by Dudley Pope
Aurelia’s tamarind – Ned and Thomas had been quick to name it as hers – was halfway along the western slope of the hills which would protect the house when completed. To windward, another range of similar hills ran parallel, plunging down to the sea to form the eastern end of the bay.
Ned had already brought the Griffin round to the north coast and sent in a boat to survey the bay. It was deep enough for both the Griffin and Thomas’ ship; the holding ground was good and, Ned had told her, would be an excellent anchorage except during the northers of the winter, which brought rollers crashing against the cliffs with a ferocity that had frightened Aurelia the first time she saw them and helped Ned persuade her not to insist on building their house on the edge of the cliff. A constant view of the sea was splendid, Ned had agreed, but had Aurelia thought of the fine spray in the sea air? Polished silver tarnishing within hours; mildew as much of an enemy of cloth and leather as it was on board a ship. Paint would peel off window frames and shutters…the way Ned described it all, Aurelia began to think of sea air as a corrosive acid…
She settled herself on the stool after looking carefully on the ground in case it had stirred up a nest of ants which would crawl up her own legs, seeking bare skin to bite with vicious hot-needle nips. Then she unrolled the parchment plan of the house and looked at it for the thousandth time.
The architect must have spent as much time drawing the title of the house as the plan itself! Yorke Hall, with Plantations and Lands it said on a shield surrounded by elaborate crosshatching indicating the nearby hills and valleys. Aurelia knew there was a second parchment indicating all land, rivers and streams, the big stands of trees and where various crops would best grow. The site of a proposed sugar mill was shown beside the largest river, along with the little houses, hospital, kitchens and the water cistern for the slaves who would eventually work the plantation.
The house seemed enormous. She looked at the plan and then the front elevation; then she shut her eyes, trying to picture the completed building. Yes, rectangular and on two floors, its roof giving it a Norman look. The front entrance – that was impressive: high double doors opened out on to a stone balcony the width of the house and wide stone staircases curved round like horns at each end.
When she protested that visitors climbing the steps still had a long walk to the front door even when they reached the balcony, Ned’s explanation had been chillingly simple: whether they approached from left or right, they would have to pass the windows of three rooms before reaching the door. In times of danger those windows would be shuttered, and each double shutter (made of bullet wood) would have two keyhole-shaped gunloops carved in it, so twelve muskets – two for each window – could drive off any unwelcome visitors, from whichever direction they approached.
For several days Aurelia had teased Ned over the gunloops, saying that the Spanish would never come. “Spaniards!” he exclaimed finally. “I’m not worried about Spaniards; I’m concerned about the Maroons!”
The Maroons (originally called Cimarróns by the Spanish – the word meant “wild man”, she remembered) still lived scattered among the mountainous ridges that were almost the backbone of the island. They came down in bands to loot and steal: they would set fire to plantation houses, burn crops, shoot settlers if they had the chance – Ned said they were fantastic marksmen – and drive off their cattle and donkeys, taking them back whence they came, into the thick forests of the Grand Ridge of the Blue Mountains or, if they came from the western end of the island, into the remote area known simply as “the Cockpit country”.
Looking across the rolling hills and up into the mountains it was hard to think of roving bands of hostile Maroons. She could understand the Spanish freeing their slaves after the British attacked the island and gradually captured the important places. These Indian slaves were the native men who had looked after the great herds of cattle, wonderful horsemen and fine shots, who could lasso or shoot the cattle as required.
If one came from the eastern islands, negroes from Africa working in the sugar and tobacco plantations came to mind when one thought of slaves; but as one moved westward, to the big islands of the Greater Antilles, Cuba, Hispaniola and Porto Rico, the word slaves usually meant herdsmen, native Indians captured three or four generations ago by the Spanish settlers.
