The Brotherhood of Pirates

by William Gilkerson

  On Wednesday, the captain spent all afternoon in Dr. Wentzel’s dentist’s chair, with the consequence that he could eat only soup for supper. Mother made him a chicken broth, and he went to bed right after. On Thursday, somewhat recovered, he went for a long chat with choirmaster Campbell, who invited him to sit in with the church choir’s practice, where he filled in the missing baritone so well as to be asked to join the group for Sunday services, much to the annoyance of Meg.

  “He’s worming his way into our lives,” she said.

  On Friday, he paid me six dollars, per the terms of my employment, allowing me to get my paint set and colour my drawings of Viking ships. I’d had to do so little to earn my pay; I began to haunt his table in the hope of something to put my conscience to rest, and also for another of his stories. This he promised for Sunday afternoon at four o’clock sharp; and he agreed that Jenny could sit in, if her parents allowed her to come. Jenny’s parents were protective of her—too much so in her view—but they agreed to bring her to the inn for the special lesson.

  All during the week I kept track of Klaus Moehner’s boat, taking full precautions whenever it was in its dock. Soon, I knew, it would lay up for the winter, and there would be no safe moment for me. On my Saturday errand-run to town, I thought I saw Grendel, but it was another dog. On Saturday evening the captain got Meg out again by playing his tin flute for the last of our customers, who bought another drink and stayed to listen. Meg had some criticism regarding the way he was playing a tune, and in learning her version he got her into singing while he played, which made a music so sweet that the room was transfixed. Much as Meg had gotten a distaste for the captain, she could not resist singing a few more airs to the sound of his pennywhistle. At the end of the impromptu concert, she gathered the best tips she had seen in some time, gave him a curt nod, and retired to the kitchen, where I followed her. I was amazed at what they had accomplished with no practice.

  “He doesn’t embarrass himself with his instrument,” Meg conceded. This sounded thin, and I told her so, but she had nothing more to say to me. There had come a distance between us, but then, Meg had put a space between herself and the world, so I didn’t take it personally. I went back to the captain’s table, to watch for an appropriate moment for a question or two, but he was gathering up his papers.

  “I’ll need you Wednesday after school to help me shift Merry Adventure over to Tom’s yard. The tide’s right then. And I’ll see you and your friend at four o’clock for class,” whereupon he retired.

  There was no more whispering in church the following Sunday morning. I sat with the family, and the captain was at the front with the choir, wearing a robe. His voice made a resonant foundation for the others, mostly women, except for Ernie Fischback, whose high tenor was pleasing but soft. The captain’s baritone descended into basso during one of Meg’s solos, and it became a duet, with sounds that competed and made a perfect balance. The hymn was much remarked on after the service, where the captain came in for a lot of compliments out on the lawn.

  There were more comments at Sunday dinner, to which the captain was again invited. Aunt Karen couldn’t resist having another go at him, this time more subtly, starting with his music. He had learned to sing in Devonshire. Further probing, however, only got her a very teacherly lecture in the geophysical characteristics of Devon and Cornwall, with notes on its indigenous flora and fauna, sociological history, and more. When he excused himself, there was some relief.

  “He does have a talent for not talking about himself,” Aunt Karen commented when he had left the table, “and I think he’s given me a warning of what to expect when he’s questioned.”

  Meg agreed. “I just learned more about Cornwall than I wanted to know.”

  As four o’clock approached, the captain was not at his table. Remembering his tardiness of the week before, I reckoned he would be at least fifteen minutes late, maybe more. There was still some warmth in the late afternoon sun, so I went to meet Jenny at the gate when her parents dropped her off. We lingered outside for a few minutes as I tried to prepare her for the vivid storytelling she was about to hear, then we went in to wait. But to my surprise, the captain was there, pacing in front of an old National Geographic map of the world that he had mounted and propped up. He had changed into a baggy tweed suit and vest that was unironed; he wore what looked like a school tie of some kind, and his spectacles were perched on his nose in a way that made him the perfect image of a professor. He was as sober as a judge.

