The Pirate Round

by James Nelson

  ‘Damn your eyes! He’s no queen’s officer, he is a bloody pirate! Give him no thought, unless you would be cut down on deck!’ Marlowe shouted, but rather than inspire the men, that only seemed to confuse them more.

  Damn it! Marlowe turned, looked aft. The longboat was pulling for them with a will, the men bending to the oars, the boat more than matching the Elizabeth Galley’s speed. Thirty feet astern and gaining, all those men, all those weapons.

  What did they have for defense? No cannon, no swivels. A smattering of muskets and cutlasses. Marlowe had intended to rely on the Elizabeth Galley’s speed to keep them out of danger. He had not thought of being overtaken by a rowed vessel.

  ‘Damn it!’ he said out loud. He heard Honeyman’s voice, a menacing growl, a squealing overhead. The men were being driven to set the main topsail, but even that would not keep them out of Press’s hands. Unless the wind picked up dramatically in the next two minutes, the boat would overtake them.

  Bickerstaff appeared beside him. ‘I would not expect these men to defend the ship, Thomas. They are not sure with whom they should place their loyalty.’

  ‘You are right. I am loath to say so.’ If they are loyal to anyone, Marlowe thought, it is Honeyman. For all the good that will do me.

  ‘Perhaps you should slip away,’ Bickerstaff suggested. ‘Go down the starboard side with a float as Press comes up the larboard. I do not think he will molest the others if you are gone.’

  ‘Do you think I would be so craven?’

  ‘No, but it is a prudent suggestion, and so I thought it my duty to make it.’

  ‘And I appreciate that, but I cannot.’ He looked back at the boat. Almost up with the after end of the Elizabeth Galley.

  Marlowe felt a gust of wind on his neck, and the Elizabeth Galley heeled a bit, and the water gurgled around the cutwater. Hope surged up as he looked astern, saw the longboat disappearing again in the mist and dark. And then the gust passed, and the ship came down on an even keel, and the sound of the water died away. They had gained fifty feet. It would take Press four minutes to make up the distance.

  ‘Perhaps we can fend them off,’ Marlowe said, and then he ran down the quarterdeck and along the gangway over the waist. ‘Mr Honeyman, get a gang to unlash those spars!’ He pointed amidships to the top of the main hatch, where the spare yards and topmasts were stored, long, massive tapered timbers like a giant bundle of kindling. ‘Roust out that main topsail yard! We shall fend these dogs off!’

  ‘Come on, come on, you heard the captain! Go! Go!’ Honeyman shouted the orders, and the men reacted, casting off the lashings, arranging themselves along the length of the heavy spar. They moved to Honeyman’s orders and because Marlowe had hit on just the right degree of resistance – keeping the boarders off without bloodshed, avoiding the possibility of shooting at a queen’s officer, if he was, or being shot by one.

  But they would not enjoy that neutrality for long, Marlowe understood. They might boom Press off once or twice, but then Press would start shooting, and then the Elizabeth Galleys would have to reexamine their loyalties.

  The men hefted the heavy spar, twenty-five feet long and three hundred pounds, and maneuvered it so it was lying crosswise on the ship, ready to be tilted over the side and used like a giant poker to push the boat away.

  How long will we be able to do that? Marlowe wondered. Not very long.

  And then Honeyman was there, at his side, and Marlowe wondered what fresh requests the men had at that critical juncture. But Honeyman just nodded and said, ‘Spar’s ready for fending off, Captain.’ He hesitated, just a beat, and then added, ‘I was thinking, we might hoist it aloft with the stay tackle. Get it more vertical.’ He looked Marlowe in the eye, and there was a wicked expression on his face. ‘Of course, if we do that, there’s a chance we might drop it. If you get my meaning.’

  It took Marlowe a few seconds before he did, but when he saw what Honeyman was suggesting, he grinned as well and said, ‘A fine idea, Honeyman. Sway her aloft.’

  Honeyman rushed off, called, ‘Let us get the stay tackle on this spar, make it easier to maneuver!’

