Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
1 Unexpected Guests
2 The Admiral Anson Inn
3 Scoutings
4 Books and Lessons
5 Schemings
6 The Night Raid
7 Of Queens and Princes
8 The Concert
9 On Dealing with Dogs
10 In the Cellars
11 My First Toast
12 A Load of Lead
13 Kiddings
14 Merry Adventure
15 Reflections During a Short Crossing
16 Boston
17 Off the Graves
18 More Dangers
19 Return and Departure
20 Afterwards
Author’s Note
About the Author
Copyright
About the Book
In 1952, off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, fierce winds force a small boat into port. The captain is the eccentric Charles Johnson, who then takes up residence at the small inn run by a young boy, Jim, and his mother. With each day, Captain Johnson becomes more and more valuable to the family and changes the fortunes of their struggling business.
But it soon becomes clear that the stranger living in their midst is more than just a sailor. Who is this man who tells such vivid stories about sailing on a pirate ship? And how can he possibly know so much?
Winner of the 2006 Governor General’s Literary Award for Children’s Literature
Written and illustrated by
WILLIAM GILKERSON
To the brotherhood of the coast
1
Unexpected Guests
Note to the reader: Most of these recollections are of events that happened over a half-century ago. All are burned in my memory. Because a few of the people described are still alive, I am changing some place names and almost all other names, except that of the captain himself, as I knew him, and whose ghost attends me in many ways. I cannot say for sure that the story is yet ended, but I have a sense that it is time to tell it, beginning with the day he blew into my life. It was mid-November of 1952, and I was twelve years old.
THAT FRIDAY STARTED badly, and it got worse as it went along. An early winter gale was thrashing the Nova Scotia coast, and just getting out of bed was a chilling event. Below, Meg ignored me at breakfast, and my mother was fretting over the inn’s unpaid bills. For my walk to school, there was freezing rain, with a lot of slips and one hard fall into a deep puddle of muddy slush, much to the delight of some of my classmates. During morning English, I was wrongly accused and convicted of shooting a paper clip at the blackboard, and was made to sit in the cloakroom, where everything was as wet as myself. I got no lunch because my sandwich had perished in the puddle, along with my dignity, such as it was.
In the afternoon, it amused the Moehner sisters to mock me in various snide ways. Outside, the gale backed easterly, bringing flurries, so when school let out, the Moehner brothers could throw snowballs at me. I plodded home with the wind in my face, except for the last few hundred feet, when I had to run flat out from a genuinely dangerous dog that was terrorising my life at that time. Home, the inn, brought safety but little comfort. My mother was on the point of tears over a letter from a creditor, and Meg was talking to the floor she was washing. I found some hard rolls to munch, and went upstairs to my room to change clothes and try to do homework. My room was a wintry universe of its own. It did have a fine, broad view of Grey Rocks Harbour and the bay beyond, but its only warmth leaked up from the kitchen below. We could not afford the fuel to heat the whole place.
Dry clothes helped, and I sat down and tried to think about what to write about pirates, which had been my choice of subject for an important history essay. No doubt I had been inspired by Treasure Island, and imagined myself as Stevenson’s fictional Jim Hawkins, which is a name I like well enough to use here. Anyway, whatever vision of buried treasure on a lush, tropical beach that had once inspired me, it was now long gone, leaving me stuck with the assignment and my burdensome life in general.
A hard gust rattled the old glass of my windows. I peered out into the gathering twilight, trying to conjure the Caribbean. Between snow flurries, I could see waves breaking even into the inner harbour; beyond, out in the bay, every shoal was clearly marked by white breakers. Then, unbelievably, I saw a small yacht, a simple working sailboat with tan sails and an old gaff rig, plunging in the seas, running for its life before the storm.
