The Brotherhood of Pirates

by William Gilkerson

  “It’s me,” I announced with a rap.

  “Go to my table and wait for me,” came his voice, and as I left, the music started again, some kind of flute, or whistle. So back down I went, reflecting on all of the teachings I’d ever had to be prompt. “Punctuality is Virtue,” read an inscription (in Latin) over the doors of my school, and it was part of me, and still is. As the minutes ticked past, my image of Captain Charles Johnson began to fade. Click, I distinctly heard the big minute hand engage its next station. Either he had totally forgotten the time he had given me for our appointment, or he was purposely keeping me cooling my heels while he practised his instrument. If it was the former, it was forgivable; if it was the latter, it was beyond my experience. When the clock rang another bell (marking the half-hour), I was just gathering up my notebook to leave when he came down the stairs, very businesslike, and a bit rumpled.

  “Now,” he said, standing in front of the fire to warm his backside. “It’s pirates. Well, before I go into it, I have one thing to say to you that is more important than anything else about the whole subject. It’s the thing you must remember always.” Here he paused. “In fact, it’s much too important to address without a refill of this empty glass; can you find Meg? Tell her to make it a double ration.”

  So off I went; not finding Meg or Mother (the inn being closed for the Sabbath), I took it upon myself to pour him his rum—damn the rules—double ration, and deliver it.

  “Now,” it was my turn to say, leading him to where he’d left off.

  “Here’s to now,” he toasted. I prompted him that there was something he wanted me to remember. “About pirates, you were saying . . .”

  “It’s a big subject, pirates. Piracy. My side of our bargain, as I take it, is that I’m to teach you about it, but let’s start smaller. How many words are you given in your essay?”

  “Five or six written pages.”

  “You’ll need more,” he said. “When is it due?”

  “Before the Christmas holiday.”

  “You’ll have to extend it.”

  I said, “I doubt pirates would be considered an important enough topic to break the rules for.”

  “Rules are a given,” he said. “What could be more important than seeing who makes ’em, and who breaks ’em, and who makes their own, and how it’s worked throughout time?” He paused to take a sip of his rum. “The rules. I reckon the first act of piracy happened when a caveman on a raft from one side of a river met another chap from the other side, attacked him, took everything he had, and made the rule that the river belonged to him, and his family, of course. So there came government, and anybody from the other side of the river who did the same thing was a criminal committing an act of piracy.” He groped for his tobacco and pipe.

  “Minoan texts are full of pirates. Much later Julius Caesar was captured by pirates. They held him for ransom, and released him when it was paid; he went back with warships, captured his captors, and hanged them. Pirates were throughout time, and they’re here still. History would remember Julius Caesar as a pirate if he had done the things he did in ships. He broke all the rules. So that’s important in seeing how the political world works, but it’s not nearly as important as women.”

  “Women?” He seemed to be losing the thread of the conversation.

  “Women. They’re a very important thing to understand, lad, and it’s hard to do that without understanding pirates and horses.”

  “Horses?”

  “Aye, but we barely have time to deal with pirates, who have a special place in the hearts of most women, and in their dreams. A very special pirate, no slave to any rule of man, who will always sweep her from the bonds of her life in a ship with sails spreading free, and a loyal crew that is very respectful of her gentility. He will fight to the finish for her, her own Captain Blood, or the chap from Frenchman’s Creek, or any of those movies and books.” Here he lit his pipe. “I could have made a lot more in royalties if I’d written fiction.”

  I reminded him that my essay was required to be a factual history, probably starting with the Vikings.

  “And it’s not just women who love pirates,” he continued, “it’s everybody, children on up, back to the olden times. It’s always been that way. Why does everybody always like pirates? Why do you suppose that is?” I shook my head.

  “Well,” he sighed, “we’ll get to that in due course. As to the Vikings, what have you been told about them?”

  “That they were pillagers, murderers, and thugs.”

  This got a solemn nod from him. “That is essentially correct. Doing exactly what they’d been trained to do.”

