That night a quick rain washed the decks and drizzled upon us. I awoke and moved to a place where the water hit at my feet rather than my face, and saw Patience awake, too, her eyes focused on some distant dream. I leaned against her breast, she put her arms around me, and I slept.
After that time, the women talked more to each other. They included us, but just as often spoke as if we were not there. I learned things. I learned about what men and women do. Things I should not have heard, I suppose, yet they meant little to me and were so strange as to seem like tall tales and nothing more.
CHAPTER 3
October 17, 1729
The sailors treated the men on the other ships with the same food and physick that we had gotten. The privateers started dividing up the stolen goods. As I watched I could see that they had also divided up the Saracens. Some who had not been hung had been pressed or volunteered, and now served the privateers.
After loading the ships with food from shore, they lined us up, sorting us by age, I think, but in any case, Patience and I were placed in two different lines. Longboats unloaded a few of the men captives and took women from her line in their places. Patey and I looked from one to the other as Englishmen prodded some reluctant woman toward the railing where other women scaled the rigging down to the longboats which had come from the third sloop. The woman balked and spoke some language not English nor the patois I knew. While they fussed with her I sidled like a crab across the line and stood behind Patience. I felt the wind leave me as a blow I never saw coming pushed me back into the other line.
“Ressie!” Patience cried, rushing to my side. Women gave us wide berth.
“Patience!” I replied. We clung to each other and I buried myself in her skirts.
“Please, sir!” Patience said. “Please let us go together. We’re orphaned enough. Let her come with me or me with her!” She spoke to a man whom I had not seen before, one who sported a long, bushy beard and had come from the third sloop. He stood next to the man who had knocked the spine out of me. Patience said, “My brother waits in your ship, sir. I beg you by God’s grace. Will you let us go together?”
The two men turned from us and conferred for a few minutes. One left and came back with the man I had heard called “Captain.” Finally he said, “All right. Take ’em. But leave the other white ones with me so there’s equal.”
Then the bearded man whistled as shrill as ever I have heard, and his companion shoved Patience and me toward the railing. I found climbing down the rigging staggeringly more difficult than climbing up had been. With my foot searching and not finding hold, each web of rigging shifted under me and took my strength. Halfway down I began to tremble and my hands grew weak. My knees shook and dark spots welled up behind my eyes. I believed I was going to fall into the sea before I took a last step, but as I did, hands took hold of me and set me into the longboat. I crouched low and put my head on my knees, quivering violently.
Patience held me in her arms as they took us toward a new rig sitting shallow in the water. She climbed behind me, holding me upright as I progressed on shaking legs. The rope rigging took us over gun ports, and it made me shake with greater violence than ever. I put my toe in the mouth of a cannon to steady myself.
On the deck this ship seemed much smaller than our previous prison. Not more than forty or fifty tons. Her masts were leaner but tall as those before though raked at an angle like a shark’s fin. Everything I could make out about this vessel was sleek and lean, riding high in the water as if she were built for speed and nothing less. Above the jib the colors she flew were a long square of red and a yellow triangle, foreign to me except for the topmost one. The Jolly Roger.
I could not count the sailors. I saw a dozen but knew that some might have been plundering some other plantation onshore. There were forty-three of us prisoners on this ship. Men bunked before the mainmast, too, so the women’s ride in the aft was roughest. August restrained himself from coming to us, but he stood in his line of captives and nodded. I felt foolish, for all I dared to do was nod in return.
I gripped Patience’s hand. For a long moment I stared at her skin and mine together. I felt a great longing to hold August’s hand. Patey’s skin and mine were so alike, same freckles, same lines in the palms, same-shaped fingernails. August had my same tawny hair, almost a shade of red in the sun. It troubled me that I could not remember a sense of his skin. We three were all we had until we could get home somehow.
In short order they herded us belowdecks. As I stood in line for my turn to descend, I looked back at the other ship, so much higher in the water, pocked with cannon holes and missing a mast. None of the prisoners were still on the deck there. I supposed they had returned to that filthy hold already. At least—at least—I thought, I was here with Patience and August. A swell of distress filled my eyes with tears at the thought of having been left behind—though I knew where my feet carried me, down into this ship’s nether regions—just as I had cried over nearly having my finger crushed. I believed I would have died there. If not from cause, I would have died of loneliness.
“Ressie. Quit crying. You’re calling attention to yourself. Hush.”
“I will try.” That was when I learned to cry inside. Tears welled up and ran down my throat and through my nose, making it run. I gritted my teeth and sniffed hard.
We were prisoners, yet once a day about mid-morning we were marched up the steps and fed real soup. It was three days until I spotted August again. To my surprise he walked straight toward me, unshackled and hearty. He seemed uncommonly cheerful. “Hail, Resolute, old girl,” he said. He took my hand and bowed over it as if he were mocking a true gentleman.
“Hail a chicken’s hind foot, old brother,” I said. “I had no idea if they had kept the men and boys. You have new clothes, too.”
“We were lying before the mast, in a separate hold. That is until yesterday, when some of us became sailors, too.”
“What are you speaking of?”
