by Dudley Pope
Copyright & Information
Buccaneer
First published in 1981
Copyright: Kay Pope; House of Stratus 1981-2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of Dudley Pope to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., 21 Beeching Park, Kelly Bray,
Cornwall, PL17 8QS, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
EAN ISBN Edition
0755104374 9780755104376 Print
0755117816 9780755117819 Pdf
0755119274 9780755119271 Mobi
075512040X 9780755120406 Epub
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
www.houseofstratus.com
About the Author
Dudley Bernard Egerton Pope was born in Ashford, Kent on 29 December 1925. When at the tender age of fourteen World War II broke out and Dudley attempted to join the Home Guard by concealing his age. At sixteen, once again using a ruse, he joined the merchant navy a year early, signing papers as a cadet with the Silver Line. They sailed between Liverpool and West Africa, carrying groundnut oil.
Before long, his ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic and a few survivors, including Dudley, spent two weeks in a lifeboat prior to being rescued. His injuries were severe and because of them he was invalided out of the merchant service and refused entry into the Royal Navy when officially called up for active service aged eighteen.
Turning to journalism, he set about ‘getting on with the rest of his life’, as the Naval Review Board had advised him. He graduated to being Naval and Defence correspondent with the London Evening News in 1944. The call of the sea, however, was never far away and by the late 1940’s he had managed to acquire his first boat. In it, he took part in cross-channel races and also sailed off to Denmark, where he created something of a stir, his being one of the first yachts to visit the country since the war.
In 1953 he met Kay, whom he married in 1954, and together they formed a lifelong partnership in pursuit of scholarly adventure on the sea. From 1959 they were based in Porto Santo Stefano in Italy for a few years, wintering on land and living aboard during the summer. They traded up boats wherever possible, so as to provide more living space, and Kay Pope states:
‘In September 1963, we returned to England where we had bought the 53 foot cutter Golden Dragon and moved on board where she lay on the east coast. In July 1965, we cruised down the coasts of Spain and Portugal, to Gibraltar, and then to the Canary Islands. Early November of the same year we then sailed across the Atlantic to Barbados and Grenada, where we stayed three years.
Our daughter, Victoria was 4 months old when we left the UK and 10 months when we arrived in Barbados. In April 1968, we moved on board ‘Ramage’ in St Thomas, US Virgin Islands and lost our mainmast off St Croix, when attempting to return to Grenada.’
The couple spent the next nine years cruising between the British Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, before going to Antigua in 1977 and finally St.Martin in 1979.
The sea was clearly in Pope’s blood, his family having originated in Padstow, Cornwall and later owning a shipyard in Plymouth. His great-grandfather had actually preceded him to the West Indies when in 1823, after a spell in Canada, he went to St.Vincent as a Methodist missionary, before returning to the family business in Devon.
In later life, Dudley Pope was forced to move ashore because of vertigo and other difficulties caused by injuries sustained during the war. He died in St.Martin in 1997, where Kay now lives. Their daughter, Victoria, has in turn inherited a love of the sea and lives on a sloop, as well as practising her father's initial profession of journalism.
As an experienced seaman, talented journalist and historian, it was a natural progression for Pope to write authoritative accounts of naval battles and his first book, Flag 4: The Battle of Coastal Forces in the Mediterranean, was published in 1954. This was followed in 1956 by the Battle of the River Plate, which remains the most accurate and meticulously researched account of this first turning point for Britain in World War II. Many more followed, including the biography of Sir Henry Morgan, (Harry Morgan’s Way) which has one won wide acclaim as being both scholarly and thoroughly readable. It portrays the history of Britain’s early Caribbean settlement and describes the Buccaneer’s bases and refuges, the way they lived, their ships and the raids they made on the coast of central America and the Spain Main, including the sack of Panama.
Recognising Pope’s talent and eye for detail, C.S. Forrester (the creator of the Hornblower Series) encouraged him to try his hand at fiction. The result, in 1965, was the appearance of the first of the Ramage novels, followed by a further seventeen culminating with Ramage and the Dido which was published in 1989. These follow the career and exploits of a young naval officer, Nicholas Ramage, who was clearly named after Pope’s yacht. He also published the ‘Ned Yorke’ series of novels, which commences as would be expected in the Caribbean, in the seventeenth century, but culminates in ‘Convoy’ and ‘Decoy’ with a Ned Yorke of the same family many generations on fighting the Battle of the Atlantic.
All of Dudley Pope’s works are renowned for their level of detail and accuracy, as well as managing to bring to the modern reader an authentic feeling of the atmosphere of the times in which they are set.
