by Rima Jean
True to his military calling, he ensured every man swore to obey his rules, stating that if any man broke his word, Captain Roberts himself would fight the disobeying dog with sword or pistol. Roberts cast an eerily pleasant look at his men as he said, “I neither fear nor value any of you.”
And there wasn’t a single person among us who didn’t believe it.
He didn’t drink, preferring tea to the alcohol. While he didn’t ban drinking altogether, he imposed as many rules as he could to curb drunkenness among his men. He dressed himself in the finest clothes aboard, in damask and ostrich feathers, gold and diamonds. If the men secretly thought Roberts a teetotaler or a dandy, they dared not say so – not to Roberts, nor to each other. Captain Bartholomew Roberts was an enigma, and his calm, disciplined demeanor no doubt concealed a certain madness.
He must have been mad. Only a madman would do what he did.
He was one of the SEAL’s top guys, commander of a SEAL Team and a number of operational SEAL platoons, a fearless, calculating soldier. A Naval Academy graduate, he was a veteran of several covert operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He was airborne qualified, a master diver, and an expert with explosives and small arms of all types. Most importantly, he was an educated navigator who’d spent his early life at sea, learning its secrets.
I knew next to nothing about his personal life, and he gave away nothing. His contempt for me made me wonder about his past experiences with women. Divorced, maybe? Secretly gay? I didn’t know. I did know, however, that he crossed the time portal alone, not knowing if he would survive, when or where he would end up, or if he could ever get back.
A man with nothing to lose.
He told no one that he planned to do it, did it against the better judgment of those who understood far more than him. He entered the “storm” in a raft, armed with his SEAL survival gear. He claims to have been conscious throughout the ordeal, although he was knocked from his raft and spent a great deal of time not knowing which way was up, assaulted by the angry sea. When the storm finally subsided, Roberts found himself bobbing at sea, as I had. Unlike me, however, Roberts was not rescued by Edward England.
A weaker, less prepared person would have perished. But Roberts was trained to survive, and he knew where he was going – he’d studied the area thoroughly before entering the portal. He detected land from the color of the sky and the pattern of the waves. He swam and then let the waves carry him onto a small island, which he later determined was Salt Cay, a small island northeast of Nassau. Once on Salt Cay, Roberts built a raft and, hiding his SEAL gear in a safe place, dressed in the plain white shirt and brown pants he had packed for the occasion and set off for Nassau.
He’d seen the ships pass, had been able to discern roughly what era he was in. In Nassau, he attracted little attention, and within a day, in the dankness of a seedy pub, he found himself employment aboard a slaver. He had no real plan, he said, except to survive until the time portal opened again. I imagine he was excited by the challenge of making it in the eighteenth century, of not just surviving, but thriving.
Upon hearing his name, many Welshmen mistook him for another John Roberts, the son of George Roberts, a cattle farmer from Little Newcastle in Pembrokeshire, Wales. Of Welsh ancestry himself, Roberts knew how common his name was, and how a case of mistaken identity was not unusual. He decided to assume the identity of this eighteenth-century John Roberts. It was better than being a man with no past, no roots. He wanted to pass for “one of them,” and he was hardly afraid of another man, a man from this era or any other, who bore his name. Roberts dared any of them to challenge his identity. He watched the men carefully, learned to speak and behave like them. He adopted some of their ways, but rejected those he considered signs of “weakness” – the drinking, the gambling, the women… the vices. To succeed in their world, he would have to be better than them in all respects.
He was but a lowly deck hand aboard the slaver at first, subject to the callous brutality of the slave-ship culture. He was unfazed by the sickness and death around him, unsurprised by the suffering of his fellow sailors, of the slaves who moaned and cried in the belly of the ship. He worked hard and never complained, volunteering for the more difficult chores, the more dangerous tasks. Needless to say, it did not take long for the officers aboard to notice Roberts. Not only was this man big and strong and healthy, but he met their eyes unabashedly, returning their hard stares challengingly. Bring it, his eyes said. And they might have, out of fear more than anything, if not for Roberts’ obvious knowledge of the sea and seafaring. His ability to maneuver vessels with such accuracy and precision, his understanding of the wind, tide, and weather… He left those around him watching him in awe.