“I’ve signed on. They read us the articles and I’ve signed on. I ain’t a prisoner no more. Coxswain second class. Ship’s boy. I get double what the prisoners get to eat and a share in all the plunder. All I have to do is row the captain around and sometimes climb the rigging—” Besides the crude manner, his voice had taken a lower register as if he had a bad ague of the chest.
“How you speak. Is your voice this low all the time now?”
“Of course. Why would it not be? I am grown, after all.”
“La, August. How you go on.”
“I fear, Miss Resolute Catherine Eugenia Talbot, that you mistrust my words.”
I pouted and stuck out my lower lip while I balled up a fist. “Mistrust? August Talbot, if you have signed on with a ship of pirates, you are bound to hang as a criminal!”
He grabbed my shoulders and inclined our heads together, whispering, “Not pirates, Ressie. Privateers. Your feet stand upon the deck of the Falls Greenway, as true a sloop as ever sailed, contracted by the Crown to lay waste to them that scuttle her goods and profits. And I shall be rich before long and take back all that was stolen from us and more!” A breeze ruffled August’s hair, sticking out like feathers from a knitted Monmouth cap, the type worn by many of the men.
“Well, then. Well. If you are one of the sailors, then, master seagull second class, I wish to go home.”
“Nah. We’re headed north to the American colonies.” As he spoke he looked about himself as if he were now the proud owner of his own rig called Falls Greenway. “That ship you left behind was bound for Port Royal. There you’d be sold like any common slave and it’s a rum time you’d have of it. The quartermaster is watching for a ship to take. These three and their longboats—I mean, we call them snows—work together, you see, for the common good. We’ll surround her—Spanish, I think, more’s the gold—and the three will take her. I am to truss the tops’l if it’s called to me.”
“Port Royal! It is the other side of the island. Over the mountain to home! I
would escape and get home to Ma.” I raced to the side and held fast to one of the pins. “I want to go home!” I cried aloud. The ship rolled. A gull squawked overhead and landed on the railing next to the table where the food sat. The bird dared to take a dash at the soup pot and left a splat of filth on the table, barely missing the open pot.
August cast his eyes around us. “You would drown. Do not even think of escape.”
Not think of escape? I pulled the shore closer with my eyes. “How far away are we now from Port Royal?”
August said, “Port Royal? Why, this ain’t Jamaica. This be Hispaniola. I told you we’re lying in wait. Our scouts have just returned. A Spanish brigantine be bound here before long and they’ll surround her. I hope we see some guns firing.” A light came from my brother’s eyes when he spoke. Sea madness had taken him.
“Like they did to us?”
His face sobered. “Well, and aye.”
Tears came then, running down my face and chin. “You’ve struck your lot with freebooters and picaroons. What about me? What about Patey? How shall we get home?”
“There’s nothing left there. Did not Pa always say to make the best of things? Keep it in your cock-hat that we’re bound for the northern colonies.”
A sailor had approached us unawares and now his shadow engulfed August’s form. “Get away from there. Sop’s thataway.” He jerked his head toward the table.
I recognized the voice. I suppose because of that I hoped for a moment for mercy from the man. My eyes gathered the spectacle of him from his boots to his coat and tricorn hat and my mouth dropped open. His clothes were different, his manner, too, but I knew him. We stood in the shadow of Rafe MacAlister.
“Aye, aye,” August said, and he darted away, with that foolish, boyish, duck-footed run he has. A pirate boy is my bonny brother. Well and aye, then. Uncle Rafe might have been looking upon me with disdain, I was not sure. That was one of those things that was hard to measure, for grown people always lie to children about whether they like them. No matter, for my ability to despise Rafe MacAlister had long ago grown to full breadth. Now that I found him here in the company of privateers, I knew I had been right to loathe him, and I kept my eyes away from his as I joined other captives at the soup kettle. Perhaps he had been the one to trick August into signing the ship’s articles, too. Not until I had a bowl in my hands and could appear preoccupied did I chance to turn and look at him. But the man was gone. As for August, I promised myself that if I should see him again I would tear out his eyes.
When I finished my soup, I followed the row of women back to our jail. This vessel, the others said, had been built to carry cows and sheep. If the builder had spread the bars one inch wider in any place, I could have slipped between them and made my escape. But to where? Swim to Jamaica? I would swim, I vowed, as no one had swum before. Only when I sat on a knee formed by one of the ship’s ribs, leaning my head against the side, did I notice that Patience was not to be found. It never occurred to me where she might be, and I felt I had but to wait for her. After all, she was not a good swimmer.
I picked at a piece of tar squeezed from between the planks near my head and rolled it between my fingers as I thought about home. From a tiny opening where tarred rope connected parts I could not name, I could get one eye to the outside and see that it was still daylight. The Saracens’ hideous ship, now run by English pirates, was going to our home, albeit the ship itself was full of holes and might sink on the way. This one, no matter that it was cleaner and there was food and air, was not going home at all! We were already at Hispaniola and this accursed boat was going north.