  The stay tackle, a block and tackle that hung between the masts, directly over the main hatch, was used primarily for hoisting the cargo and supplies in and out of the Galley’s hold. Now eager hands grabbed the end of the tackle and made it fast to the middle of the spare topsail yard, and Honeyman shouted, ‘Sway away!’ The men hauled together, and the long, tapered spar rose up in the air.

  The longboat had regained the distance lost to the cat’s paw of wind, was pulling over the last stretch to the Galley’s side, twenty feet off and closing.

  Across the water Marlowe heard Press shout, ‘Pull, you whoresons!’ though he could see the men were already pulling with all they had.

  Damn it, damn it, too bloody late, Marlowe fretted as his men hauled away on the tackle and the yard rose up, up, wavering and tilting in the air.

  Marlowe’s eyes moved between the yard rising up overhead and Press’s boat flying toward them. A pistol banged out, the ball thudded into the mainmast – Press giving the men of the Elizabeth Galley a taste of things to come if they did not comply – and the message struck like the bullet.

  The lower end of the yard was resting on the Galley’s rail, pointing down at the water, and the upper end was twenty-five feet above him, pointing at the sky, the whole thing nearly vertical.

  Ten feet away Marlowe saw the longboat, a dim shadow in the mist. He could make out the crew giving one last pull, the men unshipping their oars again and snatching up weapons, poised, ready to board. There was the bowman again, a dark shape, once more reaching out with the boat hook. There was Press, in the stern sheets, unmistakable. Marlowe could see him run his eyes along the Galley’s rail, looking, no doubt, for Malachias Barrett.

  Marlowe grabbed the low end of the yard, shoved it along the rail until it was hanging directly over the place where Press’s boat would strike the Elizabeth Galley’s side. He was astounded that Press had not yet smoked his intentions.

  And in that instant, Press did. The longboat hit the Galley’s side with a shudder, the men poised to board, and Press shouted, ‘Shove off! Shove off, damn it!’ and over Press’s voice Marlowe shouted, ‘Honeyman! Let go!’

  The yard jerked from Marlowe’s hand as Honeyman let go of the end of the stay tackle. The huge spar plunged down, down over the side, down like a great lance aimed at Press’s boat. Marlowe watched the long wooden shaft rush past, heard the sound of thin planks shattering as the lower end of the three-hundred-pound yard smashed right through the bottom of the boat and kept going.

  Overhead he could just make out the end of the quivering spar as it stopped, sinking itself into the mud of the Thames.

  He heard shouts of surprise, screams of outrage, saw the panicked boat crew shrinking away from the water that flooded in through the shattered bottom of the boat.

  The line from the stay tackle spun through the blocks and then fell into the water. Already astern, the spare topsail yard was sticking straight up from the river like a giant pin, and skewered on that pin was the longboat that held Roger Press and his stunned, shouting men.

  And then the mist enveloped them, and they were lost from sight, and only the shouting remained. In a minute that, too, was gone.

  The Elizabeth Galley drifted on a mythic river, her own black and forlorn River Styx, alone.

  Marlowe looked around the deck. The men were smiling, talking in low voices, laughing. There was no remorse for what they had done, no fear of reprisal. It had been too good a trick for any second thoughts.

  Peleg Dinwiddie stepped up to him, grinning as broadly as the others. ‘I guess you done for them, sir,’ he said.

  ‘I reckon they’ll stay put, for the time being,’ Marlowe agreed.

  ‘You’d said we was to drop downriver a mile or so. It’ll be dead reckoning for that, sir, and not so accurate on such a night, I fear.’

  ‘Oh.’ Marlowe had
already forgotten that plan of dropping downriver. ‘As to that, I reckon you may as well steer for the open sea. Our business here is done, like it or not.’

  CHAPTER 8

  The island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, three hundred miles off the southeast coast of Africa. As if half of Mozambique had cracked off and drifted away, fetching up at last in that place. On a chart one can see where the island would still fit clean against the African coast, snapping into place like a puzzle piece or the perfectly tooled part of some machine.

  But for all that kinship to the Dark Continent, the Madagascar of 1706 was a world unto itself, supporting a culture almost entirely unique in the world. It was the advance base, the dockyard, the chandlery, the marketplace, and in many cases the home of the men who sailed the Pirate Round.