‘Expert knowledge of naval history’- Guardian
“An author who really knows Nelson’s navy” - Observer
‘The best of Hornblower’s successors’ - Sunday Times
‘All the verve and expertise of Forrester’ - Observer
Dedication
For Jane: with love
Hispaniola & the Spanish Main
Chapter One
Now the wind had died, the cloying smell of charcoal once again covered the island and soaked into the folds of his jerkin so that every movement provoked puffs, like pumping a blacksmith’s bellows. Yorke wished that his father had bought a plantation on the windward side where the Trade winds arrived cool and fresh after crossing the Atlantic, free of wood smoke and the warm, damp stench of the dung of the cattle, hogs, horses and mules which ranged the length of the ropes tethering their hind legs.
Clearing the island of the Brazil wood forests sufficiently to farm it properly was going to take years, he thought irritably. Thirty years ago the first few settlers had been hard put to find an acre clear of trees and later arrivals began buying so-called plantations comprising either flat sandy scrub or woods which they had to clear, felling the trees and digging up the roots.
Some of the poorer planters with only a few white indentured servants had tried various ways of killing the roots instead of digging (the dry season made the trees go wide or deep searching for water) but usually ended up ploughing round them. Gouging a basin-like depression in the top of the root and filling it with turpentine did not work very well; nor did Stockholm tar, because the heat of the tropical sun dried up the liquors before they soaked deep enough into the sap-sodden wood to kill it.
Yorke’s method, which h
e was still using on the tiny corner of the estate yet to be cleared, was simpler and more effective, although provoking the scorn of his neighbours. He had the servants strip a foot-wide band of bark from just above ground level, and within a few weeks the tree was obviously dying. In a year or so the burrowing termites would reduce it to a riddled shell, but a sudden gale of wind often saved the bother of cutting it down, so the trunk could be burned where it fell or sawn up for the cooking ovens, while the root was soon dry enough to burn out.
Yorke felt drained of energy. He had slept badly, worried about the ship just arrived from England and now at anchor in the bay off Bridgetown. God only knew what letters her master had brought out; what fresh orders, proclamations and proscriptions from the Parliamentarians for the governor. Cromwell and the Council of State sniffed out and harried Royalists with the same tenacity that the Spanish Inquisition rooted out heretics. The only difference, it seemed to Ned, was that the Parliamentarians lacked the rack.
Yorke knew for certain that whatever news or instructions she was carrying, the arrival of the sloop – the William and Mary, taken from John Alston last year for some alleged plotting on behalf of the King – could mean only new penal taxes for the Royalists remaining in Barbados and the latest news from their relatives of what more the Lord Protector had confiscated in England.
He paused, watching one of the indentured servants filing at a saw blade to sharpen it before resuming his task of squaring up a block of coral stone, needed to extend a wing of the house. It was extraordinary that the coral block was comparatively soft when dragged from the sea and easily worked with saw, mason’s chisel and maul: yet within a few months the air so hardened it that newcomers would inquire the whereabouts of the local quarry. He had heard of a similar material used in Italy. Tuffa, that was the name. It was sawn out of quarries just as a farm labourer would cut hay from a rick, but a few months later became as hard as a good mortar.
He thought for a moment. Was it worth sending for a horse, saddling up and riding into Bridgetown to see what letters the William and Mary’s master had brought from brother George in joyless Puritan England?
He would meet fellow planters riding in for the same purpose and three quarters of them, Roundheads to a man, would be sneering, some even viciously pleased, at any orders enforcing new regulations and proscriptions on the Royalists. The few Cavaliers left, harassed by the governor, knowing that nothing short of a miracle could save them from having to sell out their plantations at ridiculous prices to Parliamentarians, would be even more maudlin than usual and, if there had been time, drunk as well. Finally he told himself that the news would be as good or bad tomorrow as today, with the advantage that tomorrow many fewer planters would be at the landing stage and in the taverns. He would be able to collect his mail and hear the news without some drunken neighbour trying to provoke him into drawing his sword – or, for that matter some raddled trull offering to console him.
A man was well advised to bear the label of a coward these days. Being the only Cavalier in a roistering group of a dozen Roundheads, at least one of whom was likely to be a regular duellist, was to invite a fight with three, the other nine ready to swear before the magistrate that the Royalist had drawn first.
Wilson would certainly be in Bridgetown; he would be expecting mail and drafts for the sugar and tobacco that he had sent home in the William and Mary. Any orders from London could only be to the advantage of such a staunch Parliamentarian. He would have arrived at the quayside early and drunk – he rarely mounted his horse sober – and would stay in town drinking with his cronies until dusk. By then he would be so sodden that mosquitoes and sandflies made no impression. The indentured servant whose task it was to find him would hoist him on to the horse and, as usual, he would fall off the other side and the servant would have to get help to sling him athwart the horse’s back, with head and arms hanging down one side and legs the other, and the body periodically jerking in spasms as Wilson vomited.
