture of the pirate, his little shining eyes intent upon the bars, his form in the candle-light looking like a sketch of a strange, wildly-apparelled man done in phosphorus, coupled with the loom of the black chests, the sense of our desolation, the folly of our enjoyment of the sight of the treasure in the face of our pitiable and dismal plight, the melancholy storming of the wind, moaning like the rumble of thunder heard in a vault, and above all the feeling of unreality inspired by the thought of my companion having lain for eight-and-forty years as good as dead, combined to render the scene so startlingly impressive that it remains at this hour painted as vividly upon the eye of memory as if I had come from it five minutes ago.

  “So!” cried the Frenchman suddenly, slamming the lid of the chest. “Tis all here! Now then to the business of considering how to come off with it.”

  He thrust the keys in his pocket, and we returned to the cook-room.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  WE TALK OVER OUR SITUATION

  That night, as afterwards, Tassard occupied the berth that he was used to sleep in before he was frozen. Although I had not then the least fear that he would attempt any malignant tricks with me whilst we remained in this posture, the feeling that he lay in the berth next but one to mine made me uneasy in spite of my reasoning; and I was so nervous as to silently shoot a great iron bolt, so that it would have been impossible to enter without beating the door in.

  In sober truth, the sight of the treasure had put a sort of fever into my imagination, of the heat and effects of which I was not completely sensible until I was alone in my cabin and swinging in the darkness. That the value of what I had seen came to ninety or a hundred thousand pound
s of our money I could not doubt; and I will not deny that my fancy was greatly excited by thinking of it. But there was something else. Suppose we should have the happiness to escape with this treasure, then I was perfectly certain the Frenchman would come between me and my share of it. This apprehension threading my heated thoughts of the gold and silver kept me restless during the greater part of the night, and I also held my brains on the stretch with devices for saving ourselves and the treasure; yet I could not satisfy my mind that anything was to be done unless Nature herself assisted us in freeing the schooner.

  However, as it happened, the gale roared for a whole week, and the cold was so frightful and the air so charged with spray and hail that we were forced to lie close below with the hatches on for our lives. It was true Cape Horn weather, with seas as high as cliffs, and a westering tendency in the wind that flung sheets of water through the ravine, which must have quickly filled the hollow and built us up in ice to the height of the rails but for the strong slope down which the water rushed as fast as it was hurled.

  I never needed to peep an inch beyond the companion-way to view the sky; nor for the matter of that was there ever any occasion to leave the cabin to guess at the weather, for the perpetual thunder of it echoed strong in every part of the vessel below, and the whole fabric was constantly shivering to the blows of the falls of water on her decks.

  At first the Frenchman and I would sit in the greatest fear imaginable, constantly expecting some mighty disaster, such as the rending of the ice under our keel and our being swallowed up, or the coming together of the slopes in such a manner as to crush the ship, or the fall upon her of ice weighty enough to beat her flat; though perhaps this we least feared, for unless the storm changed the whole face of the cliffs, there was no ice in our neighbourhood to serve us in that way. But as the time slipped by and nothing worse happened than one sharp movement only in the vessel, following the heels of a great noise like a cannon discharged just outside; though this movement scared us nearly out of our senses, and held us in a manner dumbfounded for the rest of the day; I say, the time passing and nothing more terrifying than what I have related happening, we took heart and waited with some courage and patience for the gale to break, never doubting that we should find a wonderful change when we surveyed the scene from the heights.

  We lived well, sparing ourselves in nothing that the vessel contained, the abundance rendering stint idle; the Frenchman cooked, for he was a better hand than I at that work, and provided several relishable sea-pies, cakes, and broths. As for liquor, there was enough on board to drown the pair of us twenty times over: wines of France, Spain, Portugal, very choice fine brandy, rum in plenty, such variety indeed as enabled us to brew a different kind of punch every day in the seven. But we were much more careful with the coal, and spared it to the utmost by burning the hammocks, bedding, and chests that lay in the forecastle; that is to say, we burnt these things by degrees, the stock being excessive, and by judiciously mixing them with coal and wood, they made good warming fires, and as tinder lasted long too.

  We occupied one morning in thoroughly overhauling the forecastle for such articles of value as the sailors had dropped or forgotten in their flight; but found much less than I had expected from the sight of the money and other things on the deck. There was little in this way to be found in the cabins: I mean in the captain’s cabin which I used, and the one next it that had been the mate’s, for of course I did not search Mr. Tassard’s berth. But though it was quite likely that the seamen had plundered these cabins before they left the ship, I was also sure that the Frenchman had made a clean sweep of what they had overlooked when he pretended to search for the keys of the treasure-chests; and this suspicion I seemed to find confirmed by the appearance of the captain’s boxes. One of these boxes contained books, papers, a telescope, some nautical instruments, and the like. I looked at the books and the papers, in the hope of finding something to read; but they were written and printed in the Spanish tongue, and might have been Hebrew for all the good they were to me.

