The Pirate Devlin

by Mark Keating

  'I can't navigate like that, Patrick. It's not in my soul! I can reckon with the best of 'em, but I needs someone with the mind for the whole manner of it!' His eyes gleamed. 'My thoughts are, Patrick, that if I can navigate well, the whole world could open up to us! The East, the South Seas! Cut away from these lanes! With good longitude, I could save weeks off a voyage and run rings round those navy boys!' He slapped the table passionately and swigged at his wine.

  'To what end would this be my concern, Captain?' Devlin squinted as the sun lowered into the window.

  Toombs began the account that Lewis had told him. How Devlin was the manservant to Captain John Coxon. How Coxon was a skilled navigator, one who could tell where he was in the world just by fathoms and the samples the soundings brought up, even by the colour of the sea and the yaw of the ship. How, when Coxon went to take his morning readings, Devlin was there with his coffee, and for every reading throughout the day. That Devlin was present whenever Lewis and Coxon compared readings, when courses were plotted and noted.

  'I would begin to suspect, mate, that it would be not entirely unreasonable to assume that some of that knowledge might "soak" in, so to speak, you might say.'

  Devlin could not disagree. The years with Coxon had been instructive. Coxon had shared his books with Devlin when he discovered with delight that his steward could read and read well. Devlin helped teach the young midshipmen the duty of the traverse board, the peg and wood diagram that kept the course and speed of the ship throughout the watch.

  He could 'box' the compass in French, to Coxon's amusement, and Coxon would beam with pride when he slapped the backstaff into Devlin's hands and bade him read the correct latitude, if he would be so kind, after some lieutenant had fuddled his way through an incoherent attempt.

  After too much Madeira and flank steak, Coxon would bemoan Devlin's Irish birth and his brief dalliance under the pavillion-blanc flag of the Marine Royale that would deny him a fine second or third lieutenant.

  'But perhaps a sailing master you could be, Patrick? That could be done. It is only exams, after all, don't you know?' Then Devlin would clear the table, brush Coxon's hat and coat before returning with the last black coffee of the night.

  Just how much Lewis had spoken of him, how much of his past, would need careful teasing out of Toombs.

  He looked Toombs square in the eye. 'No more than anything else, Captain. But Lewis was Coxon s navigator. His is the skill.'

  Toombs turned away to the stern window, which was glowing in the afternoon sun. 'Lewis disapproves of us… gentlemen.'

  It was only then that Devlin had noticed Alastair Lewis's absence. Ever since they were both pressed into service, Lewis was either on the quarterdeck with the captain or occupied in the sparse cabin. He looked at Toombs's silhouetted back and watched his head lower.

  Lewis was passionate about his loyalties, that had been obvious. He seemed to clash with Toombs every day, and Toombs, Devlin was sure, would ultimately distrust him to occupy such an important position on his quarterdeck.

  Behind him, Devlin could hear the songs of the crew calling in the evening, songs of lubrication and bordellos, the friendly creaking of the boards beneath him and the slow lapping of the sea against the hull. He waited for Toombs to speak.

  'If you knew him, and had any kinship with him, you may go and see him.' Toombs turned. 'But I'm afraid, Pat, he's been blinded by some of the mates.'

  He elaborated that he had wanted Lewis to plot a course to St Nicholas, one of the Verde Islands. The course should be taken away from the coast to avoid patrols, and continue through I he night for added safety, especially as it was only weeks since they had left a burning English frigate near the Straits of Gibraltar. Toombs's own weakness with navigation had required Lewis's skill. Lewis had refused and Toombs had taken him below, in the dark and heat, and forced him onto his knees. A thick, knotted oakum rope, coarse as broken glass, had been put round his head, across his eyes, and twisted over and over, tighter and tighter. Some sweet tongue had christened the act 'the rosary of pain'; most just called it 'wooldling'.

  Usually the victim will have a change of heart as the ears start to rip, the blood starts to run down the neck and the eyes are forced back into the skull. Lewis just screamed on and on, until his eyelids tore and his eyes began to grind against the burning knots. The men had shocked themselves, their torturer's giggles switching to heavy, almost carnal gasps. They let him collapse to the wet, dark deck. Cowering in his own blood. Retching in pain.

