Pirate Latitudes

by Michael Crichton

  Hunter himself professed to despise such superstition, yet he went to his cabin, locked the door, got down on his knees, and prayed. All around him, the furniture of the cabin crashed back and forth from one wall to another, as the ship rocked crazily on the seas.

  Outside, the storm screamed with demonic fury, and the ship beneath him creaked and groaned in long, agonizing moans. At first, he did not notice any other sound, and then he heard a woman’s scream. And then another.

  He left his cabin and found five sailors dragging Lady Sarah Almont forward, to the companionway ladder. She was screaming and wrestling in their grip.

  “Hold there,” Hunter shouted, and went up to them. Waves crashed over them, smashing against the deck.

  The men would not look him in the eye.

  “What goes here?” Hunter demanded.

  None of the men spoke. It was Lady Sarah who finally shrieked: “They’re going to throw me in the ocean!”

  The leader of the men seemed to be Edwards, a rough seaman, veteran of dozens of privateering campaigns.

  “She’s a witch,” he said, looking at Hunter defiantly. “That’s what it is, Captain. We’ll never last this storm if she’s on board.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Hunter said.

  “Mark me,” Edwards said. “We’ll not last with her on board. Mark me, she’s a witch as ever I saw.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I knew it first I seen her,” Edwards said.

  “By what proofs?” Hunter persisted.

  “The man is mad,” Lady Sarah said. “Stark mad.”

  “What proofs?” Hunter demanded, shouting over the wind.

  Edwards hesitated. Finally, he released the girl, and turned away. “No use talking of it,” he said. “You mark me, though. Mark me.”

  He walked away. One by one, the other men backed off. Hunter was alone with Lady Sarah.

  “Go to your cabin,” Hunter said, “and bolt the door, and stay there. On no account come out, and do not open the door for any reason.”

  Her eyes were wide with fright. She nodded, and went to her room. Hunter waited until he saw the door to her cabin close, and then, after a moment’s hesitation, he went on deck, into the full blast of the storm.

  Belowdecks, the storm seemed fearsome, but on the main deck it exceeded all preparation. The wind tore at him like an invisible brute, a thousand strong hands pulling at his arms and legs, wrenching him away from any handhold or support. The rain struck him with such force that at first he cried aloud. He could hardly see in the first few seconds. He made out Enders at the tiller, lashed firmly into his position.

  Hunter went over to him, holding to a guideline strung along the deck, finally reaching the shelter of the aft castle. He took an extra line and looped it around himself, leaned closer to Enders, and shouted, “How fare you?”

  “No better, no worse,” Enders shouted back. “We hold, and we’ll hold some while longer, but it’s hours. I can feel her start to break.”

  “How many hours?”

  Enders reply was lost in the mountain of water that surged over them and smashed down on the deck.

  It was, Hunter thought, as good an answer as any. No ship could take such a pounding for long, especially not a crippled ship.

  . . .

  BACK IN HER CABIN, Lady Sarah Almont surveyed the destruction caused by the storm, and the seamen who had burst in upon her as she had been making her preparations. Carefully, as the boat rocked, she righted her candles on the deck, and lit them one after another, until there were five red candles glowing. Then she scratched a pentagram on the deck, and stepped inside it.

  She was very afraid. When the Frenchwoman, Madame de Rochambeau had shown her the latest in the fads of the Court of Louis XIV, she had been amused, even scoffed a little. But they said in France that women killed their newborn babies in order to secure eternal youth. If that was so, perhaps a little spell might preserve her life . . .

  What was the harm? She closed her eyes, hearing the storm howl around her. “Greedigut,” she whispered, feeling the words on her lips. She caressed herself, kneeling on the deck inside the scratched pentagram. “Greedigut. Greedigut, come to me.”

  The deck pitched crazily, the candles slid one way, then the next. She had to pause to catch them in their slide. It was all very distracting. How difficult to be a witch! Madame de Rochambeau had told her nothing of spells aboard ship. Perhaps they did not work. Perhaps it was all a lot of French foolishness.

  “Greedigut . . .” she moaned. She caressed herself.

  And then, she fancied she heard the storm abating.

  Or was it just her imagination?

  “Greedigut, come to me, have me, dwell in me . . .”

  She imagined claws, she felt the wind whipping at her nightdress, she sensed a presence . . .

  And the wind died.

  Part V

  The Mouth of

  the Dragon

  Chapter 32

  HUNTER AWOKE FROM a restless sleep with an odd sense that something was wrong. He sat up in bed, and realized that everything was quieter: the motion of the ship was less frantic, and the wind had died to a whisper.

  He hurried onto the deck, where a light rain was falling. He saw that the seas were calmer, and visibility had increased. Enders, still at the tiller, looked half-dead but he was grinning.

  “We weathered her, Captain,” he said. “Not much left to her, but we’ve come through.”

  Enders pointed to starboard. There was land — the low, gray profile of an island.

  “What is it?” Hunter said.

  “Dunno,” Enders said. “But we’ll just make it.”