  “With what possible justification?” I asked. He ruminated.

  “Go back a thousand years. Instead of this cosy room, you’ve got a northern winter ahead of you cooped in a very smoky hut somewhere in Norway or Sweden or Denmark, with nothing to do but listen to tales of battle, learning that the best thing in the world is to be a good warrior. Your uncles practise fighting with wooden swords. You do too. It’s your school. You learn to throw a spear, swing an axe, get good at it, get ready to put your life on the line; if you’re killed, you’ll go to Valhalla, Viking heaven, where you can sit around drinking mead with all of the other fallen heroes for all eternity. You’ll be favoured by the gods.”

  Here he blew a big puff of smoke in my face, causing me to try to wave it away. “So, imagine after a winter of breathing an atmosphere like that with every breath, spring comes, and you’re out. The boats are launched, and you’ve got the fresh air, on an open deck, and you’re headed south, most likely. A fair wind carries your ship across the North Sea, and a beautiful ship she is—double ended and graceful, a marvellously crafted thing that can ride easily over stormy seas, or be rowed through calms. Mostly she sails. She has only one square sail, but the grander sailing ships of later centuries will work the same way, just with more sails and more decks. Your ship has only one deck, and it’s open to the rain and the stinging salt spray. For protection, you can pull your skins around you. You are trained to be as tough as your shipmates, and if you can be tougher, that’s all to the good.

  “Other ships like yours have carried settlers to Iceland, Greenland, and even the great western continent beyond. Columbus won’t get there for another five hundred years. In the hands of good sailors, this little vessel can take you anywhere you want to go, and you’re among the finest sailors of all time. You can land where you want, pay a surprise visit, and be off again before any force can march to challenge you. Or you can stay and claim the place, which is how big areas of Europe’s seaboard got resettled by Norse people. And you’ll keep your old teachings for centuries to come.” A pop from the fireplace punctuated his point.

  “You’re carrying some cargo to swap, furs, maybe slaves, but you’re hoping for plunder along the way. That would be any ship weaker than yours. Looking for one, your captain goes probing down the English coast—let’s say he’s chosen the Eastern Channel—sailing by day, anchoring at night. He has a sea chart that’s pretty rough, and short on a lot of important details, so he relies more on his nose than anything.”

  “Nose?” I questioned. I had learned coastal navigation from my grandfather, with compass, protractor, and dividers.

  “Nose.” He was very definite about that. “Today it’s nearly a forgotten instrument because there’s radar, and motors, and sonar, and all the other gadgets.” A sniff. “Technology has cost us our nose,” he added, having a swallow of rum.

  “Now you’ve got a brisk northwester, sailing broad between the Flemish Banks to port, and the Goodwin Sands to starboard, heading fair into the Dover Strait, one of the richest hunting grounds in the Northern Seas, as they were called. You sight a ship far ahead. There’s a bit of sail trimming to be done, and then you’re foaming along at eight or nine knots, maybe ten, with a fair wind and following sea. Your prey tries to run. It’s bigger than your ship, and looks much the same, but it’s a lot slower. You gain on it. There
aren’t many people to be seen, just tempting bundles of cargo on deck. As you approach, you take up your shield and weapons. It’s the moment for which you’ve been praying to Odin: Battle. Your helmsman nudges the ship’s stem into your opponent’s quarter, and all of you swarm over his rail on the lift of a wave.”

  The captain paused, glancing behind me. So spellbound had I become, I hadn’t noticed Meg entering the taproom, which was dark tonight, except for our table. It was six o’clock, suppertime.

  “Chowder, cheese, bread, and Brussels sprouts,” she announced, setting down her tray and summarily laying out his supper.

  “Ahhh,” he said, rubbing his hands, asking for a beer and another rum.

  “Another? Where’d you get your first one?”

  I said I’d poured it because nobody else was around, which got me a stern look, and the reminder that I was due in the kitchen for our own supper. I went there and ate with Mother, Meg, and the distraction of having been left sword in hand, ready for some action.

  “Where are you tonight?” asked Mother.

