The English Monster

by Lloyd Shepherd

  But then he yawns. It is almost midnight, and it has been a long day. He turns right at the end of the wall, and trudges down Old Gravel Lane, toward Lower Gun Alley and Abigail. Nodding at a tall young man who is limping away from Wapping as their coats brush against each other, Waterman-Constable Charles Horton ends his investigation for this evening, and heads home.

  MAY 1565

  After several days, the Hawkyns fleet left Rio de la Hacha in some triumph, and on friendly terms with the locals. Hawkyns even had a testimonial from the town’s treasurer inside his pocket. The mood on the ships was high. Trading had been a success, and now the crew looked forward to heading home and enjoying the fruits of their labors.

  But in this they were disappointed. What followed instead were dozens of fruitless and frustrating days sailing around the islands of the Caribbean. Hawkyns spent much of this time standing on the aft castle, looking vaguely into the distance and drumming his fingers on the rail, as if pondering the meaning of existence, or at least the meaning of money. He seemed uncertain of what to do next. Were there still opportunities for money to be made, or should they now head home with what they had?

  The crew continued to work the ship, with growing surliness, glancing at Hawkyns and his retinue of gentlemen and waiting for some signal as to what the admiral was up to. Over the course of a fortnight the little fleet pulled in to several different places—Margarita, Cartagena, Cabo de la Vela—but they had nothing significant left to trade. The Africans had almost all been sold; a disconsolate few remained to be taken back to England as gifts. The hold brimmed with the bounty they’d received in return: Indian gold and silver, pearls (Billy and Drake had pocketed six from their little expedition, and the value of one of these was worth more money than anything Billy had ever had his hands on), jewels and mountains of hides, taken from the island of Curaçao, where tens of thousands of cattle carcasses rotted in the sun and the Spaniards sold hides at ridiculously low prices.

  This apparently aimless wandering became the soil for all sorts of belowdecks rumors. Hawkyns was pondering another prize, said some, a different type of transaction, a more larcenous one even than those perpetrated on Burburata and Rio de la Hacha. The rumormongers leaned in, touched their noses, and with immensely secretive authority swore blind that the admiral had his eye on the biggest prize of all: the Spanish treasure fleet, which sailed twice a year from Portobelo and Cartagena back to Spain, transporting the wealth of the Americas from the New World to the Old. It was due any moment. They weren’t hanging about to trade; it was good old Plymouth piracy that Hawkyns had his eyes on.

  Others nodded sagely, smirked to themselves at the idiocy of their shipmates, and whispered of Hawkyns’s real aim, as they saw it, an even more exotic target: the fountain of youth of Ponce de León, believed to be a river within the Spanish territory of Florida. The aging conquistador, it was said, had spent months trying to find the restorative waters told of by the local Indians, to cure his impotence. The combination of Indian mysticism and Spanish sexual dysfunction was too sweet not to interest a bored and sated crew of English sailors, and for a while the two rumors—treasure fleet versus fountain of youth—rebounded off each other as the men muttered and groaned and itched with impatience.

  Drake found the rumors ridiculous. “Why would we have gone through those elaborate charades to avoid annoying the King of Spain? Why would we do that and then attempt to sink his treasure fleet? Hawkyns is not a stupid man. And as for a fountain of youth? Ponce de León was looking for gold, that is all. And he died of a wound in Havana.”

  Billy, whose diplomatic sophistication was growing with every minute he spent with Drake, did not point out that Hawkyns had probably already succeeded in annoying the King of Spain greatly, and that the trading had gone on under the threat of cannon and sword.

  But it soon appeared that Drake was right. Hawkyns seemed to have his eyes on a rather more prosaic prize—hides, the price of which had astonished the English and which would represent easy money to be made back home. They were heading for Hispaniola, where Hawkyns had acquired hides on his first trip to the region. But the currents were against them, the cloud came down, and for days they wandered aimlessly, the strong underlying current shoving the fleet along as if by some unseen giant hand, confounding the navigators and taking them up the side of Hispaniola and toward the channel between the giant island and the dangling peninsula of Florida. Belowdecks the excited chatter about a fountain of youth reached fever pitch, even while the officers struggled to find a way through the strange warm winds and rapid currents of the Caribbean.

  One particularly aimless evening in the midst of this wandering, Drake and Billy were standing at the rail, watching the stars, which had only reappeared from the clouds a few hours before. Billy touched the pearl in his pocket, which stayed there and never shifted, and imagined handing it to Kate on his return to Stanton St. John. He thought of her fine blond hair and high cheekbones. So strangely Slavic for such an English rose.

  “I think I know where we’re heading,” said Drake, with the customary smirk-and-wink.

  “Hispaniola?” said Billy, disturbed from a reverie of Oxfordshire pig-farming.

  “Possibly, for a bit. But I think we’re actually in the business of finding a particular gift for the Queen.”

  “A gift?”

