by Alex Scarrow
The bay, sketched out on parchment by one of Modyford’s spies, looked daunting: long, narrow and clearly overlooked by the fortifications. But then it was the other smaller details that changed everything, the kind of details an unassuming fisherman wandering around could easily pick up. The garrison was grossly under strength. San Felipe should have had a hundred men, but in fact had less than fifty. Castillo Santiago, the main fortification, should have had two hundred men, but was down to approximately sixty, many of whom were untrained as gunners. San Geronimo, in the town, wasn’t even finished and was occupied by an army engineer, seven labourers and a dozen work mules.
Easy pickings. And knowing these titbits, Liam was now almost as fired up about this raid as Rashim. Perhaps in two days’ time they’d be sailing back to Jamaica with a greater personal wealth stowed in the two ships’ holds than the governor of Jamaica himself.
It’s got to be all about speed and stealth; about disguising how few of them there were … convincing the Spanish soldiers they were staring out into the night at a much larger invasion force.
Liam smiled. They had a rather simple yet ingenious plan lined up.
Chapter 53
1667, San Felipe, Puerto Bello
The single crack of a musket shot did the job. Within a minute, Liam could see a pair of softly glowing oil lamps bobbing along the stonework wall of San Felipe and, silhouetted against their amber aura, the heads of several men looking out into the dark in the direction the shot had come from.
‘All right, Will … light ’em up, lad!’ he whispered.
Will struck a flint, lit the end of his torch, then ran along the line of men, touching his torch against theirs. Soon all thirty men of Liam’s landing party held a flaming torch in each hand and were lighting others that had been stuck into the ground next to several dozen crudely constructed ‘scarecrows’: four- and five-foot-tall stakes of wood with crossbars tied to them and rags of clothing draped over them topped by woollen caps. Soon just over a hundred torches flickered in a long, uneven line a hundred yards down the slope from the fort.
It had taken them nearly seven hours since anchoring in the next cove. All but a skeleton crew had been left behind on each ship; the rest had rowed ashore and crossed the rugged terrain by the pale light of the moon and stars. Liam’s raiding party numbered thirty. Rashim had taken the rest, a hundred and seven of them, and rowed across the bay to duplicate the very same ruse on the landward side of the other fort, Castillo Santiago.
Now Liam could see the glow of a dozen lamps along the wall, and could faintly hear Spanish voices calling to each other.
‘OK … so we’ve got their attention now.’
He reached for the white parlay flag beside him and grabbed the torch that Will was holding. ‘You stay right here, Will.’
‘Be careful, sir.’
‘Oh, I plan to be.’
Liam strode forward, sweeping the flag to and fro in front of him, up the steep, boulder-strewn hillside towards the south wall of the fort, hoping desperately that the flickering torch he was holding in his other hand was clearly illuminating the flag. Fifty yards short, he heard a solitary musket crack and saw a tongue of muzzle flash. A shot whistled close by.
‘Hey! Parlay!’
A voice from the wall barked a command, which Liam could only hope was a ceasefire order. ‘I wish to speak to your commanding officer!’ he yelled. He approached another dozen yards, the steep incline finally giving way to more even ground now. A small wooden doorway creaked open at the base of the wall and three men emerged, one of them carrying an oil lamp in one hand.
‘I want to speak to your commanding officer!’ Liam called out again.
‘English?’ a heavily accented voice crossed the ground to him.
Irish actually, he nearly found himself replying. And then realized that would be a lie anyway.
‘Yes! English!’
One of the men stepped forward, leaving the other two behind. Liam and the lone Spaniard slowly approached each other until they were half a dozen yards apart.
‘Do you speak English?’
The man, young and slender, still blinking sleep out of his eyes, tilted his head and shrugged as he finished buttoning his tunic. ‘Little English. Si. Yes.’
‘Are you the fort commander?’
‘Si, Captain Mendoza. Yes. What … is … this?’
