The Brotherhood of Pirates

by William Gilkerson

  “If you’re feeling a bit pongy, stay above ’til it passes. Do as I told you: keep a straight spine, chin lifted above the horizon line, and try to eat an apple, or cracker or something.” I gave him a baleful look. Aside from being tired and seasick, I was worried, uneasy that Merry was not soaking her seams and tightening up, as promised. On the contrary, she was leaking more than ever, and all of her noises seemed ominous. Even with just the mainsail and staysail, both shortened down by reefing, the little vessel seemed overtaxed. Also, visibility was lessening. I mentioned these things.

  “I wish I had a bigger ship to offer ye, mate, for your better comfort, but then there’d have to be a crew to deal with to run things, on top of looking after the ship, and I’ve got my hands full with just you. As to Merry, she’s laughing. Listen to her.” Aloft, the rigging noises came from a whole different orchestra than the band down below. Here, the deadeyes squeaked, the tackles creaked, and all the spars had something to say from time to time, particularly the gaff jaws, rubbing the mast like a string bass with every roll.

  “She asks me to tell you she’s happy aloft, and she’ll let you know if something starts to go wrong. As to her leaking, that’s her new planks not yet settled, and we’re giving ’em a workout. Us too, after a winter of losing our sea legs, eh? And you’re right about the visibility. Wind’s backing, and Merry might not like that. Let’s have a peek at the chart. Where are we?” he asked, sliding one toward me. He pointed to a tick mark. “That’s about where we were four hours ago, and . . .” We went into a navigation lesson: courses and speed, current. I was dismayed to find we had spent our two days of punishment making good less than fifty miles, all told.

  “Here’s where we need the motor,” I offered.

  “Then you’d know about discomfort, and we’d hardly be helped by it. We’ve had a fresh twenty-knot wind right in our teeth, and square little seas, just the wrong size for Merry. We’ve sailed four miles for every one made good, and the weather’s thickening; I call for a crew vote on whether or not to put in and shelter for a day, or at least until the wind shifts enough to give us a slant for Boston.” I couldn’t have agreed more. “Right. Now, where shall we go?” And the navigation lesson continued. By popular consent, we would make for Port Roseway, as the captain called it, although the chart didn’t call it a port. In any case, it was shelter, and it was a good point of departure from Nova Scotia for crossing the Gulf of Maine. We perhaps could be there by early afternoon.

  The weather continued to thicken, and Merry continued to plunge and pound, making hard progress toward a green bell buoy that would mark our approach if we could find it in the mist. While it was still a good distance ahead of us, he pressed me into sounding the depth of water. So I brought up the lead line, hooked my arm around the forward shroud, and swung the lead as far forward as I could. The weight splashed and plunged as I let its line run through my fingers, feeling for its tags and for the head to hit bottom. I had never done it in these conditions, or such deep water, and I made a terrific tangle trying to bring it back aboard.

  “Have another go,” he commanded, and I did, and another after that, looking for changes in the bottom, getting totally soaked in the process.

  “Bloody hell!” I said, borrowing his own expletive.

  “Shhhh!” he shushed me, putting a finger to his lips.

  “Well, you say ‘bloody hell,’ and . . .”

  “Shhhh! Listen!” I did listen, and heard the low roar of engines getting louder by the moment. The captain stood up in the cockpit. “Fetch me the foghorn and the flare gun, and look smart about it,” he instructed, but before I could extricate myself from the coils of the lead line, a shape appeared in the mist, then defined itself as a massive motor yacht heading right for us at top speed, its Decca radar antenna turning.

  “Bloody hell,” said the captain, “hang on!”

