by Tim Severin
‘A wise man knows when to retreat, taking his spoils with him,’ Coxon declared.
‘Half a hat full of pesos!’ scoffed Sawkins. He was bright-eyed with enthusiasm. ‘We can get twenty times as much if we have the courage to stay in the South Sea. I propose that we sail south and plunder as we go until we reach the land’s end. There we round the Cape, and sail home, our pockets full.’
Captain Coxon looked openly scornful. ‘Anyone who believes that claim is putting his head into a Spanish noose.’
‘Do your people always quarrel so openly?’ said someone quietly in Spanish at Hector’s elbow. It was Captain Peralta who had edged his way into the assembly and was listening to the argument.
‘Can you understand what they are saying?’ whispered Hector.
‘Only a little. But the anger in their voices is evident.’
Hector was about to ask Dan whether he wanted to return to Golden Island when a loud husky voice rang out. It was the bald quartermaster who had served under Captain Harris. ‘There’s no point in putting this to a vote,’ he shouted, and he marched up the companionway to the quarterdeck where he turned to face the crowd. ‘Those who want to go back to Golden Island under Captain Coxon’s command, make your way to the starboard rail,’ he bawled. ‘Those who prefer to stay in the South Sea and serve under Captain Sawkins assemble on the port side.’
There was a low murmuring of discussion among the men, and a general movement as the buccaneers began to separate into two groups. Hector noted that the numbers were broadly equal, though perhaps a small majority had elected to travel back with Coxon. He looked enquiringly at Dan. As usual the Miskito had said little and was standing quietly watching what was going on.
‘Dan, I’m for going back to the Caribbean. What do you want to do?’ Hector said. He had never mentioned Susanna to Dan, and now he was uneasy that he was not telling his friend the true reason for his decision. To his relief, Dan merely shrugged and said, ‘I would like to see more of the South Sea. Few of my people have ever been there. But I will go along with whatever you, Jacques and Jezreel decide.’
There was another shout from the quartermaster. ‘Make up your minds and cut the chatter!’
Glancing round, Hector realised that he and his three friends were almost the last people standing in the middle of the deck, still undecided.
‘Come on, Jezreel! Come with us!’ shouted someone from starboard side where Coxon’s volunteers were clustered. During the hand-to-hand fighting on the deck of Peralta’s ship, Jezreel’s great height and his obvious fighting skill had made him a favourite with the buccaneers.
‘Best take your winnings when you’re still on your feet, and not try another bout with a fresh opponent. You’ll likely finish up with a broken face as well as an empty purse. That’s something else I learned in the fight game,’ muttered Jezreel. He strolled across to join the group.
‘Hey Frenchy! You too! We need someone to show us how to roast monkey so it tastes like beef!’ called another of Coxon’s group. Jacques, too, was popular with the men. Jacques grinned broadly and set off, following Jezreel.
Hector was overcome with relief. Without special pleading his friends had chosen the course of action that he had wanted for them. He touched Dan on the arm. ‘Come on, Dan. Let’s join them.’ Then he too started across the deck.
He had not gone more than a couple of paces when Coxon’s voice rang out. ‘I am not having that wretch in my company!’
Hector glanced up. Coxon was standing at the quarterdeck rail and pointing directly at him, his face working with anger. ‘He’s not to be trusted!’ the buccaneer captain announced. ‘He’s a Spanish-lover.’
A murmur ran through the crowd of onlookers. Hector realised that many of them must have seen him in quiet conversation with Peralta. Others would have known that he was responsible for saving the Spaniard from the sea.
‘He would betray us if it suits him,’ Coxon continued. His tone had dropped to a low snarl now. Hector was open-mouthed, taken completely by surprise and so stunned by the accusation that he did not know how to respond. The captain pressed home his advantage.
‘Someone among us warned the Spaniards at Santa Maria of our coming. That is why we found so little plunder there.’ His words dropped into the awkward silence as the general buzz and chatter ceased. ‘I have often wondered who it was, and how the garrison was alerted. It was easy enough for someone to send a warning by the hand of his friend the striker.’