It was hard to imagine what folly had caught the little boat out in such weather, or how it had survived thus far, but here it was, and now fast approaching its doom, unless by some miracle it could make in over the bar. That was almost closed by heavy breakers at the moment, and looked impossible even for one of the locals who knew the water. I wasn’t the only watcher, because a red distress flare went up from the lighthouse on Grey Rocks Point. In a minute the harbourmaster Tom—who had a radio—hurried down to his boat with a couple of volunteers, all putting on their oilskins. I watched these events unfold through the old binoculars my grandfather had left me. He taught me to sail well enough so that I had come to think of myself as a kind of authority on the subject, and one of his first lessons had been never to get yourself into anything like the situation that the skipper of this boat was now in. Disaster loomed.
Flying under shortened sail, the vessel kept the channel well enough, yawing on the crests but keeping control, not jibing. The bar was a cauldron in front of it. I could see a lone helmsman at the tiller, with nobody else above deck. It appeared to be a yawl, maybe thirty-five feet, with a small mizzenmast carrying only a red ensign. From the mainmast flew a scrap of yellow flag. Everything vanished from my view as the vessel plunged into a deep trough, but then she rose, reappearing on the crest of a comber that picked her up and carried her across the bar in one long, breathless swoosh, past the breakwater, and into the relative safety of the basin. Very, very lucky, I thought.
Here came the rescue boat fighting its way out of the harbour, just in time to exchange shouts with the yacht, as it shot past on its way in. Tom gestured toward our dock; the yachtsman turned toward me, and I glimpsed him in the last light. My startled first impression was of a young pirate, a dark figure right out of the illustrations in my books, wearing a tricorne hat and wrapped in a boat cloak, an apparition from olden times. The lone sailor yelled something to Tom, then put his helm down, and trimmed his sail. Suddenly realising that he was steering for the inn’s wharf, I grabbed my coat and took the stairs three at a time, alerting my mother that something was happening as I raced to the back deck; there I took another skid, but made it down the steps to the wharf just as the boat nosed in toward the leeward side, next to my own little sailboat, the only other one on the dock at this season.
The boatman leapt to the halyards and dropped his gaff. With the sail flapping, he took up a coil of line and threw it across my arm, leaving me to hitch it to a piling while he tended to a stern line. Then there was a hurried fussing with a pair of spring lines, and the sail to be furled. “Come aboard, lad, and give me a hand,” he yelled at me, his head buried in wet, flogging canvas, and so I scrambled aboard and busied myself helping gather and gasket the sail. I was struggling with a last strop as the skipper finished with his end of the job, and ducked below through the hatch.
“Come down,” he called, and I was right behind him into the cabin. It was dark and damp, but out of the wind. A moment later it was lit by the glow of a kerosene lamp, and for the first time I had a clear view of the newcomer, who was nothing like the pirate I thought I’d seen through the binoculars. He wasn’t young at all: old in fact, wi
th a short white beard and close-cropped white hair, as I saw when he removed his hat. It was no tricorne, just a plain hat with broad brim that the wind must have cocked when he was sailing in. His old-style boat cloak was real enough, though; under it he wore a navy-surplus pea jacket, and under that an outer sweater, all of which he peeled off down to an under-sweater, hanging things here and there to drip dry. He had a square, creased face with wide-set eyes that looked tired.
“Captain Charles Johnson,” he introduced himself, plumping down onto a settee, motioning me to do likewise, “at your service.” He immediately pulled a tobacco tin out of a rack. “I’m getting too old for this kind of life,” he remarked, putting a gnarly finger into the tin, frowning. “It’s too damp to smoke. I’ll have to dry it out. Who might you be?” I introduced myself, mentioning that my family owned the Admiral Anson Inn, at whose dock he was now laying. His face brightened, then broke into a smile, missing one tooth. “Well, then, I can tell I’m in luck, because an inn’s what I need, and a hot bath, and this snug berth for my little boaty, an’ a bit of good company, which I can tell is what’s here, to my great good luck.” I asked him where he was from and where he was headed.
“The sea,” he said with a sweep of his arm, “in answer to both your questions.”