And of course, as Ned never tired of telling her, it was to the herds of cattle and the Cimarróns that the buccaneers traced their origins… As the Spanish fled from the big islands or moved on to the Main in their search for gold, they left behind herds of cattle and thousands of hogs, all of which bred happily because they had no natural enemies: only the Cimarróns (released by the Spanish, or escaped from captivity) hunted them.
Then when the small islands to the east, the ones standing like sentry boxes to stop the Atlantic invading the Caribbee, were later captured by French, British and Dutch who started plantations, it was only a matter of time before the white rebels and refugees from those islands also moved westwards, into the big islands which, except for the bigger cities like San Juan, Havana and Santo Domingo, had been abandoned by the Spanish, with the Cimarróns running wild in the forests and mountains.
“Rebels and refugees” – well, they were: Protestant Frenchmen, Royalist English, Irish and Scots oppressed by Cromwell, Dutchmen escaping from a Netherlands where the Spanish were determined to turn everyone into Catholics…
These men were indeed rebels, she realized, but the majority of them were not rebels in the sense that they actually rebelled against a particular king or a government or a religious system, but rather it was a case that they did not conform to the pattern of life laid down in their own country. They did not necessarily agree with the Pope, or Cromwell, or Colbert, or whichever Spanish duke was ruling the Netherlands, and the price of disagreement (assuming the man escaped with his life) was getting out of the country – and being labelled a rebel.
These “rebel” French, British and Dutch from the islands to windward had moved westward in small groups, three men here, a dozen there. They made canoes from hollowed-out tree trunks and once they reached the shores of the Spanish islands they poached cattle and hogs, selling hides and lard to passing ships, or exchanging them for powder and shot. And these men, not surprisingly, were called the “Cow Killers” – not to be confused with the native Cimarróns. Their only enemies were rum, disease – and the Spanish, who hunted them down when possible, although whether because they objected to the men living among the bays and lagoons of their islands or because they could not bear having heretics round their shores, Aurelia did not know.
At first, the “Cow Killers” could not preserve the meat they killed – presumably they were often too far from the natural salt ponds that lined many coasts – and they saw the meat go rotten within twelve hours in the tropical heat. Yet the Cimarróns had a simple solution, which the “Cow Killers” adopted – they cut the meat into narrow strips and dried it in smoke over a slow fire. They dug a shallow pit for the fire and then built over it a grating of green wood, the whole thing being called a barbecu by the Indians, although the French called it a grille de bois.
A slow fire cured the meat by heat and smoke and the meat would then last a good six months, providing it was first dusted with salt. Beef, as she knew only too well, had little taste left by then, but hog’s flesh was better. Anyway, the Indians called such meat boucan, and the “Cow Killers” soon found that by packing boucanned meat into their satchels and canoes they had food for long expeditions. Then because they adopted the custom of Caribbee Indians, the “Cow Killers” gradually became known as boucaniers, a word the English soon rendered as buccaneers.
“Boucan” – Aurelia laughed to herself over the word. Curing meat over a barbecu was, as she knew from long experience, a hot and smoky business, and people living along the Norman coast of France soon referred to a house with a smoky chimney as “un vrai boucan”.
Aurelia remembered she had first heard the phrase as a child, and now as an adult she was (at first she hesitated over the word, then found she was, in fact proud of it) the mistress of the leader of the buccaneers, and her closest friend was the mistress of his second-in-command
Diana – yes, a ripe woman, in the most glorious sense of the word. And Thomas was a lusty man, a man with a roaring laugh and an unquenchable thirst – yet sensitive and gentle. No, Ned became angry when she began to speculate over the love life of people she knew…
Eventually, some of the boucaniers built larger canoes and captured small coasting vessels from the Spanish, and from then on she supposed they were pirates, attacking Spanish villages, towns and ships whenever they had the chance.