Belatedly Hector remembered that in the last day before the assault on Santa Maria, he had seen little of Dan. The Miskito had been away on a hunting trip to obtain fresh food.
Coxon was icily certain of himself. ‘I will not include a traitor in my company. He stays here.’
Hector had a quick glimpse of the vindictive expression on the buccaneer’s face as the man began to make his way to join the group who had chosen him as their leader.
‘If he stays here, then I do too,’ said Jezreel. He stepped out of the crowd and began to make his way back towards Hector. His great height made his departure very obvious.
There was another movement among the men who had voted to follow Coxon. This time it was Jacques. He too was abandoning the group.
Hector remained where he was, numbed by the turn of events as his two friends came back across the deck. ‘Looks like we’re staying in the South Sea,’ announced Jezreel loud enough for all to hear. ‘Captain Sawkins was always a better bet than Coxon.’
They moved across to the port side where Sawkins’ company was assembled and as they did so, Hector became conscious of more movement behind him. Glancing back over his shoulder he saw that at least a dozen men who had previously decided to follow Coxon, had now changed their minds. They too were switching sides. One by one they were deserting Coxon’s group in full view of the man they had chosen to follow only minutes earlier.
Suddenly a hand gripped Hector by the shoulder, and he was swung round. He found himself staring into Coxon’s livid face. It was contorted with rage. ‘No man crosses me twice,’ he snarled. The buccaneer captain was shaking with anger. His hand dropped towards his waistband, and a moment later Coxon had pulled out a pistol and had rammed the barrel hard into the young man’s stomach. Hector felt the muzzle quivering with the force of Coxon’s anger. ‘This is what I should have done when I first laid eyes on you,’ Coxon hissed.
Hector tensed, already feeling the bullet in his guts, when an arm seemed to come from nowhere, sweeping down towards the pistol and knocking it aside just as Coxon pulled the trigger. The pistol ball buried itself in the wooden deck, and at the same moment someone kicked the buccaneer captain’s feet from under him so that he fell heavily to the deck. Looking up, Hector saw that it was Jezreel who had deflected the pistol’s aim while Jacques had tripped the buccaneer. Both men were looking grim.
No one made any move to help Coxon though Dan collected the empty pistol which had been dropped, and handed it to Coxon once he was back on his feet.
Aware that the entire company was watching him, the captain brushed himself down without saying a word. Then he stepped up close to Hector, and said in a voice so low that no one else could hear but thick with menace, ‘You would be well advised to leave your bones here in the South Seas, Lynch. Should you ever return to a place where I can reach you, I will make sure that you pay for what you have done today.’
ELEVEN
NEXT MORNING Captain Coxon and his company were gone. They left before sunrise in one of the captured vessels, eighty men in all. ‘Bastards, bastards, utter bastards!’ announced one of the surgeons who had decided to stay on. He had just discovered that Coxon’s company had taken with them most of the expedition medicines. ‘How are we expected to do our job when we lack the remedies. They scamper off, tails between their legs, while we’re the ones who can expect to see action.’ To show his disgust, he spat over the side of the galleon.
She was now to be their flagship, and at 400 tons made an impre
ssive show with a wealth of gilding to show off her high stern in the typical Spanish style. She lacked cannon, but with luck their victims would not even know that she was in foreign hands until she was within musket range. The men had been debating what to call her. La Santissima Trinidad sounded too much like popery. Yet every sailor knew that it was bad luck to change a vessel’s name. So at Hector’s suggestion they had decided to keep the name but change the language, calling her Trinity, and even the most superstitious of their company had been content.
‘I’ve still got a few medicines stowed in my knapsack,’ Hector told the disgruntled surgeon. Basil Ringrose was originally from Kent, and Hector had taken an instant liking to him. Ringrose had a friendly manner which matched his open, freckled face topped by a mass of chestnut curls.
‘We must put together a common stock of all the medicines that remain.’ Ringrose said. ‘It’s fortunate that I always carry my surgical instruments with me in their own roll of oil cloth.’
It was Ringrose who had amputated one of Captain Harris’s legs, trying unsuccessfully to save his life. But the stump had begun to rot, and with gangrene had come death.