  “By that,” he said, indicating the clock with his walking stick (now a pointer), “you are exactly nine and a half minutes late, which is very disrespectful not only to your teacher, but also to your own education.” This was gently spoken, but he put a hard eye behind it. I started to take the blame, but he didn’t want to hear it. “Get seated and get your notebooks and pencils out.” He regarded Jenny. “Your name? Right. And you’re here because you want to learn about piracy? Very well, Mistress MacGregor, your reasons are your own, but it is an important subject. You are welcome to audit the class, which today deals with the transitional period between the end of the Viking era and the adaptation of their methods during the medieval period and into the early Renaissance. We are discussing the evolution of piracy only in Northern Europe, not the Mediterranean or Asia.” He tapped the map with his stick. “Have you got that?” We scribbled away. “I presume, Mistress MacGregor, that you have read your colleague’s notes about Vikings by way of preparation?”

  “No, but he’s told me about it.”

  I found myself putting my hand up, as in school.

  “Question?”

  “If the Vikings were really so powerful, why did they die out? What defeated them?”

  “A new religion. In this case Christianity, with the basic virtues that the major religions hold in common. Different teaching, rather, where chopping people up came to be more frowned on. The Vikings lost their Valhalla, and turned to farming, fishing, and trade. Also, the kingdoms were getting better sorted out, and things were a bit less of a free-for-all than during the Dark Ages. Europe got a middle class—people who were better off than the serfs, but not aristocrats, although they came to support the aristocrats. There were a lot of shipowners among them, and trade flourished, and taxes were collected.” He paused to let us write it down, nodding to Mother, who had come to listen, wheeling in Aunt Karen. Even Meg had ducked in.

  “So there were a good many ships about. The graceful ships of the Vikings spawned other forms, grew bigger with more decks, more masts and sails, like this.” He opened a book he had brought to a picture of a thirteenth-century cog. “Those ships evolved into these,” he indicated a fifteenth-century carrack, “which made a rich prize for any pirate. Who were the pirates? Just about everybody at sea, or at least that was a prudent rule to go by if you were the skipper of this carrack. Ashore, there had come boundaries and the laws of nations, but these held no sway at sea. As in Viking times, the big fish ate the little fish. Because every ship and cargo you pirated fattened everybody of your home port, from the merchants to the local baron to the monarchy itself, it was thought to be a very good thing for you to do, and you taught your children how to do it, and life went on. Or not. If the chaps whose ships you were taking got hold of you, they would hang you. If you were lucky. Sometimes some rather more unpleasant things were done. Those were barbarous days,” he added, darkly.

  “Ughh,” said Jenny, who wanted to know when we were going to get to Captain Kidd. “He buried his treasure on Oak Island in Mahone Bay,” she added, “and they’re still looking for it.” The captain scowled.

  “Please do not interrupt, Mistress. I will discuss the infamous Kidd when you have the foundation of how he came to be. Without understanding who he was, how could anybody expect to find any alleged treasure he might have left? We won’t get to him for several classes yet. We’ll move along faster if you make shorter notes.

  “About halfway through the medieval period, there came
efforts to bring some law to the sea, at first by the seaports, and then nations, issuing licences to their own pirates, written letters under seal saying the captain carrying it was not a pirate, and therefore should not be hanged if taken, nor his crew. If you wanted this licence, your authority charged you for it, then told you whose ships you were not supposed to take, and got a share of the prizes that you did take. Your authorities were also the adjudicators of what you brought in. Your judges. This worked out very well for the authorities, who could never be accused of piracy because they were, after all, the authorities, and also because they didn’t go out and chase ships.

  “The sailors who did, and who had a licence to do it, came to be called privateers, and often enough their papers saved their necks when they were captured, because the other chaps were doing the same thing. To your victims, whether you were a legal pirate or an illegal one was a technical point of little immediate concern.

