by Dudley Pope
Aquin Bay, tack to the south-east… Tack to the north-east… Cape Raimond, tack to the south-east… So the Griffin and Phoenix worked their way eastward: Cap Jacmel, False Cape, Alta Vela, Punta Beata, Punta Avarena, Punta Salinas… Ned noted them down in his log and was thankful he had several Spanish charts, taken from captured prizes, which he could piece together to give a continuous picture on parchment of the coast. On the evening of the third day he called Aurelia on deck and pointed to the land lying on their larboard bow: flat, with mountains beyond and what seemed to be the mouth of a river well the east.
“That’s where Cromwell’s plans for the Caribbee started to go wrong.” When Aurelia looked puzzled, he explained: “Out of sight over there to windward is the city of Santo Domingo, where Admiral Penn was supposed to anchor his ships and land General Venables and his army to capture the whole of Hispaniola…”
“Don’t laugh at them, Ned,” Aurelia said. “If they hadn’t failed here and then gone on to take Jamaica instead, we’d have had nowhere to go after escaping from Barbados!”
Out of curiosity Ned held on to within five miles of Santo Domingo before ordering the Griffin to tack yet again to the south-east. There were plenty of flat stretches of coast, and he could imagine the nervous Penn and the indecisive Venables slowly passing their objective as the following wind and the current carried them on westward…to a marshy stretch of coast where thousands of their men would perish from disease. Poor planning, poor leadership and poor troops had thwarted Cromwell’s plans (grand enough, Ned admitted) and left the Spaniards still owning Hispaniola.
Finally, after tacks which took them into San Pedros de Macoris and La Romana (with Catalina Island lying just off it), they reached the south-eastern tip of Hispaniola, which looked on the chart like a rabbit’s head nibbling a piece of lettuce which was Saona Island.
Once they tacked clear of Saona Island and could no longer see any more of Hispaniola to the north, Ned sighed with relief and showed Aurelia their position on the chart. They were now entering the Mona Passage, some sixty to seventy miles wide, separating Hispaniola from Porto Rico. It showed on the chart as a neat, parallel-sided channel between the two islands, with the tiny deserted island of Mona almost exactly midway.
There was another small island, Desecheo, at the northern end of the Mona Passage, much closer to the end of Porto Rico. “Very convenient, that one,” Ned said. “We can make long tacks north-east now, and as soon as we sight Desecheo it’ll show us where we are, so we then tack to the south-east until Mona gives us our position on the other leg and we can tack again.”
Aurelia ran her finger in a straight line from Saona Island, through Mona Island, and into the bay of Boquerón.
Ned nodded and said: “Yes, it’s easy to see why Thomas chose Boquerón to look for water. It was the nearest place with a sheltered bay and took him only a few miles off his course to St Martin.”
Aurelia then ran her finger eastwards from Cabo Rojo at the end of Porto Rico, passing the towns of Guánica, Ponce and Jobos to the headland at the far end of Porto Rico. She continued in a straight line, eventually reaching St Martin while leaving many smaller islands (the Virgin Islands, the chart said) to the north and one, Santa Cruz, to the south. Santa Cruz? That would be St Croix in French.
“We are getting so close now I am getting more frightened, Ned,” she said, holding his arm.
“We faced bigger odds at Santiago and Portobelo than we’ll ever find here,” he said reassuringly.
She shook her head. “No, I didn’t mean that. I mean, when we land at Boquerón, or wherever you decide, and find out.”
Ned, for the moment engrossed in the chart, was not concentrating on what she was saying.
