Of the present tribe, none was named Raleigh or White. They possessed no surnames amongst them. There were 163 individuals in the tribe, all told. Besides those leading citizens with whom you have already made acquaintance, they went by the names of Tom, Dick, Fang, Gobo, Hotspur, Casper, Monger, Water, Karoo, Peaseblossom, Touchstone, Lionheart, Moonshine, Wart, Basilisco, Percy, Flute, Hal, Honeybreath, Hammerhead, Hawk, Handsaw, Bess, Catherine, Mary, Twitchgrass, Acorn, Goatsbeard, Sweetflag, Moth, Lark, Throstle, Thistle, Betony, Jack-snake, Jack-a-merry, Jack-a-bones, Cuckoobird, Eyebright, Foxbait, Hyssop, Mistletoe, Bugaboo, Bugbear, Bug, Pan, Pygmy, Pigmeat, Jollyroger, Jingletoes, Wintergreen, and Zeus.
And then there was Tansy, daughter of the recuperating King Merkin, a summer’s day of a girl, abloom like a yellow flower in the sweetness of young maidenhood, who in the Wejun manner entreated by affections as though to catch a husband.
She never tired of hearing me describe the marvels of our cities, and I never tired of watching her as she raptly sat and listened. Like country maidens everywhere, she dreamed of shining towns where handsome princes and their sweethearts lived in a dazzling whirl of romance.
“Speak again of this Governor’s Ball,” she begged me, and I would paint her a word-picture of the gala doings on a glittering winter’s night in Manhattan; the fine carriages drawing up before the old Federal Hall behind the teams of snorting, bobtailed geldings, the cream of New York society spilling out and pausing deliberately before the entrance to be oohed and aahed by the envious public; the rustling silk gowns, fur cloaks, and coiffures of the ladies; the handsome velvet coats and dashing military tunics of the men; the snow falling like silver confetti in the lamplight. Here now is Hamilton! Ah, Hamilton! His still-youthful face glows with intelligence, showing not the strains of factional strife. His political star has slipped from the sky’s zenith to the horizon, but waits there ready to rise again in glory. From the crowd a youth cries, “Huzzah, huzzah for Alec!” The New World Apollo doffs his fine hat and scans the noisy throng. “Columbia College cries huzzah for Hamilton!” I yell again. A smile of gratitude lights up his face, for wolves of faction jeer his every breath, and he salutes me, Sammy Walker! I am so dizzy with excitement I am like to swoon. He has looked into my eyes, recognized me! I am somebody now—!
“O, happy hour! Doth he have a lady?”
“Who? Me?”
“Not thee. This lion, Hamilton.”
“O, yes—”
“What is her costume, prithee tell.”
“Her hair is much bothered over, so as to look as though she just stepped out of a Grecian forest glade—”
“What is this ‘Grecian,” I would like to know?”
“An ancient land, whose arts and attainments long ago presaged our own.”
“Is’t far away as England’s starry glow?”
“A little farther. But I shall take you someday, if you would like to go.”
“O, no!”
“No? Tansy, you recoil as from a blow.”
“Nay, I may gleek upon occasion, sir. To fly across the vasty vaults on high, we needs be corpses, meaning we must die.”
“Pish. I could take you to England and Greece across the sea, and plunk you down again in Paradise as altogether well as when you left.”
“What is this ‘sea’? Is’t like the darkling sky?”
“Did you never see the sea?”
“No, an it pleases your mastership, not me.”
Of course, I was falling in love with her.
While I was busy falling in love and playing the role of Leader-of-Men, Uncle had botanized the island to his satisfaction and began pressing to depart these half-wild, poetical people, for he still intended to be at his hearthside on Christmas eve.
In order to do so, he desired to sail the sloop captured from the Spaniards to New Orleans, by means of coasting. We had reason to suppose that the Gulf of Mexico lay not more than a few leagues down the river, though the Wejuns had never ventured there in their little dugouts for fear of their enemies. I had as well some thoughts about bringing back home with us several members of the tribe, since we had no sloths to show for our pains and expense, for the fate of Raleigh’s colonists was one of the great romantic mysteries of America, and our discovery would certainly amaze the scientific community. My last and fondest hope was to include little Tansy in this party, but had broached the subject neither to her papa nor to Uncle.
