The Brotherhood of Pirates

by William Gilkerson

  “Source?” He picked up an auger and started drilling holes with it. “Why, all the accounts they left. What’s your teacher’s source to the contrary? Ask her to name you any earlier pure democracy, with a vote for every person, never mind their wealth, or race, or religion, or sexual preferences, or sometimes even gender, for that matter. Anne Bonny and Mary Read were women pirates on equal shares under Calico Jack. Ask your Miss Titherington where anything like that happened earlier, and give her a good, primary source bibliography and you’re laughing. She’ll have her own question on her own plate.”

  “What bibliography? What books?”

  “The old standard ones will do: Esquemeling, Bartholomew Sharp, Raveneau de Lussan, the Sieur de Montaubon, Ringrose, Dampier, Rogers, Shelvock. And Johnson, of course. I may be leaving out one or two, but those are the chaps who were out there buccaneering, privateering, pirating, call it what you like.” He said he would rummage for copies of their books, most of which he thought he had somewhere. “Just a question of finding ’em, what?” He sighed. “One accumulates so many books, I fear, all now damp stained, and dear little Merry has to carry them all, don’t you, darling?” He patted her hull. “You’ve another question?” he asked me, continuing to drill his line of holes.

  I had a confusion of questions: where should my essay end, and how was I going to get there? I didn’t have time to read all of those books, even if I could read them. It took forever to decipher a page of Esquemeling. Also, nothing seemed ever to change, with governments sponsoring pirates century after century. Where were the real pirates? He finished drilling his holes, opened a box of bronze screws, and turned the first one home, using a screwdriver head in the auger. The whole place was perfumed with newly worked pine, and the wood smoke from its scraps. Tom’s stove glowed red-hot with them. The captain put another screw in place. Had he even been listening?

  “As to your questions, there’s been no end to piracy, so where you end your paper is up to you. But after Morgan, things did change. There came a new generation of the brotherhood, which I reckon is what you’re calling the real pirates. Long John Silver, eh? Johnson’s pirates, whom Stevenson cribbed from. Quite. Well, now you’ve got all the background you need, except for Kidd, who marked a generational change, which is an honour he could have done without.”

  Before I knew it, there in Tom’s shop, with Tom band-sawing frames for a cape dory in the background, I found myself auditioning as Captain Kidd. After my experiences as a deckhand, I wanted to be a captain again, and a gentleman, although Kidd was no Drake, not by the captain’s account of his background. “He was a big Scot, son of a Presbyterian minister, who didn’t follow his father’s calling. He did work his way into command of a buccaneer ship, and helped capture Saint Martin from France for the English governor at Saint Kitts. That was in 1689 as I recollect, just one of the times England and France were at war. After Morgan, the rules started to tighten in the Caribbean. There was still a licensed living to be made, buccaneering, in times of declared war, maybe capturing the enemy’s buccaneers, who might well be your former shipmates. It was the luck of the draw, and times were thinner.

  “So Kidd chap, who is forty-four, distinguishes himself in some hard fighting—too hard for the liking of his crew, because while he’s ashore being honoured by the governor, they sail away with the ship. Very embarrassing.” He cinched home another screw. “You’re Kidd. No ship, no money, just the clothes on your back. What do you do now?”

  According to the captain, the thing I did then was talk the governor into giving me another ship and crew and a warrant to find and recapture my former ship, but before we could get into it, Tom called for our help with something he was cutting, and I didn’t get feeling much like Kidd, just then. Nor later, as we went home together, me wheeling my bike, getting a background for wherever he was leading me. With harder treaties, the heyday of the buccaneers in the Caribbean had passed, sending them off to more profitable, less troublesome places, such as the North American ports and the Pacific coast (where some of Morgan’s buccaneers had remained after his raid on Panama), and the Indian Ocean.

  Relentlessly, Kidd tracked his former ship to New York, an economically troubled colony that needed all the hard cash it could get. Buccaneers were a good source. Kidd’s ex-crew got there, sold their loot and their ship, bought another, and sailed for the Indian Ocean moments before Kidd got there to catch them.