  'If you don't want to see him, we'll just shoot him and give him to the sharks. The lads could do with the sport.' He placed his knuckles upon the table. 'Then you can join him, or sail my ship with me.' He looked Devlin up and down with a sway of the head. 'Fine boots by the way there, mate.'

  Below, Devlin was greeted by the stench of bodies and rotten food fuming in the African heat. He left the final step of the companion, instinctively lowering his head as he walked through the dark.

  Sunlight slatted through from the hatches above, thick dust swimming in its rays. The songs of the men pitched just above the incessant moaning of the ship as Devlin weaved his way past swaying lanterns and piles of stores towards a dark lump sitting slumped against sacks of rice.

  He knelt before Lewis, pushing his dragging sword behind. Lewis was trembling, sobbing. Across his eyes his own bloodstained linen blindfolded his pain. Devlin spoke Lewis's name softly, and the man jerked.

  'Patrick? Is that you, man? Thank the Lord! Have you come to save me?' In the months he had known Alastair Lewis this was the first time he had addressed Devlin as 'man'. It was slightly more reverent than the 'boy' he was used to. He only recalled Lewis barking demands for port and coffees, clean shoes and linen, as Lewis took advantage of his position and knew what Irishmen were for. He pitied Lewis's fate, but only as he might that of a rabid dog.

  Since their capture he had never even glanced at Devlin. Lewis had replaced Coxon's quarterdeck with Toombs's and simply argued slightly more on this one. Devlin wanted to see him, to find out what had been said about him in Lewis's torture.

  He touched Lewis's shoulder. 'No, Mister Lewis, sir. You're too ill to live.'

  Lewis's hand reached out for Devlin and grabbed his arm. 'Surely not, Patrick! My wife! Tell them about my wife!'

  Devlin knew nothing about Lewis's wife. He only knew that Lewis was a navigator appointed by the South Sea Company to attend to their interests in the Noble s escorting of one of their slavers. He removed Lewis's hand.

  'I need to know what you told them about me, sir.'

  'About you?' Lewis turned his head as if listening for other voices. 'What would you have to do with anything, man! Just get me out of here! Help me!'

  Devlin's concern was that Lewis knew he could speak French. He had lived for two years in St Malo before rolling into the Marine Royale, and happy they were to enlist an Irishman to hamper the English. He was only a couple of months in service before Coxon had captured their sloop of war.

  As a prisoner, Devlin stepped forward to negotiate between Coxon and the French officers, thinking only of his belly and dislike for chains. Coxon had found an Irishman in the French navy amusing, keeping him as his servant rather than imprisoning him with the rest.

  That had been four long years ago, the end of the war, and Coxon had never tired of showing off his Irish Frenchman.

  If this were known, if the thought had rattled around inside the most sodden brain that some word had passed between Devlin and the Frenchman, either aboard the Lucy or on the loneliness of the island, he was sure he would be standing in his own blood. No secrets on a ship. And dead men do not lie.

  It clearly gnawed at Toombs that the ten French marines, without officers, had fought like tigers to protect nothing but a couple of hogsheads of stale water and rancid pork. They had met their deaths for that rat food, all but one, and he could only speak his own damned tongue.

  They had gathered slowly from him, if not painfully,
that the sloop was voyaging to the island for the marooned pig to gain stores, hence their empty hold. Toombs had decided to fulfil this plan, as fresh meat was always welcome. Now, with the promise of pork exposed as a lie, Toombs would be wondering again why the sloop sailed empty, with only ten common sailors on board.

  Devlin's shoulders appeared from below and he looked above at the spreading purple sky. He saw Toombs and Peter Sam at the taffrail with a pipe and a mug each, as idle as any gentleman on his country-house balcony.

  Toombs saw Devlin approach and tipped his hat back. Peter Sam turned his head to follow Toombs's gaze and immediately stepped towards Devlin to block him as he came up the length of the short stair.

  'Where do you think you're stepping, man?'