When Roberts arrived in London, he chose to join the crew of another slaver, the Princess, a three-masted ship bound for West Africa. He was given the position of third mate, which was technically an officer’s position. Naturally, it was not enough for Roberts.
“Why didn’t you join the Royal Navy?” I asked him. “Surely that would be better than working aboard a slave-ship.”
He smiled at me like I was an ignoramus. “I would have had no chance at all to rise in the ranks in the Royal Navy. Not unless I could prove I was a gentleman.” He very nearly snarled the word. “At least aboard a slave-ship, I had a chance – albeit a small one – to come to a position of power, to beat the class system that stifles this dreary, archaic world.”
With Roberts as third mate, the Princess sailed to Anomabu on the Gold Coast. Anomabu, the mosquito-infested trading post, where Roberts would face the most appalling conditions, a variety of diseases, shark-infested waters, slave revolts… And that wasn’t all. He would face another danger, one that he had not taken seriously up until he was looking it in the face, a smiling face, as it were, with bold blue eyes.
Pirates.
The pirate Howel Davis foiled John Roberts’ plan of rising in the ranks of a merchant ship, and Roberts was none too happy about it. Roberts had dealt with modern-day Somali pirates, and he assumed these pirates of old were much the same, minus the grenade launchers and cell phones. A pirate was nothing but an opportunistic terrorist, mugging and murdering for personal gain, sometimes in the name of some religion or ideology. These guys, Roberts was certain, were no different – poverty-stricken and angry at the world for having been dealt a bad hand, they were now taking their revenge.
But even though Roberts was an unwilling, recalcitrant pirate recruit, he couldn’t help but notice that Howel Davis and his band of sea dogs were different from what he’d expected. These “Golden Age” pirates were racially and ethnically diverse, and while prejudices still existed, Roberts was startled to find that they had formed their own sophisticated democratic societies, complete with constitutions. And this, fifty years before the Declaration of Independence. It helped, of course, that Howel Davis himself was a particularly tolerant pirate, with an obvious distaste for violence. While revenge and the desire for social justice may have been an issue for some, the main goal, of course, was profit. Cost-benefit concerns shaped the ways in which the pirate ship was run – the flying of the black flag to encourage surrender, the equality of the men regardless of race, the cruel torture of the worst merchant captains….
“When I was elected captain,” Roberts told me, his eyes lit with a fervor I had never seen them display before, “Kennedy stood and spoke on my behalf, stating that I was the candidate best able to protect them from ‘the dangers and tempests of an unstable element, and of the consequences of anarchy.’ ” Roberts met my eyes and smiled, as though the words still caught him by surprise. “These pirates may be outlaws, but they have highly advanced laws.”
I considered for a moment, watching Roberts carefully. “You like that, huh?” I asked.
“I like order,” Roberts replied. “I like a well-oiled machine. I like a challenge.” He stared at me for a second before adding, “I like to win.”
I scratched nervously at a patch of
scaly skin on my forearm. Who knew what that was. Could be anything from dry skin to scabies. Probably the latter. I asked Roberts, “Do you think you’ll stay here? Rather than go back to 2022?”
Roberts squinted into the sun. “Yes.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “But why? You have an amazing life in the future, an amazing career with so much promise. Why on earth would you stay here to become an outlaw and suffer the same fate as every other pirate? There’s no fortune or glory in this, man. Surely you know that.”
“Do not pretend to know about my life,” Roberts answered curtly. “And the men who failed at this did not have my knowledge, my ability. I can go down in history as the pirate. The Long John Silvers and the Jack Sparrows will be fashioned after me, the greatest pirate of them all.”
This gave me pause. Was it possible he knew his own future? I said carefully, “Do you know for sure what will become of you?”
Roberts shook his head. “No. I’m not much of a historian, unfortunately. I know very little about this era, let alone its pirates. I’ve heard of one or two, of course… Captain Morgan comes to mind…”
“But wouldn’t you have heard of yourself if you became a famous pirate?”
“Perhaps,” Roberts replied. “And perhaps I have heard of myself. As I said, I’m not much of a history buff.”