  Their ship had been blown for two days and nights, and they had no idea of their position. They approached the little island, which was low, and scrubby, and uninviting. Even from a distance they could see the cactus plants thick along the shore.

  “I reckon we’re down the Windward Chain,” Enders said, squinting judiciously. “Probably near the Boca del Dragon, and there’s no respite in those waters.” He sighed. “Wish we could see the sun, for a sighting.”

  The Boca del Dragon — the Dragon’s Mouth — was the stretch of water between the Windward Caribbean islands and the coast of South America. It was a famous and feared stretch of water, though at the moment it seemed placid enough.

  Despite calm seas, El Trinidad rolled and wallowed like a drunkard. Yet they managed with shredded canvas to round the southern tip of the island, and find a fair cove on the western shore. It was protected, and had a sandy bottom suitable for careening. Hunter secured the ship, and his exhausted crew went ashore to rest.

  There was no sign of Sanson or the Cassandra; whether they had survived the storm was a matter of indifference to Hunter’s men, exhausted beyond the point of reasonable fatigue. The men lay sprawled in their wet clothes on the beach and slept with their faces in the sand, their bodies prostrate like corpses. The sun emerged, briefly, from behind thinning clouds. Hunter felt weariness overtake him, and slept as well.

  The next three days were fair. The crew worked hard careening the ship, repairing the damage below the waterline, and the spars of the ragged superstructure. A search of the ship disclosed no wood aboard. Normally, a galleon the size of El Trinidad carried extra spars and masts in the hold, but these had been removed by the Spanish to allow more cargo. Hunter’s men had to make do as best they could.

  Enders sighted the sun with his astrolabe and fixed their latitude. They were not far from the Spanish strongholds of Cartagena and Maricaibo, on the South American coast. But aside from this, they had no knowledge of their island, which they called No Name Cay.

  Hunter felt a captain’s vulnerability with El Trinidad hauled over on her side, unseaworthy. Should they be attacked no
w, they would have a difficult time of it. Still he had no reason to fear anything; the island was obviously uninhabited, as were the two nearest little islands to the south.

  But there was something hostile and uninviting about No Name. The land was arid, and thickly overgrown with cactus, in places as dense as any forest. Brightly colored birds chattered high up in the overgrowth, their cries carried by the wind. The wind never stopped; it was a hot, maddening wind that blew at almost ten knots, throughout the day and night, with only a brief respite at dawn. The men grew accustomed to working and sleeping with the whine of the wind in their ears.

  Something about this place made Hunter post guards around the ship and the scattered campfires of the crew. He told himself it was the need to reestablish discipline among the men, but in truth it was some other foreboding. On the fourth evening, at dinner, he gave the night’s watches. Enders would take the first; he himself would take the midnight watch, and he would be relieved by Bellows. He sent a man off to notify Enders and Bellows. The man returned an hour later.

  “Sorry, Captain,” he said. “I can’t find Bellows.”

  “What do you mean, can’t find him?”

  “He’s not to be found, Captain.”

  Hunter scanned the undergrowth around the shore. “He’s off sleeping somewhere,” he said. “Find him and bring him to me. It will be the worse for him.”

  “Aye, Captain,” the man said.

  But a search of the cove did not yield any trace of Bellows. In the growing darkness, Hunter called off the search and collected his men around the fires. He counted thirty-four, including the Spanish prisoners and Lady Sarah. He ordered them to stay close to the fires, and assigned another man to take Bellows’s watch.

  The night passed uneventfully.

  . . .

  IN THE MORNING, Hunter led a party in search of wood. There was none to be found on No Name, so he set off with ten armed men toward the island nearest to the south. This island was, at least from a distance, similar to their own, and Hunter had no real expectation of finding wood.

  But he felt obliged to search.

  He beached his boat on the eastern shore, and set off with his party into the interior, moving through dense clumps of cactus that plucked and tore at his clothes. They reached high ground at mid-morning, and from there, made two discoveries.

  First, they could clearly see the next island in the chain to the south. Thin gray trickles of smoke from a half-dozen fires drifted into the air; the island was obviously inhabited.

  Of more immediate interest, they saw the roofs of a village, along the water on the western coast of the island. From where they stood, the buildings had the crude appearance of a Spanish outpost settlement.

  Hunter led his men cautiously forward to the village. With muskets at the ready, they slipped from one clump of cactus to another. When they were very close, one of Hunter’s men discharged his musket prematurely; the sound of the report echoed, and was carried by the wind. Hunter swore, and watched for the village to panic.

  But there was no activity, no sign of life.

  After a short pause, he led his men down into the village. Almost immediately, he could tell the settlement was deserted. The houses were empty; Hunter entered the first but he found nothing save a Bible, printed in Spanish, and a couple of moth-eaten blankets thrown across rude, broken beds. Tarantulas scampered for cover in the darkness.

  He went back into the street. His men moved stealthily into one house after another, only to emerge empty-handed, shaking their heads.

  “Perhaps they were warned of our coming,” a seaman suggested.

  Hunter shook his head. “Look at the bay.”

  In the bay were four small dinghies, all moored in shoal water, rocking gently with the lapping waves. Fleeing villagers would certainly have escaped by water.

