Pirate Latitudes

by Michael Crichton

  “Get my horse,” Scott commanded, and hastily arranged his disarrayed clothing. He emerged at the front of the Governor’s Mansion, looked around cautiously, and jumped on his stallion.

  He was unhorsed a few moments later, and flung rudely to the cobblestones no more than a hundred yards from the Governor’s Mansion. A contingent of vagabonds led by Richards, the governor’s manservant — and directed by Hunter, that scoundrel — clapped him in irons and took him away to Marshallsea.

  To await trial: the nerve of the ruffians!

  . . .

  HACKLETT AWOKE TO the tolling of the church bells, and also guessed their meaning. He leapt out of bed, ignoring his wife, who had lain the whole night, wide awake, staring at the ceiling, listening to his drunken snores. She was in pain and she had been badly humiliated.

  Hacklett went to the chamber door and called to Richards.

  “What has transpired?”

  “Hunter escaped,” Richards said flatly. “Dodson and Poorman and Phips are all dead, perhaps more.”

  “And the man is still loose?”

  “I do not know,” Richards said, pointedly failing to add Your Excellency.

  “Dear God,” Hacklett said. “Bolt the doors. Call the guard. Alert Commander Scott.”

  “Commander Scott left some few minutes past.”

  “Left? Dear God,” Hacklett said, and slammed the chamber door, locking it. He turned back to the bed. “Dear God,” he said. “Dear God, we shall all be murdered by that pirate.”

  “Not all,” his wife said, pointing a pistol at him. Her husband kept a brace of loaded pistols by the bed, and she now held them aimed at him, one in each hand.

  “Emily,” Hacklett said, “don’t be a fool. This is no time for your silliness, the man is a vicious killer.”

  “Come no closer,” she said.

  He hesitated. “You jest.”

  “I do not.”

  Hacklett looked at his wife, and the pistols she held. He was not himself skilled with weapons, but he knew from limited experience that a pistol was extremely difficult to fire with accuracy. He did not feel fear so much as irritation.

  “Emily, you are being a damnable fool.”

  “Stay,” she commanded.

  “Emily, you are a bitch and a whore but you are not, I’ll wager, a murderer and I will have—”

  She fired one gun. The room filled with smoke. Hacklett cried aloud in terror, and several moments passed before both husband and wife realized that he had not been hit.

  Hacklett laughed, mostly in relief.

  “As you see,” he said, “it is no simple matter. Now give me the pistol, Emily.”

  He came quite close before she fired again, hitting him in the groin. The impact was not powerful. Hacklett remained standing. He took another step, coming so near her that he could almost touch her.

  “I have always hated you,” he said, in a conversational tone. “From the first day that I met you. Do you remember? I said to you, ‘Good day, madam,’ and you said to me—”

  He broke off into a coughing fit, and collapsed on the ground, doubled over in pain.

  Blood was now seeping from his waist.

  “You said to me,” he said. “You said . . . Oh damn your black eyes, woman . . . it hurts . . . you said to me . . .”

  He rocked on the ground, his hands pressed to his groin, his face twisted in pain, eyes shut tightly. He moaned in time to his rocking: “Aaah . . . aaah . . . aaah . . .”

  She sat up in the bed and dropped the pistol. It touched the sheet, so hot that it burned the imprint of the barrel into the fabric. She quickly picked it up and flung it on the floor, then looked back at her husband. He continued to rock as before, still moaning, and then he stopped, and looked over at her, and spoke through clenched teeth.

  “Finish it,” he whispered.

  She shook her head. The chambers were empty; she did not know how to load them again, even if there were spare shot and powder.

  “Finish it,” he said again.

  A dozen conflicting emotions pressed in her mind. Realizing that he was not soon to die, she went to the side table, and poured a glass of claret, and brought it to him. She lifted his head, and helped him to drink. He drank a little, and then a fury overcame him, and with one bloody hand he pushed her away. His strength was surprising. She fell back, with a red imprint of a flat hand on her nightdress.

  “Damn you for a king’s bitch,” he whispered, and took up his rocking again. He was now absorbed in his pain, and seemed to have lost any sense that she was there. She got to her feet, poured a glass of wine for herself, sipped it, and watched.

  She was still standing there when Hunter entered the room half an hour later. Hacklett was alive, but wholly ashen, his actions feeble except for an occasional spastic twitch. He lay in an enormous pool of blood.

  Hunter took out his pistol and moved toward Hacklett.

  “No,” she said.

  He hesitated, then stepped away.

  “Thank you for your kindness,” Mrs. Hacklett said.

  Chapter 37

  ON OCTOBER 23, 1665, the conviction of Charles Hunter and his crew on a charge of piracy and robbery was summarily overturned by Lewisham, Judge of the Admiralty, meeting in closed session with Sir James Almont, newly restored Governor of the Jamaica Colony.

  In the same session, Commander Edwin Scott, Chief Officer of the Garrison of Fort Charles, was convicted of high treason and sentenced to be hanged the following day. A confession in his own handwriting was obtained on the promise of commutation of sentence. Once the letter was written, an unknown officer shot Scott to death in his cell in Fort Charles. The officer was never apprehended.