“Find out what? It’s all here on the chart. It looks quite straightforward.” A moment later he was trying to put his arm round her, bracing himself against the roll of the ship as she started sobbing. “Oh Ned, Ned… No, I mean when we find out about Diana and Thomas: if they are still alive…”
Alive, dead or just locked in a dungeon? Ned had asked himself those questions almost hourly, it seemed, since the three survivors had first landed in Port Royal. Alive – well, to be still alive meant that the Spanish authorities did not know or guess two things: Thomas’ real identity and that he was second-in-command of the buccaneers, of the Brethren of the Coast. Diana’s fate was wrapped up with Thomas’, of course. If the Spanish neither knew nor suspected, then there was a chance that both of them were being held under an easy form of arrest somewhere near Boquerón while the local mayor, or alcalde, sent a messenger to the island’s capital of San Juan to know what the Governor wanted doing. And providing no one knew the identity of the prisoners, there was a chance (a slight chance? good chance?) that they would be freed, and the alcalde would be told that he could also release the ship. Thomas had broken no law – he had been scrupulous, using a white flag. But…
Dead? In that case, the Spaniards knew (or had discovered) Thomas’ identity, or guessed it from the name of the ship. They would probably have put him on the rack to try to discover what he was doing as far east as Porto Rico, but even if they knew one of their plate galleons was stranded off St Martin, they would never guess that Thomas was on his way to look at it: they knew the buccaneers had twenty or thirty ships, and the lure of such an enormous haul of gold and silver would bring them all out – there was no chance that the Governor of Porto Rico had yet heard of any raids on the ships called to Cartagena.
So Thomas would have been put on the rack, and perhaps even Diana (with Thomas being forced to watch). Thomas alone would reveal nothing, but Ned pictured himself being forced to watch Aurelia on the rack. Would he talk to save Aurelia from the agony? Yes, he would, most decidedly. And Thomas? It was hard to say, because if Diana could speak, she would tell Thomas to shut up…
If they discovered who Thomas was, then the Spanish would certainly kill him. But the peace treaty with England? Ned knew the answer to that almost before he asked himself the question: Spain would never consider the peace treaty applied “Beyond the Line”, and all buccaneers caught “Beyond the Line” were executed.
Which left the third alternative: Thomas and Diana left to rot in a dungeon. Ned remembered the dungeons at Santiago and Portobelo. Prisoners were kept there with thick and rusty chains round legs and wrists, so that every movement caused chafe which developed into sores, sores which became gangrenous… Just rice and water to eat, and rats to share it… And likely enough the priests trying to get hold of them, two heretics whose souls should be saved by stretching them on the racks.
The garotte or the rack. Poor Thomas and Diana. Ned hoped that if it was death by the garotte they were executed separately: for either of them having to watch the other being garotted would be worse than death itself. The garotte was barbaric. Hanging was quick because, even if the hangman was a bungler, at worst the victim was suffocated by the noose, and became unconscious in three or four minutes, probably less. But the object of the garotte was that it could – according to orders previously given to the executioner – take hours to kill a man. He pictured the garotte itself, and shuddered.
The most refined one he had seen – they varied, of course – was simply a hinged metal collar fitting round the neck and which could be tightened by a threaded rod joining the two halves, slowly throttling the victim before (when the rod had been turned sufficiently and the collar had contracted enough) breaking his neck. The cruder and more usual garottes were simply hinged collars of a smaller diameter than a man’s neck, the two ends being joined by a threaded rod which turned to bring the two ends together, usually strangling the victim long before it could break his neck. Or her neck: being a heretic was not a man’s prerogative. And the earliest garottes were simply a rope noose round the neck, tightened by twisting a stick…
Alive or dead or in a dungeon: well, Ned was ce
rtain that the final decision would not rest with the local alcalde: the Spaniards were experts at passing on a decision to the next senior man, and so they should be: the whole system of government on the Main (in Spain, too, he assumed) inflicted harsh penalties on any of the King’s servants who made mistakes.
So probably the decision about Thomas’ fate had already passed through several hands. The alcalde, or perhaps even the garrison commander in Boquerón, if there was one, would certainly know exactly what to do when an English ship came in and anchored and sent a party on shore with a white flag, asking for a safe conduct to get water. They would know that with no English possession within three or four days’ sailing, the ship’s company must be desperate for water.