  “What do you do now?” he asked.

  “Chase them down wherever they are,” was my notion—mistaken, as I learned.

  “Kidd got to New York at a moment when two competing would-be governors were at war. The upheaval stemmed from England’s Glorious Revolution, after James II. I’ll spare you the politics. You can look it up in your books. Kidd sailed into a shooting war, picked the winning side, running arms, soldiers, and munitions. He missed his quarry, but came out well ahead in New York, honoured for his service, again with friends in high places, plus profits. Swallows the anchor and moves ashore. Marries a well-off widow in 1691, and settles into a pleasing house at 119 Pearl Street, if I remember correctly. Very cosy. New respectability, two daughters, a family pew in Trinity Church . . . the good life. There was only one thing wrong.” Here we approached the inn, and I felt obliged to pedal ahead of him, so that we arrived separately. Mother had noted and approved our real standoffishness to one another and I thought it prudent to keep the impression.

  In point of fact, the family had lots more than me to think about. The inn’s infractions had come by registered mail, and the news was worse than bad. That Sunday dinner was short on cheer.

  “There’s no point in getting quotes, because it’s going to cost so much more than we can ever pay for,” Mother said with a hopelessness that was shared around the table. There seemed no antidote. Meg said she would put together another concert—a brave offer, but futile. Some thousands of dollars were needed.

  “Maybe there’s something in the lower cellar,” I reminded Mother of the boarded-up passage the captain had found. This was news to the others. Everybody looked over to where he was sitting, in genteel exile, sipping coffee, reading a three-day-old Boston newspaper.

  There was some discussion about the cellar, but without much hope. “People who want to hide something of any value usually make more of an effort to really hide it,” Robin pointed out, noting that planked-up doors were not a favoured camouflage. He did promise Mother that he would go down there and have a look around himself sometime during the week. A week would be allowed anyway, before any decisions, while the family got rough estimates for the probable costs involved, and Mother got together with Uncle Bill about any possibilities for legal challenges or delays. “But unless we get divine intervention,” she capped the subject, “I don’t know what choice we’ve got but to sell the place for what Roy Moehner’s offering. If we let him foreclose, we’ll get nothing.” Shortly after the meal, they packed up for another Halifax trip, Mother to see Uncle Bill, Aunt Karen to the doctor, and Robin to drive them. It was an emergency.

  “You are in charge,” she told me, “and you’re to have no truck with Captain Johnson, am I clear? Functional talking only.” I promised, and off they went, leaving Meg and me to clear up. When I returned to the captain’s table, he was gone. I looked again around the old room, with its glow of ancient wood, thinking about living in some affordable place inland, with plasterboard walls, and felt very low. What would we do? Here came Meg, on her way out to the trash box, adding to it some letters that she had not opened. Especially since the concert, she had gotten mail, but she never answered a letter in her life, as far as I ever knew, or read one.

  Feeling groundless, I asked her what she would do if we lost the place, as seemed most likely. She regarded me with sad eyes. “This old inn’s been my salvation, and if there’s no more inn, then there’s fate shovelling me back out into the world again.” Something about the look on my face made her hug me. As she did, her drummer arrived to pick her up. �
��Bye,” she said, leaving with him.

  I went up to knock at the captain’s door, reckoning he would take my mind off my lonely miseries, but he was not there. He was probably working on his boat, and I had no idea when he would return. Needing company, I called up Jenny and told her everybody was gone, and how would she like to come and check out the inn for ghosts again? She had found six or seven during previous visits. “Maybe you missed some,” I suggested.

  Jenny did come, although ghosts weren’t her current interest. She wanted to go back to the cellar and find the treasure she thought must be there, based on what I’d told her. She had her rubber boots, her own flashlight, and a notepad for making maps. “Either we go down there, or I’m going back. Get your boots.” So I did, and the kitchen flashlight, plus a spare from behind the bar.