I whispered against the hull, “I will always live in Jamaica. No one can take me far enough that I shall not find a way to return.” I used the piece of tar to scratch a line against the wall. I drew Patey, August, and myself, with sad faces and chains around our feet. I wrote, “Jamaica, Two Crowns, we are prisoners here.” I drew Pa, lying down with a cross upon his chest.
As I drew, I thought of Ma, pining away there, with no way with which to write us, her children, and now with Pa buried in the ocean—oh, Saint Christopher, do not let him wash up on shore where she finds him—she’ll be widowed and no doubt unable to manage the plantation, then put out. She’ll need us. And now, August a turncoat and a vagabond privateer! Ma’s heart will break upon hearing that news. When I drew Ma, I drew tears falling from her eyes. I vowed then that when I found opportunity to write her, I would not write of his wretched apprenticeship. Patience and I would write of our captivity and deprivations. We would somehow make our way home and together we and Ma would survive, perhaps on Ma’s sewing. “Oh, la,” I said aloud, for want of any real words to tell the depths of my aching emptiness. The thought that I had begged to go aboard this ship plagued me above all else. If I had stayed where I was, I would have been put off in Jamaica!
“Let us have a seat, there, girl,” a woman said to me. She pointed to a small mat. “You can have my bed there, if you wish. My back pains me so.”
At that moment the iron door creaked open and I said, “Here, madam, you may have it,” as I saw Patience slip through the opening, clutching a parcel, her head bowed. She flinched when the door closed with a loud clang. I thought she had carried her pocket and I called, “Patey!” At once I felt a thrill that she had procured our passage home, and the same moment a terror that her rings had been traded for naught.
Patience came toward me, eyes on the floor, and reached my side just as men above slid the hatch cover closed and the twilight of this deck enveloped us.
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“Above,” she whispered.
“That lady said I could use this mat. Would you sit with me?”
Patience lay upon the mat but turned her body away from me and curled her knees up. Her shoulders shook as she cried.
“Patey?” I whispered. “What is that you’re carrying? Well, no matter. Please take heart. We shall find a way to get home.” Even as I spoke, I doubted we could. I thought of what August had said about escape. I thought of Ma, looking out to sea from the widow’s walk, day after day, waiting for us. I put my arm around Patey’s waist to comfort her.
She flung my arm from her as if it had been a snake, hurting my shoulder. “Keep still!”
I pulled back a little. “Where did you go? Why did they not bring you with the rest of us? Tell me what happened. Why are you carrying that?”
“Leave me alone, Resolute. Leave me.”
I was not sure if she had not finished her words or if she meant more than a wish for me to keep shushed and meant me to leave away from her side. I said, “You did not have to hurt my arm. I merely reached to pat your side.”
“Simply do not touch me.”
“Fine, then.”
She lay a-weeping then, moaning sometimes, and as it was dark and I was fed, I slept to the sound of her sobbing, an old familiar tune. When the woman asked for her pallet again, Patience sat next to me on the wale. She reached under her skirt and loosened a tie, then pulled off the petticoat Ma had made for her. She raised it over our heads and made for us a little tent. She held my hands, and when I started to make a sound, shook them. She opened the parcel she had brought. Into my hands she placed a boiled turtle egg and half an orange. The need for food was ever awake in me and I crammed the egg into my mouth, whole. The fruit had dried, but once I bit through the hard part, the juice was sweet and tart on my tongue.
“Do not smack,” she whispered. “I have one for each of us.”
“Oh, this is excellent. How did you get these?”
“Just eat it. Eat all of it, too. Even the rind will keep us from scurvy.”
“Someone will smell these.” But no one did, or if they did they had no idea whence it came, and so we crouched in our dark corner huddled together and ate. Although I might at one time have been loath to eat an orange rind, my hunger spoke over the bitter tang on my tongue. I stuck the orange rind in my cheek and sucked at it until it di
ssolved. It left a raw place on my tongue and I rubbed the spot against my teeth.
The next day passed with no sign of August or a Spanish galleon filled with gold. I felt renewed enough to feel both thankful to Patience and irritated at our situation, and I complained to anyone who would listen. That evening before I closed my eyes, I hoped for another stolen morsel from Patience, but she stayed at my side all the time and so was not able to collect anything extra. I believed she would do what she could for both of us, just as Ma would have done. It gave me some peace to know that.
At dawn calls from above awoke us. “Strike colors! Take the whip! At the guns! Man the sweeps!” This was followed by the sounds of hurried action, and from my tiny peephole I saw a set of oars thrust from our ship’s sides begin to move in tandem to a chant of “Yo-hope!” We turned sharply; the ship listed hard to one side until it rose upon the surface of the water. Our vessel cut through waves helped by sail and oar alike. Some woman of our group cried, “We’re going keel over!” and someone else hushed her.
Cannons bellowed off our port side and shook the ribs of the ship and all mine, too. I screamed and clasped my ears at the unexpected roar of them. They levied a full broadside and all of a sudden everyone on this deck lurched and fell as the ship turned into the wind, jerking and hauling with shouts from the oarsmen as it started moving full astern. We swayed again, falling upon each other, and felt the concussion of another full broadside from our ranks of starboard cannon.
My Name Is Resolute Page 5