  Our life was extraordinarily dismal and melancholy, how much so I am unable to express. It was just the same as living in a dungeon. There was no crevice for the daylight to shine through, and had there been we must have closed it to keep the cold out. Nothing could be imagined more gloomy to the spirits than the perpetual night of the schooner’s interior. The furnace, it is true, would, when it flamed heartily, throw a brightness about it; but often it sank into redness that did but empurple the gloom. We burned but one candle at a time, and its light was very small, so that our time was spent chiefly in a sullen twilight. Added to all this was my dislike of my companion. He would half fuddle himself with liquor, and in that condition hiccup out twenty kinds of villainous yarns of piracy, murder, and bloodshed, boasting of the number of persons he had despatched, of his system of torturing prisoners to make them confess what they had concealed and where. He would drivel about his amours, of the style in which he lived when ashore, and the like; but whether reticence had grown into a habit too strong even for drink to break down, he never once gave me so much as a hint touching his youth and early life. He was completely a Frenchman in his vanity, and you would have thought him entirely odious and detestable for this excessive quality in him alone. Methinks I see him now, sitting before me, with one half of him reflecting the light of the furnace, his little eyes twinkling with a cruel merriment of wine, telling me a lying story of the adoration of a noble, queenly-lookingcaptive for his person—some lovely Spanish court lady whom, with others, they had taken out of a small frigate bound to old Spain. To test her sincerity he offered to procure her liberty at the first opportunity that offered; but she wept, raved, tore her hair. No; without her Jules life would be unendurable; her husband, her country, her king, nay, even the allurements and sparkle of the court, had grown disgusting; and so on, and so on. And I think a monkey would have burst into laughter to see the bald-headed old satyr beat his bosom, flourish his arms, ogle, languish, and simper, all with a cut-throat expression, too, soften his voice, and act in short as if he was not telling me as big a lie as was ever related on shipboard.

  It naturally rendered me very melancholy to reflect that I had restored this old villain to life, and I protest it was a continuous shock to such religious feelings as I had managed to preserve to reflect that what had been as good as nearly half a century of death had done nothing for this elderly rogue’s morals. It entered my head once to believe that if I could succeed in getting him to believe he had lain frozen for eight-and-forty years, he might be seized with a fright (for he was a white-livered creature), and in some directions mend, and so come to a sense of the service I had done him, of which he appeared wholly insensible, and qualify me to rid my mind of the fears which I entertained concerning our association, should we manage to escape with the treasure. I said to him bluntly—not apropos (to use his own lingo) of anything we were talking about,—

  “’Tis odd, Mr. Tassard, you should doubt my assurance that this is the year eighteen hundred and one.”

  He stared, grinned, and said, “Do you think so?”

  “Well,” said I, “perhaps it is not so odd after all; but you should suffer me to have as good an idea of the passage of time as yourself. You cannot tell me how long your stupor lasted.”

  “Two days if you like!” he interrupted vehemently. “Why more? Why longer than a day? How do you know that I had sunk into the condition in which you found me longer than an hour or two when you landed? How do you know, hey? How do you know?” and he snapped his fingers.

  “I know by the date you name and by the year that this is,” said I defiantly.

  He uttered a coarse French expression and added, “You want to prove that I have been insensible for forty-eight years.”

  “It is the fact,” said I.

  He looked so wild and fierce that I drew myself erect ready for him if he should fall upon me. Then, slowly wagging his head whilst the anger in his face softened out, he sai
d, “Who reigns in France now?”

  I said, “There is no king; he was beheaded.”

  “What was his name?” said he.

  “Louis the Sixteenth,” I answered.

  “Ha!” cried he, with an arch sneer; “Louis the Sixteenth, hey? Are you sure it wasn’t Louis the Seventeenth?”

  “He is dead too.”

  “This is news, Mr. Rodney,” said he scornfully.

  “Whilst you have been here,” said I, “many mighty changes have happened. France has produced as great a general and as dangerous a villain as the world ever beheld; his name is Buonaparte.”

  He shrugged his shoulders with an air of mocking pity.

  “Who is your king?” he asked.

  “George the Third,” said I; “God bless him!”

  “So—George and Louis—Louis and George. I see how it is. Stick to your dates, sir. But, my friend, never set up as a schoolmaster.”

  This sally seemed to delight him, and he burst into a loud laugh.

  “Eighteen hundred and one!” he cried. “A man I knew once lost ten thousand livres at a coup. What do you think happened? They settled in him here;” he patted his belly: “he went about bragging to everybody that he was made of money, and was nicknamed the walking bourse. One day he asked a friend to dine with him; when the bill was presented he felt in his pockets, and exclaimed, ‘I left my purse at home. No matter; there is plenty here;’ with which he seized a table-knife and ripped himself open. Eighteen hundred and one, d’ye call it? Soit. But let it be your secret, my friend. The world will not love you for making it fifty years older than it is.”

  It was ridiculous to attempt to combat such obstinacy as this, and as the subject produced nothing but excitement and irritation, I dropped it and meddled with it no more, leaving him to his conviction that I was cracked in this one particular. In fact, it was a matter of no consequence at all; what came very much closer home was the business of our deliverance, and over this we talked long and very earnestly, for he forgot to be mean and fierce and boastful, and I to dislike and fear him, when we spoke of getting away with our treasure, and returning to our native home.