  Madagascar had not been the first choice of the Roundsmen, ideal though it was in so many ways. They had first set up on Bab’s Key, the little island marked Perim on the charts, at the entrance to the Red Sea. It was a perfect spot, insofar as it was at the very crossroads of the great wealth of shipping in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea – treasure ships bringing tribute to the Great Mogul; shiploads of wealthy pilgrims bound for Mecca; the lumbering, lightly manned ships of British, French, and Dutch East India companies.

  But Perim had no water, and that was the most precious jewel of all aboard ships that were at the mercy of wind and tide. A miscalculation in that area, especially in the arid and brutally hot Red Sea countries, could result in a death more horrible than anything the pirates could inflict on their most hated enemy.

  So the Roundsmen had moved their operations to Madagascar. It was over two thousand miles from their hunting grounds, but piracy was a movable profession, and what Madagascar lacked in proximity it more than made up for in other ways.

  The island was lush, fruitful, with an abundance of fresh water. The climate was perfect – not sweltering, not frigid – a place where a man could pass out drunk on the ground with no fear of the weather’s killing him. The natives were cowed by the power of firearms, and, even if they had not been, they were far too involved with fighting among themselves ever to coordinate any real resistance to the Europeans’ encroachment. Any band of pirates had only to help the local tribe in a raid against its neighbor to find themselves welcome on the island.

  The native girls had much to recommend them as well. Mostly local Malagasies, they had a well-earned reputation for comeliness, with none of the Christian women’s aversion to fornication nor the mercenary attitude of the whores.

  So perfect a place was Madagascar, such the pirates’ Eden, that many never left. They took local girls for wife, set up in trade with other Roundsmen, idled away their days in ease and drunkenness. In the entire history of piracy, only Tortuga, Port Royal in Jamaica, and Nassau would come close to rivaling Madagascar as the pirates’ utopia, a place where they alone ruled.

  And of all the pirate communities that developed along Madagascar’s extensive coastline, at Fort Dauphin and the Bay of St Augustin and Diégo-Suarez and Ranter Bay and lesser places, the jewel of them all was the tiny island of St Mary’s, twenty-six miles long and one mile wide, less than ten miles off the northeast coast.

  It was at St Mary’s that the progenitor of the Roundsmen, Thomas Tew, first landed his massive take and divided it among his men. But Tew was not the first white man on St Mary’s. By the time the Amity’s anchor splashed into the bay, St Mary’s had already been settled by an Englishman named Adam Baldridge.

  Baldridge recognized the island’s potential as a defensible outpost – its shallow harbor with an island like a fortress at its mouth, the vicious reefs that prevented ships from landing anywhere else but under his guns. He recognized Madagascar’s ideal location as a byway from Europe and America to the Red Sea and India. He saw in the island a fine place to hide from the murder charge for which he had fled Jamaica. St Mary’s suited his every need.

  Business exploded for him. Manufactured goods, rum, and naval stores poured in from England and America, plundered goods and gold and jewels from the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, with Baldridge standing right in the confluence of all that wealth.

  From his tiny outpost, carved from the jungle, Baldridge established an empire that any of those men living along Pall Mall or St James might have envied. He built warehouses, a stockade fortress, a mansion crafted in the English style from local materials, high on a hill that gave him a grand view of all he had created. He had a harem as big as any found in the East. He ruled his island kingdom without challenge.

  By 1697 Baldridge was the undisputed ‘King of the Pirates,’ even holding a personal court and adjudicating disputes from all over Madagascar.

  In the end the king pushed his luck too far, sold a few too many of the local citizens into slavery, and his once-loyal people rose against him, driving him out.

  He settled at last in New York and lived a long life there. He was content, but he was no longer a king.

  Now I am king. The thought drifted through Elephiant Yancy’s mind. I am king now.

  Elephiant Yancy sat on the wide, second-story flagstone veranda that Baldridge had built, in a grand chair carved from slabs of mahogany and inlaid with ebony and ivory detailing. He was a small man, and thus the chair itself sat on a raised section of stone that he, Yancy, had had constructed, so that even seated he might look down on anyone standing before him.

