Captain Crossbones

by Donald Barr Chidsey

  CAPTAIN CROSSBONES

  by

  DONALD BARR CHIDSEY

  Captain Crossbones

  Copyright © 1958, 1986, by Donald Barr Chidsey.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidepress.com

  CHAPTER I

  THE LIGHT of a leprous moon swathed Fort Nassau, a pile that, while by no means old in this year 1718, had been so often and so savagely sacked by the Spaniards that it had about it the air of a ruin whose very ghosts have crept away. The ramparts were rubble, the gun platforms pocked with craters. Dismounted cannons were strewn like jackstraws across the bailey and along the base of the walls: spiked as they had been, their touchholes torn open, their muzzles plugged with lead, they were not worth their weight in junk, and nobody had even troubled to steal them.

  Yet this fort was manned. A torch spluttered in its iron cresset. Sentries stood at the gate, from time to time apprehensively eyeing the town beyond, where many a rumshop still glowed, though it was near dawn. There were sentries, too, on the walls, which they paced with uncertainty, leaning forward like men wading waist-deep in water.

  There was even a flag—the black flag of death.

  The flag had not been raised above any part of the fort proper, but rather over a structure that stood at the base of the wall on the bay side. The last carpenter’s hammer had sounded against this structure but a few hours ago, so that now it stood ready for its burden. It was strong. It could support all of the weight about to be suspended from it. A platform about four feet off the earth was supported by three large but empty hogsheads. Each of the hogsheads was encircled by at rope, and by means of a master-rope connecting them, these platform supports could be jerked away all at once. Other ropes dangled from a crossbeam, nine of them, and each one ended in a noose.

  Silence hung heavy in that place. The sentries scarcely grunted when they turned. No word of command came from the lighted chamber atop the guardhouse where the new governor, who had staked his career and quite possibly his life on this mass execution, could have been pictured counting the hours, even the minutes. Nor in the cell where the nine convicted men lay was there much conversation.

  Moonlight seeped into this lugubrious place through a couple of gratings, and it was smeared hesitantly across the ceiling. The straw was clean, and so on the whole was the cell itself. The men were gyved, each by his right ankle, to a long and exceedingly strong steel chain. The ends of this chain were fastened to staples at the two ends of the cell. The prisoners could rise, stretch, and make their way in turns to and from the pail. They could hear the pacing of the guards, the challenges, even the slap of wavelets against the shore; but the gratings were high, and the men could see nothing that lay outside.

  They were a motley crew.

  The leader was John Augur, who had been serving under Jennings when the buccaneers first took over this island of New Providence. A middle-aged and flatulent man; he had hair that was greasy and gray. He stank. He belched. He scratched himself. Unspeakably the brute, he filled his last hours with expressions of outrage that he and his pals should have been tried at all, much less convicted.

  “What kind of a cove is this? All the others always divvied with us. Does Rogers think he’s better’n them?”

  “Maybe we didn’t offer enough?” suggested Will Cunningham, a small goat-faced man in his forties.

  “We offered every dollar we had! Ain’t that enough?”

  These two were old and tough and fit to die. The others were young.

  Two of the younger men were Irish

  Dennis Macarty didn’t know the meaning of tears. Piracy had been just another lark for this light-hearted lad.

  “I always said I’d die with my shoes off. D’ye suppose they’ll let me kick them off when the time comes?”

  “Shut up,” said William Dowling.

  Dowling was the other one from Ireland. Handsome in a dark way, he was morally a monster. He alone had put up no sort of defense. Far from showing remorse, he had boasted in court that the reason he’d left Ireland was that he murdered his own mother: he had beaten her to death, the brave boy.

  Tom Morris, George Bendell, William Ling, all were under twenty. They said nothing, but their eyes were open and sometimes their lips moved as though in prayer. They were badly frightened.

  “The only one I feel sorry for is Rounsivel here,” said William Lewis, cocking his head and squinting at the contents of the bottle he held, to measure the amount left.

  A giant, Lewis was amiable when drunk but at no other time. Once, in London, he had been a promising pugilist, but now his hand wobbled and his step was not steady.

  “He never was on the account, yet they’re going to stretch his neck the same as us.”

  “That’s because he’s a lawyer, and they hate lawyers,” Augur put in. “He told ’em, didn’t he? He said that Rogers’ commission don’t authorize him to make up no court of vice admiralty. We should’ve been sent home. Our trial was illegal.”

  “Which will help us,” chuckled Macarty, “when they knock those planks out from under our feet.”

  “Shut up,” said William Dowling.

  “Illegal,” said John Augur, “that’s what it is.”

  The ninth man, the one to whom reference had been made, was in his lower twenties. Long, lean, hard, but not coarse, sartorially, perhaps because he’d had the furthest to fall, he showed the poorest of the lot. His salmon-colored drugget coat was smudged. The buckles were gone from his shoes—stolen. He had succeeded in keeping his holland shirt and colebatteen ruffles tolerably clean, but he had no manner of cravat left. He’d been obliged to throw away his periwig, so infested with lice had it become. Now, like the others, he wore his own hair: but his, cropped, made his head shine baldishly in the eerie light of the moon. It was a long, slightly equine head, and the absence of hair made his face show even more saturnine than would normally have been the case.