  For Captain Hunter, now the toast of the town, one final problem remained: Andre Sanson. The Frenchman was nowhere to be found, and it was reported that he had fled into the inland hills. Hunter put out the word that he would pay well for any news of Sanson, and by mid-afternoon he had a surprising report.

  Hunter had stationed himself publicly in the Black Boar, and soon enough an old bawdy woman came to see him. Hunter knew her; she ran a whoring house, her name was Simmons. She approached him nervously.

  “Speak up, woman,” he said, and he called for a glass of kill-devil to ease her fears.

  “Well, sir,” she said, drinking the liquor, “a week past, a man of the name of Carter comes to Port Royal, desperate ill.”

  “Is this John Carter, a seaman?”

  “The same.”

  “Speak on,” Hunter said.

  “He says he has been picked up by an English packet boat from St. Kitts. They had spotted a fire on a small uninhabited cay, and, pausing to investigate, had found this Carter marooned, and brought him thence.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Oh, he has fled, he has. He’s terrified of meeting with Sanson, the Frenchy villain. He’s in the hills now, but he told me his story, right enough.”

  Hunter said, “And that is?”

  The bawdy woman told the story quickly. Carter was aboard the sloop Cassandra, carrying part of the galleon treasure, under Sanson’s command. There had been a fierce hurricane, in which the ship was wrecked on the inner reef of an island, and most of the crew killed. Sanson had gathered the others together, and had salvaged the treasure, which he directed them to bury on the island. Then they had all built a longboat with the flotsam of the wrecked sloop.

  And then, Carter had reported, Sanson had killed them all — twelve men — and set sail alone. Carter had been badly wounded, but somehow survived and lived to return home and tell his story. And he said further that he did not know the name of the island, nor the exact location of the treasure, but that Sanson had scratched a map on a coin, which he then hung around his neck.

  Hunter lis
tened to the story in silence, thanked the woman, and gave her a coin for her trouble. More than ever, now, he wanted to find Sanson. He sat in the Black Boar and patiently listened to every person with a rumor of the Frenchman’s whereabouts. There were at least a dozen stories. Sanson had gone to Port Morant. Sanson had fled to Inagua. Sanson had gone into hiding in the hills.

  When finally the truth came, it was stunning. Enders burst into the tavern:

  “Captain, he’s on board the galleon!”

  “What?”

  “Aye, sir. There were six of us set as guard; he killed two, and sent the rest in the boat to tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Either you arrange his pardon, and discard openly your feud with him, or he’ll sink the ship, Captain. Sink her at anchor. He must have your word by nightfall, Captain.”

  Hunter swore. He went to the window of the tavern and looked out at the harbor. El Trinidad rode lightly at anchor, but she was moored well offshore, in deep water — too deep to salvage any treasure if she were sunk.

  “He’s damnably clever,” Enders said.

  “Indeed,” Hunter said.

  “Will you make your reply?”

  “Not now,” Hunter said. He turned away from the window. “Is he alone on the ship?”

  “Aye, if that matters.”

  Sanson alone was worth a dozen men or more in an open battle.

  The treasure galleon was not moored close to any other ships in the harbor; nearly a quarter mile of open water surrounded it on all sides. It stood in splendid, impregnable isolation.

  “I must think,” Hunter said, and went to sit again.

  . . .

  A SHIP MOORED in open, placid water was as safe as a fortress surrounded by a moat. And what Sanson did next made him even safer: he dumped slops and garbage all around the vessel to attract sharks. There were plenty of sharks in the harbor anyway, so that swimming to El Trinidad was a form of suicide.

  Nor could any boat approach the ship without being easily spotted.

  Therefore, the approach must be open and apparently harmless. But an open longboat gave no opportunity for hiding. Hunter scratched his head. He paced the floor of the Black Boar and then, still restless, he went out into the street.

  There he saw a water-spouter, a common conjurer of the day, spouting streams of multicolored water from his lips. Conjuring was forbidden in the Massachusetts Colony as tending to promote the work of the devil; for Hunter, it had an odd fascination.

  He watched the water-spouter for several moments, as he drank and spewed different kinds of water one after another. Finally, he went up to the man.

  “I want to know your secrets.”

  “Many a fine woman in the Court of King Charles has said as much, and offered more than you have offered.”

  “I offer you,” Hunter said, “your life.” And he pressed a loaded pistol in his face.

  “You’ll not bully me,” the conjurer said.

  “I fancy, I will.”

  And a few moments later, he was back in the conjurer’s tent, hearing the details of his exploits.

  “Things are not as they seem,” said the conjurer.

  “Show me,” Hunter said.

  The conjurer explained that before a performance, he swallowed a pill confected of the gall of a heifer and baked wheat flour. “This cleanses my stomach, you see.”

  “I do. Go on.”

  “Next, I take a mixture of brazil nuts and water, boiled until it is dark red in color. I swallow this before I work.”

  “Go on.”

  “Then I wash the glasses with white vinegar.”

  “Go on.”

  “And some glasses not so washed.”

  “Go on.”

