The Pirate Round

by James Nelson

  Peleg did not actually take part, of course. Marlowe never thought he would. Rather, he sat at the table, hands folded, trying to look as if he were carefully considering every point made. He nodded, twisted his fingers, frowned, smiled as the occasion warranted, but he said nothing. In the great cabin he possessed none of the authority and confidence with which he prowled the quarterdeck. He looked very uncomfortable, in fact.

  ‘Without we are paid for our cargo, we cannot even buy the provisions we will need to return to the colonies,’ Elizabeth pointed out. Thomas could hear the despair creeping in around the edges of her voice. It was time to put a stop to this talk.

  ‘The tobacco is lost to us,’ Marlowe said. ‘We may as well have dumped it in the river.’

  ‘But sure there is some way …?’ Elizabeth began.

  ‘No. Perhaps if I had driven that tops’l yard right through Roger Press’s black heart, we might have been able to return. Believe me, I tried, but I fear I killed no more than the boat.

  ‘Press will see to it that Dickerson informs him if anyone comes calling in regard to our tobacco. He will have the warehouse watched. Even if we send someone in our stead, hire an agent, it will do us no good. Anyone who looks twice at our cargo will be arrested. I do not care to think on what Press might do to someone in order that he might extract information from him.’

  ‘This Press would seem quite rabid with the thought of vengeance,’ Bickerstaff observed.

  ‘He is like that. Always was, as I recall. Though it is not as if marooning him was my notion. It was a vote of the crew.’

  ‘“Marooning him” sir?’ Dinwiddie spoke for the first time.

  ‘It is nothing, Mr Dinwiddie. Happened a long time ago. A … business decision, if you will.’

  ‘Still, I can see how a fellow might take it personal,’ Bickerstaff observed.

  ‘All right, goddamn it, can we speak of our cargo?’ Elizabeth said, annoyed, exasperated. ‘What are we to do about that?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Marlowe said. ‘Abandon it.’

  ‘Then we are ruined.’

  ‘Perhaps. Or perhaps there is some other way that we might regain our fortune …’

  He said the words, let them hang in the air, gave the others a moment to wonder. It was good theater, and he needed every trick he could muster.

  ‘Very well, if you will make us beg,’ said Bickerstaff, ‘pray what is this scheme of yours, this main chance?’

  ‘We sail for Madagascar.’

  Silence again as these words took hold. There was no need to explain the scheme further. No need to describe the treasure ships of the Great Mogul, the riches to be had on the Pirate Round. The four people sitting at the table in the great cabin knew all about it, as did anyone in the American colonies with any connection to the sea. The name ‘Madagascar’ was enough to summon it all up.

  ‘Piracy, then?’ said Bickerstaff, making no attempt to disguise his disdain. ‘On the account?’

  ‘Not piracy. Privateering. Stay …’ Marlowe cut Bickerstaff off before he could make the obvious objection. ‘I do have a commission for privateering, my dear Francis. Governor Richier was kind enough to offer me one, and I had the foresight to accept.’

  ‘Richier offered you one? Just like that? Did he think it his duty as host? Is that a consideration he extends to all his guests?’

  ‘Well, I may have offered him some little token, I do not recall.’

  Bickerstaff just looked at him, making a small shaking motion with his head, and Marlowe could see he was taken aback by what he was hearing.

  After all these years, and you are still surprised by me, Marlowe thought. But wait, my friend, it gets better yet.

  ‘Very well, privateering,’ Elizabeth said. ‘You have a commission, it is as legal as it is wont to be.’ As a young woman, beautiful and destitute, Elizabeth had been forced into prostitution. She understood the occasional need for pragmatism over loftier moral considerations. ‘But Madagascar is halfway around the world. We have no provisions and no money to buy them.’

  ‘Ah, as to that, I do happen to have a bit tucked away,’ Marlowe said. ‘Enough certainly to provision for the voyage.’

  ‘Tucked away?’ Elizabeth said. ‘You mean to say you have money – specie – that I did not know about?’

  ‘Well, yes, in fact. I buried it on the property, just after I bought it. Before we were married, ages before. Quite forgot about it, really. Just thought to dig it up before we left.’