  “With pirates,” Meg answered for me.

  “Vikings,” I corrected her, and it was a half an hour before I could get back to hear the rest of the story. The captain was writing again, this time a list of things he needed to do as soon as he’d cleared customs the next day. “Do you have a good family dentist?” he asked, and noted down Doc Wentzel’s name. I was impatient to hear about the rest of the battle.

  “Right. Well, where did I leave off?” Memory refreshed, he plunged me again into the fray. “Just as your feet hit the deck, the bundles of cargo shed their coverings and turn out to be a troop of armed men; others rise up from behind the bulwarks where they’ve been hiding; too late, you realise you’re facing another crew of Vikings, just as fierce as you are, and twice as numerous. They’ve dragged ropes in the water to slow down their ship, and now they’ve got you. You’ve fallen for a trick that’s been the undoing of many a pirate. Before you have a chance to recover from your surprise, you’re under a shower of spears, and you don’t have a chance.

  “The ending of the story is, if you fight, you’ll be chopped up. If you don’t, you’ll be sold as a slave to somebody who cares less about you than your mother does. Here endeth the lesson for today.” He smiled. “Would you run up to my room and fetch me my pennywhistle? It’s on the bed.”

  This turned out to be the tin flute I’d heard earlier. It was a flageolet, the simplest of instruments, but when he put it to his lips and played an air with great precision, it brought Meg out from the kitchen.

  “That’s ‘Black Donald’s March,’ ” he said, finishing.

  “And it’s not how it goes,” said Meg.

  “How does it, then?”

  “Like this,” she said, humming it.

  “Like this?” he played it her way, which wasn’t much different to my ear.

  “Better,” she commented, collecting his dishes.

  “You have a lovely voice,” he told her.

  “I do,” she said, returning to the kitchen with her tray.

  When I went to bed, he was still playing to himself by his fire.

  4

  Books and Lessons

  MONDAY MARKED A return to my workaday world of school, where I arrived without incident. The weather had cleared, and I did not expect an encounter with Grendel, because Klaus’s boat (a red cape islander), was out—gone from its berth near the end of the government wharf, which I could see with binoculars from my room. (I had soon learned to keep track of its movements. When it was gone, that meant Grendel was either out running traps with his owner, or penned up somewhere.) It was math in the morning. For a change, I had a hard time getting into it. A piece of my mind was still at sea, captured by the Vikings.

  “You seem far away today,” said Jenny when we got together during lunchtime. Jenny MacGregor was my best chum. We had started kindergarten together, then we had been bumped ahead a grade, setting us apart from everyone else, and together we were the best students in our class (although we were a year younger), which did not endear us to anyone except sometimes our teacher, Miss Titherington. Jenny and I were each other’s only friends in school.

  I told Jenny the story of my weekend, leaving out the little secrets that had come up, describing my new friend Captain Johnson, and bragging about his talents as both a sailor and as a storyteller. Lunchtime wasn’t long enough for the full account, so I picked up where I’d left off at afternoon recess, trying without success to recreate something of the power of his peculiarly vivid narrative. I tried to imitate it with feeble results.

  “Anyway,” I left off, “for a second he made me feel what he was saying as though it was really happening, and I keep thinking about it.”

  “Maybe he’s a hypnotist,” she cautioned me. I thought not. He hadn’t dangled any watches, or told me my eyelids were growing heavy. “Well then, maybe he is an avatar, one of the wise ones who are immortal and have secret errands. They move among us in disguise.” I should mention right off that Jenny lived in a world inhabited by all the invisible beings she’d ever read about, and she read everything she could find about ghosts, avatars, spirits, vampires, hypnotists, levitation, Madame Blavatsky, and anything else occult. She had a round face on top of a thin neck, and had to wear glasses. Jenny spent even more time by herself than I did. I told her I doubted avatars needed dentists or drank rum, and I thought he was just a particularly talented storyteller.