  I got myself inboard just in time; at what seemed like the last moment, the motor yacht’s helmsman changed course just enough to pass us close astern. As it flashed by, a party of people on its sheltered afterdeck gawked at us, drinks in hand. At the next moment, the big vessel’s bow wave slammed into Merry, throwing us nearly onto our side. I clung to the nearest handhold for dear life, cruelly barking my shin. The last view I had of the yacht was the name on its high stern, Cock Tails, and its party of people laughing at our little predicament from behind their windows. Then it was gone again into the blowing mist, the sound of its engines receding as the captain brought Merry back on course. “Well there you have it,” he commented, “the modern world, at your fingertips: radar going, and nobody watching.”

  I went back to throwing the long lead, which I got right after a while—a good thing, because an hour or two later my soundings told us that we’d passed our marker. “I put us about here.” He put his finger on the chart. He had brought it up into the cockpit, where he held it folded on his lap as he steered. “We passed that buoy upwind of it, or we would have heard its bell, meaning we’re in here.” He indicated an area. I was concerned that our lives might hang on my accuracy with the lead line, in which I suddenly had less confidence. “Never mind. We’ll find out soon enough. Make some more soundings.”

  “What would you do if you were in this situation alone?” I asked, going back to work at the hard, drenching task.

  “Dear boy, I wouldn’t be here if I was alone, if I could help it. I’d be way out there somewhere,” he gestured to the open sea, “and hove to with a sea anchor out, having a snooze and waiting for a nicer wind.” Our own wind eased as we sailed in under the lee of Cape Negro, at Nova Scotia’s southwest corner, and the waves layed down, making life a great deal more tolerable. A watery sun began to penetrate the mist as an island loomed out of it on our port side.

  “Avast sounding,” he ordered, wiping his spectacles for a closer look at the chart. “That would be what the admiralty chaps call Grey Island, which I never heard of. We called it Foxy Point, it being attached to the mainland at that time, making a snug little shelter for all kinds of foxes on the prowl.” He seemed bemused.

  “We?”

  “We pirates o’course.” He winked. “And I’m here to tell it to you like we lived it.” Suddenly he was Long John Silver in the Treasure Island movie, doing an imitation that got a whoop out of me. I’d seen the film a number of times, and he must have, too.

  “Look at the chart.” He was back to business. “By the position of the bar, you can see where the island used to be connected to what’s now Fox Bar. We’ll anchor in behind there, and give Merry a snooze. Use one y’rself, could ye?” I could indeed, but there were several fathoms of iron anchor chain to get up on deck and the heavy anchor to put over the bow on command, as Merry luffed up under a sheltering shore with no sign of habitation.

  “What you could call a nice, peaceful little place,” he mused, waiting for Merry to back up and set her hook. I had my face buried in the mainsail, handling it alone, as he stood enjoying the scenery. “Bucolic, I’d say. All it wants is a cow here and there. Let me give you a hand with that furl.” When all was done, and the little mizzen was set to keep Merry’s nose weather-vaned to the breeze, and we had hung out our wet clothes to dry, I curled up on the foredeck with my head on the furled jib, and the last thing I heard before going to sleep was his tin flute.

  The captain let me sleep the afternoon away before nudging me awake with his toe, setting me to lighting up the stove and making supper. Feeling refreshed and dried out, I went back to my duties under his critical eye. He lounged in the cockpit with pipe and rum as I cleaned the dishes in a tub of seawater, thinking about something he’d said during his Long John Silver imitation. Now that my pirate essay was done, I was nagged by having missed the very group of pirates I thought I was going to be writing about in the first place. He nodded.

  “Last generation of the brotherhood. Early 1700s. Johnson’s lot. Blackbeard, Vane, Rackham, Bonny and Read, Davis, England, Black Bart, Lowther, Low . . . the naughties. V
ery juicy. Quite right, you’ve got all the background, but no more essay. Well observed. Did you have a question?”

  I was hoping he would continue with his stories, particularly the illusory kind that plucked me into the action. What was it like for the last of the buccaneers? No fairy tales. Aside from his joke about having been here before with pirates, had pirates really been here?

