by Dudley Pope
The shouts increased until it seemed to Ned that all the captains were calling the island’s name in English, French or Spanish. He looked round at Thomas, who muttered the single word: “Vote!”
Ned held up his hand for silence, and the shouting stopped. “Very well, some of you want to change our base. Remember, on the one hand we have here provisions and we can buy chandlery for our ships, but we have an English Governor. At Tortuga we are free of any interference, but we can’t get provisions or chandlery. So we will vote. All in favour of moving to Tortuga?”
Many hands shot into the air, and Ned said: “Now, those in favour of staying here?”
Only three captains indicated they wanted to remain in Jamaica, one of them shouting angrily at the others: “You fools! There are no women in Tortuga! You’ll just get drunk and because you can’t have a woman, you’ll start quarrelling.”
Secco stepped forward, removed his hat with a flourish and turned to face his fellow captains. “Women? Where is the difficulty? Many of us carry half a dozen women on board. That way the food gets cooked, the clothes mended, and…”
“And…?” echoed several captains amid laughter.
“Very well, that’s decided,” Ned said. “You’d all better get back to your ships and attend to provisioning and watering, and whatever else you need.”
Slapping each other on the back like a group of boisterous schoolboys let out of class, they made their way over the Griffin’s bulwarks and down into their boats. Ned turned to Thomas.
“Well, my lord bishop, are we doing the right thing?”
Thomas shrugged his massive shoulders. “Depends whether or not we decide the safety of Jamaica is our problem or Loosely’s.”
“With old Heffer blundering around in the past it’s become a habit, I suppose,” Ned said, “even though Heffer now admits that but for us he’d have had nothing to hand over to Loosely.”
“Diana’s not going to like it,” Thomas commented gloomily, “nor is Aurelia. They both want to finish the houses. Yesterday they were having long conferences about the sort of furniture they are going to have made. They’ve already decided both houses have the same, so the carpenters make duplicates.”
“I’m staying here for a while,” Ned said. “I’d like to get the house finished, too. And Tortuga is such a depressing place.”
“Good,” said Thomas. “That means I can stay with a clear conscience, and that means Diana will be in a good mood. But let’s agree to keep away from the Governor: he’s more stupid than I believed possible. He’s bound to get a barony – unless the Dons get him first with a garotte.”
Two hours later while the four of them were sitting in the Griffin’s hot saloon talking of the problems of building houses, Saxby knocked at the door and looked in to report. “Secco’s coming over in a boat with that Dutchman, Firman. From the number of boats visiting Secco’s ship, the captains have been having a meeting. I wasn’t invited.”
Saxby had been foreman of Ned’s plantation in Barbados, and commanded the Griffin when she was needed to carry cargoes for the plantation. When the Roundheads were about to seize the plantation and Ned decided to flee with Aurelia and those of the plantation staff who wanted to come, Saxby had sailed the Griffin with the Roundheads shooting at them. Now he commanded the Phoenix, which had been the Griffin’s first prize. Saxby was a quiet, competent man who kept to himself – not, Ned knew, because he scorned the friendship of others but because he was a private man. Private except for his Mistress, Martha Judd.
A Lincolnshire man, stockily built with a stentorian voice, Saxby had a curious past. Both he and his father had been farm labourers and were pressed into the Navy at the same time. Saxby had a great appetite for women and a dislike of hot liquors, so service at sea deprived him of his one pleasure and tried to pour down his throat the spirits he hated. After several years at sea (during which time he lost sight of his father) Saxby finally deserted, returned to his Lincolnshire village, and was still working there when the Civil War began. He was taken prisoner by the Roundheads and transported to Barbados.
Ned, recalling the story of the couple, remembered that Mrs Judd, wide-hipped, big-breasted, a woman with an enormous zest for life and for finding a man who could satisfy her and keep her respect, had been working as a housekeeper for a landowner at Banbury, in Oxfordshire, when the Civil War started. What, Ned had always wondered, had happened to Mr Judd? He never appeared in any of the stories (usually slightly bawdy) that Mrs Judd delighted in telling.
Anyway, as the Royalists were finally defeated the Banbury landowner had to flee, leaving his wife and children in Mrs Judd’s care. Within days the house was attacked by Roundhead looters, who were also busy breaking the stained-glass windows in the local churches, whereupon an enraged Mrs Judd had set about them with two kitchen knives, changing them for a billhook as soon as she could get to the potting shed. Fortunately for Mrs Judd (and eventually Saxby) she failed to decapitate any of the Roundheads, who took her prisoner and ordered her to be transported to Barbados. On board the ship taking her to what she had anticipated would be a harsh, hot and loveless exile, she met Saxby, and both of them had ended up working on Ned’s plantation. As Mrs Judd had once confided to Aurelia, instead of starting what she had expected to be the life of an overworked nun, she had become an overworked mistress, the wink at the end of the story indicating to Aurelia that it was not only in the kitchen that Mrs Judd worked hard.
Bawdy, lively, only too ready and certainly quite capable of taking charge in any situation, Mrs Judd had taken charge of Saxby, whose red complexion glistened, even if his blue eyes were often red-rimmed when he started work of a morning on the plantation.
