The Bermuda Privateer

by William Westbrook

  On Sea Dog came, full speed up from the rear. Even in this wind she was a racer. As he passed Beauty, Fallon doffed his French capitaine’s hat to her, and Sea Dog’s gun ports flew open as the schooner bore down on the French brig, now sitting defenseless with gun ports closed and confusion creeping into her timbers. Down came the French flag from Sea Dog’s gaff and up went the British ensign. And out came Britain’s guns.

  “Fire!” yelled Fallon, and the starboard broadside thundered out the full weight of its metal. French sailors scattered like pins in a game, and the brig desperately tried to both get underway and man her guns.

  “Round up, lads!” Fallon cried. “Give it to her again!”

  Sea Dog rounded and sent another broadside into the brig’s fragile stern, all but obliterating her hopeful name, Triomphant. The starboard carronade first, then gun after gun. Glass and wood were blown to bits as the 9-pounders did their deadly work. But Sea Dog would have to sail off and tack to press the battle. Triomphant countered with an uneven broadside aimed high for Sea Dog’s rigging. Shot holes appeared in the massive foresail, the fore-top was blown apart, and the windward preventer snapped like a shot.

  By now Fleur had gotten underway and was coming up on Triomphant’s starboard side. Still preoccupied with Sea Dog, the French were late running out their starboard battery and Beauty got a roaring broadside off before she tacked away, briefly exposing her own stern to the French brig. Triomphant’s fore-topmast cracked, and then fell over the side, taking the fore-topgallant with it and virtually stopping the ship in its tracks. Yet she fired several guns into Fleur’s stern, blowing out the windows and demolishing the taffrail. Beauty was standing by Fleur’s helmsman as a splinter shot through his buttocks, and he fell screaming. Quickly she took the helm and wore ship, ordering the crew to prepare for boarding.

  Fallon ordered Sea Dog to the crippled brig’s larboard side. The two ships clashed together as Fallon led the Sea Dogs onto Triomphant’s deck, the men screaming with the ferocity only prize money can stimulate as they fell on the startled Frenchmen. Fallon drove his sword into the belly of an onrushing French sailor in an officer’s uniform whose eyes opened wide in surprise, never to close again. The Sea Dogs hacked and speared, but the French fought back just as violently. Now there were fresh screams from the starboard side as Beauty’s boarders rushed over the railing. More shots were fired and swords sliced into soft flesh, and everywhere men were fighting and bleeding and dying.

  It was too much. Fallon called for surrender, and slowly the French sailors laid down their weapons, many collapsing as they did. Their capitaine lay decapitated by a round shot, their officers were either dead or dying, and the fight had gone out of the men.

  “Captain, more sail to the east!” called an alert lookout from Fleur. It had to be the French squadron.

  Fallon wheeled around. There was not a moment to lose. “Beauty,” he called, “get underway quickly! We’ll meet tomorrow!” They had agreed to rendezvous at a pinprick on the chart a day’s sail away if things went as planned. So far, they had.

  Jumping back to his own ship, Fallon yelled, “Tom Pleasant! Clear the wreckage aft quickly. Tom…” But Tom Pleasant did not answer, and would not again. Fallon turned around as fear gripped him. His eyes settled on the boy’s body lying against the starboard bulwark, his small legs distorted and folded almost backward. A jagged splinter had pierced his chest straight through. Momentarily forgetting his command, Fallon collapsed at the boy’s side, but there was nothing for it. The youngster’s eyes were open, looking at his captain expectantly a last time, waiting for orders.

  Fallon staggered to his feet, his mind still assaulted by the din and grasping for direction.

  “Nico! The prize, what are your orders?” It was a voice he knew, someone close to him, calling in the fog. Turning his head, he saw Becker, a kind face with wild white hair.

  “Nat,” he mumbled, his mind coming back to the situation at hand. “Take command of the prize, and get the prisoners into the brig’s boats as quickly as possible.”