  “When have I ever told you a fairy tale? And I’ve been here before, right enough. And this bay was a wee hidey-hole where the king’s big cruisers couldn’t patrol. Bartholomew Roberts came in here; so did Bellamy, and that blackguard Ned Low took a big haul right here where we’re floating. Back in 1722. July, I think. He surprised thirteen fishing vessels that were doing what we are, and took ’em all. There are too many stories to think about right now, except . . . you said something earlier about Treasure Island, I believe?” I had not, although I had thought about it. “Never mind. Have you read the English poet John Masefield on the subject?” In fact, I’d had to memorise some Masefield; and started to recite it: “I must go down to the sea again . . .”

  “Story of my life,” he interrupted me, “but that’s not the poem; I’m referring to his ‘Ballad of John Silver,’ which he wrote after he fell in love with Stevenson, who had fallen in love with Johnson’s History of the Pirates, and borrowed Johnson’s buccaneer dialogue, as well as the names of a few of Johnson’s actual pirates for Treasure Island. So Masefield goes back to Johnson. They all do, in the end.” He fetched a book from below, turned to a marked page, cleared his throat, and read:

  “We were schooner-rigged and rakish,

  with a long and lissome hull,

  And we flew the pretty colours of the crossbones and the skull;

  We’d a big black Jolly Roger flapping grimly at the fore,

  And we sailed the Spanish Water in the happy days of yore.”

  “Why did they call the black flag with bones a Jolly Roger?” I interrupted.

  “Right up through Kidd’s time, they used a blood-red flag that meant ‘if you fight, no quarter; all-out battle without mercy; massacre.’ That was why the buccaneers loved it so. It was a fearful thing when a ship flew that flag; symbol of terror, and terror was the pirate’s best friend. A peaceful surrender—better than cannonballs, damage, and difficulties, neh? Froggies called it the Jolie Rouge, and out it came as Jolly Roger in English, with the advantage that the Devil was Old Roger. Then, in the later days, it was usually a black flag signifying death, with whatever design suited the vanity of the captain. Lots of skulls and skeletons. Terror. But we digress. Ahem:

  “We’d a long brass gun amidships, like a well-conducted ship,

  We had each a brace of pistols and a cutlass at the hip;

  It’s a point which tells against us, and a fact to be deplored,

  But we chased the goodly merchant-men and laid their ships aboard.

  “Then the dead men fouled the scuppers and the wounded filled the chains,

  And the paint-work all was spatter dashed with other peoples brains,

  She was boarded, she was looted, she was scuttled till she sank.

  And the pale survivors left us by the medium of the plank.”

  Here he interrupted himself, lowering the book and taking off his spectacles to gesture with them for emphasis: “There’s a key and operative word there, which I would underscore, that being ‘other,’ other people’s brains. Very important point. He’s got the boarding and looting part right, but they didn’t do all that much scuttling. If they didn’t keep a ship, they generally gave it back to whatever prisoners they couldn’t get to join ’em, or burned it. If anybody went overboard, it was likely some officers who had been abusing their crew, making their little last splashes without the ceremony of any plank. Now, let’s see . . .” He picked up where he’d left off:

  “O! then it was (while standing by the taffrail on the poop)

  We could hear the drowning folk lament the absent chicken-coop;

  “I confess I’ve never understood how chicken coops got into this otherwise totally comprehensible verse. But he does get back on course, I trust you’ll agree:

  “Then, having washed the blood away, we’d little else to do

  Than to dance a quiet hornpipe as the old salts taught us to.

  “O! the fiddle on the fo’c’s’le, and the slapping naked soles,

  And the genial ‘Down the middle, Jake, and curtsey when she rolls!’

  With the silver seas around us and the pale moon over-head,

  And the look-out not a-looking and his pipe-bowl glowing red.

  “Ah! The pig-tailed, quidding pirates and the pretty pranks we played,

  All have since been put a stop-to by the naughty Board of Trade;

  The schooners and the merry crews are laid away to rest,

  A little south the sunset in the Islands of the Blest.”