Before I felt comfortable leaving, however, provision had to be made for their defense; thus the ultimately disastrous raid upon the Spanish garrison was conceived. For I believed that if the Gulf lay close at hand, there too would be found the military outpost from whence had come those Spaniards to their slaughter the day we were captured. It was my further opinion that said outpost would contain much in the way of arms and ammunition, and that it would be lightly defended, if at all. And so my boyish mind devised the naval adventure that would prove to be both our and the Wejuns’ undoing.
With twenty of the men aboard, we hoisted the ragtag sails and set off downstream in a fresh breeze. Not a league below the island, the river grew very wide. On either distant shore, the flat terrain was relieved only by the spiky knobs of palmettos. The sky took on a leaden, bellicose character.
After we had been under way a good while, I mustered the men aft and broke the news to them that Uncle and I would be departing their Paradise for our own country, and that we desired to recruit five good sailors of their number to help us sail the hulk to New Orleans. They responded with stunned silence. Off a reedy shoal to starboard, a rookery of snowy egrets rose as one in noisy, frightened flight.
“What say ye, men? Any volunteers? Hotspur? Gobbo? Flute?”
They glanced at each other without speaking, the wind tousling their sun-bleached locks.
“Art leaving Paradise forever, lordship?” Lovelace, my ensign, finally spoke up on behalf of the men.
“No, not forever,” I dissembled, knowing not what the future might hold.
“What shall become of us?” asked Bugbear plaintively, failing to complete his iamb.
“You shall be grandly equipped to defend yourselves, I promise. Now, which of you stout fellows will come with us?”
Again they glanced fearfully amongst themselves. No one stepped forward.
“You needn’t decide this minute,” said I, trying to put a good face on. “Think of it. For those who form our crew shall discover wonders beyond their wildest dreams. Very well, back to your posts.”
Their mood had turned as sullen as the sky. The breeze had become a hardy blow. The river was now several miles in width and brackish. The swells that dashed across our bow tasted of brine; the air was redolent of oysters and barnacles, the fecund life of an estuary. The Wejuns wore looks of apprehension upon their faces, for none had ever ventured so far from Paradise before.
About half past one o’clock, we spied the Spanish garrison, a small earthworks fortress thrown up on a miserable scrap of island where the river took a southwest bend to a larger bay beyond. It was situated to command a view of all traffic entering and leaving the river, and thus control it. We hove a mile off her with our bowsprit in the wind and sails reefed while I looked the fortress over through my glass.
Not a soul was visible on her ramparts, not so much as a sentry. The Spanish colors flapped emptily in the wind, the flag so old, tattered, and faded as to seem a very rag. At her wharf before her gate, a weathered dory rocked forlornly at its berth, the mast lashed fore to aft and riggings stowed. My heart raced: I had been right, the garrison was indeed unmanned.
“Up mainsail and bring her about, Mr. Lovelace!” I cried, and our canvas snapped smartly as it caught the wind.
Now we had upon this sloop a pair of swivel guns of very antique design, one each at port and starboard, and capable of firing a one-pound ball, a supply of which we had found on board. What Fort Paradise wanted, however, was real cannon, and these I spied upon the ramparts of the Spanish garrison,
ripe for the taking! We bore down on it.
“Light a wick and prepare to fire the starboard swivel,” I commanded.
We closed in: a mile, three quarters, an half….
“Aim for the gate. All right, fire!”
Wick to touchhole. A flash and a loud crack! The ball sent a roostertail of sand flying into the air, having struck short of the mark.
“That’s the way, my boys. Hurrah!” I cried encouragement. This first volley provoked no return fire from the garrison—further evidence that it was, in fact, deserted. “Hard alee, my gallant fishes,” I ordered them. “Let’s try the portside gun.”
“Ready, sirrah!”
“Aim and fire!”
We came about and fired. To my delight and astonishment, the missile found the target. A cloud of dust and wooden splinters blew out of the fortress’s gateway.
“Huzzah!” the men cried.
We made two more passes before her, blasting the gate each time and reducing it to rubble. Finally, we made ready to land.