If anyone was responsible for the transformation of Saxby from a seaman who had deserted and become a plantation foreman into the captain of a buccaneer ship and the equal of any of the other captains, it was Mrs Judd. Ned was not sure if the man’s new confidence had come from his Lincolnshire forebears or from being clasped to Mrs Judd’s ample bosom and eager thighs, but what mattered was that it had come at the right time.
Saxby returned to the saloon to report. “Secco and the Dutchman are coming alongside now. D’you want to see ’em on deck or down ’ere, sir?” he asked Ned.
“We’ll come on deck,” Ned said.
“You can’t expect them to accept old Loosely’s decisions,” Thomas said as he stood up. “We don’t even agree with them ourselves!”
“I don’t, and I don’t forget that most of the buccaneers are French, or Dutch, or even Spanish. But when we’re here in Jamaica we have to accept whatever the Governor says – providing,” Ned added, “we know that he’s acting on government instructions. We might find ourselves defying him if he gets hysterical and starts issuing his own orders…”
Diana said: “Ned’s right. Anyway, he’ll soon run through his list of orders from London. Then the executive council can make sure he doesn’t do anything too silly.”
“He’s got to call a council meeting first,” Thomas pointed out, “and there’s nothing to stop him leaving the executive council supping rum punch while that fancy private secretary, Hamilton, nails up decrees on the front door.”
“You don’t have to go up to the door and read them,” Aurelia said.
“A town crier, that’ll be the next appointment he makes,” Thomas grumbled. “‘Oyez, oyez, now hear ye, the Governor has decreed…’ I can just hear it.”
“I can hear the town crier’s yells as the shopkeepers pitch him in the lobster crawl,” Ned said, “and I can see the Governor’s decree floating away as the town crier splashes his way back to the shore.”
He led the way to the door.
Since both Secco and Firman seemed embarrassed, each waiting for the other to start, Ned asked amiably: “So what have you all decided to do?”
Secco looked relieved. The buccaneers were simply a group of privateersmen (former privateersmen, now that Luce had withdrawn their commissions) who had elected a leader whom they respected enough to follow and called him their Admiral. Nothing was written down: no orders were ever written. The only agreement – and that only an understanding between them all – was that when the Admiral led them, they obeyed him. There was nothing to stop any one – or indeed all – of the Brethren of the Coast, as they called themselves, refusing to follow.
“We…er, we did not like the Governor’s decision…”
“Nor did we,” Ned said, to help the man.
“And like you we do not like Tortuga. And we know what the Spaniards are doing…”
Thomas clapped his hands and laughed. “And the idea of all those ships sailing round to Cartagena was irresistible!”
Secco grinned and nodded. “Yes, Sir Thomas. Many of us think we can capture some, exchanging our small ships for bigger ones. I have fifty men crowded into my ship, for instance. I would like a bigger one, and then I can carry more men–”
“And your share of the purchase will then be bigger,” Thomas said teasingly.
“My share as a captain stays the same,” Secco said stiffly. “If I have more men, there are more men to share the crew’s portion.”
“Don’t be so damned touchy,” Thomas said. “I was only teasing you. Bigger ships and more men mean more purchase, so we all get richer.”
“You don’t want me to come with you?” Ned asked.
“No, sir,” Secco said, and then corrected himself as Firman made a sudden gesture. “Forgive me, I didn’t mean we don’t want you to come. The message I bring is that the captains want to go after these ships, and if you and Sir Thomas want to stay behind to complete your houses, we shall understand. It is a raid of no importance, except in improving our fleet.”
Ned nodded. “Good. I agree to that, and neither Sir Thomas nor I expect to share in the purchase. Just one thing, though. In time I may be able to persuade the Governor to be more – er, practical. For the moment, therefore, I don’t want to quarrel with him.”
“You want to leave the door open,” Secco said, pleased with his knowledge of English idiom.
“Exactly. A door the Governor can come through to ask us for a favour, and a door we can go through, for whatever reason.”
“I’ll explain that to the Brethren,” Secco said.
“And explain that the open door is the reason why neither I nor Sir Thomas want to know where you are all going. As far as we know you are all going to Tortuga because the Governor has taken away your commissions. If you all change your minds after you’ve sailed from Port Royal – well,” Ned shrugged his shoulders, “that’s your affair. Sir Thomas and I will be busy over on the north coast working as masons and sawyers – and perhaps tilers – before we see you again. Anyway, good luck to you all.”
After the two captains had left, Thomas said: “They found the right answer without any nudges or winks from us.”
“Yes, though I suppose it could be argued they’re doing the right thing for the wrong reason.”
“Wrong reason?” Thomas raised his eyebrows, but Diana said at once: “Don’t be so dense. Ned means that the right reason – for the future of Jamaica – is that they’re going to capture ships which might land a Spanish army on our beaches; but, in fact, they’re off in search of the ships simply to capture larger ones for themselves.”
“Let’s not be too fussy,” Thomas rumbled. “Otherwise we’ll get as muddled as a convocation of bishops and start jabbering the sort of nonsense one expects from the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
“A Canterbury gallop,” Diana said unexpectedly. “When I was young and had my first horse, my father said I could ride only at a Canterbury gallop.”