  Now it was Elizabeth’s turn to look stunned. Before she could speak, Bickerstaff said, ‘I know the Moors are considered easy game, but we have no cannon, no small arms, no powder. Sure they are not so cowardly that they will surrender to an unarmed vessel?’

  ‘I think the small pittance I have should be enough to buy us those things. Cannon, small arms, powder – yes, I reckon we can stretch it enough that we might get what we need.’

  ‘But where? What chandler will you apply to for those articles?’

  ‘We shall get them in Madagascar, my dearest Francis! All things are to be had in Madagascar.’

  ‘Hold a moment.’ Elizabeth found her voice at last. ‘Do you mean to say that you have specie enough to provision and arm this ship? That you have all this time been in possession of enough money to do all that, and you let me think we were on the very edge of ruin?’

  ‘Ah …’ Marlowe stalled. From the moment he decided to dig up that hidden booty, he had envisioned this scene. It had been like watching a great storm building on the horizon, knowing it could not be avoided, that it would lash him eventually. And here it was.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ he said. ‘But I cannot tell you all my secrets, now can I? You would fast grow bored with me if I did not retain just a little mystery.’

  Marlowe did not think that his flip answer would placate her, and he was right. He saw her eyebrows come together, her lips purse, her arms fold, and he knew he had not yet felt the brunt of the storm. We’ll run before it under bare poles, he thought. There is naught else to do.

  ‘Well, I reckon you got this all thought out!’ Peleg Dinwiddie said. His voice was loud and enthusiastic, and it startled the others, who, being wrapped up in layer upon layer of emotion and personal history and the subtleties of their relationship, had entirely forgotten that he was there.

  Bickerstaff looked sharply at Marlowe. ‘Thomas, I find your coyness frankly offensive. Pray do not pretend you have not planned this for some time.’

  Bickerstaff was right, of course. Marlowe had been planning it for some time. Years. Ever since the horrible memory of his pursuit of King James had begun to fade. Ever since his fortunes had begun to ebb and his boredom and disgust with the gentry of the Tidewater, of the idle life of a lord of the manor, had begun to flood. Ever since then he had been planning this, even if he had never said so explicitly, not even to himself.

  He was sick of playing the gentleman around Williamsburg. He was sick of worrying about money. He was sick of the small beer of tobacco cultivation. He was ready for a big payoff.

  ‘Perhaps I have. And a damned good job, too. Because we would be shipwrecked, ruined, with no options, if I had not.’ Marlowe was growing weary of the coy act as well. ‘So I have steered us to a place where we might find some real money. If any of you can advise some other course, then I am pleased to listen.’

  The great cabin was silent, an uncomfortable, grim, angry silence, as each person’s eyes shifted from one to another. Dinwiddie alone did not look angry. He looked worried, and Marlowe guessed that he was afraid someone might talk the captain out of steering for Madagascar.

  But Marlowe knew that would not happen.

  ‘No,’ Bickerstaff said at last, his words clipped. ‘No, we have no choice. That is your genius, Thomas, it always has been. You do not ask others to follow you; you maneuver them until they have no choice. You did it with the Plymouth Prize, you did it when we hunted for King James, and you are doing it now. I am in awe, sir, of your skil
l.’

  ‘I will accept your compliment, whether you meant it as such or no,’ said Marlowe.

  ‘Of course, tricking us into acquiescence is one thing. Your plans are for naught if the men will not agree.’

  At that, Peleg Dinwiddie actually chuckled, an odd sound in such a charged atmosphere. ‘Oh, sir, I do not reckon you’ll get much fight out of them!’

  Dinwiddie was right about that. Once those in the great cabin had agreed to Marlowe’s plans – or had at least yielded to the dual thrusts of logic and coercion – they made their way to the quarterdeck. Thomas could see the curious glances, the eyes following them as they climbed up the ladder aft. Every man aboard the ship understood what had taken place in London, the predicament that Marlowe was in, the fact that they were each owed money. They knew that the ship’s decision makers had spent the entire morning in the great cabin, and they guessed that some word was imminent.

