I did not, although I could see for miles through the binoculars—every other boat, and all of Cape Ann stretching to the east. Like Selkirk, I was feeling severe frustration. After an hour, I ducked below for my copy of Johnson, reading between sweeps of the horizon, the passages he had assigned. In due course, I started cooking the omelette he had requested, and its aroma brought him out of his bunk. “Ah!” he said, supervising the garnish. I reported that there was no sign of the enemy, and the same frustrating, dead calm. When I started to complain about it, I was interrupted at once.
“You’ve had a day of no wind, and your mind’s all jumbled from it. Think of Selkirk, and bring me a beer.” I brought it to him, along with the Selkirk question that he had earlier evaded.
“What is half of a salvation?”
He pondered, nodding, not immediately answering, spearing the last bits of egg from his plate. Finally, he laid it aside, empty.
“Very nice. Has your school taught you about parable, fable, metaphor, allegory, simile, and such? Good. Now, here’s your situation.” He put his feet up onto the cockpit seat, with the half-smile that meant I was going to have to work for whatever he was about to say.
“At the outset, you want to get away.”
“From what?”
He shrugged. “Your world. Whatever it is. It’s a rum go, so you get your own ship, boat, whatever vessel, and you cast off its lines and clear out.”
“To where?”
“You don’t have a clue, but somewhere else, for sure, on your own. So you make a course for somewhere where something might be, not knowing whether there’s anything there, or even if there’s a there to go to, or anything else at all anywhere. Never mind. Off you go, and then there you are.”
“Where?”
“At sea. On the course you’ve layed. It blows up, and you reef your sails. It falls calm, and you rig out your light-weather canvas, hoping for a whisper of breeze, like where we are now. In short, you get calms and storms, and you sail on. And on and on, to the point of tedium, with nothing on your horizon. You’re far too far gone to turn back, but you begin to lose faith in the direction you’ve chosen. It’s hot. Sweat runs down your body. Your rations turn sour, and your water thickens in the cask, so that you have to hold your nose when you drink it, and ignore the wriggly little creatures that are swimming in it. You wonder what in bloody hell made you commit yourself to this insane voyage, and you think about changing course, but to what? To where? In an uncharted ocean, how are you to know if there’s anything here at all?”
“Is there?”
“How can you say? You see land, a clear elevation on the horizon, but it turns out to be a mirage, a trick of nature. Very disappointing. You make friends with the little creatures that share your boat with you. You feed the mice, and treasure the company of cockroaches. Did I tell you before about Caleb Whitback’s cockroach?” He had not. “Caleb did three years in solitary confinement in a Spanish dungeon. Cockroaches were his only company, so he made particular friends with one. Sarah, he called it, after his wife, reckoning the creature was female, I suppose.
“In any case, he taught Sarah to do incredible tricks—counting bread crumbs, standing up, sitting down, turning in circles, all on command, in some language Caleb had learned with it over time. When the Dons let him go, Caleb’s only asset in the world was Sarah, and he reckoned she would be worth a fortune, exhibited in London. His first night back in Blighty, he goes into a pub, orders a pint, takes Sarah out of her special little box, and puts her on the bar, ready to try out the act on the publican when he comes back with the beer that he can’t pay for. ‘See this?’ says Caleb. ‘Oh, sorry,’ apologises the publican, squashing Sarah with his thumb. ‘Beer’s on the house.’” He sighed. “But I digress. Where were we?”
“Nowhere?”
“Just so. Poor you. Child of confusion, lost, with heat rash, sunburn, and the squitters. And just when you’ve resigned yourself to madness or death, you see land, real land. An island. Maybe a continent. Purple at first, in the distance, it’s still a long way off, but the sight of it gives you the will to endure, and to work your sails, and navigate your way through reefs to a cool, lush, green land, a place of great beauty, with waterfalls, villages, barking dogs, playing children, flowers, salvation. Half-salvation because the next thing you learn is that you’ve landed among cannibals.” He laughed, not funnily.
He seemed unduly dismal, and I told him so, adding the question: “If that’s half of a salvation, what’s the other half?”