“What’s that, riding facing the horse’s tail?” Thomas asked facetiously.
“Riding at a canter, of course,” Diana said.
“Slower than what we’d call a canter,” Ned said. “Comes from the monks riding to Canterbury – their horses would amble, not canter. Irony, my lord bishop.”
“I keep forgetting you come from Kent,” Thomas said. “So you’d know all the scurrilous stories from Canterbury…”
Chapter Six
For the next week the work on the houses went sufficiently fast to complete the foundations, and both Diana and Aurelia walked round, jumping the trenches, and delighted to have at long last a real idea of the size of each room.
Thomas, who had been teasing Diana because she had not been able to visualize the sizes from the scale on the plans, admitted to Ned that his house was proving larger than he had expected.
“At least it’ll be cool,” he said.
“Like a barn,” Ned said. “You’ll be able to have the hens and the horses eating with you in the dining room.”
“You wait,” Thomas said gloomily, “as soon as it’s finished, we’re going to get dozens of visitors. They’ll all be ‘just calling in’ as it gets dark, so we’ll have to offer a night’s lodging, and each of ’em will find an excuse to stay sennight.”
“I thought you liked people: always surrounded by a merry throng of topers and gamblers – I thought that was when my lord bishop was in his element. A belly full of wine and slapping your last hundred pounds on the roll of a dice.”
“Ah, that was before I met Diana,” Thomas said reminiscently. “The sound of wine tumbling into a goblet was a musical waterfall and the clinking of dice a welcome descant – music to m’ears. Now – well, I hate the sound of dice more than a fusillade of musketry, and the music has gone out of wine and hot liquors.”
“Ah, Thomas, now even your late and unlamented Uncle Oliver would be proud of you.”
“Yes, and if only Diana was Lady Whetstone so that she was my lawful wife and not my mistress, he’d have made me one of his admirals. But no! I think he may have forgiven the gambling and the drinking and the wenching, but he knew I was a Royalist at heart and that he couldn’t–”
He stopped for a moment, listening above the buffeting wind. “A horse. Don’t say it’s Secco back already! Two horses, in fact!”
“More likely a messenger from old Loosely bidding us to a council meeting to consider raising taxes to build him a residence more in keeping with his sense of his own importance.”
“My word, we need some rain: just look at the dust those horses are raising. Recognize the men?”
Ned shook his head. “Strangers to me. I’m sure they’re messengers from Loosely.”
“He wouldn’t spare a couple of men.”
Aurelia had joined them and said: “Why try to guess? Just be patient!”
“Patience has never been a friend of mine,” Ned said. “Ah, they’ve seen us. No, I don’t recognize them.”
“Sailors,” Aurelia commented. “From their clothes and the way they sit a horse, they’re more used to holding a tiller than reins.”
The two men reined in and while raising their hats to Aurelia confirmed her identification if only by the lack of flourish and the cautious way they dismounted.
“Mr Yorke?” one inquired. “Mr Edward Yorke?”
When introductions had been made, it transpired that the men were the captain and the mate of a trading sloop. The captain, George Hoskins, a chubby and jovial man from the Isle of Wight, who, despite his obvious lack of experience with horses, was very bow-legged, explained that they traded between Jamaica and the eastern islands, starting at Barbados and taking on their final cargo at St Kitts and Nevis, and then bearing away for the long run to leeward which brought them to Jamaica while staying far enough south to avoid the Spaniards in Porto Rico and Hispaniola.
“Going back,” he explained, “it’s such a long beat to windward to lay up for Barbados
that if it gets too brisk we ease sheets a little to go down south to Curaçao and see what the Hollanders are offering. Drive a very hard bargain, does mynheer, an’ o’ course enough of their own ships trade northwards that they don’t leave much pickings for us.”
Ned realized that Hoskins was not to be rushed and in his own good time would explain why he had ridden over the mountains on what he obviously regarded as a dangerous and uncomfortable beast.
Finally Hoskins glanced at Ned and then Thomas. “St Martin and Anguilla. You know them?”
Both men shook their heads. “I know where they are,” Ned said, “but I’ve never been farther north than Antigua. Don’t the French and Dutch share St Martin? Anguilla – who claims that?”
“Whoever happens to be anchored in the bay on the north side,” Hoskins said. “The island’s almost deserted; it’s just a good anchorage, ’cept in a west or north wind.”
Ned saw that there was a reason for Hoskins asking if they knew two of the most insignificant of the dozen or so islands forming the chain known as the Windward and Leeward Islands. “What are they like, these two?”
“Well, on the chart St Martin and Anguilla look like a cooking pot with the lid held up across the top. The lid’s Anguilla, which is separated from St Martin by a channel about seven miles wide.”
As the man did not go on, Ned asked: “How do the French and the Dutch get on, sharing an island?”
Hoskins grinned. “About as well as you could expect: until any trouble comes over the horizon, they cooperate as little as possible. The Dutch own the southern half, the French the northern. A ridge of mountains cuts the island in half the other way, so it’s really a bun divided into quarters.