  Then, the water-spouter explained, he drank water from clean glasses, and regurgitated the contents of his stomach, producing glasses of bright red “claret.” In other glasses, which had a coating of vinegar, the same liquid became “beer,” of a dark brown color.

  Drinking and regurgitating more water produced a lighter red color, which was called “sherry.”

  “There’s no more trick to it than that,” said the conjurer. “Things are not as they seem, and that’s an end to it.” He sighed. “It’s all in directing attention to the wrong place.”

  Hunter thanked the man, and went off to search for Enders.

  . . .

  “DO YOU KNOW the woman who enabled our release from Marshallsea?”

  “Anne Sharpe is her name.”

  “Find her,” Hunter said. “And get for the longboat crew six of the best men you can muster.”

  “Why, Captain?”

  “We are going to pay a visit to Sanson.”

  Chapter 38

  ANDRE SANSON, THE lethal, powerful Frenchman, was not accustomed to the sensation of fear, and he did not feel afraid as he saw the longboat put out from shore. He observed the boat carefully; from a distance, he could see six oarsmen and two people sitting in the bow, but he could not discern who they were.

  He expected some ruse. The Englishman Hunter was crafty, and he would use his craft if he could. Sanson knew that he was not clever, as Hunter was. His own talents were more animal, more directly physical. And yet he was confident that there was no trick Hunter could play upon him. It was, very simply, impossible. He was alone on this ship and he would remain alone, safely, until night fell. But he would have his freedom by dusk or he would destroy the ship.

  And he knew Hunter would never let the ship be destroyed. He had fought too hard and suffered too much for that treasure. He would do anything to keep it — even to the point of releasing Sanson. The Frenchman was confident.

  He peered at the approaching longboat. As it came nearer, he saw that Hunter himself stood in the prow, along with some woman. What could be the meaning of this? His head ached to wonder what Hunter had planned.

  Yet, in the end, he contented himself with the reassurance that no trick was possible. Hunter was clever but there was a limit to cleverness. And Hunter must know that even from a distance, he could be picked off as quickly and simply as a man brushes a fly from his sleeve. Sanson could kill him now if he wished. But there was no reason. All he wanted was his freedom, and a pardon. For that, he needed Hunter alive.

  The longboat came closer, and Hunter waved cheerfully. “Sanson, you French pig!” he called.

  Sanson waved back, grinning. “Hunter, you English pox of a sheep!” he shouted with a joviality that he did not feel at all. His tension was considerable, and increased as he realized how casually Hunter was behaving.

  The longboat pulled alongside El Trinidad. Sanson leaned over slightly, showing them the crossbow. But he did not want to lean too far, though he was eager for a look inside the boat.

  “Why are you here, Hunter?”

  “I have brought you a present. May we come aboard?”

  “You two only,” Sanson said, and stepped back from the railing. He quickly ran to the opposite side of the ship, to see if another longboat was approaching from another direction. He saw nothing but calm water, and the rippling fins of cruising sharks.

  Turning back, he heard the sound of two people clambering up the side of the ship. He aimed his crossbow as a woman appeared. She was young and damnably pretty. She smiled at him, almost shyly, and stepped to one side as Hunter came on deck. Hunter paused, and looked at Sanson, who was twenty paces away, with the crossbow in his hands.

  “Not a very hospitable greeting,” Hunter said.

  “You must forgive me,” Sanson said. He looked at the girl, then back to Hunter. “Have you arranged to meet my demands?”

  “I am doing so, even as we talk. Sir James is drawing up the papers, and they shall be delivered in a few hours.”

  “And the
meaning of this visit?”

  Hunter gave a short laugh. “Sanson,” he said, “you know me for a practical man. You know that you have all the cards. I must agree to anything you say. This time, you have been too clever, even for me.”

  “I know,” Sanson said.

  “Someday,” Hunter said, his eyes narrowing, “I shall find you and kill you. I promise you that. But for now, you have won.”

  “This is a trick,” Sanson said, with the sudden realization that something was very wrong.

  “No trick,” Hunter said. “Torture.”

  “Torture?”

  “Indeed,” Hunter said. “Things are not always as they seem. So that you may spend the afternoon in pleasurable pursuits, I have brought you this woman. Surely we can agree that she is most charming — for an Englishwoman. I will leave her here for you.” Hunter laughed. “If you dare.”

  Now Sanson laughed. “Hunter, you are the devil’s own servant. I cannot take this woman without ceasing to keep watch, yes?”

  “May her English beauty torment you,” Hunter said, and then, with a short bow, he climbed over the side. Sanson listened to the thud of his feet on the hull of the ship, and then a final thump as Hunter landed in the longboat. He heard Hunter order the boat to put off, and he heard the stroke of the oars.

  It was a trick, he thought. Somehow, a trick. He looked at the woman: she must be armed in some fashion.

  “Lie down,” he growled harshly.

  She seemed confused.

  “Lie down!” he said, and stamped the deck.

  She lay on the deck, and he moved cautiously over to her, then frisked her through her garments. She had no weapons. Yet he was sure it was a trick.

  He went to the railing and looked out at the longboat, now pulling strongly for shore. Hunter sat in the bow, facing land, not looking back. There were six oarsmen. Everyone was accounted for.