“Hurry, men!”
It was not possible to bring any of the cannon with us, and what a huge disappointment this was. But we simply did not have the time to get them aboard. Instead, I had the men scuttle them, dumping them over the ramparts and into the tidal muck below.
The wind had risen to near gale force. Big rolling waves crashed on the windward side of the island. It put me much in mind of the great hurricane of ’90 that roared out of the Atlantic and slammed into my dear Long Island. (I was very young then, but I remember the howling air being filled with improbable things: women’s caps, cornstalks, a rooster, loose shingles. During the height of the storm an iron crowbar was driven straight through the heart of a linden tree in the nearby hamlet of Huntington. It was a great curiosity of the district for years afterward.)
Loading the sloop was not easy, for she pitched this way and that way at her mooring, and we lost a few kegs when they rolled free of hands and shattered against the bulwarks. It was out of the question to stow them belowdecks, for the hold of this creaking old scow was ankle deep in bilgewater.
“Ready to cast off, Mr. Lovelace?” I shouted above the gale.
“Aye, sirrah, an it please you, anytime.”
We hove back out into the river, our mainsail full and hull singing. With the storm blowing directly out of the Gulf, we were able to run before the wind upriver, our tattered harlequin sail outspread and glorious. We had made less than a league from the Spanish fortress when those two sinister ships once again hove into view. The brigantine stopped on the lee side of the island, unwilling to hazard the shoals of the river with her deep draft. But to my alarm the pinnace beat forward on our wake, without a moment’s pause. The prospect of an actual engagement with a live enemy—not merely an idle cannonading upon a vacant fortress—turned my exhilaration to the darkest dread. For in the real world of modern naval combat we were as ill-equipped against this foe as an Egyptian dhow against one of Bonaparte’s men-of-war.
“Charge both swivel guns with a pound of nails,” I told my ensign, “and see that every free hand is ready with a musket.”
“Aye, sirrah, we’ll sting those Spaniel puppies!”
Though our sails could not have been more favorably full, it was equally so for the pinnace, and they soon commenced to close the gap between our running crafts. Through my glass I counted six cannon on her deck, of the six-pounder class. Also visible through the lens was the curious sight of the Spanish captain, gazing right back at me through his own glass.
Just as they inexorably closed on us, so too did the river narrow as we plied upstream with the gale to our backs. In a little while, they were an hundred yards off our stern, then seventy-five. Then they were right upon our stern, stealing our wind.
“A nombre del Rey, Carlos IV, halta!” cried the Spaniard captain through a leathern speaking cone. My knowledge of his language was, of course, nil, but anyone not an imbecile could tell that he wished us to come about and stand. When it was quite clear to him that we would not obey his order, he called a dozen crewmen forward with muskets bristling. Luckily for us, neither their port nor starboard cannon could be employed against us in the present disposition of things, nor had they any arms on deck like our swivels. My men, however, showed marked unease at the sight of the more disciplined Spanish sailors.
“Shoal ahead, sirrah!” cried Thistle, our lookout up on the masthead, and at once I sensed a remedy to our problem.
“What side?” I shouted aloft.
“I have forgotten myself which is which,” he cried down.
“Port to left, starboard to the right.”
“Then it’s starboard, an it please you, sir.”
Just so, for the pinnace was now drawing up upon our starboard. The enemy captain was yelling through his funnel, “Halta, tus perros sucios!”
“Up thy filthy arse, thou Spaniel whoreson!” Lovelace replied politely, doffing his cap. A volley of musket fire raked our deck as a blue pall of smoke swirled into our sail. “Why, bugger me! I am shot through and slain!” my devoted ensign uttered in a tone of complete astonishment before this Earl of Fishes corkscrewed to the deck, clutching his breast. Two of our men held him in their arms as his eyes went waxy. My terror was extreme, but there are times when even panic must take a back seat to vengeance.
“Starboard swivel—”
“Aye, sirrah!”
“Take goodly aim upon that Spanish churl and blast his head into the rigging!”
“With pleasure, my lord. Adieu thy lights, thou scum!”
