The Fortunes of Captain Blood cb-3

by Rafael Sabatini

  They had put into Bieque, and, ostensibly for the purpose of buying stores, Yberville had gone ashore to see what news might be gleaned that could be turned to account. For this was at a time when the Arabella was sailing at a venture, without definite object. A Basque who had spent some years across the border in Spain, Yberville spoke a fluent Castilian which enabled him to pass for a Spaniard when he chose, and so equipped him perfectly for this scouting task in a Spanish settlement.

  He had come back to the big red–hulled ship at anchor in the roadstead, with the flag of Spain impudently flaunted from her maintruck, with news that seemed to him to indicate a likely enterprise. He had learnt that Don Ignacio de la Fuente, sometime Grand Inquisitor of Castile, and now appointed Cardinal–Archbishop of New Spain, was on his way to Mexico on the eighty–gun galleon the Santa Veronica, and in passing was visiting the bishoprics of his province. His Eminence had been at San Salvador, and he was now reported on his way to San Juan de Puerto Rico, after which he was expected at San Domingo, perhaps at Santiago de Cuba, and certainly at Havana, before finally crossing to the Main.

  Unblushingly Yberville disclosed the profit which his rascally mind conceived might be extracted from these circumstances.

  'Next to King Philip himself,' he opined, 'or, at least, next to the Grand inquisitor, the Cardinal–Archbishop of Seville, there is no Spaniard living who would command a higher ransom than this Primate of New Spain.'

  Blood checked in his stride. The two were pacing the high poop of the Arabella in the bright November sunshine of that region of perpetual summer. Yberville's tall vigour was still set off by the finery of lilac satin in which he had gone ashore, a purple love–knot in his long brown curls. Forward at the capstan and at the braces was the bustle of preparation to get the great ship under way; and in the forechains, Snell, the bo'sun, his bald pate gleaming in a circlet of untidy grey curls, was ordering in obscene and fragmentary Castilian some bumboats to stand off.

  Blood's vivid eyes flashed disapproval upon the jovial countenance of his companion. 'What then?' he asked.

  'Why, just that. The Santa Veronica carries a sacerdotal cargo as rich as the plate in any ship that ever came out of Mexico.' And he laughed.

  But Blood did not laugh with him. 'I see. And it's your blackguardly notion that we should lay her board and board, and seize the Archbishop?'

  'Just that, my faith! The place to lie in wait for the Santa Veronica would be the straits north of Saona. There we should catch his Eminence on his way to San Domingo. It should offer little difficulty.'

  Under the shade of his broad hat Blood's countenance had become forbidding. He shook his head. 'That is not for us.'

  'Not for us? Why not? Are you deterred by her eighty guns?'

  'I am deterred by nothing but the trifle of sacrilege concerned. To lay violent hands on an archbishop, and hold him to ransom! I may be a sinner, God knows; but underneath it all I hope I'm a true son of the Church.'

  'You mean a son of the true Church,' Yberville amended. 'I hope I'm no less myself, but not on that account would I make a scruple of holding a Grand Inquisitor to ransom.'

  'Maybe not. But then you had the advantage of being bred in a seminary. That makes you free, I suppose, with holy things.'

  Yberville laughed at the sarcasm. 'It makes me discriminate between the Faith of Rome and the Faith of Spain. Your Spaniard with his Holy House, his autos de fé and his faggots is very nearly a heretic in my eyes.'

  'A sophistry, to justify the abduction of a Cardinal. But I'm not a sophist, Yberville, whatever else I may be. We'll keep out of sacrilege, so we will.'

  Before the determination in his tone and face, Yberville fetched a sigh of resignation. 'Well, well! If that's your feeling… But it's a great chance neglected.'

  And it was now that Captain Blood dilated upon the irony of his fate, until from the capstan to interrupt him came the bo'sun's cry: 'Belay there!' Then his whistle shrilled, and men swarmed aloft to let go the clewlines. The Arabella shook out her sails as a bird spreads its wings, and stood out for the open sea, to continue at a venture, without definite aim.