  He looked quickly at the squadron, now noticeably closer. “And bring up Viceux and the other prisoners and get them in the boats, as well. Give the boats lanterns. You men, get the ship to rights and prepare to make sail. Hurry lads! And for God’s sake, get Tom Pleasant below. Easy with him!”

  Fallon forced himself to take charge again and put the youngster’s death in a compartment to be dealt with later. My God, Tom Pleasant.

  The French squadron had set all sail to the topgallants and were sailing as fast as possible down toward Sea Dog, but the wind was holding light and the sun was all but gone and they were too many miles away. When Fallon’s little armada at last sheeted all sails home and began to slip away, it was virtually dark. The prisoner’s boats had all lanterns lit, and as the lights bobbed and danced and slowly disappeared, Fallon hoped the French capitaines would do the proper thing and pick up their countrymen. Both Sea Dog and the captured brig were darkened and in very little time they simply disappeared into the night.

  SIX

  THE THREE ships, tiny on the grand expanse of blue ocean, sailed for home. They were battered and shot through and leaky, and the crews worked watch on watch to patch and caulk and mend them with what they had aboard. They were sober crews, glad to be alive. Eleven of their friends and shipmates were dead, and twice that many were under Pence’s care for wounds ranging from slight to grievous. These men, hors de combat, might never fight again.

  The devastation, physical and human, had been much worse on Triomphant. Sea Dog’s eighteen-pound carronade had sent its deadly ball crashing into the brig’s stern, into and through the capitaine’s cabin. At short distance, the shot had traveled halfway through the ship, stern to bow, exploding splinters through the deck.

  Fallon’s business now was to get home with three ships more or less intact. His own Sea Dog was lightly damaged compared with the others, owing to French tactics of shooting for mast and rigging on the up roll to destroy maneuverability. British tactics favored broadsides into the hull on the down roll, causing catastrophic destruction that killed and maimed the enemy’s crews. As a consequence, French casualties were usually higher in any sea action.

  “Signal from Fleur, sir!” shouted the lookout. Fallon knew Beauty was short on water, as they all were, and the signal meant she was cutting to half rations.

  “Signal affirmative,” said Fallon—almost expecting Tom Pleasant to answer. Instead, another ship’s boy bent on the signal and sent it aloft. Sea Dog had been on short rations for the past two days, which meant a half gallon of small beer per man instead of the usual gallon. From a medical standpoint, besides the effects of half rations, Pence would be worried about disease, as he should be. Disease was the greatest killer of men at sea, by far. Well, men kept in cramped and damp conditions, with poor nutrition, stressed by fear of imminent death or wounding were going to get sick. Or go insane, which was a greater problem at sea than on land.

  Pence was one of the more progressive surgeons Fallon had known, though some of his theories about eating greens and root vegetables to ward off illness seemed far-fetched. He could afford wild theories since he wasn’t actually in the Royal Navy, mused Fallon. And limes, by God! Pence squirted lime juice into every cup of water, even the men’s grog. The men complained bitterly at first but learned to tolerate the taste. And to give the devil his due, there had been no scurvy on Fallon’s ship. So perhaps Pence knew something, after all.

  On they sailed, still more than three thousand miles from home and cottage, with the mauls ringing out over the sea as the repair work continued. Triomphant was jury rigged and put reasonably to rights, although her stern was poxed. Fleur looked sound, with fresh patches on her mainsail and foresail. Beauty had found paint below decks and had the crew painting the newly scarfed railings.

  Tom Pleasant, the boy who struggled with geometry, was buried with a gunner’s mate and a helmsman, their bodies sewn into canvas weight
ed with shot and slid down a plank on a 45-degree angle into the sea. It had put Fallon in a low mood, and as a consequence he left his cabin irregularly and ate alone instead of keeping table for his officers. This was the trouble with handpicking your friends and neighbors for privateering. He would go to Tom Pleasant’s family—to all the dead crewmen’s families—and explain, but there was no real explanation except they were dead, buried at sea, with wives and children and even parents left without a grave to tend. Fallon would divide his share of prize money among the families, but that would not put a father or son in the house again.