But by the time the British had captured Jamaica and driven out the Spanish, the island was only too glad of the boucaniers to keep the Spanish away, and gave the owners of the ships commissions or “letters of marque” so that they could sail as privateers. A privateer, she learned soon after leaving Barbados, was a privately owned ship with a licence, or letter of marque, allowing it to act as a warship on behalf of the country issuing the licence. She did not think it a very fair system because the owner lost everything if his ship was lost (in battle or by shipwreck) and of course he had to pay for all damage. In return he could keep a certain percentage of what he captured from the enemy but, in the case of commissions issued in Jamaica, the King and his brother now took their share, a quarter, and there were plenty of hangers-on round the prize court who needed bribes…
No, as far as she was concerned, issuing commissions was just a cheap way of having a Navy, even if Ned had been elected the leader of the buccaneers, hence his title of Admiral of the Brethren of the Coast.
Now, apparently, all that was over – the new Governor of Jamaica (and apparently the King of England, too) had decided Jamaica did not need the buccaneers (or an Army, be it ever so small) to protect it: instead Spain was now a friend – she shivered at the thought – and all the commissions previously issued to the buccaneers were cancelled. So be it. At last she and Diana could have the houses built that they dreamed about. Yet if they were honest, she admitted that as soon as each was finished and furnished and they had lived in them for a few months, they would tire of them and wish themselves back at sea…
She opened her eyes again and found the sun’s glare, shining under the tree, almost painful. From up here on the cliff, the sea, scattered with white horses, seemed strewn with winking diamonds reflecting the sun.
The house, she told herself, think about it! Two floors – not counting the ground floor which would be in effect the cellar, a series of arches allowing a cooling breeze to blow under the house and providing plenty of storage space for butts of wine and the like. Twelve bedrooms on the upper floor – that was probably more than they would need, but Ned insisted on building for a large family and with plenty of room for guests. Aurelia thought for a moment – say six children, that would be seven bedrooms including their own. Thomas would often be too drunk to go back to his own home, so an eighth for him and Diana. Four other guests. No, perhaps twelve was not being too generous. The first floor would of course be the main one. A small entrance hall, leading into a vast room as long as the house was broad: a room spacious enough to entertain a hundred people, Ned wanted, with room for those who might wish to dance. She admitted that the secret of a cool house (apart from having it built facing the right way, with sufficient windows for the breeze) was space. Crowd people together and they felt hot. Take two people and put them in the same room at the same temperature, one at each end, and each would probably complain of feeling chilly.
Most of the servants would live in the three small houses built behind the main building. And there, beside the house, was the cistern – collecting all the rain from the roof. The men were already beginning to dig out the huge hole, but Ned had decided that Saxby must oversee the masons when they started. He had seen too many cisterns that leaked so badly that people were out of water by May…
She was glad that Ned agreed – indeed, insisted – that the trees should be left standing. In fact they had had to cut down and rout out the root of only one small tamarind tree, which had been growing exactly where the house had to be.
She heard Ned’s horse neighing and, in the distance over the hills behind her, she heard another answering. And was that the thud of galloping hooves? Who on earth could be riding up to see them? The port was many miles away, and anyway Thomas and Diana, who had only left for their building site an hour ago, would not gallop in the heat of the day…
Ned left the sawyers, where he had been inspecting the trunk of a mahogany tree straddling the pit where they were just about to saw it into long planks, and walked along the track to meet the horsemen – the hoofbeats revealed there were at least two. He saw that they were Secco, the Spanish owner and captain of one of the buccaneer ships, and Gustav, a Dutchman who owned another.
Secco reined up his horse and swept off his hat, decorated with a green plume. “Admiral,” he said breathlessly, “we’re sorry to interrupt the building, but…”
“But what?” Ned said amiably. “You haven’t ridden up from the port to show us how to cut planks!”
“The Spaniards are preparing a landing!”
“Is that all? You should have waited until we came down for more supplies.”
Secco pretended to strike his brow and swore in Spanish. “And that’s all the thanks we get! I am returning from Sinamaica in the Golfo de Venezuela when I meet Gustav who has been doing business–” Secco rubbed an index finger against his thumb, “–at Tucacas and we both heave-to for a drink of rum and a gossip.