  In leisurely fashion, with the light airs prevailing, they skimmed about the Virgin Islands, keeping a sharp look–out for what might blow into their range; but not until some three or four days later, when perhaps a score of miles to the south of Puerto Rico, did they sight a likely quarry. This was a small two–masted carack, very high in the poop, carrying not more than a dozen guns, and obviously a Spaniard, from the picture of Our Lady of Sorrows on the ballooning mainsail.

  The Arabella shifted a point or two nearer to the wind, hoisted the Union Flag, and coming within range put a shot across the Spaniard's bows, as a signal to heave to.

  Considering the presumed Englishman's heavy armament and superior sailing power, it is not surprising that the carack should have been prompt to obey that summons. But it was certainly a surprising contradiction to the decoration of her mainsail that simultaneously with her coming up into the wind the Cross of St George should break from her maintruck. After that she lowered a boat, and sent it speeding across the quarter–mile of gently ruffled sapphire water to the Arabella.

  Out of his boat, a short, stockily built man, red of hair and of face, decently dressed in bottle green, climbed the Jacob's ladder of Blood's ship. With purposefulness in every line of him, he rolled forward on short, powerful legs towards Captain Blood, who, in a stateliness of black and silver, waited to receive him in the ship's waist. Blood was supported there by the scarcely less splendid Yberville, the giant Wolverstone, who had left an eye at Sedgemoor and boasted that with the one remaining he could see twice as much as any ordinary man, and Jeremy Pitt, the sailing–master of the Arabella, from whose entertaining chronicles we derive this account of the affair.

  Pitt sums up this newcomer in a sentence. 'Not in all my life did I ever see a hotter man.' There was a scorching penetration in the glance of his small eyes under their beetling sandy brows as they raked his surroundings: the deck that was clean–scoured as a trencher, the gleaming brass of the scuttle butts and of the swivel–gun on the poop–rail, the orderly array of muskets in the rack about the mainmast. All may well have led him to suppose that he was aboard a King's ship.

  Finally his questing hazel eyes returned to a second and closer inspection of the waiting group.

  'My name is Walker,' he announced with a truculent air and in an accent that proclaimed a northern origin. 'Captain Walker. And I'll be glad to know who the devil you may be that ye're so poxy ready with your gunfire. If ye've put a shot athwart my bows 'cause o' they emblems o' Popery on my mains'l, supposing me a Spaniard, faith, then ye're just the men I be looking for.'

  Blood was austere. 'If you are the captain of that ship, it's glad I'd be to learn how that comes to be the case.'

  'Ay, ay. So ye may, ecod! It's a long tale, Cap'n, and an ugly.'

  Blood took the hint. 'Come below,' he said, 'and let us have it.'

  It was in the great cabin of the Arabella with its carved and gilded bulkheads, its hangings of green damask, its costly plate and books and pictures and other sybaritic equipment such as the rough little North Country seaman had never dreamed could be found under a ship's deck, that the tale was told. It was told to the four who had received this odd visitor, and after Blood had presented himself and his associates, thereby momentarily abating some of the little shipmaster's truculence. But he recovered all his heat and fury when they came to sit about the table, on which the negro steward had set Canary Sack and Nantes brandy and a jug of meg, and it roared in him as he related what he had endured.

  He had sailed, he told them, from Plymouth, six months earlier, bound in the first instance for the Coast of Guinea, where he had taken aboard three hundred able–bodied young negroes, bought with beads and knives and axes from an African chieftain with whom he had already previously done several similar tradings. With this valuable cargo under hatches he was making his way to Jamaica,
where a ready market awaited him, when, at the end of September, somewhere off the Bahamas, he was caught by an early storm, forerunner of the approaching hurricane season.

  'By the mercy o' God we came through it afloat. But we was so battered and feckless that I had to jettison all my guns. Under the strain we had sprung a leak that kept us pumping for our lives; most o' my upper works was gone, and my mizzen was in such a state that I couldna' wi' safety ha' spread a night–shift on it. I must run to the nearest port for graving, and the nearest port happened to be Havana.

  'When the port Alcalde had come aboard, seen for hisself my draggle–tailed condition, and that, anyway, wi'out guns I were toothless, as ye might say, he let me come into the shelter o' the lagoon, and there, without careening, we set about repairs.