He touched off the small cannon. Its charge of nails raked the enemy’s ranks and cut to ribbons several of them, including the captain, who dropped his speaking cone and reached for his face as though he had merely been stung by wasps. But it had been reduced to a pulp, like a squashed pomegranate, and he slumped over his own rail an instant later, as dead as my dear Lovelace. The Spanish crew fell into disarray at his loss, yowling and caterwauling, firing at random. Three others of my men lay sprawled upon our deck, dying or already dead, but the rest held to their posts, good sailors and better soldiers. Suddenly our sloop lurched. A deep groan shivered its timbers, and I realized our keel was scraping the top of that previously sighted shoal. The mast shuddered. My men glanced anxiously at one another. For a moment we hung suspended on the bar, listing badly to port. Several more powder kegs broke loose and tumbled overboard. Then a gust of wind welled behind us and the mast creaked as the big sail ballooned out and lifted us off the shoal. Another volley of vicious Spanish gunfire scoured our deck. My poor, loyal Karoo took a terrible wound to his jaw and spun around the deck like a rag doll dashed to the floor by an angry child. Water, Bugbear, and Hammerhead likewise fell. Our ranks were being decimated.
Suddenly the pinnace struck the selfsame shoal we had just sailed free of. Her masts groaned and rigging shook. A thunderous crack resounded amidst the screams of her crew as her mainmast crashed to the deck, crushing several sailors. A cannon broke loose from its carriage, rolled across the deck, and crashed through a bulwark into the river. What with their deeper draft than ours, our enemy was hopelessly aground. We hove away from her, from the screams and imprecations of her stranded crew, and a shout of victory went up among my valiant men. It was only the second time in two centuries that they had beaten their arch-foe—but at what a cost I tremble to relate: five dead, including my ensign and first mate, and seven wounded, some horribly. What sort of victory, thought I, would this be for the Wejun wives?
The stranded pinnace soon disappeared from view. The euphoria amongst our crew was short-lived, however, for the roaring gale soon turned into a howling maelstrom. The sky grew as green as bilgewater. The trees along the banks bowed against the wind like mere reeds. Storm-blown leaves and branches littered the river, while along the shore many shallow-rooted giants toppled like tenpins. We raced forward, mainsail half-reefed to keep our mast from breaking, and jibs furled. The wounded we comforted as best we could, which is to say, not very well. For we had nothing aboard to avail their relief save assurances that they would recover from their wounds and live, even when it was an arrant lie. Then, at last, we sighted Paradise—the Wejun isle, that is, not the place where the God of Love doth dwell.
We lost our mast in the attempt to jibe at the sheltered cove below the village proper. Our boom swung ’round and down she came, just like that, killing poor Touchstone as it fell.
“Drop anchor, men! Get the wounded off her first!”
I was yet up to my chest in the lagoon when one of the villagers staggered out of the path through the woods, wobbled in place for a moment, and shouted above the wind, “Hell is empty! And all the devils are here!”
Following this pronouncement, he fell face forward in the sand, disclosing an Indian war axe buried in the center of his back.
We glanced dumbly at each other—after the terror of our chase it seemed a sort of ghoulish prank. Moreover, the victim in question, one Jack-a-merry by name, had a reputation as a joke
r. But it did not take us long to apprehend that he was quite authentically dead.
“Stinkards!” wailed the men in despair and struggled for shore.
“Fuzees! Fuzees!” the crew shouted desperately at others yet aboard the dismasted sloop. These now grabbed as many muskets as they could seize, jumped ship, and slugged through the murky water toward the beach.
“Hold ’em high!” I admonished them. “You’ll wet the flashpans!”
The muskets were passed all ’round. Cries, shrieks, and screams were audible from the village amid the howling blasts of the storm—the pathetic outcry of their wives, children, loved ones. These appeals shattered whatever military discipline they had lately learned, and all broke ranks for the village, some trying to load their weapons on the run, others brandishing them aloft by the barrels like clubs, and emitting the yelps of savages.
“Stop, men! I implore you! Form ranks!” I shouted after them, but it was no use. I charged a pistol and a musket and followed close behind.
The scene that greeted me was truly the end of the world, the end of the Wejun’s sweet little portion of time and place called Paradise. Every cottage stood aflame, roaring in the wind. Bodies lay everywhere, men and women, young and old alike, little boys and girls shot with so many arrows they looked like porcupines, many with limbs cut off, some yet groaning in their death throes. By the time we arrived upon the scene, the enemy had eloped out the other end of the village. Now, only a few sporadic gunshots sounded over the taunting yells of the retreating savages in the far distance.