‘I’m only a surgeon’s assistant,’ Hector confessed. ‘I came to help Surgeon Smeeton of Captain Harris’s company, and he’s turned back. But I have been keeping notes of how to prepare various medicines using local ingredients.’
‘I saw you writing things down and thought that you were helping Dampier over there,’ explained Ringrose. He nodded towards a saturnine, lantern-jawed man who was leaning perilously far out over the side of the anchored galleon and staring down into the sea. The man was dropping small chips of wood into the water and watching them float away. Propped against the bulwark was a bamboo tube similar to the one that Hector carried.
‘What’s he doing?’ Hector asked.
‘I have no idea. You had better go and ask him for yourself. Dampier seems to take an interest in nearly everything that we come across.’
Hector approached the stranger, who was now writing down something on a scrap of paper.
The man looked up from his quill. Brown melancholy eyes framed a narrow nose above a long upper lip. He looked too scholarly to be a sea thief.
‘Tides,’ said the man pensively, even before Hector could pose his question. ‘I’m trying to work out the source of the tides. You may have noticed that here in the South Sea the tides run much stronger than those we left behind in the Caribbean.’
‘I had remarked on that,’ said Hector. Dampier shot him a quizzical glance from the sad-looking eyes.
‘Then how do you explain it? Surely if the ocean is all one body of water, the tides should be similar everywhere. Some people claim that the fierce tides in the South Sea are made by water rushing through tunnels under the land, flooding here from the Caribbean. But I do not believe it.’
‘Then what do you think is the reason?’
Dampier bent his head to blow gently on the wet ink. ‘That I have not yet understood. But I believe it is to do with the wind patterns, the shape of the ocean floor, and phases of the moon of course. What is important at this time is to make observations. Interpretation can come later.’
‘I was told that you make observations of everything.’
Dampier had a habit of rubbing his finger along his long upper lip. ‘Nearly everything. I’m interested in fish and fowl, people and plants, the weather and the seasons. It is my chief reason for travelling.’
‘Surgeon Smeeton, for whom I was an assistant, was of a like mind. Though he was mainly interested in the medical practices of native peoples.’
‘Surgeon Smeeton, I hear that he has left the expedition. A pity. I knew him in Jamaica.’
Hector felt a quick surge of interest at the mention of Jamaica. ‘Do you know Jamaica well?’ he asked.
‘I was there for a few months, training to be an overseer on a sugar plantation,’ Dampier replied. ‘But I disagreed with my employer, and the opportunity to go on the account – as these buccaneers call their adventuring – was too tempting. It was a chance to see new places.’
‘When you were in Jamaica did you hear anything of the Lynch family?’
‘Difficult not to. He was the governor, and his family possess as much, if not more acreage, than any other landowners on the island.’
‘What about the son, Robert Lynch, and his sister Susanna? Did you meet them by any chance?’
‘Far too grand for me,’ said Dampier shaking his head. ‘Though I did encounter young Robert briefly. He wanted information about the best conditions for planting indigo. I told him that he was better to consult an established indigo grower.’
‘What about his sister Susanna?’
‘I never met her in person though I saw her at a distance. A very pretty creature. Destined for a grand marriage, I would say. One day her parents will be taking her to London to find a suitable match.’
Hector felt a stab of disappointment. It was exactly what the surveyor Snead had said. ‘So you don’t think she would stay on in Jamaica?’
‘There’s nothing for her there. Why all the questions? Do you know her?’
‘I met her just once,’ Hector confessed.
Dampier treated him to a shrewd look. ‘Sweet on her, are you? Well, that’s as strange and curious as anything I’ve observed in the South Sea, a humble adventurer pining after a grandee’s daughter.’ He gave a lugubrious sniff, and began to roll up the piece of paper ready to slide it into the bamboo tube with his other notes. Then a thought must have occurred to him, for he looked up and said, ‘If Surgeon Smeeton no longer requires your services, perhaps you would lend me a hand in making my observations.’
‘I would be pleased to,’ Hector assured him, ‘though my chief duty must still be to assist the surgeons.’