  George Rounsivel, not because he meant to be aloof but only out of weariness, spoke no word. He had done as well as he could for the others, shifting at each chain-change, waiving his turn at the pail, even from time to time trying to cheer them with a story. But now he uttered no sound, for he was sick of them and their kind. It was not the least bitter of his reflections that he, who a month ago wouldn’t have known one of their sort, soon would hang with them in the last great ghastly companionship of death, unidentifiable from the others save perhaps by the quality of his shirt.

  Arms around his legs, chin on knees, he sat and stared at nothing, brooding. Oddly—for in every other way no two men less like one another could have been conceived—he resembled John Augur in that it was not grief that consumed him in this his last hour, but indignation. Damn it, that trial had been irregular! All of George Rounsivel’s professional training was outraged, all his sense of decency as well.

  Time was what he had fought for. If these prisoners had been sent back to England for trial, as they should have been, George Rounsivel would have been able, if only by post, to establish his bona fides. He could have proven that he was a gentleman, a member of the Pennsylvania colonial bar, and that he had been dispatched to the Bahama Islands by financiers who had commissioned him to study the possibilities of cotton planting there He could not prove this now; the pirates had destroyed his papers. But in England he could have proven it. He might have spent some months in a noisome jail, and it was unlikely that he would ever have gotten his belongings back, but at least he would live.

  In a way, George Rousivel could not blame the governor, who was obliged to take strong measures—or else knuckle under to these knaves. Bearing a royal proclamation of pardon for past offenses, he had come
to a place where piracy was not so much an adventure as a way of life. Bahamans ate and drank piracy, and slept and dreamed and danced it. It was their raison d’etre. They had listened to royal proclamations in the past. They would renounce the wickenedness of stealing on the high seas—provided they were not called upon to give up their loot—and then, when the next opportunity came along, they would once again, in their own words, “go on the account.” It was the accepted practice. If you weren’t a working pirate it was only because you couldn’t get a berth, or else because you were in cahoots with the active ones and as a buyer of stolen goods made more money ashore than you would have made at sea. Nothing else was imaginable, here.

  And then . . . along had come this man Woodes Rogers.

  Hundreds had given themselves up; but when it was suggested that they work—repair the fort, for instance, against expected attacks from the French or Spaniards—they had held up their hands in horror. They were pirates at heart, every one of them.

  It was ironical too. If, as the authorities feared, the residents of the town of Nassau rose in arms and rushed the fort to free the prisoners, it would not be for him, George Rounsivel, the only honest one, but for the other eight.

  Those others, to give them credit, had stoutly stood up in court and sworn that Rounsivel was no pirate by choice but had in fact been forced. Nevertheless this plea was thrown out. It was, after all, too common. Three out of four pirates, caught red-handed, protested that they’d been forced. Many refused to sign articles of brotherhood-and-association for that very reason—fear of putting themselves on record as members of a conspiracy. Instead they were satisfied with a lesser share of the loot. Others, when they joined a pirate crew, first pleaded with their companions to give them a paper testifying that they had been coerced. This was a regular practice. Indeed, it was precisely because they craved somebody who could frame a document with long legal words and phrases that these outlaws had seized the young attorney, George Rounsivel, from a vessel they’d sacked at sea. Illiterate, they had immense respect for the written word. If it was on paper, they thought, it couldn’t be wrong.

  And so George Rounsivel too had been convicted—by a court that had no jurisdiction in such a case.

  To be hanged as a pirate would be bad enough. To be hanged as a pirate illegally was insufferable.

  The ruffians to right and left of him had fallen silent. His thoughts were not with his Maker, as they should have been, but rather with the possibility of a final speech, a speech from the very gallows. He had never heard of such a speech being effective. They were for the most part given out of vanity, he supposed. But the instinct to live is very strong. George Rounsivel’s law degree could not protect him here, nor yet his taut, trained athlete’s body. Would he become like the others, or even lower, and scream and plead for mercy? Could he find the power to make a last-minute speech of the sort traditionally permitted of the felon who was about to be “turned off”? Would words come?

  “I tell you I was forced! I was a prisoner, not a pirate, and I could prove it if they hadn’t thrown my papers overboard!”

  He could picture in his mind’s eye the hangman stolidly waiting for him to finish, the officer of the day with drawn sword, the governor fingering a timepiece, and the nervous guards, who would watch the crowd.

  “Send to Philadelphia, if you don’t believe me! Ask anyone in Philadelphia who George Rounsivel is!”

  Would he rant on, repeating himself, hysterical, sobbing? It was a thought to turn a man’s stomach. But you never knew. You never could know until you were there what you’d do.

  If on the other hand he did speak with some eloquence and did stir the spectators—it was certain that everybody on the island would be there—he would stir them only to anger against the new governor, not to pity. George Rounsivel might precipitate a riot; he was hardly likely to survive one.

  He was pondering this point when there came the sound of a scuffle, and a woman screamed.