In that fashion, besotted master, perspiring servant and besmeared horse would walk the five miles out to the plantation in St James’s parish. By this time Wilson would have vomited himself into a semblance of sobriety: enough to jog the last mile or two swaying upright in the saddle; enough to abuse Aurelia when he arrived and probably hit her a few times but, Yorke hoped, still too drunk to be potent; more concerned with ordering tankards of rumbullion to be put on the table than ordering Aurelia to bed.
Yorke tried daily to drive this picture from his mind: his body would tauten like a rope under strain; he would see Wilson’s closely-spaced, bloodshot eyes flicking from side to side like a boar inspecting a trough; then that piggish mouth (with the sloping chin jutting from bulging cheeks one realized it lacked only the ring through the nose) would sneer some insult in a strangely high-pitched voice.
Yorke admitted that this was not the man that Aurelia had married. When Wilson had taken the French girl as a bride in England he had been a wide-shouldered and stocky young man, black-haired and passing for handsome, his only slight physical faults the receding chin and closely-spaced eyes. At least, that was what Aurelia said, and if one looked carefully there were still traces, like the puddles left after a thunderstorm.
Four years in the tropics, four years of drinking rumbullion like water, four years of a life when it was unlikely he was sober for a total of seven hours a week, and never two consecutive, had reduced his face to the likeness of a comical model made of unleavened bread and left out in the rain: bloated yet sodden, the features soft and blurred, the eyes like currants stuck in the dough, each with a red rim as though resting in a curl of bacon.
Wilson had made a bad start in the island: one had to make allowances for that. Arriving five years after the King’s trial and execution, he had brought plenty of money and a weakness for hot liquors. Opinionated, wealthy, at first a Parliamentarian among a majority of Royalists, he had listened to no advice, asked no questions, had few guests to the house he rented – and sent most of those home disgusted at the way he belittled and abused his young and shy wife in public, drawing crude and vulgar comparisons with her early life in France – she was from a Huguenot family hounded out of Poitou – and the rough existence of the island.
Then he had bought an estate. He had to buy it from a Royalist who, more farsighted than most and worried at the way events were going in England, had decided to sell up to try his luck in Virginia. And, disliking Wilson’s politics and manners, he had charged him a high price – some said £200 an acre – for what was a large plantation but well known as an unlucky one: a river, one of the few on the island, flooded in the sudden storms, washing away the soil but leaving it a desert for the rest of the year, with no grass or scrub to stop the soil being scattered on the wind. One of the earliest plantations to be cleared of trees, it also taught the more observant planters the need for holding down the soil against the scorching sun and the strong winds so that the crops could take advantage of the rainy season.
At that time Cromwell and Parliament had complete power in England. For Yorke, aged twenty-one, it had been a time when he dreaded the arrival of each ship: every letter from his elder brother seemed to tell him that the Parliamentarians had seized yet another relative or his lands. Looking back on it was like remembering a recurrent nightmare: the King executed, the Prince escaped to France, most of the estates of the Royalists seized and their owners hunted down, churches stripped of ornaments or defaced, Catholic priests hunted like foxes. His own father and brother wounded at the battle of Marston Moor; and escaping only because they were left for dead on the battlefield. And he, the younger son, earlier ordered to look after the family plantation in Barbados, removed by a six-week sea voyage from news.
Then, slowly at the beginning, came the pressure on the island. The Cavaliers had at first been in the majority and the wilder ones tried to force out the Roundheads. The wiser Royalists protested, pointing out that
they had to trade with England, and with it in Commonwealth hands the Caribbean islands were simply fruit that would shrivel and fall if the tree decided their time had come. The majority of the Assembly would not listen, and Cromwell’s people, men like Wilson, sat in their homes, besotted with rumbullion – and waited.
The tree analogy had been a good one. The Royalist planters of course soon found they had no market for their produce in England – and England was no longer a source for all the things they needed to run a plantation, be it a horse or saddle, needles and thread, jerkins and hose for owners and servants, boots, spades and linen, silk and lace for the wives. Holland was the next choice – but Cromwell went to war with the Dutch for two years.
Swiftly the balance of power in the Barbados Assembly had changed: the Roundhead planters were bitter and resentful, but backed by renegade Royalists. Reinforced with Parliament’s orders, they set out to break the Royalists. Some of them, like Wilson, saw it as a perfect opportunity to repair at practically no cost early mistakes in the choice of plantations or to buy, for next to nothing, well-run Royalist estates to replace or extend their own.
Now, Yorke thought bitterly, the island was divided: Cavalier and Roundhead clung to what they had. He was still standing in the heat of the sun and the indentured servant was beginning to look uncomfortable, thinking that the master was checking on his work.
He walked back to the house, glancing at the bronze sundial on its plinth in front of the stone steps leading up to the front door. Eight o’clock, and the sun strengthening.
“Henry,” he called, “I’ll have my horse!”