  “I would have to hear him before I could say anything more,” she pronounced as the bell rang. I said I would ask him if she could listen in. The last hour of the day we spent on art projects, with Jenny painting big, yellow sunflowers. I drew Viking ships with spears whizzing through the air between them.

  The bike ride home was uneventful, but I was surprised back at the inn; as I came through the gate, there was the captain in his cloak with a naked cutlass in his hand, poking with it at the ground under the pantry windows.

  “Hah!” he said. “Foundations. Look here. Feel along this line with the blade tip.” He handed me the cutlass, and I did as instructed, finding the edge of a buried wall a few inches under the soil. “It comes to a corner here, where I’ve put a rock to mark it, and another one there,” he pointed, “and rejoins the inn over there. I think it has to be what’s left of the original structure that the inn was built over. Let’s pace it off and get a rough measurement.” This activity was interrupted by a car pulling up outside the wall. “I’ve been entertaining myself while waiting for the officials to show up and clear me. This may be them. You’d better run down to Merry Adventure and hang that sword back where it belongs; that will save us from having to explain what we’re doing with it.”

  So off I ran, just in time to avoid the two government officers who came through the gate, representatives of Customs and Immigration. As the captain led them down to the wharf, I saw him telling again the story of his distressed entry. He was finishing as they arrived at the boat. He introduced me as his new assistant. They clambered aboard, looking around, then went below to look around some more. I noticed that the vacant spot we’d left under the bunk (with the removal of the chest) had been filled with some boxes and bits of gear that looked very natural there.

  “Are you carrying any bonded stores?” the Customs man wanted to know. “Spirits, tobacco, or firearms?”

  “Spirits?” The captain seemed confused.

  “Whisky, brandy, spiritous liquors,” the Customs man patiently explained.

  “Of course. Yes, I do understand. Forgive me if I’m a bit slow today. I’ve taken quite a battering for an old chap, and not quite recovered. Your pardon. I do have a bit of rum, just a bottle or two. Maybe three.” He groped under the settee. “Here’s one, half-full, offer you chaps a drink? No? Now, what else? Tobacco. Just this bit here,” he reached for his tin, “which needs a refill. Firearms? I have this.” He produced an old brass flare pistol, which the officer looked at and handed back. I saw his eye tou
ch the decorative antique weapons and move on.

  “Have you carried anything at all ashore?”

  “Uh,” the captain pondered. “Toothbrush, that kind of thing, clothes, just personal gear. You can have a look at my room if you like. Frightfully good of you to let me come ashore. A lifesaver, that.” Here the Immigration man demanded papers, which the captain had to rummage for. He seemed disorganised and bumbly, smaller and older somehow. “Ah, forgot, had them in my pocket!” He produced the papers, and they were examined.

  “Since your entry here was accidental, how come you asked the harbourmaster to point you to the Admiral Anson’s dock?” (This was news to me. I had assumed he was there at Tom’s suggestion, when they had exchanged shouts.) The captain said he’d heard about the place at one time or another, had an antiquarian’s interest since it was where he’d been blown, and started on a ramble about some of the other old places he’d seen in his life.

  “How long do you plan to stay?” the Immigration man interrupted him. The captain scratched his head. He had a small bald spot right on top of it.

  “I have to have the old girl out of the water for some work to her planks before I can safely put to sea again, and there’s my old Ailsa Craig diesel to repair, and here’s winter. I’ll be off for Boston come spring. Have you ever been in the Boston Athenaeum? Marvellous collections; some quite valuable source material.” The Immigration man glanced at his watch and started stamping the captain’s papers without further examination.

  “Who told you about the Admiral Anson Inn?” I asked when they had gone. He scratched his head again, still in bumbly mode, unable to remember because it had been so long ago.

  In the week following, I saw little of him, although we heard through the Grey Rocks grapevine of his activities. He had gone to the bank to exchange his money into Canadian dollars, and he opened an account. On Tuesday he made arrangements with Tom for Merry Adventure to be hauled into a boat shed where she could undergo whatever needed surgery and repair to its blown engine. Getting the parts was the main concern, the engine being very old.