by Dudley Pope
The general, lost in Thomas’ booming and cheerful voice, shook his head with what Ned felt was resignation and said: “I didn’t know; I have only one.”
Thomas looked puzzled, realized what the general was thinking and decided not to enlighten him: it would make a good story for Diana and Aurelia.
“Thank you for coming over,” the general said. “We face a grave emergency–”
“Who is ‘we’?” Thomas interrupted.
“Well, strictly speaking, I suppose the army in Jamaica. You see, some fishermen have just come in from Santiago de Cuba, or near there, with news that the Spanish are preparing a fleet to retake this island. Ten thousand soldiers were mentioned.”
“Have they sailed yet?” Thomas asked innocently.
“Er, no, not yet. At the end of next month, I understand.”
“Six weeks’ time. Well, at least you have time to build a fort or two and some batteries to protect the anchorage. Remarkable how the end of this sandspit forms the doorway to the harbour. The Dons used to hang their victims there.”
The general looked startled. “Hang who? Where?”
“The end of the point – they called it palizada, which means ‘palisade’ in English, or ‘stockade’. The Dons strung up Protestants captured at sea, privateersmen, prisoners of war… Never very fussy, the Dons. Still, you can use it. Call it Gallows Point.”
The general nodded. “Gallows Point. Yes, that is a good idea. A few skeletons hanging in chains from gibbets there will frighten off unwelcome visitors.”
Ned managed to repress a shudder and just avoided commenting: “And welcome ones, too.”
“This Spanish army at Santiago de Cuba,” the general said. “We have no defences against it.”
“I was just saying, General, that you will have to build a fort or two and some batteries.”
“But I have no guns to put in them!” His tone was that of a man whose misery always triumphed over the optimism of others. “I have men and nothing with which to feed them; men with no weapons to defend themselves; men dying from the fevers these noxious night vapours bring with them.”
Thomas nodded sympathetically. “The Lord Protector is going to be very upset when he reads your dispatches. A general whose army had neither guns nor food…no, that wasn’t how he ran the New Model Army…”
The general looked even more lugubrious; like a condemned man accepting that his plea for clemency had been dismissed. “It was Venables, of course, who left us in this mess; he was in such a rush to get back to report to the Lord Protector that he took one of the frigates. That led to the admiral going with the rest of his fleet, to look after his own interests, and the few storeships that had arrived to stay without protection. That was about the time you came.”
For two or three minutes no one spoke: Thomas and Ned were deliberately silent, determined not to make it any easier for the general, who in turn neither knew what to suggest nor how to draw ideas from the two men who had been quick enough to provide grain – at a price, the general noted – when he asked them.
Finally Ned said in the saddest voice he could produce: “A Spanish army carried here by a Spanish fleet. Well, you could charter one of those small privateers to sail to England with a dispatch. Providing it arrives safely, at least the Lord Protector will know what happened to his – what was it called, ‘The Western Design’?”
Heffer nodded miserably. “It was a grand conception. Never before have the English tried anything like it. Just imagine, the whole of Hispaniola would have been English.”
“Just as well it failed,” Thomas said brutally. “What the devil would we have done with an island like that! How would we have defended it? We can’t even defend Jamaica, and you could lose a dozen Jamaicas in Hispaniola!”
The general looked startled and Ned was reminded once again of a sheep’s head: the man’s eyes were wide now, and he looked as though any moment he would start calling the lambs.
“You think Jamaica is an important capture?”
“The finest anchorage in the whole Caribbee,” Thomas said flatly. “If you had a few guns to defend the entrance, you could use it as a base to attack the plate galleons when they sail up from Cartagena to Havana; you can raid the Greater Antilles – Cuba, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico; you can raid Mexico and the Moskito Coast; you can raid the Main – just as we did to get your grain. Why, I’m almost tempted to stay a few weeks myself, and I know my friend feels the same.”
The bait was in position but for a moment Ned thought it had too subtle a taste for the general. Then, like a man waking with a start, he said: “Why don’t you stay, then? There’s plenty of fresh water, and once we get the cattle and hogs down from the hills, you can put down fresh salt meat.”
“And what do we use to pay for that, General? We are privateers,” Ned said. “Which reminds me, we need a commission signed by you for our third ship, the Phoenix.”
“Of course! In whose name?”
“The master, William Saxby.”
“Rowlands!” the general bellowed, and when the lieutenant appeared ordered him to prepare the commission at once and bring it in for signature.
“You still owe me twenty guineas for the other two ships,” he commented.
“We undercharged you on the grain, so I suggest there is no charge for them or the Phoenix, which carried the most grain.”
“But only two of the three ships carried grain,” the general said fretfully.
“Then call Rowlands back and don’t trouble yourself with a commission for the Phoenix,” Ned said easily. “The Spanish certainly don’t ask for them; they’d just as soon fire a broadside. I had an idea you were going to make a proposal, and a commission would give everything an air of – how shall we say, dignity?”