Uncle I located amid a patch of pink hollyhocks in what had formerly been the garden of the Duke of Owls. He lay in a heap, his head in a pool of bright and viscous blood. I thought him dead for certain, and the tears streamed down my cheeks ’till I saw his leg twitch. At once I dropped beside him and rolled him up upon my lap.
“O, Uncle!”
His face was a purplish mass where some savage had struck him four-square with a club. His nose was clearly broken and askew, his front teeth cracked in half, lips bruised like berries. I placed my hand behind his head, trying to hold it up, but recoiled as I felt a warm, sticky wound. His head lolled to one side. The brutes had scalped that side of his head, peeling off the skin from above the ear to the bald margin near the top of his head. His eyes opened; he tried to speak but couldn’t.
“Sssshhh. Don’t move. Be still,” I said, and searched the rest of his person for wounds, but there were no others. He must have been struck down in the first wave of the invasion, deprived of the scalp, and been left bleeding and forgotten in the chest-high flowers.
The noble Duke of Owls was not so lucky. Robin lay beside his wife and little boy in the dusty footpath beyond his garden, the three in loving last embrace, their mingled lifebloods oozing into the porous earth. The wind moaned in the surrounding forest like the dead of the ages. I cried and vomicked all at once, and then the rain came.
It fell as if the brooding skies themselves were sickened with remorse, great lashing sheets of water that sent plumes of steam from the burning cottages and washed clean the blood-streaked corpses of the dead.
I lay Uncle back amidst the flowers and commenced my search for Tansy. I had turned over several bodies when the remnant of my valiant crew emerged from the woods with a prisoner in tow, a topknotted, copper-skinned savage bedizened from ankle to crown in an elaborate scheme of swirled tattoos. I hastened toward them in the stinging rain. Two of the men, Tom and Basilisco, were sharpening stakes, very businesslike.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
They did not reply, but merely glowered at me. Soon, the stakes were ready. Monger flung the captive to the muddy ground. Three more Wejuns fell upon him, holding down his arms with their knees. The prisoner behaved with the utmost stoicism until they commenced driving the long stakes through his wrists and feet, and then he screamed and writhed like any poor wight.
“Stop that! Stop it, I say!” I shouted, but they would no longer obey. I had the eerie feeling for an instant that I myself were dead and didn’t know it, for that is how they responded to my commands. When the prisoner was fully immobilized upon the ground, the men all drew their knives and fell upon him like a pack of ghouls, cutting pieces out of his living flesh and eating them before his eyes. I railed at them to cease, to no avail. Rather, they glared up at me, blood dripping from their mouths as if relishing my horror of their evil act as much as they enjoyed the vengeful abomination in and of itself. They consumed the poor wretch methodically, from the limbs inward, and concluded by slitting through his breastbone, removing the still-beating heart, and passing it ’round for bites, like schoolboys sharing an apple. They had only just finished when Merkin limped forth in the torrential rain. He carried Tansy in his arms, her body naked, the broken arrows yet protruding from her ribs, and he lay her at my feet.
“Go,” he said in his brittle voice, the cold rain dripping off his beaked nose, the wings of his feathered helmet broken and askew. “Go, thou bringer of death.”
“I … I cannot leave you now—”
“Go!” he shouted, seizing a rapier from one of the others and holding the tip before my face. “Iambics fail me now. Go!” he shouted, “Go! Away at once!”
“But my Uncle … he—”
“Toads, beetles, bats light on you! Go, I say!”
“But what will you do. Where will you go—?”
“Live. Wander. Elsewhere. Further. Go! Else thy heart become my supper, go! In England’s name: get thee gone and go!”
I backed away from them. What a terrible portrait they made, the dozen survivors huddled in the lashing wind and rain, a mutilated savage at their feet, a murdered angel of a maiden before him, and the broken old King surrounded by everything he had ruled and loved, turned to a wilderness of death and ashes. I returned to Uncle in the hollyhocks.
“Come, dear fellow,” I said, kneeling beside him.
He opened his eyes and blinked in the deluge.
“Mmmpphh—”
“Don’t try to speak. Here. Can you put your arm about my neck? That’s a good fellow. See if you can stand now.”