  He closed the book with a certain reverence, “An’ that’s how it was, to be sure, young Jim,” he said, back into his Long John Silver imitation. I’d noticed that his everyday voice in fact had changed aboard Merry, with much more of his native dialect in it, and it suited the poem.

  “What now?” he asked, cupping his hand to his ear. Once more he’d heard something before I did: engines again, this time idling with a low rumble as the same yacht we’d met earlier nosed into view out of the mist, making ready to anchor not too far away.

  “Seems we’re to have the company of our dear friends of this morning,” he commented, wanting me to fetch up his binoculars. “Cock Tails,” he read the name. “Out of Halifax.” The motor yacht’s anchor chain rattled out to a festive toot from the ship’s horn. Merry was downwind and we caught fragments of their louder conversation.

  “Now maybe we can persuade our captain to come down and have a drink with us,” shrilled a woman’s voice, calling up to the bridge. The captain did come down and joined the group, as did a young deckhand in a white uniform. This inspired another toast, and a blast of dance music, and a hundred deck lights all at once, shattering what was left of the twilight. “Their flag has a cocktail glass on it,” he observed.

  “I’m for runnin’ up the Jolly Roger,” I said.

  “You tell me a story for a change,” he suggested, continuing to watch the activity aboard the yacht through his glasses. “I want you to summarise everything about the pirates that I’ve told you. If I’m going to take you any further into this thing, I want to know you’ve got it right so far.”

  I was glad for the chance to show him my grasp of the subject, so I started with cavemen on rafts, then went to Vikings, and through the Middle Ages. I dealt with the introduction of documented pirates and privateers, governments sponsoring piracy, and Sir Francis Drake, the queen’s pirate; Granuaile, Ireland’s pirate; then the baronial pirates; and Mainwaring—the pirate who wrote the book on how to stamp out piracy. Then the buccaneers, for whom I had a lot of sympathy even if history didn’t, and Morgan. This all took some time, most of which he spent scrutinising the yacht through his glasses. I paused, wondering if he was even listening to me. Across the water, Frank Sinatra was crooning.

  “Quite. And what’s the thing they all had in common?”

  I was good at oral exams, and ready with the answer to his question. I explained that up through Morgan, just about every pirate had the backing of some government or another, with the possible exception of Granuaile, who considered that she was the government, until events proved otherwise.

  “Good show. And what changed after Morgan that caught up with Kidd?” I launched into a dissertation on the economic value of peaceable trade between nations, and a tightening of rules and treaties, with lots less tolerance for the loose, old ways of the buccaneers.

  “The owner’s wife is showing a bit of leg to the captain,” he chuckled, glued to the binoculars, “and the rest of ’em are feeling no pain. Tell me about letters of reprisal.”

  “When somebody took one of your ships, or looted a town, the governor coul
d issue a letter that allowed you to take ships or loot a town from where they came. Getting even.” His quiz continued, with my answers ever more interrupted by shrieks of laughter, loud toasts, splashes from bottles tossed overboard, and the occasional sound of a breaking glass. “I can’t compete with that,” I said after a while. A woman was being pursued noisily around the ship at that moment, and a male guest was having a pee over the stern. I asked the captain what he found so fascinating about a drunken party of ignorant, careless rich people on a fancy yacht.

  “Just so,” he agreed. “They’ve been tippling all day; prob’ly went roaring up to Shelburne for a look-see, then came roaring back here where they can finish their party for the night in a more private place, which they are doing. In the final phases, I’d say.” On cue, somebody switched off the yacht’s deck lights. But for the orange glow from the vessel’s saloon, Roseway Bay was abruptly quite dark, with a clearing sky overhead, and haze on the water. “Beddy-bye time,” he said, putting aside the optics in favour of his pipe. I told him I’d had a good sleep, and didn’t feel particularly tired.