  The padlock was off the outer door, as was the lock on the deep cellar’s entrance. The grating stood open, just as the last time we’d come down here weeks before. “He’s here!” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me that the captain would return on his own. What was he doing?

  “Maybe he’s getting the treasure while the getting’s good,” said Jenny, leading the way below. Working our way along the same dank passage we’d followed previously, we were trying to figure which one he had come out of before, when he came out of it a second time, preceded by the beam of his flashlight.

  “You two again?”

  “I thought you were supposed to wait for me to open the sealed passage,” I reproached him.

  “I haven’t opened anything. We can, though, if you’d like.”

  My immediate worries about how I would explain to my mother were overwhelmed by Jenny. The direction in which he led us was away from where he’d just come from, I noticed. Picking our way around the puddles, we followed him along the main passage, farther than we had explored, to a bend where he stopped and held his light on a row of vertical planks, nailed to the heavy framework around what had once been a rough portal of some kind.

  “Hold your torches on it, and let’s have a look.” Working his fingers into an open seam, he gave a pull, and an entire plank came away with little fuss. The saltwater floodings of the cellar had kept the wood from rotting, but had completely rusted away the spikes. Our flashlight beams darted into the gap, finding only darkness.

  “There is treasure down here,” pronounced Jenny. “I can feel it.”

  “That would be a very great surprise, Mistress MacGregor, and I wouldn’t get your hopes up,” he cautioned her, wrenching away another plank, and then another, opening a doorway into the passage beyond. Entering, we found ourselves surrounded by the natural rock of a tidal cave, carved by nature, and paved with a worn footpath. Piled at its beginning was a jumble of rickety crates, spilling mouldy old junk when kicked. Beyond, the tunnel took a bend.

  “D’ye hear that?” The captain put his finger to his lips. Coming from somewhere not too distant was the sound of surf. He had to restrain Jenny from running ahead, which was just as well, because when the cave finished its bend, it made another sharp one, then the path ended abruptly in a sheer drop, a fatal trap to anybody walking too quickly. Beneath was a churn of waves surging in and out. I realised this was the depth of the crevasse I had only seen from the sea. Daylight came through from its other end.

  “This is where pirates could have landed,” Jenny opined, “and rumrunners.”

  “I’m afraid neither,” said the captain. “Nor anybody else, not in any boat. Just look.” Close below, the surge rumbled and hissed, churning through sharp fingers of striated rock.

  “What’s the use of a tunnel to nowhere?” I wanted to know.

  “Your question’s its own answer,” he said, which did not help me. Nor did I much care at that moment. I had never liked it down here, and with the disappointment of no treasure trove, I was ready to go back, but he pursued the point. “Who would build a path to a somewhere that is nowhere, and then board over it later? Why,” he answered his own question, “cooks, minions, varlets, and legions of scullery maids bearing bags and boxes of all the trash that this old inn produced over its generations. It was the trash and garbage dump. In the summer, they could just take it out and heave it over the cliff, but this was the way to go under the snow. The kitchen communicated directly with this part of the cellar in the last century. Later on in history, you had trash men coming around to take away junk, and you sealed up the old tunnel because it’s dangerous. Look,” he said. We had returned to where we’d started, and he stooped to examine the contents of the crates we’d found there. “Kitchen trash.” He was right. On top of the nearest box was a pile of battered old tin plates, encrusted with whitish mould, plus empty cans and broken bottles. Rummaging, the captain pulled out a teapot, old-fashioned and very slimy.

  “Silver?” Jenny held out a moment of hope.

  “If it were, it would be treasure indeed, Mistress, but nobody would have thrown out silver. What we have here is just about the cheapest stuff in the world, pewter. Lots of it. Not just pewter, but lead-based pewter. Over time, it gave everybody who ate or drank from it lead poisoning. When people discovered that around the middle of the last century, everybody who had old pewter got rid of it. Most of it was melted down, but this lot got thrown out. Nearly thrown out . . . brought down here and just left.”