I helped him up, placed his arm about my waist, and helped him hobble forward. In the meantime, the Wejuns advanced as a group. They formed a kind of cordon behind us and drove us back down the path to the lagoon where we had left the sloop. It too was now destroyed. The wind had driven it from the cove and stranded it on a shoal downstream, its broken mast stuck crazily in the submerged sand bar like an old fence post, the hull awrap with riggings, and the patchwork mainsail draped over the stern like a beggar’s shroud. The Wejuns, led now by Monger, prodded us with their swords to the water’s edge. The storm had whipped the lagoon to a froth. The air was filled with flying leaves and twigs. Tree limbs crashed in the verdure around us.
“I’m afraid we must depart Paradise without delay,” I explained to Uncle. He nodded his head to indicate that he understood, and we hobbled into the water. “Hold fast to my shirt,” I said. We waded into the river.
My mind next went blank of all concerns save one: make the opposite shore. Not storm, not crocodile, not weariness of limb or weariness of living’s ceaseless horrors might oppose that necessity. And by the all-perceiving, all-indifferent God of nature—or possibly despite him—we crawled upon that reeking opposite shore, and lived!
16
Have circumstances ever required you to live like a marsh rat? For three days and nights we huddled ’neath the shelter of a topped swamp oak (Quercus shumardii) while the hurricane raged above us, battering the riparian world and all its denizens. I emerged from our watery den only to procure the freshwater clams that were our sole nutriment in this dire interval. (And just as well for Uncle, whose battered mouth and broken teeth could not have endured a sodden biscuit.) The Ocmulgee oyster, as this mollusk has since been named, compares to a Long Island cherrystone as an horse apple compares to an October pippin. Odd to relate, though, they were full of perfect little blue-b
lack pearls, for which in our present circumstances we had about as much use as a marsh rat has for a vermeil snuffbox.
Uncle’s scalp wound, while very painful and ugly, proved superficial. And when at last the hurricane ran its course, and flocks of winging cranes beat westward against the pumpkin-colored sun, and the alligators roared anew along the river’s timeless, teeming bank, we left our marsh rat’s lair for good, bid silent, sad farewell to the tragical isle across the storm-swollen stream, and limped off northeast toward home.
Sometimes, in cases of extreme adversity, the body keeps going long after the mind has snuffed its lamps. And so, forward we lurched, Uncle and I, arm in arm, away from the reeking swamps of Spanish Florida back toward the closest reaches of the United States, viz., the half-wild state of Georgia.
For a word-portrait of its deep forests, grassy vales, sweetwater brooks, verdant uplands, stolid, rocky mounts—I recommend Bartram.1 For ours was anything but a leisurely scientific tour. Rather, it was a furtive, skulking flight across a territory filled with some of the most pugnacious of all the southeastern tribes of savages, those “Stinkards” of Wejun lore, whom we Americans call the Creeks. That they did not catch us and visit some ingenious and abominable cruelties upon our persons seems more a matter of luck than deft evasion. For we spied roving bands of them everywhere, war parties bedizened in their campaigning colors, often passing in fearsome file bare inches before our noses, as we hid ourselves ’neath a hollow log or a clump of hydrangea (H. quercifolia).
Once, whilst waiting out the perilous daylight hours upon a recessed shelf of granite high above a peaceful, grassy meadow, we observed a most heinous slaughter of a fugitive tribe of Calusa by these same Creeks. The former, a ragged little band of no more than fifty individuals, having been driven from their native haunts by the Spanish, and doomed to wander north into the lands of their enemies, had just arrived beside the little stream that watered the meadow, had just thrown up their flimsy shelters and charged their supper fires—the children playing at the brook’s reedy verge—when down from the pending rocky hill opposite our perch swooped an hundred Creeks, warriors at the peak of fractious manhood, shrieking like fiends and lusting for carnage. And when they departed that little vale an half hour later, not a live Calusa soul remained. Not babbling babe, nor doddering grayhead, nor female of any sort did they spare. In years hence, these same bellicose Creeks would visit equal havoc on the white intruder, but at this time they were happy to exterminate their redskin cousins, for warfare was to them not a political tool of the last resort—it was the very essence, the animating principle, of life itself.
An Embarrassment of Riches Page 33