The wharf was in as poor repair as our boat, and the seas being squally, we tied up with considerable difficulty. Five men stayed aboard whilst the rest of us jumped off, rifles, pistols, and swords in hand. (Poor Costard fell through a rotted plank, breaking his ankle, and had to be carried back to the ship.) We crept toward the splintered gate. Not a single Spaniard appeared to offer resistance. We ran inside. I at once climbed a stone stairway up the ramparts.
“Cut down that flag,” I told my men, not realizing that I was committing an act of war upon a nation at peace with the United States.
Inside the garrison nothing stirred save a rotted canvas awning before what must have been the captain’s quarters, and which flapped gloomily in the breeze. The prospect into the broad bay southward showed a sky-scape of terrible roiling storm clouds the color of ash. Whitecaps were rolling out on the open water. The horizon line was obscured by a curtain of haze, possibly rain.
“Bugbear, Tom, Basilisco, stay here aloft as watches.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“The rest, with me.”
Three squat buildings stood within the fortress’s walls. They were not much grander than Wejun cottages and made of marly blocks of yellow-gray stone, very crumbly to the touch. The roofs were woven mats of palmetto leaves, weighted down with flat stones. Like everything Spanish, these dwellings were in a condition of the utmost shabbiness. We entered the first.
It was dim inside, for no windows existed, only slots to fire out of in the event the ramparts were breached and the defenders fell back to their barracks. A barracks, incidentally, is what this hovel was—a foul little room hung with double tiers of rude rope hammocks. The rafters were festooned with oddments of their wardrobes, a shirt here, a stocking there. At the room’s center stood a round table made of a barrelhead and surrounded by packing crates: seats. A deck of cards was dealt to five vanished hands. I thought of those poor mutilated mother’s sons carved up in that little glade on Paradise Island. They had probably been called to arms hastily, I fancied, and left on their fatal sortie thinking they would return after slaughtering a few helpless Wejuns and finish their game. No such luck, thought I.
Tapers were found. My men marveled at the idea of running a wick through some solidified fat—the art of candle-making. It was quite new to them, being among hundreds of other skills lost to them over the generations. Some time was wasted here in plundering these common soldiers’ sea chests and meager belongings. They contained almost nothing of value beyond a few strings of rosary beads and a velvet cloak that must have been some poor fellow’s pride and joy.
The second building was evidently the officers’ quarters. One grim little room contained a crude plank bed. Standing in a niche carved into the soft building blocks was a painted statuette, about a foot high, of the holy virgin. The paint was peeling and the wood was cracked, denoting its many years of service. How pious these Spaniards were while they set about the task of systematically butchering two continents of primitive peoples. How such a man as this Spanish captain addressed his idol in the festering dark of the Floridian night and confessed his litany of foul deeds I was hard put to comprehend. More pathetic still, the bare little chamber evoked a character driven not by gold—for the prospect of fortune in this dreary Gulf Coast backwater must have been long extinguished—but a personality driven by a sense of duty. And what duty! To murder for the love of Christ?
The Wejuns evinced curiosity over the statue of the virgin. They had never seen such an one before and, of course, the entire grand fable of Christianity was a blank to them. For the time being I lacked the patience to explain.
“’Tis a likeness of his mother,” I told them. Thus, the object became at once an hundred times as abhorrent to them, and Wart, a wit amongst them, dashed it to pieces.
The third and final building we entered was a stout little edifice with an arched roof of that same jaundice-colored stone, set up against the earthen ramparts. This proved to be their storehouse and magazine, and it contained precisely what we had come in search of—guns, lead, and powder—plus something we had hoped not to find, viz., a live Spaniard. What is more, he was a Spaniard equipped with a lighted candle that, upon seeing us enter, he threatened to toss amongst the powder kegs. By means of mummery, he made his intentions very plain.
“Nunca hecho dañado a nadie!” he protested.
“Thou needy, hollow-eyed wretch,” Lovelace sneered at him. “Thou cur of curs, thou living dead man—”
“Or creature that doth bear the shape of man,” quoth Goatsbeard.
“Por favor! Por favor! No me matas! No me matas! No hecho nada! Por favor….”
“Goodly Lord, what a wit-snapper is he,” said Karoo.