“No, no, think nothing of it; the Phoenix must have a commission. Now, I am no sailor; I am a simple soldier who is now also the governor of Jamaica. I also realize that we should have a fleet to protect us, but – well, I am not of course blaming Admiral Penn, because his orders were to return to England with his fleet as soon as his original orders were carried out. I do not think the Lord Protector ever visualized this situation, where a fleet would be needed to protect a captured island.”
“He must have been an optimist, the Lord Protector – and his Council of State – if he thought the Spanish would not counter-attack.”
Heffer was not to be trapped into anything that could be reported to Cromwell as criticism. “No doubt he assumed all their ships would be sunk.”
“Of course,” Thomas said and Ned found it hard to keep a straight face. “But forgive me, you were saying that you felt you need a fleet to defend you?”
“Don’t you?” Heffer said cautiously. “If this Spanish army, ten thousand strong, lands on the north side of the island and marches against us here… I have three thousand men, no artillery, precious little cavalry and more than five hundred men sick. What shall I do?”
“If it was me, I’d go to England in a privateer and report to the Lord Protector,” Thomas said unsympathetically.
“I cannot desert my post,” Heffer said, his right hand on his breast.
“Of course not,” Ned said. “I suppose the Dons will string you all up on gibbets along the Palisades.”
“Yes, I fear so,” said the general miserably, “unless you gentlemen can do anything to help.”
“Oh, you want more grain, eh?” Thomas said.
“Well, I had in mind a more active role.”
“We can’t possibly evacuate three thousand men,” Ned said. “And anyway, where would you take them? Back to Barbados? The island would be hard put to feed them for the months needed for the dispatch to reach England and transport ships collected and sent out here. A year, eh Thomas?”
“At least, not that we could carry a tent
h of that number from here to Barbados. Seven hundred miles to windward – can you imagine it? The men would die like flies. Yellow fever, typhus…” he shuddered. “What would happen to my own men? Sons to me, every one of them. And daughters.”
“Mine, too,” Ned said mournfully. “More of a parish than a ship; prayers twice a day and always before we go into battle.”
“Very laudable, very laudable,” the general said hurriedly, realizing that fatherhood and prayers were quickly driving him into a corner. “But I was wondering if you could be persuaded to take the other four privateers under your command. That would give you a squadron of seven vessels.”
“Still not enough to evacuate three thousand soldiers,” Thomas said firmly, determined to force Heffer out into the open.
“No, let us for the moment leave aside the question of quitting the island. With these seven ships, I was wondering – that is to say, given I am only a soldier – whether you could sail for Cuba and, ah, make some sort of – well, a demonstration. Not at Santiago, of course!” he said hastily, “but close to some other big city, so that the Spanish will fear an attack…”
Both Ned and Thomas said nothing for a full two minutes. The silence pressed down on Heffer, who closed his eyes and put his elbows on the table and joined the tips of his fingers as though to make a tent into which he could crawl.
Thomas coughed a few times, as if clearing his throat would help him think, and then said slowly, apparently ruling out the idea: “If we demonstrate with seven ships for seven days and still don’t land an army, the Dons are going to guess we are trying to fool them.”
“But they are not fools,” Ned commented. “They will ask themselves: ‘What are the English doing that they try to mislead us into thinking they are going to land there?’ When they see there is no landing anywhere, they’ll guess we are trying to draw them away from where we really fear an attack, like a lapwing pretending to be lame to draw you away from her nest.”
The general opened his eyes and nodded and both Ned and Thomas suddenly realized that Heffer was being the lapwing: he had been leading them away from what he really wanted to propose in the hope that instead one of them would suggest it.
“Well,” Thomas said finally, “so that’s that. We must be getting back to our ships. If the Spanish fleet is coming, we don’t want to get trapped in this anchorage. Do you – er, have you a family you would like us to take? We can’t guarantee where we’ll go but almost anywhere will be safer than here.”
The general shook his head. “Thank you, I am alone. If you would spare me just a moment, I have just one more – well, hardly a proposal, but…”
“But what?”
“A sudden attack on Santiago de Cuba. It’s our only chance!” Heffer said it in such a rush that it came out like one long word.
“Your only chance,” Ned said. “For us it would be suicide.”
“One sudden attack. You keep every penny of the purchase. The other four privateers, too.”
“Purchase!” Thomas exclaimed. “If what you say is true there’ll be no purchase! Santiago with the Spanish fleet anchored there with an extra ten thousand soldiers on top of the normal garrison. And we have seven privateers, every one of them built as a merchantman. It would be like a company of one-legged soldiers, led from behind by a pot-valiant Falstaff, attacking your garrison of three thousand!”
“There is no way you can be persuaded to change your mind?”
“You could charter the seven ships, put a couple of hundred soldiers in each of them, and we could land the troops – say 1,400 of them, if the other privateers can carry that many, which I doubt – twenty or thirty miles from Santiago so that they can make a flank attack.”
“How do they get back here?”
“We could arrange a rendezvous,” Thomas said bleakly, “but they might find the Spanish fleet waiting there, laying buoys to mark where we’ve sunk.”
“So you cannot help? You have a fantastic opportunity to render the Lord Protector a great service. You could be the saviour of his Western Design. He would never forget you, you can be sure of that.”