“What do Secco and Gustav find to gossip about a couple of hundred miles north-west of Aruba? Ah, Mr Yorke, you might well ask!”
The sun was hot; the horses had swirled up dust which dried Ned’s throat (but not, he noted, Secco’s). Behind him the saw grunted its way along the mahogany trunk while to the right the masons’ chisels and mallets in the little quarry alternated in a monotonous series of clinks and thuds.
Ned realized that Secco’s report would take all afternoon unless he made the right responses. “I’ve no idea. But what did Secco and Gustav find to talk about when they met a couple of hundred miles north-west of Aruba?”
“The Viceroy’s latest orders, that’s what!”
The sun beat through Ned’s coat and the heat shimmered up from the rock of the track. Who sent a loquacious Spaniard and a monosyllabic Dutchman with important news?
“And what are the Viceroy’s latest orders?” Ned asked, hoping that the extra saw would soon be brought up from the port.
“To invade Jamaica, that’s what they are!” Secco announced triumphantly.
Ned gave a loud mock groan. “The Viceroy gives that order on Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays, and twice on Sundays.”
“Is different,” Gustav grunted, dismounting and nodding towards a nearby tamarind. “Is shade there, no?”
The three men gathered under the tree, hunching their shoulders because the lower boughs grew out horizontally like a ceiling.
“Why is it different this time?” Ned demanded.
“He calls ships to Cartagena,” Gustav said, seeming to begrudge each word.
“And that’s what I hear all round the Golfo,” Secco said. “All ships to finish discharging their cargo and sail for Cartagena.”
“All ships? Fisherman, fly boats, sloops?”
“No, no, no! That’s what makes it serious,” Secco said. “Only the big ships. The Viceroy’s order gives the minimum size. Each must be able to carry so many quintals of corn. Not” he added hurriedly, “that they are wanted to carry grain. There isn’t that much grain in Cartagena. No, but it’s significant that the ships are ordered to take on as much water as they have barrels before the
y go to Cartagena. We hear there is a great water shortage in Cartagena.”
“Hmmm,” Ned said, to give himself time to think and let Secco get his breath back.
“Water,” Gustav growled. “For the troops they carry to attack Jamaica.”
That makes sense, Ned thought to himself. All we need now is proof that troops are being marched to Cartagena: that battalions from Panama are being brought across the isthmus to join more from the Caribbee side. And that sort of proof will be hard to get. Troops cannot march on this side because there are no roads: they would have to be carried in by sea. In the ships the Viceroy has requested? Perhaps. And their horses, and the carts to carry their tents, and their field kitchens, and artillery and powder and shot?
But why? Trying to see into the mind of a Spanish Viceroy while standing in the shade of a tamarind tree with two buccaneers and two sweating and farting horses smelling ripe after their long gallop was – no, not a waste of time. Facts were facts, however hot the weather; it was easier to consider them in the cool, though.
If these two men now rode back to Port Royal they would gossip, and that would raise the alarm as effectively as half a dozen hoarse criers with handbells swinging. Gossip would reach the Governor and Heffer and the soldiers (who by now were anxiously waiting to get their back pay, which many of them probably saw as the key to Port Royal’s rum shops and brothels, both long denied them since neither gave credit). Gossip would soon be regarded as fact, embroidered until a Spanish fleet had been seen on the horizon and priests in long black robes had been sighted striding down from the mountains, followed by mules dragging carts loaded with the racks of the Inquisition. Crowds, Ned thought soberly, were only slightly less gullible and easily panicked than vote-hunting members of Parliament in session.
Ned gestured along the track. “Come along, we’d better water your horses and give you something to eat. I want to ride over and have a chat with Sir Thomas. You’d better stay here until I get back. I don’t suppose either of you wants to ride back to Port Royal tonight? No? Very well, we’ll find beds for you in one of the tents.”