  For Jenny, there was no treasure, not even a smuggler’s corridor with bones. My own hopes for a magical solution to our problems were left in the cave, which the captain reclosed as we left, propping the planks back in place.

  “Some treasure,” was my gloomy comment to Jenny when she went home.

  “There’s treasure. Somewhere. I can feel it. It’s what he’s looking for down there. It’s why he came here in the first place.” She got me to agree to collaborate in keeping secret eyes on what else he might be up to down below.

  13

  Kiddings

  “SO . . .” THE CAPTAIN stoked his pipe. “Kidd had it all.” He was back on point in his story. We had dined, separately. I had cleared his table, built up his fire, and brought him his rum, wanting none of it myself. “Successful career as a privateer, the right patrons, everything a chap could want—loving, wealthy wife, beautiful children, nice house, family pew in the church that the right people went to. Everything rainbows except . . .”

  “A ship?” I was ahead of him. He nodded.

  “Aye. As he sat in that church pew, listening to hymns and holy scripture, what he heard was the music of the East, and it was seductive music, played on strange instruments, and he yearned for the feel of a deck under his feet again. The Indian Ocean was where the best buccaneering action had shifted in the waning years of the seventeenth century. The Caribbean was no longer the happy hunting ground, nor was the west coast of Africa. On the other side of Africa, however, you had Madagascar, where slaves were an abundant commodity, and the Arabian Sea, and the Malabar and Coromandel coasts, full of rich natives. The natives had ships with fat cargoes—silks, brocades, ivory, pearls, jewels, slaves, silver, gold, the lot—and they were helpless against the warships of the West.”

  “Natives?”

  “Non-Christian, non-English peoples. With that simple separation, all the ‘heathen’ of the world became fair game, and you had better ships and cannons, and some kind of document, from your favourite New England governor, in a far ocean where few documents got examined. It was a long trip to get there, but worth it when you did.

  “Needing bases, the buccaneers turned their attention to Madagascar: it was strategically placed, and full of warring tribes that could be exploited in the same way the warring tribes of Ireland had been dealt with, for instance, by Queen Elizabeth. That is, you came in with a powerful military force, took sides in the local war, demolished the enemy, became strong enough to dominate your ally, turned on him, then took over. It was a time-honoured technique that the buccaneers learned from their own governments, and put to use on Madagascar.”

  “Poor natives,” I commented.

&
nbsp; “Poor natives indeed,” he agreed, “but nothing new. The Africans had their own slave trade going among themselves for centuries. The Westerners simply opened a new outlet to the market. In any case, by Kidd’s time, factors had come out from New York and established fortified trading posts where booty could be liquidated without having to sail it home. Goods and slaves could be exchanged for spirits, sailcloth, nails, shoes—gear hard to come by out there—and necessaries like gunpowder, cannon, hemp, chain, tar, lead, all in exchange for rubies and diamonds and gold. Above all, gold. Gold was what you got for everything else.

  “There sprang up a regular traffic between Madagascar and New York. One could send mail. If a buccaneer wanted to pay off and go home, he could buy passage on the next New York-bound ship for a hundred pieces of eight, plus food, a small price for a sailor who had made thousands, as Avery’s crew did. Avery came out from New York after Thomas Tew, who had sailed home to be toasted as a celebrity in New England. Kidd couldn’t stand being left out of it all.”

  “All right,” I said, ready to be included. “I am Kidd.”

  “You’re nothing like him. He was a big brute of a buccaneer captain, readier to bully a rough crew than to handle a teacup. He was no gentleman, your Kidd chap, except for a veneer in society. The days of the gentleman pirates were gone, alas. The thing you do have in common with him is a liking for permissions from the authorities, which is arguably very prudent. Kidd wanted to plug into the age-old formula for the sea marauders: get aristocratic patronage, investment, and some kind of documentation to let him sail off and do things to make all of his investors happy, with lots of loot left over to buy his way out of whatever he’d had to do. That was the system, since time before memory. With a wink and a nudge and a nod.” He brooded. “And what’s changed, eh?”