  Devlin pulled himself to the top of the rail, one foot on the deck, staring straight into Peter Sam's black eyes.

  'He's our new "artist",' Toombs yelled. 'Ain't you, Patrick?'

  Devlin pushed past Peter without a glance and walked to the rail, standing next to Toombs and looking out to mighty Africa.

  'Aye, Captain. If you'll have me.'

  'Why was I not told of this?' Peter Sam's broad form squared up to the two of them.

  Toombs slammed his fist on the rail, almost smashing his pipe in his hand. 'How dare you question me, sir! I needs an artist, and Patrick knows the art well enough to remove the burden from you or I!'

  'You don't know that, Captain. He's just some lickerish ponce's waister!' Peter spat. Devlin said nothing and began I he routine of filling his own pipe.

  'Then he shall have the moment to prove it, Peter. You can summon the men for me, if it's not too much of a trouble for you, mate.'

  Peter ground his jaw and spun round to face the drunken brethren beneath. 'Pay attention, you dogs!' he bellowed.

  The heads turned and stopped their singing and gaming. An air of wariness spread around in whispers. 'The captain will address you, lads, so pipes down!'

  Toombs snapped his coat, tugged the front cock of his hat down and winked at Devlin as he approached the audience looking up at him from the waist of the ship, his mug held high in his left hand.

  'Lads! I have good news!' He spread his arms, looked kindly Into the faces he liked. 'I know I promised you that English frigate, but that young quim burned it beneath our feet!' A rousing cheer, raised mugs and laughter.

  'And our gentleman artist from the lordly South Sea Company has been most "blinded" to our cause!' The men choked on their drink at this one. 'But our newly acquired Patrick Devlin, from the same frigate, the servant you recall painfully who fought you away from the captain's cabin, has agreed to be our new artist!' A satisfied murmur. 'I have a plan, lads, to sail to old St Nick tomorrow.' He closed his right hand into a fist.

  'I aims to capture the Portuguese governor there and hold him to ransom! The plan will be revealed to you on the morn, boys, and Patrick will take us there!'

  He raised his empty mug. The men roared and took that as the signal to return to their drink. They cared little for their destiny tomorrow - or next year. They would fight and sail when the sun rose and set. The reason immaterial.

  Toombs turned back to Devlin and Peter Sam. 'There. Now, Patrick, make any preparations that you need to sail me to St Nicholas. What happened 'twixt you and Lewis, by and by, mate?'

  As if in answer, a crack rang out below deck, and Toombs's eyes shot down to the empty belt where Devlin's left-locked pistol used to be.

  'I told him it was best not to be fed to the sharks alive.' Devlin tapped his forehead and stepped down to retrieve his pistol.

  * * *

  Chapter Two

  Cape Coast Castle, African Gold Coast, April 1717

  John Coxon dragged himself to the top of the West Tower, the wind-vane tower that captured the delicious morning African sun before it began to sear. He hung on to the battlements, breathing deep, trying to stave off the threat of nausea. As he had been every morning for the past three months, he was in his full working clothes, despite the aching heat. There was no uniform officer dress but, like most, Coxon had a rotating wardrobe of white breeches and stockings, white linen shirts and dull waistcoats, all wrapped in a square- cut, dark twill greatcoat with muted black piping and brass buttons, which now, after his illness, sloped from his shoulders; he had been forced as well to splice a new notch on his breeches belt.

  He looked up and drew in the sea. By the beat of the sun on his back he knew it to be past ten, but there were still some straggling fishermen skimming up to the shore beneath him. The guns to the left and right of him stared out also, like silent sentinels. Nobody ever manned them, and the salt from the sea and air was eating them away. On the first day that he was able to walk any distance he had found a swallow's nest in one of them, the touch-hole carelessly painted over.

  The bleached white castle sat on Africa's Gold Coast. It was the final door that millions of slaves would walk through before they began the long journey to the Americas. Even now, beneath Coxon's feet in the gaol below, nine hundred men stood naked together, waiting for the slavers to arrive, unable to sit down for lack of space and the hardened excrement that made up the floor, in a dark hell that had originally been made for just one hundred and fifty prisoners.