  “During the later 1300s, the first cannon were mounted on ships; over some generations they became bigger and efficient enough to sink a ship, which happened for the first time in 1513. Did you get that date?” This was directed at Jenny, who rolled her eyes, but wrote it down. “Good. Not that the pirates wanted to sink anybody, for obvious reasons, but cannons were useful for slowing down a chase by crippling the rigging, and necessary for self-defence. For the capture, however, the pirate still used spears and swords, along with pistols, muskets, swivel guns, and grenades. By the middle of the 1500s, warships were being built that looked like this.” He turned to another picture in the book as Jenny tried to stifle a yawn. Mother and Meg left, taking Aunt Karen. He had passed the teacher test. The clock rang one bell. “With ships such as these, you could sail anywhere in the world you wanted to go, looking for places you didn’t know were there, if you didn’t mind a long painful voyage through uncharted waters. In those days, sailors still had their nose.”

  “Nose?” Jenny inquired. I whispered that I would explain it later; the captain ignored her and pressed ahead, indicating points on the map.

  “Opening a trade in slaves, ivory, and gold, the Portuguese navigators explored the African coasts well before the time of Columbus.” Jenny made a wriggle.

  “Question?” It wasn’t a question, just Jenny’s squeamishness on the whole subject of slavery, although she said she realised it was a long time ago, and now people had learned that they couldn’t own one another. “Who ain’t a slave?” growled the captain. “Do you think slavery’s a thing of the past? I urge you to examine the world more closely. Back to our subject, the explorers. Columbus got credit for discovering a continent that had been found by the Norsemen, and revisited by Basque fishermen, and some Scots with a Venetian navigator, as well as others who kept mum about their fishing grounds. Chinese junks landed on America’s West Coast. Indeed, by the time Columbus came along, he wasn’t even the first Italian to discover America, though he certainly did come onto an interesting enough new part of it.

  “Fleets followed him, exploring and claiming for Spain the lands and islands of the Americas, starting here,” his pointer went to the Antilles, then swept through the Caribbean to the Spanish Main and beyond. “All of this,” he made a sweeping circle encompassing Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, and most of South America, “with this bit, Brazil, going to the Portuguese, all by decree of the pope in Rome. There was a certain cost to the pope’s sanction, of course, but the profits to Spain were beyond the dreams of men. The Spaniards had only to explore, loot, settle, and defend, in that order.

  “Noting their success, English and French explorers did the same thing for their own sovereigns by following along in the northern wake of the Vikings, carving up North America, which was big, but nowhere near as rich as what Spain had got. Dutch ships went out, too, from here,” his stick tapped Holland, “around Africa, all the way across the Indian Ocean, through the Straits of Sunda, to here,” his stick encircled Indonesia. “They claimed much of it, and it yielded good booty in gold—and spices that were worth as much as gold back in Europe. A lot of poor sailors died getting it there.

  “In other words, the European powers now had the ships and weapons to do to the whole world exactly what the Vikings had done to Europe centuries earlier, and the same thing that the caveman on his raft did to the chap from the other side of the river. So nothing had really changed much, except—in what history books call the Great Age of Exploration—the great pirates sailed out with the blessings of their governments and of course God.” Jenny’s hand shot up.

  “Question?”

  “God would never condone piracy,” she declared.

  “It is a moot point, Mistress, because they all sailed ‘by the grace of God,’ all of them, and it was their great gift to the many peoples who had not yet made the acquaintance of that god, in exchange for all the worldly goods they had. All through history, pirates have been some of the most religious people. Your Captain Kidd chap had a pew for his family in New York’s Trinity Church; Bartholomew Roberts took over four hundred ships, but he always conducted church services on the Sabbath, with prayers during the week; and there were plenty of other God-bothering pirates, too.” I could see that Jenny was having a hard time absorbing this, but she was not to be put off her point.