“I am sure of that,” Thomas said, “but we must go back to our ships, I am glad we could help you in the matter of the grain – help the Lord Protector, perhaps I should say.”
Back on board the Griffin, they had to describe to Diana and Aurelia what the general had said and how he had said it. Ned had several questions to ask Thomas, but he had waited until they were all in the cabin. Some of the questions might come better from Diana and Aurelia: he had no wish to antagonize Thomas, who was in a curious mood. He seemed to be half drunk, yet his breath showed he had not touched any hot waters today.
Diana made no comment until Thomas had finished his story; then she said: “Whetstone, you may be Oliver Cromwell’s nephew, and he may be your least favourite uncle, but why are you so cruel to this poor wretched General Heffer? It seems to me you should sympathize: Venables, his own commander, bolted for London to make his excuses to the Lord Protector and blame the navy, and then the admiral followed, taking all the ships.”
Thomas grinned sheepishly. “Why should I help the Roundheads?”
“I’m not saying you should. I’m just chiding you – chiding, I emphasize; not nagging – for being hateful to a frightened old man.”
“Old be damned,” Thomas snorted, “he’s my age or younger. I remember the Heffers – a grumbling discontented set of Puritan scoundrels from Wiltshire. Still bearing a grudge because they did not get a penny piece from Henry at the Dissolution of the Monasteries, unlike our friend’s forebears.”
Diana and Aurelia looked at Ned and the French girl said: “That is true?”
“One estate. We should have had more.”
“I was not criticizing,” Thomas said. “Not a penny for Papists or Puritans, that’s my motto.”
“Yes, but it wasn’t General Heffer’s fault his great grandfather was not in favour at the court of Henry VIII, any more than it’s any credit to Ned that his ancestors were!”
“Your sympathy, my dear, is entirely misplaced. That two-legged sheep had the impudence to suggest we attacked the Spanish fleet in Santiago and was kind enough to say we could keep any purchase.”
“He meant well,” Diana said, “but you did not!”
Ned, puzzled by her words, said: “Attacking the Spanish fleet with seven little privateers seems – well, even a soldier can see that the odds are ridiculous.”
Diana smiled, and it was a smile that Ned mistrusted at once. It was sweet, understanding, affectionate – was everything that a smile should be, except for the look in her eyes.
“Dear Ned – Thomas knows something that you do not. He has not told you yet (though obviously he intends to within the hour), and he tried to use it to part the general from his gold, except that apparently we’ve already taken it all for the grain.”
“Dear Diana,” Ned said. “What is it that your scoundrel of a lover knows that I do not?”
“There is no Spanish fleet in the West Indies, Ned; no frigates, no galleons, just a few guarda costas. One fewer of them now, thanks to Mr Saxby.”
The captains of the four privateers were, in Ned’s view, just what he expected pirates to look like. At the moment they had commissions from General Heffer, pieces of parchment with which he had hoped to persuade them to serve under Whetstone. One of the captains was French, another Dutch, and two were English, and Ned was startled, as they climbed on board the Griffin, to find they knew Whetstone well and obviously liked him.
“The general had us over at dawn,” one of the English captains, Morgan, told Thomas. “He asked if we would serve under ‘Mr Whetheread’ in the Peleus, and we said no, we wouldn’t. Then we realized you’d been changing your name. Anyway, when we found out what he was going to propose to you, we said we’d go if you
went, and he’d better give us commissions so we’d be ready. We knew you wouldn’t have anything to do with it but thought we might as well get ourselves commissions.”
“Did he charge you for them?”
“The twenty-guinea fee? He tried,” Morgan said with a grin, “but after we had them drawn up and in our hands we said we hadn’t any money with us, and anyway we didn’t care about Jamaica; that we couldn’t pay twenty guineas for it, let alone for the privilege of getting ourselves killed for the Lord Protector.”
“What did he do then?”
“Oh, said it was a standard fee, a sort of stamp duty, but he could waive it. So we said he’d better wave ’em, and offered him the parchments to wave, but he said it was another sort of wave. So, Thomas, we’re not rascals any more; we are privateers!”
“Not wave,” Thomas said, “but W-A-I-V-E. It means to – well, make an exception. If he waives the twenty-guinea charge, you don’t have to pay it.”
Morgan pointed at Ned. “Who’s your friend, Thomas?”
Thomas introduced him by his proper name. Morgan nodded and as he shook Ned’s hand said: “You had the plantation at Barbados, didn’t you? Kingsnorth, or some such name. Chased you out, did they?”
When Ned nodded, Morgan commented: “The general has no idea who he’s asking for help – five English Royalists, a Frenchman who did in a priest who seduced his sister, and a Dutchman who was born hating Spaniards.”
Whetstone gestured for them to sit down in the shade provided by the taffrail now that the ship had swung to the east and the sun was beginning to dip rapidly. Ned found it natural to sit beside them, the only clean-shaven face in the row.
“Well, lads,” Thomas said, pausing as he walked across the deck in front of them, “does anyone want to come with me and visit the Dons?”
“Where?” asked the Frenchman. “We are new to these islands, Thomas. We have only just arrived from the Moskito Coast.”