  ‘Mr Honeyman, pray assemble the men aft,’ Marlowe said. Honeyman nodded, called the word down the deck. Men came up from below, down from aloft, back to the after end of the waist, where they assembled, some standing, some sitting, all of them looking up at the quarterdeck like groundlings before a stage.

  Marlowe looked down at them. Half of the faces looking up at him were black, and that surprised him. He did not often see the whole crew en masse, and so accustomed had he become to their odd makeup, so integrated into the shipboard life were the former field hands, that Marlowe had lost track of the fact that this was something unusual.

  He had always counted the field hands as his own faction on board. He, after all, had freed them from slavery. They were the men of Marlowe House, his people, standing between him and whatever mutinous, piratical villains they might be forced to ship.

  But now, looking out over the hands, he was not so sure.

  The men no longer grouped themselves by race. Though they appeared to stand in a loose mob, black and white, Marlowe could see that they were in fact gravitating into their watches, starboard and larboard, each with his own, and also into that most intimate of shipboard divisions, the mess.

  The clothes that the young men from Marlowe House had made new on the passage to England were now worn and tar-stained and patched. The men themselves had the loose-limbed, casual stance of the true deep-water sailor, like men possessing enormous strength of arm and endurance but not willing to waste any of it. They had the sailor’s cocksure, jaunty quality. They seemed to swagger even when they were standing still.

  The blacks were no longer the men of Marlowe House, they were Elizabeth Galleys now, loyal to their ship, loyal to their mates foremost. Once he could have counted on their support, but now they would be as unpredictable as any crowd of sailors.

  The lower deck was the most heterogeneous workplace in the world.

  ‘Listen, here, you men,’ Marlowe began, an unnecessary injunction, he saw, since he already had everyone’s rapt attention.

  Honeyman was sitting on top of the spare spars, the hard cases that he had recruited standing around him like his own personal crew. Sundry others of the men before the mast stood scattered around the waist. Twenty-eight men. Not a large crew, not for a pirate vessel.

  ‘You men know what happened in London, you know we can’t go back there. We would be taken, hanged for piracy, as unjust as that might be. The mariner doesn’t always get justice – foremast jack or master, it makes no difference. You know that better than anyone.

  ‘So we have a problem. Our cargo is gone. We’ll see not one penny of profit for our labors. But there might be a way we can recoup our loss. Perhaps even make some profit. Perhaps even strike it rich. I propose we steer for Madagascar!’

  That proposition received the response that Marlowe had expected: wild cheers, hats waved in the air, grins all around. Even the black men, who two months before probably had never even heard of Madagascar, cheered with enthusiasm, having no doubt been filled with tales of the Pirate Round by the more experienced seamen aboard.

  ‘I take heart from your response,’ Marlowe said. ‘Madagascar it is!’

  ‘Hold a moment, Captain!’ Honeyman stood up, took a step forward.

  Oh, son of a whore, Marlowe thought. Must we hear from the sea lawyer now?

  ‘I’m for Madagascar, much as the next man,’ Honeyman began. ‘But it was a merchantman we signed aboard. Merchantman rules. If we are off on the Pirate Round, then it changes things.’

  Marlowe leaned on the rail, glared down at Honeyman. ‘You men signed ship’s articles. You are bound by them.’

  ‘Beg pardon, sir, and pray believe I mean no disrespect,’ Honeyman continued, ‘but those was ship’s articles for a trading voyage to London and back to Virginia. Off to Madagascar … well, that changes it. We’re not bound by those articles. I say we draft: articles anew, in the fashion of the Code of the Coast.’

  Glare as he might, Marlowe could not silence the murmur of consent that ran through the men at this suggestion.

  Then Dinwiddie stepped forward, the timidity he might have felt in the great cabin entirely gone now that he stood on the quarterdeck, his natural forum, and faced the sailors below.

  ‘Damn you, you sneaking puppy!’ he bellowed at Honeyman. ‘Captain has given orders, and they’re to be obeyed!’

  Dinwiddie’s was a voice that would have cowed most men, but Honeyman persisted. ‘The captain will be obeyed in all things. I reckon the men will agree there be no voting on captain, nor officers, which is common among the Roundsmen, as you know well, Mr Dinwiddie. I say only we need articles.’