“Learning to like cannibals, I should think.” He regarded me, then put down his feet, deliberately straightening into an upright posture in a very theatrical way. His face softened, and his eyes became like the sad eyes of a saint, and when he spoke again, it was in a saintly voice: “More than just liking the cannibals, we must love them, for they are us.” He lifted his hands as in prayer, at the same time shifting his body directly between me and the sun, so that he glowed with its halo like a bearded prophet in a stained glass window.
Suddenly he was the most ludicrous thing I had ever seen in my whole life, and laughter took me. It was the kind of laugh that gets hold of you and takes charge and makes your ribs hurt. He laughed too, and when I eventually started to get control, he started to do the same silly thing with his face, and it knocked me down all over again, clutching my sides.
“There’s your answer, anyway, my oath on it,” he chuckled. “I reckon we should get a bit of breeze by midmorning.”
Contrary to the captain’s prediction, midmorning came with no more movement of air than before, but more powerboats than ever. Weaving his macramé, he ordered me to tell him about Woodes Rogers, and condense what I had learned from Johnson’s History. I found this a disappointing turn of events. From my reading, I realised why Rogers marked the end of the brotherhood, and probably of his stories, and he was making me tell it.
It was simple enough. The free society of buccaneers that took over the Bahamas never formed itself into anything more than a ramshackle collection of bars and bawdy houses at Nassau. Inevitably it became a nuisance. To deal with it, the British government appointed Woodes Rogers. Appointed as the crown’s Governor General of the Bahamas, Rogers went with a squadron of Royal Navy ships, plus the royal decree of pardon for pirates, buccaneers, and overstepping privateers, in exchange for their giving up the life, a sweeping amnesty.
“It was their most powerful weapon, the king’s pardon,” he interjected. “There’s a real temptation to take a document that says you won’t get hanged for whatever you’ve done, so long as you don’t do it again. Proceed.”
I recounted how King George signed the proclamation on September 5, 1717, allowing until the same date in 1718 for its circulation and results. A copy of it was sent out to Nassau, along with word that Rogers was coming. The brethren’s response was to capture the ship that brought it, then to call a grand council and send out the word. The captain interrupted again:
“And a grand council it was, Jim. They were all there. The whole family. They came from the Gulf of Mexico, the Caymans, the greater and lesser Antilles. Edward England and John Fife sailed from the Carolinas; LaBouche got the word off Newfoundland, and came in; Teach was there, and Hornigold, Martel, Fife, Burgess, Vane, Calico Jack Rackham (dressed like a peacock, as was his wont), and more, hundreds and hundreds of ’em, not counting wives, girlfriends, and locals; everybody having the biggest chin-chin the brotherhood had seen since Morgan’s day. The whole harbour was packed with ships. Black flags everywhere, each with its skull, skeleton, cutlasses, bones, severed heads, or hourglasses with drips of red blood. Such a collection. I’ve never seen . . . beg pardon. Carry on with where you were.” I proceeded.
Their choice—whether to declare a commonwealth, and fight to defend the island, or to accept the new governor, and take the king’s pardon—was decided by Captain Jennings, who was chairing the meeting. Jennings was a commodore among them, and he stopped the argument by decla
ring that he and some 150 others were going to submit when Rogers arrived. By the time that happened, in July of 1717, the die-hard pirates had sailed away.
“Except for Charley Vane,” he growled, “who fired at the first Royal Navy vessel into the harbour, then snuck out under their noses. And there went the notion of any commonwealth.” He made a toast to a point in space. “Gone. Why, with a thousand of the brethren (which we had, more or less) and guns commanding the approaches (perfect to defend, by the way) Rogers would never have got ashore. He was a good man, maybe the best, but his only troops were a few dozen old retirees they’d given him for soldiers. Most of his men were sailors, not to be trusted not to just change sides if let ashore, so y’see, they didn’t give Rogers a quarter of what he needed to take Nassau, if . . .” He paused, sighing.
“If?”
“There aren’t any ifs. None. I keep interrupting, and you’re almost at an end, right?”