‘This is a raid, sir. Your fort is surrounded. I have a two-company strength with me. Two hundred muskets trained on you and your men. And … five ships out in the bay ready to bombard your fort on my command.’ Liam took another step forward. ‘There’s no need for a massacre, Captain. I strongly recommend you surrender.’
The young officer glanced past Liam at the line of flickering torches, the dancing light catching the glint of musket barrels here and there. Liam could see his lips move as he quickly made a rough count.
‘Your men will not be harmed, sir. They will be disarmed and they will be confined to this fort, but none will be harmed. You have my word on this.’
The officer huffed indignantly. ‘Other men … soldiers … come from Puerto Bello soon. They see your flame … they come.’
Liam shook his head and smiled. ‘We know how few men you have garrisoned here. Less than fifty in this fort. We know the men in Castillo Santiago number less than a hundred. No one will be coming to relieve you. Captain, you should surrender.’
‘My men … will fight.’
‘And if they do, you understand what will happen? They will all die.’ Liam turned and gestured at the line of torches downhill. ‘These are not soldiers, you understand. They are pirates. There is no honour among them, no discipline. I am a gentleman, sir, but those men down there? They are animals. Buccaneers. Maroons. Wild men. Once the fighting starts, there will be no quarter. No prisoners taken. And you, sir … I will try my best to protect you, but … I can make no promises.’
The officer took a moment to digest that. ‘Surrender. My men … not harmed?’
‘You have my word. You must understand, it is best for you that this does not become a fight.’
Captain Mendoza took another moment before finally nodding. ‘What do you want of me?’
‘Have your men stack their muskets outside your gate. I will count the muskets when you are done and will expect to see no less than fifty. Do you understand?’
‘Si.’
‘And also the powder for your cannons. This should be set outside your gates as well. When this is done, your men should return to their barracks and they will be kept there and guarded until our business here is finished.’
‘What is your business, señor?’
‘The gold in Puerto Bello. Nothing more. This town will not be looted. The civilians will not be harmed in any way.’
‘You can promise this? With your wild men … your savages?’
‘I can give them orders. They follow them … mostly.’ Liam shrugged. ‘Just help me, Captain Mendoza. Let’s not make them too angry, too uncontrollable, with an unnecessary fight up here on this hill. Eh?’
The officer narrowed his eyes and once more gazed down at the flickering torches and the glint of drawn blades and musket barrels among them. He could hear the faint cries and yips of excited voices coming up the hill towards him. A chilling sound. Men clearly spoiling for loot and, failing that prize, thirsting for a Spanish scalp or two as a consolation.
Finally he nodded. ‘Si … I agree this.’
‘Good. Then you have an hour to place your arsenal of weapons outside. Is that understood? When you are done, signal to me.’
‘Si, señor.’
Liam nodded. ‘Better get started then, eh?’
The officer dipped his head with a quick cordial salutation then turned to make his way back to his waiting men. Liam waited until he was out of earshot before letting out a long, ragged sigh of relief.
Bleedin’ hell. That was easier than I thought it was going to be.
Chapter 54
> 1667, Castillo Santiago, Puerto Bello
Dawn was nearly breaking by the time Rashim had his larger party of men in place. The plan had been to attempt the same ruse on Castillo Santiago – under cover of night to appear to be a much larger force. But with the sky growing paler and the sun soon to breach the horizon, another approach was going to be required. At least, if Modyford’s spy was to be believed, they did in fact have the numerical advantage: 107 men to approximately 60.
Almost double. But that advantage would be negated if they had to storm and take the fort. Surrounding the fort on three sides was open ground, ground that had been hacked clear of trees and undergrowth to provide the defenders with a clear line of fire. Even clearer now the last of the night had slipped away. Any approach was going to be immediately spotted by the fort lookout and they were going to come under musket fire and, by the look of it, within the arc of fire of at least two cannons on each side.
‘Marvellous,’ he muttered.