Here came a thumping on the deck. “That’ll be my mother,” I said, and the old man was up, throwing the hatch open. “Come aboard,” he said, helping her down, apologising for the poor quarters. He bowed to her, which she wasn’t used to, but didn’t seem to mind. “All I have to offer for drink is rum,” he said, drawing a bottle from under the settee. “No? Then I hope you won’t mind my having a nip to take the chill off me.” So saying, he poured himself half a cupful, and took a swallow.
My mother picked up the questioning where I’d left off, and with better results. It seemed our guest had sailed from Bermuda, and was headed for Boston, making the long passage late so as to avoid hurricane season in the North Atlantic. Adverse winds had driven him in here, “far off course and in distress, as you can see, and with my engine down.” He said he was a retired English sea captain, sailing “here and there,” supporting himself and his old yacht as “an historian,” as he put it. He had a round, English accent, cultured, but tempered with a regional dialect of some kind.
“A rich man I’m not, but I can pay my lodging, board, and berthing for Merry Adventure.” This was the name of his yacht, which he said needed some repair before he could be off for Boston, so he hoped the Admiral Anson could accommodate him for a while, starting now. Mother had an automatic sympathy for anyone in distress, and his story sounded all right; there was room for him and welcome. Indeed, there were no winter guests at all.
While Mother and the captain talked their business, I had my first chance to look around at the cabin of his yacht. It was plain as a workboat, with no varnish except to the table, which at the moment was covered with soggy charts. There were the settees, and a wide, rumpled bunk with a puddle in the middle of it, plus a bunch of shelves stuffed with things behind battens: books, boxes, tins, many covered with sailor macramé. Under the hatch was a little galley, with kerosene stove, copper sink, pumps, garbage pail. Forward there was another space of some kind. The thing that took my eye was the only decoration in sight, a flourish of antique weapons—a blunderbuss, a pistol, and a cutlass, racked on the forward coaming in a rope-work frame.
These objects captured my attention, but there was no more time. Mother had hurried along the business and had to get back above, with me, to get ready for whatever Friday guests might show up for supper. There would be our new person for sure, who said he would come up when he had secured his vessel, pumped her bilge, and dried some tobacco in his little oven. As I slid the hatch closed behind us, he was taking another swallow of rum.
“That was different,” Mother commented. “He’s the most cheerful thing of the day, but I hope he hasn’t made himself sick.” She fussed that he probably wasn’t doing himself much good, sailing around in storms at his age, and resolved to make him a good tea and honey mixture. This was her first line of treatment for the ills of the world, I think, because she made everybody drink so much of it. Motherliness was at her core, although she was a young woman, and I think likely the best mistress and manager the Admiral Anson Inn had ever had, because of that quality in her. She was tall and slender with an explosion of disorderly blonde curls, but she had been working too hard for too long, and our current worries were taking a toll on her. Yet she was an optimist: “The snow’s stopped, and cars are moving down on the street; maybe we’ll get some guests after all.”
The inn had fallen on hard days, not for the first time, or even the second or third during its nearly two centuries of operation. But hard days were turning to desperate at this moment in the rich history of the place. Our living, such as it was, depended heavily on the summer people. During the other nine months of the year, business was thin. This year there were no winter bookings at all, and the only locals who came for a drink or dinner were those that had always come, and they seemed to be getting older and dying off, leaving no replacements. The taproom was open from 5:00 P.M. to 11:00 P.M. Tuesday through Saturday, and a set dinner was served Friday and Saturday. There was no menu, just whatever Mother fixed that night. The place that got the most local business was down in town; the Sou’wester Beverage Room, which did have a menu, and a neon sign, and stayed open all hours. It was where most of the fishermen went because they could play pool and be loud. “I won’t have any of it in my place,” said my mother, and she didn’t, and there we were, a crumbling refuge of antiquity for an ageing clientele. Much of the work fell on me.