“Careful, my boys,” I warned them, “for villain that he may be, he has the means to blow us all to England, should he choose.” The men muttered restlessly behind me. “No sharp moves, my hearties. You, Fernando, Rodrigo, whatever your name is. Give me that taper. Do you understand? Hand it over.”
The terrified knave merely froze where he was, apparently deaf to the English language. His eyes were rheumy, cheeks gaunt, clothing and person filthy. He must have suffered considerable privation since the fatal departure of his brethren.
“The candle, sir,” I demanded, trying to be firm without frightening him to the commission of a rash act. Still, it was no use. After repeated entreaties, my patience began to wear thin. “The candle, I say!”
“Nunca hecho dañado a nadie!” he continued to gibber, his veiny red eyes darting from one face to another of us, his hand trembling with the brandished taper. A muffled cry could be heard outside.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“’Tis Bugbear, sir. ‘A sail! A sail!’ he cries.”
“A sail?” I said. “What colors?”
Another cry from without.
“A Spaniel sail, my lord, is what he says,” reported Hammerhead, nearest to the door.
“O, shit and damnation,” I exclaimed. “Quick, Rinaldo, the taper! Give it to me at once. Hand it over, I say!”
The stupid wretch merely shrank further back amongst the kegs, sniveling like a beggar. An alternative course of action was obviously in order.
“Lovelace—”
“Sirrah…?”
“Clear the men out of here.”
“But—”
“Please, do what I say. O, yes, take this,” I added, handing him my pistol. He took it, skeptically, and cleared the room. “Shut the door behind you.”
He reluctantly did so. Now we were alone in the gloomy storeroom: myself and the cowering Spanish serveling. I sat down upon a crate. His eyes, moist with terror, followed my every move.
“All right, then, Felipe,” I said quietly. “What are you going to do? Blow us all to kingdom come? Or surrender? Eh?”
“No comprendo,” he said with a gulp.
“You don’t comprendo? I see. Let me put it this way. We have come a long way to seiz
e these munitions and we must needs be departing at once, without delay. Why not be a good fellow and hand me that candle, and then we shall all be happy.”
“Soy nada más que cocinero!”
“I’ll tell you what, Manuel. Why not just get on with the job, eh?” I stood up, seized a small powder keg, staved it in with my fish, and poured the contents all about his bare feet. “There you go. Well, Alphonso? What are you waiting for?”
The two of us stood face to face in that dreary room.
“Nunca quisé matar a nadie,” he said in a quavering voice, and then broke down in tears.
“A noble sentiment,” I said, not understanding him in the least. But as he stood there a’blubbering, I reached for the candle and snuffed the wick ‘twixt my thumb and forefinger. He surrendered without further struggle. “Come alone now, Enrique.”
I made for the door and threw it open.
“Hast scotched the rogue? Huzzah, my mighty lord!” said Lovelace, whose devotion was boundless.
“Let us say he has seen the better part of valor,” I replied. “Now mark you, Lovelace, he is a prisoner and I shall not see him abused. Come out, Diego,” I importuned him. “Come along now.”
But neither would he come out. Instead, to my horror he produced a long and glinting cook’s blade from the rear of his pantaloons, held it beneath his chin, and in a single deft stroke that evinced the deepest acquaintance with the butcher’s craft, slit his own throat from ear to ear.
“O, God….”
“Another sail! Of Spaniel colors, lord!” cried the vigilant Bugbear aloft the parapet. The Spaniard fell on the dirt floor of the magazine with a sickening thump, his fingers twitching and his life spilling out in crimson rivulets.
“We’ve not a moment to lose,” I said, trying to regain my composure. “Get all this onto the ship. Step lively, men!”
It was quite a haul: thirteen kegs of good dry black powder, twenty-four muskets, half a ton of lead in small bars, bullet molds, some small arms, several swords, two double-bitted axes, and a gentleman’s fowling piece. Also in the chamber were some carpenter’s tools, a box of assorted iron hardwares such as nails and hinges, two 30-foot lengths of small chain, and a keg of tacks. It took a quarter of an hour to get it all aboard. The Spanish ships, a pinnace and a larger brigantine, were approaching fast.
An Embarrassment of Riches Page 32