The situation was quite clear. The fort had to be taken before they could do anything else; it was positioned in such a way as to not only command the entrance to the bay but also overlook the small settlement of Puerto Bello. If they simply attempted to skirt round it and head towards the town and the third – unfinished – fort, Geronimo, Castillo Santiago’s cannons could fire at leisure on them. Equally, they needed to bring their two ships into the bay and right up to the town to load their plunder aboard. The ships would be vulnerable to those cannons too.
Rashim needed to take the damned fort.
‘Monsieur Anwar,’ said Pasquinel. ‘Your orders?’ The Frenchman stood beside him, surveying the situation for himself as he leaned against the long barrel of his own hunting rifle, his bearded chin resting on the muzzle. ‘You ’ave a problem, I think, yes?’
‘That wretched fort is my problem.’ Rashim looked around. On the left side of the fort, a few hundred yards away, he noted a small hillock topped with a few sparse silk cotton trees. ‘What accurate range do you have with that rifle of yours?’
Pasquinel noted the same hill, narrowed his eyes and sucked air between his lips with a soft whistle. He reached down to the ground, grabbed a fistful of powder-dry dirt, tossed it into the air and watched it drop in a dusty cloud down to his feet. ‘No wind today. Is good.’ He looked again at the hill. ‘From there?’ He nodded slowly. ‘Oui, I can be accurate.’
‘How accurate?’
Pasquinel drilled a finger on his temple. ‘Head, maybe.’
‘Beyond range of their muskets?’
‘Yes, of course.’ He smiled. ‘But not their cannon.’
The hillock appeared to be high enough to look down on to the fort. Especially if he could gain an extra few yards in height and climb one of those trees.
‘Well, perhaps while they still seem to be fast asleep … you can make your way over there without being seen?’
‘Oui.’
‘And –’ Rashim had the vaguest notion of a plan B forming – ‘if you watched me very closely from there, perhaps I could nominate a high-value target for you to take out?’
His brow rumpled. ‘Pardon?’
Rashim explained the roughly formed plan he had in mind. Not so much a plan as an opportunity that might just present itself. When he’d finished, the Frenchman was grinning, sly as a fox.
Colonel Fernandez watched a dark-skinned man wearing a frock coat with fancy lace cuffs and a tricorn hat that boasted a plume of ostrich feathers stride across the weed-tufted ground towards his fort. He was carrying a white flag above his head. And that was the first sight that unsettled Fernandez. The second thing that unsettled him was the sight of dozens of other armed men stirring at the edge of the woodland nearby.
Dozens? For all he could see it might just as easily be hundreds.
‘Madre de Dios … are we being invaded?’
He had warned the regional governor that Puerto Bello was surely soon going to become a likely target for the increasingly ambitious and greedy English pirates. Fernandez had warned him time and time again that the defences for the bay were scandalously inadequate and ill-prepared for a land raid. He had warned him the land raids on Cuba might well be duplicated here one day soon. Well, now it seemed the day had finally come.
The garrison drummer was sounding the alarm for his company of men to muster to their stations on the walls. But it was barely a company, mostly made up of old men who should be telling war stories to their doting grandchildren, and young boys, many still too fresh-faced to warrant the use of a razor.
He watched the approaching man hesitantly pacing towards the wall beneath his fluttering flag of truce, finally coming to a halt.
‘Good morning!’ the man in the tricorn hat called up. ‘Am I speaking to the commander here?’
English. These are pirates, then.
Fernandez nodded. ‘Colonel Fernandez. And who do I have the courtesy of speaking to?’
‘Captain Rashim Anwar – privateer licensed out of Port Royal and on the governor’s business.’ He took off his plumed tricorn hat and bowed theatrically. ‘We have come to steal all your gold!’ he added, smiling like the devil himself.
‘You come to seek our surrender, I take it.’
‘I wish to discuss terms with you, Colonel.’
Fernandez stroked the silver-grey bristles of his waxed moustache as he surveyed the men in the distance, stirring restlessly in the shade of the trees like a pack of hungry wolves. It wouldn’t hurt to hear what this olive-skinned man had to say. Perhaps in doing so the pirate captain might let slip some crucial details of his plans. ‘I will listen to your terms, Captain, but, understand this, I will not surrender this fort to you.’