One of my many chores was to lay and tend a fire on the two supper nights, and it was among the few duties I liked. I would have kept the fire going all the time, except we couldn’t afford the wood. It was the original kitchen hearth, huge and ancient, but maintained and still there to warm up my favourite room in the place. My family had fully restored the public room to the way it had looked in the beginning, and it had a certain magic, especially by firelight, when the waxed old beams, panels, and shelves glowed. My mother had baked loaves in the original bread oven, just to see how it worked, and it had worked fine, although it was too much trouble to use. We had a functional kitchen around the corner, out of sight. The bar ran across the end of the room, with a framed photograph of my father plus his medals in the place of honour, next to a faded print of Admiral Anson. No bottles were kept in sight. There were three conspicuous brass beer taps, two of which worked, which was one more than we needed, because we only had one kind of beer. The inn was long on charm, but short on choices.
I was building the fire when the gate bell rang, and Tom came stomping in, full of questions about our lone mariner. Mother and Meg were in the kitchen, so he drew his own beer. Tom had special privileges. Besides being harbourmaster, he was a longtime patron and friend. I was spared answering when the captain came in through the deck door. He was full of thanks to Tom for coming out to save him; grateful that it wasn’t necessary, and wanting to buy him a beer. “I’ll buy you one,” said Tom, all admiration for the way he had handled his boat coming in. The old captain repeated the same story that I’d heard earlier. Tom was an experienced skipper of fishing schooners, the knockabout schooners that we still had then, and he knew the sea. He marvelled that the old man was doing what he was doing with no crew, “Like Slocum,” he said, comparing him to the famous Nova Scotia captain who single-handedly sailed his own small boat around the world.
“Nothing like that,” said the captain, protesting there were lots of small-boat sailors since then, and that he had no ambitions for glory, just to get to Boston. He feared that by the time he could effect his repairs to Merry Adventure, the season would be too late to attempt it. He might have to winter over, and he had all kinds of questions for Tom as to where his boat could be hauled, who could work on his engine, and suchlike.
Around this point in the convers
ation, Milton and Merle Eisnor came in. It was Milton’s birthday, and I got them seated, and alerted Mother, who came out to say hi, and express her sympathy for the passing of their older brother, Charles, who had done our roof repairs around 1940, and who had been in the Anglican church choir until just a couple of months ago, when his voice failed. Meg took their drink order (beer for both), and I went back to Tom and the captain.
“I called Customs and Immigration and told ’em you’re here under the duress of storm,” Tom was telling him, “and that’s important because Grey Rocks isn’t a port of entry, as you prob’ly know. But around here there’s a lot of sympathy for anyone in trouble on the sea, such as you, and I expect some official will come over from Baywater on Monday and clear you. The police might come sooner because of your quarantine flag.” He was talking about the rules of entry that apply to ships flying the yellow flag, sailing in from foreign waters. “I told ’em I cleared you to dock. Meanwhile, here’s to your being here, safe and welcome.” They hoisted their glasses, then Tom had to get back to his family. I told the captain I was going to turn the radiator on in his room so it would be warm for him when he wanted it.
“I’ll just sit and enjoy the company and this grand room, and have a bit of supper, when your sister can bring it.” He gestured toward Meg, who was the waitress but not my sister, as I made clear right away. I should mention here that I had a crush on Meagan O’Leary, who was exactly twice my age, and infinitely out of reach, except as my friend. I was awkward around her, and she was as kind to me as she’d been to her old cat, Cleo, whom she had loved. Cleo was gone now, so I was getting more attention from Meg, off and on, although she’d spent today talking to herself.
The captain tried again to catch her eye, but she had been delayed by Tom flirting with her as he paid his tab. Tom could usually get a laugh even out of grim people when he set his mind to it, and he was giving Meg special attention because she seemed down. The captain turned to me with a touch of impatience: “I’ve been living on hard cheese and cold corned beef for about the last five days, getting a workout, and I’ve got an empty glass. Could you find it in your heart to fetch me my supper, Jim, anything your mother recommends, and another beer?” I told him Meg would have to do it because I was too young to serve spirits; I just bussed tables, and those were the rules. “Ah, yes, the rules,” he sighed.
The Brotherhood of Pirates Page 1