‘Yes, you were talking with Ringrose. You’ll discover that he’s got clever hands and is as much interested in navigation as he is in medicine. Enjoys making instruments to read the angle of the sun and devising sighting tables, that sort of thing.’
‘I had noticed that all morning he’s been making a sketch map of the bay and its islands.’
‘A very sensible precaution. We have no charts of this area. We are utterly ignorant of the ports and anchorages, currents, reefs and islands. Such details are known only to the Spaniards. In case we come back here, Ringrose is making notes so that we know just where to anchor, find water and shelter.’
‘I worked for a Turkish sea captain once, assisting him with sea charts. But apart from a single ocean crossing, I lack practical experience of navigation.’
‘Stick close to Ringrose and you’ll learn a lot, though I expect it will be mostly coastal pilotage rather than deep-sea navigation,’ Dampier assured him.
SO IT TURNED OUT. For the next two months Trinity stayed near the coast, a hungry predator looking for scraps of plunder. News of her presence had yet to spread to the Spanish settlements and in the first ten days she loitered off Panama she snapped up several unwary prizes, which sailed straight into her jaws and gave up without a fight. One was an advice ship loaded with pay for the Panama garrison, fifty-one thousand pieces of eight, and – equally welcome – fifty great earthen jars of gunpowder which replenished stocks that had run low. Other hapless victims provided rations – flour, beans, cages of live chickens, sacks of chocolate beans which the buccaneers ground to powder and drank mixed with hot water. The captured vessels were small barks and of little value. Anything useful by way of rigging or sails was taken off, then the boarding party smashed holes in their planking and sank them on the spot.
But the weather was against them. Not a day passed without frequent downpours of heavy rain which soaked the men and their clothing. The sails grew great patches of stinking mildew in the muggy tropical heat, and a miasma of damp hung over the sodden vessel. The run-off dripped through cracks in the deck spoiling everything below. Guns and equipment rusted overnight. Bread and biscuits in the cook’s stores went mouldy. In sear
ch of fresh supplies of food, Sawkins the fire-eater led a raid ashore. The local inhabitants hastily threw up breastworks at the entrance to their little town, and Sawkins was tugging at one of the wooden posts trying to uproot it when he was killed outright by a Spanish shot. His death only added to the general sense of disappointment that Trinity was wasting too much time. When the wind failed she was gripped by unknown currents which one day brought her close to the shore, and the next night pushed her almost out of sight of land. In June the rainfall eased, but the sky remained overcast and sullen, leaving the men frustrated and discontent. They grumbled and bickered, knowing they needed to progress east and south along the coast before the alarm was raised. Instead the wind, when it did blow, was fitful, and almost always from ahead. Trinity was obliged to tack back and forth. The crew found themselves staring at the same landmarks – a headland, a small island, a rock with a particular profile – from dawn until dusk, and then again at the next sunrise. They did not need a chart to tell them that they were almost standing still.
‘What else did your people expect? Did they know nothing of our equatorial weather?’ commented Capitan Peralta to Hector. The Spaniard was one of the growing number of prisoners, and the two of them were in the habit of meeting in the bows of the ship where they could not be overheard.
‘Are the rains finally over?’ Hector asked.
Peralta shrugged. ‘There can be heavy downpours at this time of year, even into August. I wonder if your comrades will still want to follow their captain by then?’
Peralta gave Hector a sideways look. The buccaneer council had elected Bartholomew Sharpe as their new general, the grand title they now gave to their overall commander.
Hector hesitated before replying, and Peralta was quick to pick up on the delay. ‘There’s something a little devious about him, isn’t there? Something not quite right.’
Hector felt it would be disloyal to agree, so said nothing. But Peralta had a point. There was an unsettling quality about Sharpe. It was something that Hector had noted at Golden Island. Even then he had thought that Sharpe was a natural mischief maker. Behind the amiable smile on the fleshy, pouting lips was an evasiveness which made one reluctant to trust him entirely. Now that Sharpe had been made general, Hector was even more apprehensive. He sensed the man was self-serving and devious.