  Coxon had sailed to Cape Coast as captain of the Noble, the twenty-four-gun frigate he had captained for almost a decade. He had watched her sail away without him, watched her escutcheon until he could no longer make out her name.

  There had been delays in waiting for their slaver to be ready to sail and, whilst enjoying the hospitality of the eccentric General Phipps, Coxon had been struck down with the tropics plague of dysentery, or as it was known rather more colloquially, the 'vacuums'.

  He was being paid a handsome twelve-and-a-half per cent commission from the South Sea Company to escort the galley to the colonies, and even with a fifteen per cent death rate on the cargo, he figured he might come away with enough to start an emporium of some kind in Boston or one of the cities of the five major colonies. The ones that at least had paved roads.

  In the wars, life was simpler, but ten years of conflict, of politics against the French and Spanish, had taken his prime years. This year, at forty, he found himself in a world of trade and companies, powdered wigs and ebony canes.

  There was no rich estate or lordly hearth for him to return to - not for him, a clergyman's son - so he had stayed on, taken his peacetime cut in pay. As the navy halved its numbers, he had seen men who had fought beside him now beg for bread in the streets of Portsmouth, and hang around the Crown Inn hoping for a chance meeting with an old, generous officer.

  In peace he had lost most of his officers to the merchant trade, and in his illness he had been forced to leave his ship to the young 'snotty' who was his first lieutenant. He had ordered Thorn to return to England, against his particular articles and orders, rather than attempt the sail to the Indies without him. Thorn had jumped into a dead officer's cot a week before he had transferred to the Noble, a second lieutenant of eager if limited ability, judging by his age and date of commission, almost thirty and still unmade. Coxon had followed with a letter explaining his decision and that General Phipps had requisitioned the very next able sloop to convey the slaver, but a fuming Alastair Lewis, the company's navigator, would reach England before the note. The decision would probably lose Coxon his commission from the South Sea Company, but he would rather that than lose the Noble to the pirates who had seethed in the Caribbean waters since the end of the war.

  Besides, he had half expected to die.

  The Guinea coast was infamous for the toll of death it exacted on the white man. Most of the soldiers who made up the hundred or so garrison were either dying or permanently diseased. Nearly all were convicted men who had chosen service rather than gaol.

  No one had ever spoken ill to them of Cape Coast Castle, but only because no one ever returned. As one dying clerk managed to write home to warn those contemplating the offer in the cloisters of th
eir cell: 'Rather run a remote hazard of being hanged at home than choose a transfer hither.'

  Coxon had survived. Mostly down to his strength of will and the care bestowed on him by General Phipps's mulatto beauty, who had tended to him with local remedies within decent, clean quarters.

  Phipps himself seemed fat and immune compared to the ghosts that haunted the rest of the castle. Coxon had noted that he serviced himself from the traders with fresh meats and other victuals. He had a vast orchard nearby that furnished him with fresh oranges, lemons, limes, paw-paws and bananas, as well as European crops he had cultivated. Meanwhile the soldiers, Coxon noted, subsisted on soups, biscuits and theft.

  Coxon had been permitted to use Phipps's private walkway, and part of his convalescence had been this daily walk to the ramparts. Often he joined Phipps here, watching the Royal African and South Sea Company ships come in to take out the seemingly endless march of blacks.

  Through Phipps's vellum and sharkskin telescope one could see the Dutch El Mina fort, barely two miles further down the coast, herding their purchases to the waiting cutters for ships bound to the South Americas. The Dutch companies reaping the rewards of the triple alliance against Spain that had granted them the 'asiento - contract - to transport slaves to their own colonies.

  The innumerable tribes sold to both parties, and it was not uncommon for the tribal chief who sold his wares to the Dutch one week to find himself being shipped out through the door of Cape Coast Castle the next, his noble robes of office torn and burned for fear of lice.

  It was often remarked upon, when looking at both these forts, that no gun faced inland, for any threat would come from a European front, not from an African one. Coxon, like many, wasted no pity on a nation that sold its own people; he only held a handkerchief to his face to stop the stench as they passed through the gates beneath him.