“You can’t change history, you know,” I said, thinking inadvertently of Howel. My heart lurched, as it did every time I remembered. “If you impact history, you would have been able to find yourself in the books in 2022.”
“I know,” Roberts said, fixing his eyes on me. “You proved that to yourself, didn’t you? It makes little difference to me. I don’t know what will happen, nor do I want to know. I will make the decisions that feel right, and what will be, will be.”
I couldn’t help myself. I said, “You are nuts. Do you realize how nuts you are?”
Roberts smiled, apparently not offended in the slightest. “Am I? Would you be going back if Howel Davis were still alive?”
I became tense, my hands in fists on my lap. “I don’t know. I was going to try… I don’t know.”
Roberts sneered. “That was why he failed. That was why he would never become a great pirate. Because he let a woman get under his skin.”
I stood, stumbling backward a bit from the suddenness of it. “You dare speak badly of Howel Davis?” I hissed.
Roberts’ smile didn’t fade. “I’m not speaking badly about Davis, although I think what he did was foolish, at best.” Roberts raised his eyebrows at me in disdain. “‘He seldom errs who thinks the worst of womankind.’”
I stared. No, he wasn’t speaking badly about Howel Davis so much as he was speaking badly about me. My lower lip quivered, and Roberts just about rolled his eyes, turning his head away and muttering, “Just like a woman to start crying.”
I wish I could have that moment back – oh, I would make him cry. Unfortunately, at the time I was still emotionally fragile, still recovering from the malaria, and simply at a loss for words. I turned and hurried back to the cabin, lest the big Navy-SEAL-turned-pirate (and insensitive asshole) see the tears streaming down my face.
Chapter Forty
Roberts and the crew of the Royal Rover decided to stick with Howel Davis’ plan and ride the south-east trade winds to Brazil. After destroying the fort at Príncipe, the pirates had sailed out to sea for a few days, laying low. Then they went to the small island of Annobón, south of São Tomé, to finish supplying their ship with provisions for the voyage to Brazil. Roberts was not going to “play games” with the governor, as his predecessor had. Rather than pretending to be a privateer or English man-of-war, Roberts simply took what he wanted by threat of force. Not surprisingly, he met with no resistance. This whole “piracy” thing might prove to be too easy for Bartholomew Roberts.
With a speed that was uncharacteristic of pleasure-loving pirates, Roberts had the men stock up and set off for the coast of Brazil. Roberts would not waste any time, for he had one stop – one very important stop – to make before he and his men could begin their plunder of Brazilian gold.
350 days from Time Zero…
I did not want to look at him, let alone speak to him, but since Roberts was my ticket home, I could do nothing but rely on him for help. I could not stand to remain in the eighteenth century – and on a pirate ship – without Howel Davis. I spent my days deep in thought, partaking in some menial labor. I had to get back to the future as soon as possible, before I went crazy.
“So where is this portal?” I asked Roberts one evening, trying my best not to let my dislike of the man show in my voice, my mannerisms. Most of the men were taking their rest, and it was the only chance I had to get some of my numerous questions answered.
“It’s not the where that’s critical,” Roberts responded, removing his hat and relaxing a bit against the railing of the quarterdeck, a steaming mug of tea in his hand. “It’s the when. The where is easy – 400 meters due east of the easternmost part of Salt Cay. When I came through the portal and finally reached the shore, I made a distinctive marking at the vegetation line, since I was fairly certain that the navigation devices of the period in which I found myself would not be sufficiently developed.”
“And you kept all of your SEAL gear, right?” I asked nervously. “I’ll be able to use them?”
Was it my imagination, or did Roberts just try to stifle a smile? He replied, “Yes, you’ll be able to use the gear. You will have a fair chance of surviving.”
A fair chance. How utterly uninspiring. I took a deep breath and then asked, “So, do you have flying cars in 2022 or what? Any major, world-changing events I should know about? And what is your deal with women, anyways? Do you hate us because we’re better than you?”
After a brief, startled look, Roberts opened his mouth to answer, only to be interrupted by a clatter and the disapproving murmur of voices. We looked down to see a small gathering of men on the deck, apparently quarreling. Roberts set down his mug, placed his hat back on his head, and descended to the deck slowly but purposefully. His eyes were fixed on one particular pirate, an intoxicated, skinny fellow who was struggling to break free from the restraining arms of the others.