So they would grant the safe conduct and, as soon as they were on shore, seize the men and the ship. None of that needed any superior’s permission; any child would know what to do, as would any shopkeeper, innkeeper or priest. Seizing heretics, buccaneers – indeed any foreigner (except a smuggler bringing in items they wanted) – was second nature.
The alcalde or garrison commander would then send a messenger to his next senior, and the decision what to do next would eventually reach the governor of the province. How many provinces in Porto Rico? A dozen or more, he guessed, and where was the capital of the one covering Boquerón? The charts did not help, but most likely it was San Germán (pronounced Her-mun), which had been important enough more than a century and a half ago to have the first church built in the New World.
Very well, but the provincial governor at San Germán would most certainly not decide for himself, even though the governor of the whole island was many miles away (at least a hundred, from the look of it, since most roads tended to go along the coast and, like Jamaica, Porto Rico had a spine of mountains that effectively cut it in two, into the northern and southern halves). Two days riding to San Juan, at least a day’s wait for the governor’s decision, and a couple of days’ ride back to San Germán. Another day to pass the orders to Boquerón – that made six days.
All of which meant, Ned realized, that the decision could have reached Boquerón (or wherever Thomas and Diana were imprisoned) at least – well: it would take the Peleus a week to get to Boquerón. Say they were captured ten days after leaving Port Royal. For seven of those ten days Ned and the Griffin had been putting in the new mast, so they had three days in hand. More than a week for the Griffin to reach Boquerón – so they were four days behind so far, and by then they would have only reached Boquerón, not discovered anything.
Ned was thankful that Aurelia knew nothing of the way Spain administered its colonies in the Main. Every Spaniard had by law to live in a community, either a large village or a town: no one, or no family, could live in isolation. No Spanish possession on the Main could trade directly with another – everything had to go back across the Atlantic and through Spain, adding enormously to the costs, apart from making it subject to special taxes. The most powerful man was always the head of the Church, whether the priest of a village, the bishop of a diocese or the archbishop of a province. No mayor or governor, even if he was Guzman, the Viceroy of Panama, would dare argue with the Church. In Spain, Ned realized, the Cross was a great deal mightier than the Crown…
He rolled up the charts, made sure that Aurelia had recovered after her glimpse of the possible fate of Thomas and Diana, and went on deck. The sun sparkled from every hurrying wavetop as it raced on to the westward; every few moments silver darts rose up from the sea, skimming up the sides of crests and down troughs before landing again after a flight of anything from ten yards to a couple of hundred. Poisson volant was their French name; the Spanish knew them as pescado volante, the English as flying fish. It was impossible, in any language, to describe that bluish-green dart, the grace of its ridge-and-furrow flight over the wavetops. And what tiny wings. Often they flew on board, the light thuds bringing up the seamen with buckets to collect them for a meal. Ned had once inspected one closely. Although it was long and slim, the wings grew from a body which had become rectangular, and when he thought of the weight of the fish in relation to the area of its wings, and then compared it with a bird, which was so much lighter yet had bigger wings, he was puzzled how it could fly. Come to that, he was puzzled how anything could fly.
Ah, now they were tacking north-eastward and there was Desecheo, a speck almost dead ahead while Porto Rico was beginning to form a very low grey line on the horizon to starboard. They were still too far away for it to be a blur; it was no more than the line on a good piece of paper made by a newly sharpened pencil. And there on the starboard beam was Mona Island, sitting straight-sided like a cooking pot on a stove.
The Griffin butted her way to windward; spray like sudden tropical showers kept the foredeck running with water; the foot of the sails was dark where the spray reached up and soaked the flax. The whole ship groaned as she thumped down into a trough and then drove up the side of an approaching wave, seesawed over the crest and dipped once again to the trough.