  They sighted no other ships in the final weeks of sailing. Although it grew warmer, most days were gray, while the wind blew reliably from the east and they sailed on a broad reach day and night. Fallon consulted the charts and predicted landfall in St. George in time for his twenty-eighth birthday. It would be good to see his father, to be at the White Horse and get news and gossip and not be responsible for anything or anyone for a while. That thought was the only thing that brought him on deck anymore.

  SEVEN

  ELINORE SOMERS watched the ships glide into the harbor and drop anchor. In the glare of the noonday sun it was difficult to tell who was aboard and who was not. She could see Nico Fallon standing at the railing of Sea Dog, however, and that was whom she was looking for.

  Elinore was twenty-four years old and had never seen the world. Never been away from Bermuda, in fact. In her mind she was caged as surely as the parakeet in her bedroom. She thought of Fallon breaking free from the island’s grasp, as men could do, and it filled her with both envy and anger. Both emotions worked on her face now. Hers was a lovely and complex face, and her blonde hair blew about it in the wind, uncontrolled and unmanageable. Her radiant blue eyes missed nothing, and there was an intelligence behind them that demanded and expected respect from everyone she met—or the relationship would not go well. With most of the young men on the island, it did not go well.

  Fallon had been her tormentor when they were young, and she had hated him. When he left as a boy to go to sea, she hated him more. He was leaving, she was staying, simple.

  But now, not so simple.

  She was a woman now and had begun to feel the stirrings of something she had never felt before. For a year she had watched Sea Dog being built, Fallon working with the men in all weather. When it was hot, he sometimes took off his shirt to work, and she could see his scarred back, which was when things began stirring in her body. What is going on? she thought. But she knew.

  When, finally, Fallon took up his command in Sea Dog and made to leave, she had been unprepared. Well, she had memorized a bit of something flirtatious to say and had also thought about throwing herself into his arms and begging him to stay. All that. But when he had come to say good-bye, she had shut the door on him, literally. She did not even say good-bye. It was inexplicable, even to her.

  Now he was home with two prizes, a hero. She felt confused and off balance when she thought of him. What had he left thinking?

  EZRA SOMERS saw his daughter walking down to Somers Wharf, where he stood waiting in anticipation of his captain’s report. He was exuberant at the prizes he saw, though of course the prize court would need to determine their value. The Admiralty agent would have been alerted to the arrival of prizes, no doubt, and could be expected to parse over spar and shot before arriving at the value of the ships. Meanwhile, repairs would be made to Sea Dog to put her to rights.

  Somers smiled at the name of his little fighting ship, named for Sir Francis Drake’s band of privateers—called Sea Dogs in the Elizabethan era. He knew their history because history was important to him. His library was probably the largest on the island, and he was well read on a variety of subjects.

  Literature and wisdom were his gifts to Elinore, but to date they remained unopened.

  Somers’s wife had died at childbirth, and a light had dimmed in his heart. It had been a late pregnancy, difficult and ultimately tragic. He had, at least, hoped for a boy, but it was not to be. Nothing was as it should have been. He was left to raise a young girl by himself, a subject that none of his books could explain, for once, and about which he knew nothing. For twenty years he had tried to understand Elinore, and sometimes he felt he had gotten close. But as she grew older, she fought his opinions, dismissed his good intentions, and kept to herself more and more. Somers knew she felt confined and misunderstood and no doubt resentful that her mother had died and left her to him to raise, but this was their life. It was disappointing that she could not make the best of it.

  He turned to Elinore now as she walked down the dock toward him, tall and beautiful as her mother had been. He observed the lightness in her step and took it for happiness in their good fortune with the prizes. It did not occur to him that he could be mistaken.