The buccaneers that remained in the Bahamas took the royal pardon, and Rogers recruited them into a loyal militia. Some expirates were authorised to sail out and capture their unreformed, former friends, which they did. Along with these setbacks, the places where a pirate could safely make port were almost gone, forcing him to live at sea, changing ships as needed, or to put into ever more remote places.
“Like Nova Scotia,” he added. “where he could make a shore base.” I proceeded. Others sailed for Madagascar, where measures also were being taken against them. They were stripped of their havens. The last pirates of that generation were mostly gone by the time Johnson’s History was published in 1724.
“Pirates weren’t gone,” he corrected me. “You mean the brotherhood. Plenty of pirates still around, but no more sense of family, like, y’see.”
“So the brotherhood was gone . . .” I started to agree.
“Not gone. Dispersed.”
“Well, at some point it was gone.”
“Oh?” his eyebrows shot up. “When was that?”
“Whenever the last one died, I suppose.”
“I’m here to report that has not yet happened,” he beamed, “because here we are, you and me, Jim, and now we can leave the history in our wake. Unless you have any pirates questions?” he added. I did, but before I could organise them, he set me to preparing our Sunday dinner. “While you cook, I’ll have a go at piping us up a wind.”
I diced some potatoes and onions to fry up with corned beef, and he took up his pennywhistle, playing repetitions of the tunes he had made up during the winter. I lit the stove, and was about halfway through the cooking when I did feel a movement of air, and the steam from the frying pan went whisking through the hatch.
“Wind?” I stuck my head out, feeling a faint but welcome whisper on my cheek. Tiny riffles ran across the water.
“Seems to be. Let me see if I can get us just a bit more of it.” He returned to his music, and by the time I had made up our plates there was enough breeze to settle Merry on her anchor line. We made short work of our noon meal, and then I was setting sails, hauling in the anchor and stowing its chain.
“That’s pretty good, being able to whistle up wind,” I allowed.
“Aye. Cheap trick, really.” He smiled. Perfectly set to the light air, Merry’s sails drew, just enough to give us way toward home again. I had always thought their brown colour ugly, but at that moment they were lovely to my eye; marred only by the big, unsightly radar reflector. When I suggested its removal, however, he ignored me.
While cleaning up the galley, I had a chance to consider just what questions I did have. None for school, obviously, but things had gone far beyond essays. He had got under my skin with his subject, and in a way that did not feel resolved. I didn’t know what resolution I wanted, but the whole pageantry of it had not led me there, and I could not think of how to phrase it. One thing I had for sure expected was at least one more experience of the vivid kind of illusion that I knew he could invoke, but seemed to have abandoned.
When I went back above, I told him I had some confusion, but I thought one more story might tie it all up for me, about somebody from the last years of the era; Blackbeard came to mind. I suggested it would be particularly helpful if he could put me into it again. Perhaps something with cutlass play, so I could practise what he had taught me. This seemed to irritate him.
“Stories, tales, yarns . . . as though that’s all I’ve got to do. Here I am, trying to tie off the ends of my little strings so they’ll hold up under divine scrutiny, and here’s you, asking me to talk, when you’ve got your own copy of Johnson, and a good pair of eyes to read the best account of Teach that you’ll ever hope to find. I suggest you do that.” And so I troubled him no more for the rest of that warm afternoon. Later in the day, the wind backed to the south and increased, letting Merry begin to make better speed, with a chuckle in her wake. Dozens of other sails were in sight, until we cleared Cape Ann and began to leave the land behind. From time to time the captain interrupted his work to search in that direction with the binoculars. When my watch came around, it became my job as well, plus some more navigation lessons that lasted until my next round of galley work at suppertime.
An hour before sunset, at the start of the first watch, he decreed a surprising change in course: “Bring her northeast.” I protested, pointing out that would take us toward the Bay of Fundy, not in the direction we wanted to go. Furthermore, it meant sailing with the wind right behind us, dead aft, which was not as favourable as our present slant.
“The correct response is ‘northeast, aye Cap’n,’” he growled.
“Northeast, aye Cap’n.” Baffled about his intention, I made the adjustment to the helm.