Invigorating for fifteen minutes, Ned thought ruefully, but damnably monotonous for days on end. Nor was there the chance of breaking the monotony by having a race with the Phoenix: Saxby sailed his ship well, and Ned always knew when he had overstood the mark, because the Phoenix would tack first, and he or Lobb would grin ruefully and give the orders for the Griffin to tack. It had happened so often that they no longer bothered to joke about Saxby dropping a hint… Ned had once broken the monotony by suggesting that Saxby was going about because Martha Judd was refusing to cook on that tack.
It was lucky (although not surprising) that the Griffin and the Phoenix each had a couple of Spaniards among the crew. In fact, the more Ned thought about it, the more surprising he found it that they did not have more. In both ships the English, Welsh, Irish and Scots were almost a minority: Dutchmen rubbed shoulders with Frenchmen, and there was even a man from Poland, though Ned was hazy about exactly where Poland was. Between France and Russia, he knew.
The Pole spoke his own energetic brand of English and as they sailed along the coast of Hispaniola the man had been disappointed that it was not necessary to set up the rigging because, as he carefully explained to Ned, sometimes when anchoring in a quiet bay to set up the rigging, along the beach you could find zeeyamber. The word had puzzled Ned until the Pole, Miroslav, had produced from his pocket a small griffin, beautifully carved in amber. “I keep as your wedding present,” he explained to Ned. He had made it himself from one of several pieces of amber he had. Before leaving Poland, he told Ned, he had served an apprenticeship with one of the amber master craftsmen of Poland.
“Where did you find the amber you have?” Ned asked. “In Hispaniola?”
The man shook his head. Amber was washed up on the beaches of the Baltic coast of Poland, and men with nets fished for it as though they were catching shrimps. The amber, he explained, was sap from pine trees which many centuries ago had hardened into rough lumps, and somehow the pine trees and the amber, or both, had rolled into the Baltic, the lumps of amber eventually washing up on the beaches.
The Pole was a true artist delighted to find an interested audience, because Lobb had come across the deck to listen, and as the Griffin thrashed her way to windward he began to explain.
Amber was found as a roughly shaped piece only distinguishable from a small rock or pebble by its lighter weight. No, he said, it did not then have this deep tan colour. The colour varied, of course: amber found in Hispaniola, for instance, was lighter, more golden, but he preferred the darker colour from the Baltic: it had more depth, more substance.
The size of the chunks found by the men on the Baltic beaches varied from the size of a thumbnail to this (he held up three bunched fingers) and, if they were lucky, this (a clenched fist). Once the amber arrived at the atelier, it was put on a small raised table so that the craftsmen could walk round and inspect it, deciding what its natural shape su
ggested to them. Yes it was going to be cut and filed and shaped and then polished, but no one wanted to waste any of it, and no true craftsman wanted to miss making the best use of the particular piece’s natural shape, quite apart from the original folding of the resin sometimes causing holes or folds. Once the design had been decided, one of the craftsmen and his apprentice (the best had several, like a good artist had pupils) would start work.
How long did it take, and what tools? Miroslav shrugged his shoulders and grinned. He had started to work on this carving of a griffin soon after joining the ship, and fortunately among the pieces of amber he had one which was tall and narrow, just wide enough for him to get the wings right, though the raised leg nearly caused a problem because it stuck out so much farther than the head and beak. The only tool used up to now had been his knife, which also served as a chisel and a file.
“But you could have made a griffin couchant – which means it is sitting with wings folded,” Ned said.
Almost shyly, Miroslav pointed to the heavy gold signet ring that Ned was wearing. “That one,” he said.
Ned’s family crest was a griffin and Miroslav had wanted to carve one like that. Ned felt both embarrassed and flattered: embarrassed that the man should use a piece from his valuable store of amber, yet flattered that Miroslav should want to carve not just a griffin, but a griffin with wings raised and standing on three feet with one forefoot lifted.
Ned asked to look at the carving again and, with the same shyness, Miroslav said: “Please do not tell the lady I make it. I want it to be a surprise on her wedding day.”
“Supposing we never get married?” Ned asked, intending to tease.