  They called her the Angel; in truth in that scorched pestiferous frontier of civilization she loomed angelic, a vision.

  Previously the women of the Bahamas had been divided into two classes—the bad and the worse. This difference was but one of price. There was no large plantation, and properly speaking no household. There were no slaves. The colony did not boast any commercial firm, or naval station, and until the arrival of the new governor with one hundred aging soldiers it had no military establishment. The population might have been ninety per cent seafaring, and almost all English. If any of these men had wives they didn’t bring them out to the islands, where until lately a lady never had been seen.

  This made the jolt harder when Woodes Rogers sailed into Nassau Bay attended, not only by those shakey soldiers, but, also by a bevy of secretaries, a wife, two small children, and a niece.

  The latter, Delicia, daughter of the governor’s beloved younger brother John, who had been killed by the Spaniards, was the Angel.

  Small, dainty, in her hoop petticoats, and her bonnets, she looked a marionette—and proved a whirlwind. There was a great deal to be done; unhesitatingly she set about doing it.

  As though it had been another passenger aboard the governor’s vessel the plague came. The attack was abrupt, but the ache was long, the pain debilitating. At lurk in these waters, raiding any vessel they met, regardless of flag, and perhaps preparing to pounce upon Nassau itself, were Charles Vane and ninety-odd unreconciled rascals who had broken out of the bay the very night Rogers arrived.

  Bigots averred that this plague had been brought about as a punishment for the colony’s many sins. The governor pointed out that Vane’s men, before they made their hasty departure, had skinned out all the cattle, leaving corpses widely scattered, polluting the air, so that for almost a week the island was encased in an unholy stink, a miasmatic infection. There was your sickness, Woodes Rogers had said.

  Whatever the reason, the Angel, asking no questions, had sallied forth to nurse the ailing. She was what they chiefly remembered of that bad time, when the vomiting and fever had faded from mind—Mistress Delicia with her serious smile and that unfailing bottle of brandy.

  It was the same when the Augur gang was rounded up. Delicia was not as affable with them as she’d been with the victims of the plague, but she was fully as efficient. All on her own authority she had ordered their cell scrubbed and fresh straw strewn there; she brought them fruits, food and wine . . . rum too, for Lewis. She even brought flowers. “Why shouldn’t they have flowers?” she had snapped at a scandalized jailor.

  She had been solemn as she went about these ministrations, greeting the prisoners and departing from them without a smile. A determined woman, dedicated to her duty, but not graciousness personified, as she had been with the victims of the plague.

  The men answered her when she spoke, and were respectful, but they did not have the courage to engage her in talk. Only once had George Rounsivel ventured to speak to her.

  This was the previous day, just after the conviction had been announced, the sentence passed.

  “You must know, ma’am, that my case is different from the others. If I could speak to your uncle in private . . .”

  She had looked up in that swift birdlike way of hers, and her eyes, the color of Parma violets, for an instant swam with moisture, but she had looked down again.

  “My uncle makes it a point of policy never to interfere with the findings of the court.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  That was all that had passed between them.

  Yet it was this same girl who had given the scream outside of the cell door—the scream that turned nine heads as though they were worked by a single wire.

  It was not all her blame. Corporal Pugh, admittedly, had sprung out of the shadows with an abruptness that might have jogged anybody. For Pugh himself was scared.

  He was characteristic of the company Woodes Rogers had brought. Rickety, cough-racked, and like so many of his companions he was a pensione
r taken from hospital. Here were men that the army no longer wanted and even the navy wouldn’t have. There was not much about their appearance to point at a military past. They weren’t alert, they lounged, and they snoozed on sentry-go. If ever these miserable totterers were called upon to defend the enfeebled walls of Fort Nassau the result would be sure. The buccaneers were a rabble, granted; they were unorganized, stupid, and in many ways unskilled men, besides being prodigiously lazy and very often drunk; but when stirred to action they could be furies, and they knew every dirty trick in the game.

  Corporal Pugh was aware of this. When he had been assigned to stand sentinel at the cell door, on this night of all nights, he knew that if the rumshops suddenly were emptied and the pirates came storming into the fort, here was the spot they’d head for. He had no dream of making an heroic stand. He had, therefore, marked out in his mind a route of retreat, and instead of standing smack before the door he had hunkered down in the shadows thrown by a charcoal bin twenty feet away. There, alas, he had all but fallen asleep. At the sound of Delicia Rogers’ step he had sprung to his feet with an abruptness that brought from her that involuntary scream.

  They grinned sheepishly.

  “Ma’am, you shouldn’t ought to be out on a night like this. You should be at Government House, where you got a guard.”

  “And what a guard! All of them hiding their heads like ostrichs—like you here, for that matter!”

  “Now, ma’am—”

  “No matter. I’ve been talking to my uncle, and I think I have at last persuaded him to reconsider the case against Rounsivel.”

  “Good. That lad’s innocent. He just got into the wrong company, that’s all. You have a let-pass?”

  “Here—”

  The light was poor. Pugh could not read anyway, but he did know the governor’s signature, and he made a show of spelling out the words.

  “Yes, that’s right. But I’m not going in there alone, ma’am.”