The fort’s oak gates cracked open for Rashim and he was ushered in and quickly escorted up some stone steps to meet the colonel standing on the cannon emplacement above the gate.
Rashim found himself facing the man he’d greeted moments ago over the battlements: a short, moustachioed man in his fifties with a pronounced pot belly, exaggerated by the high waistband of his white breeches. He was accompanied by a younger officer in his thirties, who looked ashen-faced at the figures moving menacingly back and forth beneath the distant trees. There was another older officer with thick dark grey mutton-chop whiskers and the uniform of an artillery officer.
‘Fernandez, is it?’ said Rashim.
‘Colonel Fernandez,’ he replied stiffly. ‘Now say what you have to say.’
Rashim nodded, then glanced quickly over the battlements at the paling sky and the glow of the sun peeking over the top of the nearby hill. ‘My fleet are assembled several miles down the coast.’ Fleet? Strictly speaking, it was technically a fleet … of two. ‘Our spies have informed us of how under strength your garrison is. How few men you have, the state of disrepair of your fortifications, how few of your cannons are serviceable –’
‘Then your spies have been unreliable. Our garrison is at full strength. And our cannons are all working. In fact … this gentleman –’ Fernandez nodded to his left, at the man sporting thick sideburns – ‘my chief of artillery, Sergeant Vasquez, is a renowned gunner. He will be certain to annihilate your ships the moment they attempt to enter this bay.’
Rashim glanced at the man. Dark eyes glared at him from beneath wiry grey eyebrows that flared out like dragonfly wings. He’d decided this colonel was the one. But, on second thoughts, perhaps the artillery sergeant was as much if not more important.
‘My ships will focus their firepower on this fort before proceeding up the bay, Colonel. I have, uh … five – six ships, each of them carrying twenty guns. A hundred and twenty cannons to your two dozen.’
Fernandez smiled, clearly suspecting an exaggeration. Rashim inwardly cursed his inability to tell a lie fluidly, without fumbling the words, or all too obviously scratching the tip of his nose.
‘Then, pirate,’ said Fernandez, ‘enter the bay and show me the strength of your fleet.’
The ashen-faced younger
man spoke quickly in Spanish to his colonel. The old man replied angrily, snapping at him. Shutting him up. He looked once again, nervously, out at the men gathered at the edge of the treeline.
‘Your second-in-command seems less assured of victory than you, Colonel.’
‘He is young and inexperienced,’ he replied gruffly.
Rashim smiled at the young man. ‘You’re quite right to be frightened. My men are the most vicious –’
‘Captain Anwar,’ cut in Fernandez, ‘if you have terms to discuss, please proceed with telling us them. Otherwise –’ he splayed his hands – ‘our business here is concluded.’
Rashim realized his business here was concluded. The colonel wasn’t about to surrender, no matter what terms Rashim offered. Any further talk was wasting time. In any case he now had what he wanted. Information.
‘I see, Colonel, that you are a brave man. That surrender here is out of the question. In which case, sir,’ Rashim dipped his head politely, ‘allow me to wish you the best of luck.’ He extended his hand towards Fernandez. The colonel looked at it awkwardly for a moment then grasped it firmly. Rashim felt the slightest tug of regret at that.
Rashim let his hand go and turned to the artillery sergeant. ‘And you, sir, good luck also to you. May your cannons not … uh … not misfire and your balls fire true … or something.’ Colonel Fernandez translated that into Spanish. The sergeant’s scowl deepened, but all the same he acknowledged the gesture by grasping Rashim’s hand and shaking it roughly.
Rashim lifted his tricorn hat and bowed theatrically. ‘Good day, gentlemen,’ he said and turned to go.
‘Pirate!’
Rashim turned back to face them. It was the young officer who had just called out. His cheeks were red with anger, or perhaps they were burning with the shame of being passed over.
‘Pirate, why is it you not shakes my hand?’ He extended his own, waiting for Rashim to grasp it.
‘I … I, uh … ’