  'To pay for what we lacked I offered to trade the Alcalde some o' they blacks I carried. Now happen, as I was to learn, that the mines had been swept by a plague o' some kind — smallpox or yellow fever or summut — and they was mighty short o' slaves to work them. The Alcalde would buy the lot, he says, if I would sell. Seeing how it was with me, I were glad enough to lighten the ship by being rid o' the whole cargo, and I looked on the Alcalde's need as a crowning mercy to get me out of all my difficulties. But that weren't the end o' the windfall, as I supposed it. Instead o' gold, the Alcalde proposed to me that I takes payment in green hides, which, as ye may know, is the chief product of the island of Cuba. Naught could ha' suited me better, for I knew as I could sell the hides in England for three times the purchase price, and maybe a trifle over. So he gives me a bill o' lading for the hides, which it were agreed we should take aboard so soon as we was fit to sail.

  'I pushed on wi' repairs, counting my fortune made, and looking on a voyage that at one time had seemed as if it must end in shipwreck, like to prove the most profitable as I had ever made.

  'But I were reckoning without Spanish villainy. For when we was at last in case to put to sea again, and I sends word to the Alcalde that we was ready to load the hides of his bill of lading, the mate, which I had sent ashore, comes me back wi' a poxy message that the Captain–General — as they call the Governor in Cuba — would not allow the shipment, seeing as how it was against the law for any foreigner to trade in a Spanish settlement, and the Alcalde advised us to put to sea at once, whilst the Captain–General was in a mind to permit it.

  'Ye'll maybe guess my feelings. Tom Walker, I may tell ye, bain't the man to let hisself be impudently robbed by anyone, whether pick–pocket or Captain–General. So I goes ashore myself. Not to the Alcalde. Oh no. I goes straight to the Captain–General hisself, a high–and–mighty Castilian grande, wi' a name as long as my arm. For short, they calls him Don Ruiz Perera de Valdoro y Peñascon, no less, and he's Count of Marcos too. A grande of the grandest.

  'I slaps down my bill o' lading afore him, and tells him straightly how the thieving Alcalde had dealt by me, certain sure in my fecklessness that justice would be done at once.

  'But from the way he shrugged and smiled I knew him for a villain afore ever he spoke. "Ye've been told the law, I believe," says he, wi' a leering curl to his mangy lip. "And ye've been rightly told. It is forbidden us by decree of His Catholic Majesty to buy from or sell to any foreign trader. The hides may not be shipped."

  'It were a sour disappointment to me, seeing the profit on which I'd reckoned. But I keeps my temper to myself. "So be it," says I, "although it comes mighty hard on me and the law might ha' been thought of afore I were given this poxy bill o' lading. Howsomever, here it be; and ye can have it back in return for my three hundred negros."

  'At that he scowls and tries to stare me down, twirling his moustachios the while. "God gi' me patience wi' you!" says he. "That transaction too were illegal. Ye had no right to trade your slaves here."

  '"I traded them at the Alcalde's request, Excellency," I reminds him.

  '"My friend," says he, "if you was to commit murder at someone else's request, would that excuse the crime?"

  '"It's not me what's broke the law," says I, "but him which bought the slaves from me."

  '"Ye're both guilty. Therefore, neither must profit. The slaves is confiscate to the State."

  'Now, I've told ye, sirs, as how I was making no ado about suffering the loss of my lawful profit on the hides. But to be stripped naked, as it were, by that heuck–fingered Spanish gentleman, robbed o' a cargo o' blacks, the worth o' which I had agreed at ten thousand pieces of eight — Od rot my soul! — that was more nor I could stomach. My temper got the better o' me, and I ups and storms in a mighty rage at that fine Castilian nobleman — Don Ruiz Perera de Valdoro y Peñascon — crying shame on him for such iniquity, and demanding that at least he pay me in gold the price o' my slaves.

  'The cool villain lets me rant myself out, then shows me his teeth again in another o' his wicked, fleering smiles.

  '"My friend," says he, "ye've no cause to make this pother, no cause to complain at all. Why, you heretic fool, let me tell you as I am doing far less than my strict duty, which would be to seize your ship, your crew and your person, and send you to Cadiz or Seville there to purge the heresies wi' which your kind be troubling the world."'

  Captain Walker paused there, to compose himself a little from the passion into which his memories had whipped him. He mopped his brow, and took a pull at the bumbo before resuming.