“Take a careful look aft.” He handed me the binoculars. They took some focusing; I took my time looking at the last of the day’s distant boats, seeing no sign of Lamprey. “Look some more; range about three miles, maybe a little less, bearing west. Your eyes are better than mine.” A minute later I saw what he had, which was a cruiser, bows-on, not in profile, but with just the unmistakable hint of our two-tone green enemy with its Decca gear. There was no question left in my mind that Mathew’s friends were indeed our enemies, now stalking us again, but from a good distance, pending nightfall, in the captain’s opinion.
“They’ve taken us on as a project. They’re tracking us by radar, thinking we won’t see ’em from so far away. I reckon they’ll wait until after dark, then home in on us on their little green screen, wait for a space between passing ships, and come up fast this time, before we can fire any flares. They’ve got to roar up shooting, with no vessels nearby, kill us, get the loot, then stick our corpses below and chop a big hole in Merry’s bottom, sinking the evidence. If they’re efficient at it, the whole business shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes, maybe less; so even if we do get off a flare or two, we’ll be in Davy Jones’s locker by the time anybody can get here to see where the flares came from.”
“Right,” said I. Everything was happening very suddenly, my body tensed.
“Take a breath. Take two. We’ve an hour before dark. What’s our own advantage?”
That was little enough, as far as I could see. Merry was a slow sailboat, slave to the wind, easy victim to any power craft. We would have two shots, a boat hook, and a cutlass against a probable wall of modern firepower. He agreed, instructing me as to where to rummage for a deflated rubber raft that was there for emergencies, and then to pump it up on the foredeck. After doing that, I held the helm as he improvised a tripod mast to the raft from Merry’s small reserve of planks and spars. By sunset he had finished it, plus an improvised yard and a sail.
“What are you doing?” I asked, as darkness closed in, and I could no longer see Lamprey in the binoculars. Until it faded into the darkness, its bearing and distance had not changed.
“Making a new us.” He ordered me to lower the big radar reflector and, in the last remnant of twilight, he attached the contraption so that it stuck up above everything else on the raft, and then w
e launched it together. Its sail filled to the wind on the course that we had been holding. To keep the raft guided, he had attached a short dragline to act as a rudder, and it worked very well. Off it sailed at a good clip, skimming. We trimmed Merry to a right angle from our previous course, lighting no lights, and taking down our small reflector, making us nearly invisible. “This is where dark sails come in useful,” he commented, as Merry distanced herself, reaching away from the decoy he had rigged. “Let ’em attack that.” By his calculation, it would take our assailants at least an hour or more to find it, by which time we would be long gone in a direction they would have to guess exactly if they were ever to find us again. Merry fled into an ocean that widened with every tick of the clock.
“Bloody hell.” The captain was in no good mood, having cast off the same macramé knot three or four times in pursuit of his own perfection, only to find he had to do it yet again. It was late afternoon on Thursday, our fourth day at sea since leaving Boston and Lamprey behind us. Merry had made good progress, with a fair, quartering wind that only partly eased my ongoing fears about other things. With perfect circumstances, we would fetch Grey Rocks Harbour the following day, a certain four days late for the inn’s critical deadline, with unknown consequences. Further, it now seemed unlikely that Mathew had telephoned Mother, meaning she would be some worried; and when we did get home—or soon thereafter—that would be the last I would see of the captain. I had probed the idea of my going with him, but with no success at all. Our final full day together was waning, and I again prodded him for a last tale.
“Bring up the bloody book, and read me the description of bloody Blackbeard,” he growled, and I did as I had been told, reading aloud.
“Captain Teach assumed the cognomen of Blackbeard from that large quantity of hair which, like a frightful meteor, covered his whole face and frightened America more than any comet that has appeared there a long time. This beard was black, which he suffered to grow of an extravagant length; as to breadth it came up to his eyes. He was accustomed to twist it with ribbons, in small tails, after the manner of our ramilies wigs, and turn them about his ears. In time of action, he wore a sling over his shoulders with three brace of pistols hanging in holsters like banoliers, and stuck lighted matches under his hat, which, appearing on each side of his face, his eyes naturally looking fierce and wild, made him altogether such a figure, that imagination cannot form an idea of a fury, from hell, to look more frightful.”
The Brotherhood of Pirates Page 28