  Yancy rested his head in his hand and stared idly out beyond the low wall that surrounded the veranda. Beyond and below the house lay the town of St Mary’s, where the pirates and whores and dealers in stolen goods and tavernkeepers made their homes. It was a variable population, perhaps two thousand people at its most crowded.

  To the south of the town lay the shallow harbor with its black, muddy water. At the mouth of the harbor was a small island, Quail Island, which was home to a battery of cannon and not much else. But Quail Island was perfectly situated. With his men garrisoned there, ready at the great guns, Yancy could dictate completely who came and went from St Mary’s.

  From his veranda Yancy could see the southern half of the harbor. He watched as a small ship stood slowly into the anchorage, rounded up, and dropped her anchor under a backed main topsail. Wondered, with only the slightest curiosity, if she was from England or America, or if she brought mail.

  He thought of Baldridge. Baldridge had created all this and had been forced to abandon it. He, Yancy, had found it, all but in ruins, had built it back up, had made it his own. Baldridge might have started the whole thing, but Elephiant Yancy, former pirate and Roundsman, had resurrected it to an even greater glory than Baldridge could have envisioned.

  St Mary’s Rediviva.

  He repeated that thought, worked it around in his mind the way an Arab worked his prayer beads. He didn’t really believe it at all, which was why he had to keep telling himself it was true.

  At length he looked down at the two pathetic creatures seated on the low chairs before him. One of them had been talking for … how long? Yancy did not know, had not been listening. As lord of the island, Yancy had taken it upon himself to sit in judgment in such petty disputes. It was part of the burden he had to carry as supreme ruler of the kingdom, and he accepted that, but it was still a great bother and a terrific bore.

  He was king, but he was not so ostentatious as to use that title. He insisted, rather, that he be called ‘Lord Yancy.’

  ‘It’s a lie, what he said, Lord Yancy, I swear to Jesus God it is,’ one of the men was protesting. ‘That stuff he says I stole, it was mine, it weren’t never his. Except for the knife, and that I won in gaming, fair and all, and he knows it—’

  ‘That’s a lie!’ the other interjected. ‘Son of a bitch is trepanning you, Your Honor, and I can have a dozen witnesses say that’s a fact!’

  Yancy sighed audibly, stared out at the harbor again. Other men might look at his wealth, his power, his harem of women, and they might be envious, but they did not understand the terrib
le responsibility he carried.

  He looked back at the men, put thumb and forefinger under his nose, and slowly ran the tips of those fingers down his mustache, smoothing the hair and then stroking his neatly groomed goatee with his full hand. He had practiced that gesture in the mirror until he was certain he had achieved the thoughtful, contemplative look he wanted.

  The two litigants were both talking at once, a jumble of sound that Yancy could not pull apart so as to hear the individual words. He waved his hand for silence, and both men stopped talking. They paused a moment, hung there in expectation. When Yancy did not speak, one of the men started in again, but the guard who stood to one side punched him in the head, and he shut up.

  ‘I have listened to your arguments,’ Yancy announced slowly, even though he had not. He did not in fact even recall what their dispute was about. ‘You are both liars and thieves, perfidious men. I banish you both from St Mary’s. You have until sundown to leave.’

  There, that was the simplest solution.

  Both men looked stunned, and as the guards stepped up behind them, one shouted, ‘Yancy, damn it, that ain’t …’

  The words died, withered under the heat of Yancy’s glare.

  ‘Lord Yancy, sir, I mean—’ the man stuttered.

  ‘You argue with my judgment? Shall I cut your hands off and then banish you?’

  Yancy saw the guards’ faces brighten at the thought, but the man shut his mouth tight and shook his head. Finally he managed, ‘No, my Lord …’

  ‘Good. Begone.’

  Yancy closed his eyes, massaged his temples as the guards shuffled the two away. He hoped someone was watching, as he knew that this particular gesture gave him the look of a world-weary monarch, a man who carried a great load on his shoulders.

  Elephiant Yancy was not much above five feet tall, and thin, and he had the small man’s energy, but he tried not to display it. It was not fitting for one in his position.