  “Whatever you say, pirates are bad. Everyone agrees on that. Every book.”

  “Hmm,” the captain pondered. Then he neatly tore a piece of paper into quarters, wrote the word bad on two of them, and good on the other two, and handed each of us a pair. “Regard those as labels,” he said, “and put them on whatever you think appropriate.” Neither one of us was quite sure what he meant. “Here, let me start,” he said, taking Jenny’s good label and holding it over me. “Would you agree that this chap is a good thing?” She nodded, as I did when he put my good label over Jenny. He smiled. “So far, we all agree. Now, what about this?” He turned to a picture of a cannon in the book. I liked cannons and put my good label on it at once, but to Jenny it was bad.

  “There, you see?” the captain said. “There’s no good and bad when it comes to taste; the words lose meaning, which you can call the first point of awareness, leaving you with no good and bad to fall back on. When you can accept that, you can come back to good and bad again, because they’re not yours anymore. But we have digressed. Now we’ve got the British and French in North America, the Dutch in the East Indies, and the Spaniards just about everywhere else; and, arguably, they were the biggest pirates of their age, which made them tempting targets for other pirates, opening the world to what we have come to call the Golden Age of Piracy. I confess I’ve never thought of it quite in those terms. In any case, it certainly started a golden age of pirates against pirates, known to your history books here as the Elizabethan era, from 1558 to 1603.” He regarded Jenny.

  “How would you label Sir Francis Drake?” he asked her.

  “Good.” The answer was unhesitating. “He was a hero.”

  “Well, then, you’ve just labelled a pirate good.”

  “Have not!” said Jenny.

  “Queen Elizabeth called him ‘my pirate’ and nobody disagreed; I will deal with him in the next lesson.”

  Jenny, bored, became irritated by the captain’s professorial posture. “Why should we believe any of this?”

  “You mustn’t. I urge you not to believe anything I’ve told you, or anything else, either. You’ve talked about your books; go check them. Check facts, and live your life, and look around.” The clock struck. “That will do for today. Thank you very much for your attention. You are dismissed.” With that, he gathered up his map, book, and stick and went above.

  “I hated that,” said Jenny when he was gone.

  “Well, he does know his history,” I defended him. “You have to give him that.”

  “Fill your boots.”

  5

  Schemings

  THE WEATHER HELD fair during the first half of the week, so Klaus’s boat was out working, which meant freedom from Grendel for my t
rips back and forth to school and for errands for Mother. I was with her when she brought Roy Moehner’s development company (of which Moehner Realty was a part) the payment on the loan that would keep the inn out of his hands for three months more. She was delivering the cheque personally to make sure there was no question about its having gotten there. The last payment had been mysteriously delayed, supposedly in the post, making no end of trouble for her. Roy Moehner emerged from his private office with a gentle and welcoming smile. “What a nice surprise to see you, and you, Jim.”

  He seemed like a loving uncle. I didn’t want to shake hands with him, but I had to, or else be rude to a man who had a power that was not to be trifled with. He was once mayor, and had picked his successor in that office, so that he himself could concentrate on making more money. He was grey-haired, looked like an ageing movie star, gave generously to all the local charities (as well as the volunteer fire department and the police retirement fund). He headed the Lion’s Club, was chairman of the board of this and that, and was the undisputed chief of the Moehners.

  “How can I help you?” he asked, with a gesture that seemed to offer the world at his fingertips.

  “I came to make sure there’s no confusion this time about our payment reaching you,” said Mother. As he accepted it, his face took on a kind sadness.

  “I’m of course glad to have this, but I can’t help but be aware of the difficulties you’re having with the old place; I know this can’t be an easy obligation for you to meet.”

  “It would be easier if you would refinance my note, as I’ve asked you before. Any bank would do it for me.”

  “Now, you’re aware this company’s rules about mortgage loans won’t let me do that, much as I would personally like to.”