  FALLON CLIMBED from his gig to the dock and was greeted by Somers and Elinore; the old man was congratulatory while Elinore gave Fallon a light hug, awkward and shy. He was not at his best, for though he was certainly glad to be home, his task for the afternoon weighed on his mind. After some perfunctory acknowledgment of his welcome, he took his leave.

  Indeed, the day would be spent making the rounds of the families of the dead crewmen. Fallon went up and down the streets and alleys, for he knew where they all lived. Each house greeted him the same, for a wife or daughter knew the news the moment they saw his face. Tom Pleasant’s family was left to last. He had said what he could to them, a man trying to make sense of the death of a child to parents who stared at him silently. Words like “hero” and “gallant” and “ship’s favorite” left his lips and floated softly to the parlor carpet. The task had left him drained and soulless. It was a wretched business, but he had not wanted to leave it to gossip. They deserved to know from him.

  It was late when he turned down the lane to the White Horse. Many of his crew would be there celebrating their good fortune, or drinking away their fear. His father saw him come through the low door and rushed to embrace him.

  “Nico, my God!” his father exclaimed. “’Tis good to see you in one piece. You’re all the talk, son. I’ve heard about the prizes and your wound. Let me take a look.”

  “Almost healed,” said Fallon, feeling like a boy again with a scrape to show his father. “Others got it much worse, I’m afraid. You probably heard that, too.”

  “Yes, the price of this damned war. How did the families take it?”

  “How would you take it if I had not come back to walk through your door?” said Fallon in a sudden flush of anger. His father did not flinch.

  “I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that,” said Fallon, ashamed. But the father knew his son, knew who he was and knew that today had utterly destroyed him.

  “Come, have a glass and join your mates,” his father said kindly. “I think you could use something wet. It will mean a lot to them to see you, Nico. We can catch up later.”

  Indeed, Fallon got quite drunk. Good and Irish drunk, as his father would say. When he at last stumbled up the stairs to his old bedroom it was early morning—the old Irish saying that you never walk into a pub and leave on the same day applying. He did not notice his father pulling off his sea boots or placing a blanket across him. He was not conscious of the kiss on his forehead or the soft touch on his wound.

  This night the water was calm and the winds light, and the nearest storm was far away.

  EIGHT

  FALLON ARRIVED on time at the Somers’s house and was shown into the library by the servant. The card inviting him to dinner with the date and time was in his pocket, and he fingered it nervously as he stood surrounded by more books than he thought one person could read in a lifetime. By the look of their worn backs and pages, however, it appeared they had been read.

  “There you are. Hello, Nico,” Elinore said lightly as she crossed the room to offer a cheek.

  “Hello, Elinore,” croaked Fallon, feeling badly that he hadn’t really paid attention to her on the dock, such was his low mood.
But now he most definitely was paying attention, for now she was radiant and warm and—there was no other word for it—stunning.

  Elinore blushed at the movement of his eyes over her body. She wore a blue gown, cut low to reveal her décolletage, which was further shown off by a dazzling sapphire necklace.

  She looked down, not knowing quite what to say next, but finally, “I’m sorry about the men, Nico. And especially about the boy, Tom Pleasant. I know it was hard.”

  “Yes. Well, I mean, yes. Thank you.” Words had quite left him. Even the melancholy in his eyes had stepped aside, at least momentarily. Fighting to recover, he asked how she had been, how were things on the island, all the small things he could think to ask. Elinore answered simply and politely, not going into much detail because there was not really much detail to go into.

  Fallon was on the verge of running out of questions when Elinore ventured one of her own. “Tell me, Nico,” she said seriously, “are you anxious to get to sea again?”

  Fallon looked at her curiously, but he could see it was not an idle question. She wanted to know. Why, he had no idea.

  He turned to look out the library window. Night had fallen quickly, and he could see his own reflection in the dark glass. “Yes, I guess I am. Since I was a boy it’s all I’ve done.” He laughed self-consciously. “I think it’s all I know how to do.”