  The murmur of approval grew louder, heads nodded, eyes fixed aft. Well, it is out of the damned bottle now, and I shall never get it back in, Marlowe thought. Damn that man, Honeyman – he has hoisted me by my own petard.

  Then up stepped Burgess, one of Honeyman’s hard cases, his gnarled, muscular arms folded, his gold earring flashing, his head bound in a red damask cloth. ‘I say we votes Mr Honeyman as quartermaster!’ he called, and that brought a renewed murmur of approval.

  Marlowe clenched his teeth, felt the entire thing slipping from his grasp.

  A quartermaster now, and new articles.

  But that was the way of the pirates – he knew it better than any on board. He had hoped to have it all ways, to be captain of a Red Sea Rover without submitting to the crude democracy of the Brethren of the Coast. But now he saw that would not happen. Seamen as a tribe were too protective of their precious rights to let him off that easily.

  Would they now vote him out of his captaincy? And if so, what could he do about it? It was he, after all, who had suggested piracy in the first place.

  ‘Very well,’ Marlowe said. He glanced behind him. Bickerstaff stood off to one side. He gave Marlowe a cocked eyebrow, an eloquent sermon on Marlowe’s misplaced self-assurance. ‘Let us vote.’

  The polling did not take long, no more time than it took for Marlowe to say, ‘Who here would vote Duncan Honeyman as quartermaster?’ and for every man aboard, including the former field workers from Marlowe House, to raise his hand.

  That done, Honeyman stood on the main hatch, and all eyes turned from Marlowe to him. And Marlowe understood that he had just given up his supreme authority as a legitimate ship’s captain for the popular rule of the pirates, and he was not happy. The quartermaster of a pirate ship was the representative of the men, the bridge between great cabin and lower deck, and now that bridge was Honeyman, the sea lawyer.

  How long has he planned this moment? Marlowe wondered. Since Norfolk, from the moment I first said ‘Madagascar’?

  ‘See here.’ Honeyman was talking now. ‘We said no vote on officers and Mr Dinwiddie and Mr Flanders are fine officers in any event, and Mr Marlowe as good a captain as ever I’ve sailed with. I reckon we need only choose a new bosun, and we’re set up proper.’

  They chose Burgess, as experienced and able as he was taciturn and piratical.

  Honeyman and Marlowe retired to the great cabin, where they might
work out the new articles in peace.

  ‘Captain Marlowe,’ Honeyman began, ‘I want you to know I mean no disrespect, nor no challenge to your authority, by this. It’s just … well, the way things are.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Marlowe, impatient, wanting to be done with that distasteful job. Marlowe, the manipulator, did not care to be manipulated himself, and he had been. Played like a flute.

  It took them no more than an hour to draw up the articles for the Elizabeth Galley. They both were familiar enough with the protocol of the pirate ship that they had only to write it down, with a little modification to fit their circumstances.

  Every man to have a vote in affairs of the moment, save for those concerning the disposition of the Elizabeth Galley, of which Thomas Marlowe was recognized as the sole owner.

  Every man to keep his piece, pistol, and cutlass clean and fit for service, any man who would desert the ship or his quarters in battle would suffer marooning; any man who would cheat his shipmates out of the value of one dollar would suffer marooning. The captain and quartermaster to receive two shares of a prize, boatswain and gunner and officers one and a half shares.

  It differed from the standard agreement among the pirates in only a few points. An exception was made for Elizabeth in the clause banning all women from the ship, and the great cabin was recognized as her and Thomas’s private domain, a luxury not enjoyed by most pirate captains.

  Honeyman looked on these concessions as thoughtful consideration, but Marlowe considered them patronizing and demeaning, and they made him angrier still.

  When the ink was dry, they took the document out to the waist, where it was read aloud, and then every man, save for Bickerstaff, signed, and those who could only make their mark did so, and Marlowe wrote their name beside.

  In just half a day, and with that single piece of paper, the Elizabeth Galley was transformed from an honest merchantman to a Red Sea pirate.

  That night Thomas Marlowe slept on the lockers aft. Elizabeth made it plain that he was not welcome in her bed.