  It made no sense to leave any boats behind.

  “Look here,” said a crewman, standing on the beach. Hunter went over. He saw five long deep trenches in the sand, the marks of narrow boats, or perhaps canoes of some sort, pulled up from the beach. There were many footprints of naked feet. And some reddish stains.

  “Is it blood?”

  “I don’t know.”

  There was a church, as rudely constructed as the other dwellings, at the north end of the town. Hunter and his men entered it. The interior was demolished, and all the walls were covered in blood. Some sort of slaughter had occurred here, but not recently. At least several days past. The stench of dried blood was sickening.

  “What’s this?”

  Hunter went over to a seaman, who was staring at a skin on the ground. It was leathery and scaly. “Looks like a crocodile.”

  “Aye, but from where?”

  “Not here,” Hunter said. “There are no crocs here.”

  He picked it up. The animal had once been large, at least five feet. Few Caribbean crocs grew so large; those in the inland swamps of Jamaica were only three or four feet.

  “Skinned some time past,” Hunter said. He examined it carefully. There were holes cut around the head, and a string of rawhide passed through, as if it were to be worn on a man’s shoulders.

  “Damn me, look there, Captain.”

  Hunter looked toward the next island to the south. The smoke fires, previously visible, had now disappeared. It was then that they heard the faint thumping of drums.

  “We had best return to the boat,” Hunter said, and, in the afternoon light, his men moved quickly. It took the better part of an hour to return to their longboat, beached on the eastern shore. When they arrived, they found another one of the mysterious canoe-trenches in the sand.

  And something else.

  Near their boat, an area of sand had been patted smooth and ringed with small stones. In the center, five fingers of a hand protruded into the air.

  “It’s a buried hand,” one of the seamen said. He reached forward and pulled it up by one finger.

  The finger came away clean. The man was so startled he dropped it and stepped back. “God’s wounds!”

  Hunter felt his heart pound. He looked at the seamen, who were cowering.

  “Come now,” he said, and reached forward, to pluck up all the fingers, one after another. Each came away clean. He held them in his palm. The crew stared with horror.

  “What’s it mean, Captain?”

  He had no idea. He put them into his pocket. “Back to the galleon, and we’ll see,” he said.

  . . .

  IN THE EVENING firelight, he sat staring at the fingers. It was Lazue who had provided the answer they all sought.

  “See the ends,” she said, pointing to the rough way the fingers had been cut from the palm. “That’s Caribee work, and no mistake.”

  “Caribee,” Hunter repeated, astonished. The Carib Indians, once so warlike on many Caribbean islands, were now a kind of myth, a people lost in the past. All the Indians of the Caribbean had been exterminated by the Spanish in the first hundred years of their domination. A few peaceful Arawaks, living in poverty and filth, could be found in the interior regions of some remote islands. But the bloodthirsty Caribs had long since vanished.

  Or so it was said.

  “How do you know?” Hunter said.

  “It is the ends,” Lazue repeated. “No metal made those cuts. They were made by stone blades.”

  Hunter’s brain struggled to accept this new information.

  “This must be a Donnish trick, to frighten us off,” he said. But even as he said it, he was unconvinced. Everything fit together — the tracks of the canoes, the crocodile skin with pierced rawhide thongs.

  “The Caribee are cannibals,” Lazue said tonelessly. “But they leave the fingers, as a warning. It is their way.”

  Enders came up. “Beg pardon, sir, but Miss Almont has
not returned.”

  “What?”

  “She’s not returned, sir.”

  “From where?”

  “I let her go inland,” Enders said miserably, pointing toward the dark cactus, away from the glow of the fires around the ship. “She wanted to gather fruits and berries, seems she’s a vegetarian—”

  “When did you let her go inland?”

  “This afternoon, Captain.”

  “And she’s not back yet?”

  “I sent her with two seamen,” Enders said. “I never thought—”

  He broke off.

  In the darkness came the distant pounding of Indian drums.

  Chapter 33

  IN THE FIRST of the three longboats, Hunter listened to the gentle lapping of the water on the sides of the boats, and peered through the night at the approaching island. The drumbeats were louder, and they could see the faint flicker of fire, inland.

  Seated alongside him, Lazue said, “They do not eat women.”

  “Fortunate for you,” Hunter said.

  “And for Lady Sarah.”

  “It is said,” Lazue said, chuckling in the darkness, “that the Caribee do not eat Spaniards, either. They are too tough. The Dutch are plump but tasteless, the English indifferent, but the French delectable. It is true, do you not think?”

  “I want her back,” Hunter said grimly. “We need her. How can we tell the governor that we rescued his niece only to lose her to savages for their boucan-barbecue?”

  “You have no sense of humor,” Lazue said.

  “Not tonight.”

  He looked back at the other boats, following in the darkness. All together, he had taken twenty-seven men, leaving Enders back on the El Trinidad, trying hastily to refit her by the light of fires. Enders was a wizard with ships, but this was asking too much of him. Even if they escaped with Lady Sarah, they could not leave No Name for a day, perhaps more. And in that time the Indians would attack.