“Roberts!” the drunken pirate yelled, stumbling as he pulled away. He swayed before Roberts, a froth of saliva dribbling from his lips, a look of distrust swimming in eyes. “Of the Devil, ye are, sir,” he said, pointing an accusing finger at Roberts. “I know not who ye be, but ye ain’t the John Roberts of Casnewydd-Bach. I knew George Roberts meself. Who could ye be, then, but the Devil? Look at ‘im, brothers. Tell me he ain’t got a black soul!”
We all expected an argument would ensue, that Kennedy, as quartermaster, would have to intervene and call a meeting. Perhaps the man would be punished, perhaps the majority would reconsider their choice of captain. As all these possibilities floated through my mind, Captain Roberts settled the issue immediately – by drawing his pistol and shooting the man dead where he stood.
The sound of the gunshot drowned in the humidity, and as we all stood in shock, watching the blood gush from the fallen pirate’s body, Roberts turned to the others. “Is that all?” he asked calmly, brushing gunpowder from his sleeve. When no one, not even Walter, said anything, Roberts cast a cold, deadly look at his men and then strode to the cabin.
I quaked at this display of sudden, unnecessary violence. Wasn’t anyone going to say anything? Were they all so afraid of him? Blinded by rage, I hurried after the Black Captain, tearing the cabin door open and very nearly slamming into his chest.
His eyes bore holes into me. “Is there something you wanted, Sabrina?” he asked, his jaw flexing.
“How could you do that?” I yelled. “I thought you admired the system, the laws of these pirates. How could you kill a man for saying stupid things under the influence? You’re from 2022, for God’s sake!”
He laughed. “And what does that have to do with anything? Tell me you are not so naive to
think we men are any more humane in 2022 than we are in the eighteenth century. Regardless of era, men respect one thing, and that is their own fear. Tell me you are not so stupid –”
I felt another misogynic remark coming, and before he could finish his thought, I punched him in the face. Yes, that’s right. Punched – with closed fist – squarely in the jaw. I imagine it hurt him no more than the sting of a horsefly, but the look on his face, for just a split second, was priceless. I relished it, even as he grabbed my arm and yanked me to my tiptoes. He brought his face close to mine, our noses barely touching.
“I can’t get rid of you fast enough,” he thundered. “You’re lucky I don’t just throw you overboard and feed you to the sharks.”
“Do it, you pompous son of a bitch!” I growled back. “Don’t let a woman show you up!”
In retrospect, I really was playing with fire. Nothing was stopping him from dragging me out before his crew and making an example of me. But as we glared at each other nose-to-nose, both panting like wild dogs, it occurred to me that he wouldn’t do it. It also occurred to me that, whatever Bartholomew Roberts was, he was not gay. Nope. Definitely not gay.
He released me and pushed me away roughly. “Stay out of my business, woman,” he said, regaining his composure quickly. “If you want to live to see your family again, keep out of my way.”
I watched him walk coolly out of the cabin and thanked my lucky stars that I was, in fact, a woman. Had I been a man, surely I would have been killed several times over by now.
Captain Roberts and I exchanged few words from then on – until we reached the Caribbean, less than three weeks after leaving the West African coast. The Royal Rover was in unfriendly waters, in Woodes Rogers’ territory, and the ship lurked quietly between the scattered cays, anxious to continue its journey to Brazil.
The crew knew they were here on account of me, and Roberts reassured them that it would be a quick stop. A quick stop – to unload me. I suspect the men thought Roberts intended to kill me, but they couldn’t understand why such effort was going to it. Somehow, Roberts had convinced them that this was in their best interest, and if only out of respect for their captain, no one questioned it. Anchored in a hidden cove, the pirates of the Royal Rover watched tensely as Roberts, Sam and I boarded a boat. Time was of the essence – no one wanted to run into a Royal Navy frigate, least of all me. God knows I’d be blamed for the catastrophe. I’d have rather perished attempting to cross the time portal than at the hands of some angry pirates, or worse yet, dangling by my neck at the end of a rope.