  'Od rot me for a coward, but my courage went out o' me like sweat at they words. "Better be robbed," says I to myself, "than be cast into the Fires o' the Faith in a fool's coat." So I takes my leave of his Excellency afore his sense o' duty might get the better o' what he calls his compassion — damn his dirty soul!'

  Again he paused, and then went on. 'Ye may be supposing that the end o' my trouble. But bide a while; for it weren't, nor yet the worst.

  'I gets back aboard in haste, as ye'll understand. We weighs at once, and slips out to sea without no interference from the forts. But we've not gone above four or five miles, when on our heels comes a carack of a guarda–costa and opens fire on us as soon as ever she's within range. It's my belief she had orders from the muckety Captain–General to sink us. And for why? Because the talk of the Holy Office and the Fires of the Faith was so much bluster. The last thing as that thief would wish would be as they should find out in Spain the ways by which he is becoming rich in the New World.

  'Howsomever, there was the guarda–costa, pumping round–shot into us as fast and hard as bad Spanish gunnery could contrive it. Without guns as we was it were easy as shooting woodcock. Or so they thought. But, having the weather–gauge o' them, I took the only chance left us. I put the helm hard over, and ran straight for her. Not a doubt but those muck–scutcheons counted on shooting us to pieces afore ever we could reach her, and, on my soul, they all but did. We was sinking fast, leaking like a colander, wi' our decks awash when at last we bumps alongside o' her. But by the mercy o' God to heretics, what were left o', my poor ship got a hold on that guarda–costa's timbers wi' her grapnels, what time we climbs aboard her. After that it were red hell on they decks, for we was all mad wi' rage at those cold–blooded murderers. From stem to stern we swept her wi' cold steel. I had five men killed and a half–score wounded; but the only Spaniards left alive was them as went overboard to drown.'

  The slaver paused again, and his fiery eye flung a glance of challenge at his audience. 'That's about all, I think. We kept the carack, of course, my own ship being sunk, and that'll explain they emblems o' Popery on our mainsail. I knew as they'ld bring us trouble afore long. And yet, when, as I supposed, it was on account o' they that ye put a shot athwart my hawse, it came to me that maybe I had found a friend.'

  II

  The tale was told, and the audience, thrilled and moved by it, sat in silence a while, still under the spell of it after Walker had ceased to speak.

  It was Wolverstone, at last, who stirred and growled. 'As ugly a story as I've heard of Castilian subtlety. That Captain–General would be the better for a keel–hauling.
'

  'Better still for a roasting over a slow fire,' said Yberville. 'It's the only way to give savour to this New Christian pig.'

  Blood looked at him across the table. 'New Christian?' he echoed. 'You know him, then?'

  'No more than you.' And the sometime seminarist explained. 'In Spain when a Jew is received into the Church he must take a new name. But his choice is not entirely free. The name he takes must be the name of a tree or plant, or the like, so that the source of his house may still be known. This Captain–General bears the name of Perera: Pear tree. The Valdaro and Peñascon have been subsequently added. They are always the readiest, these renegadoes, with threats of the Fires of the Faith.'

  Blood gave his attention once more to Captain Walker.

  'You'll have a purpose, sir, in giving yourself the trouble of telling us this nasty tale. What service do you seek of us?'

  'Why, just a spare set o' sails, if so be ye have them, as I'm supposing ye will. I'll pay you what they're worth; for, burn me, it's inviting trouble to try to cross the ocean with those I carry.'

  'And is that all, now! Faith, it was in my mind ye might be asking us to recover the value of your slaves from this Captain–General of Havana, with perhaps just a trifle over for our trouble in the interests of poetic justice. Havana is a wealthy city.'

  Walker stared at him. 'Ye're laughing at me, Captain. I know better than to ask the impossible.'

  'The impossible!' said Blood, with a lift of his black brows. Then he laughed. 'On my soul, it's almost like a challenge.'

  'No challenge at all. Ye'll be bonny fighters, like enough; but the devil himself wouldn't venture to sail a buccaneer ship into Havana.'

  'Ah!' Blood rubbed his chin. 'Yet this fellow needs a lesson, bad cess to him. And to rob a thief is a beckoning adventure.' He looked at his associates. 'Will we be paying him a visit, now?'