  “Yes. I think Hawkyns wants to give her the keys to Florida.”

  “Florida? You mean the fountain of youth?”

  Drake chuckled, but looked angry at the same time, and Billy saw (not for the first time) that there was steel inside this charming, immoral man, the steel of a future captain.

  “No, young William, I do not mean the fountain of bloody youth. I mean the big chunk of land, across the water from here, which stretches out toward Hispaniola and Cuba, right out into the ocean. Like a sort of gate.”

  “A gate?”

  “That’s right. A big bloody gate across the Caribbean, just waiting for a new gatekeeper.”

  “And he wants to give it to Elizabeth?”

  “Well, in a metaphysical sense. He wants to give her the keys. He wants to present maps and reports and information, everything she needs to send a fleet down here and take it.”

  “Take it?”

  “Yes, young William, take it. It’s all very well, this exploring and trading, but England wants what Spain and Portugal have got. We want dominions and chattels and land. We can’t let this ridiculous accident of history stand.”

  Drake’s hair was blown back slightly by the wind, and something about the set of his jaw and the sparkle in his eyes made Billy pay more particular attention. His friend suddenly seemed rather older than his years would suggest. Drake put his arm around Billy’s shoulders, and with his other hand swept the horizon, a Devil offering empires to Billy’s Christ, before his hand dropped back to the ship’s rail.

  “New times are coming, mark my words,” Drake continued. “We’ve already broken with the Papists and with Rome. We’ve set our own course. Elizabeth might not say it—she might not even think it yet—but England’s got the wind in its sails. France, too. You only need to look at how those pathetic Spanish colonists behaved to understand that they won’t keep a grip on all this for much longer. They got lucky. They funded a Genoese chancer when no one else would, and the gamble paid off. It paid off magnificently. The Pope backed them and the Portuguese and between them those two carved up the world. We were too busy massacring each other in England and France over matters of doctrine to pay all this much attention.

  “Out here, we’re at the edge of something enormous, Billy. Ships like the Jesus will be legends to those who come after us. We’re opening up the world, and mark my words, before much longer all these islands will be English or, just maybe, French. And Florida, over there, is the key. If we can grab it for ourselves, before the French do, the world’s our oyster.” Drake removed his arm from Billy’s shoulder, and with a practiced wink opened his other hand to hand back the p
earl he’d whisked out of Billy’s pocket while they’d been talking. “We’re going to be rich.”

  Eventually, as June reached its end, the little fleet found the right current and a helpful breeze and struggled toward Florida. For a few days, Hawkyns sailed them up and down the coast of the region, as seemingly aimless as before, but the commander spent endless days in his cabin and Billy began to see the truth of what Drake had said. Plans were being hatched. Charts were being scratched on parchment. Soundings were being taken, lists of water supplies recorded, and the crew made use of the time by taking boats out and capturing hundreds of birds and turtles from the Tortuga islands while they hunted for freshwater.

  After three weeks, they finished exploring and turned southeast, intending to head for the harbor in Havana, but the weather had become treacherous in the meantime. The currents now made navigation impossible. Freshwater supplies began to run dangerously low, and belowdecks the talk was no longer of fountains of youth; it was of the recklessness of Hawkyns and the gentlemen who surrounded him. Sanders the quartermaster had been particularly busy with his rope, as some of the men began to drag their heels when it came time to pray. The admiral ordered a rush to be made for the string of islands that garlanded the tip of the Florida peninsula. Billy considered what Drake had said about Hawkyns offering Elizabeth the Keys to the Caribbean; it didn’t feel like such a grand prize now. Panic was boiling through the crew.

  Reefs prevented all but the smallest ship in the fleet getting too close to any of the islands, so twenty men or so were rowed out to the Swallow, the 30-ton pinnace, to act as exploratory parties to find freshwater. The group included Billy, though Drake had done a vanishing trick, as was his custom when there was dull exploration to be undertaken. The wind was vicious, and as the small pinnace worked its way into the islands the Jesus was forced to bear away from the reefs around the islands and almost instantly she seemed to disappear over the horizon under the influence of the vicious underlying current. The pinnace dropped off pairs of sailors at different islands, promising to return to pick them up on the trip back. Billy and a young man named Reynolds were dropped off at one unpromising-looking place, with a sandy beach backed by dense tropical bush. They were rowed in from the pinnace, walking up the beach when the water was shallow enough, and headed toward the undergrowth.

  It was there they discovered the Spaniard’s body.

  15 DECEMBER 1811

  John Harriott occupies an unyielding volume of cold, damp London air. He does not wear either of his dress uniforms—from the navy, or from the East India Company—for the simple reason that neither of them fit him anymore. He stands at the edge of the Ratcliffe Highway, near St. George in the East, and despite the crowds he is given respectful room. Many of the ordinary people know him by sight—the man who faced down the Irish watermen in the River Police riots of 1798—and even those who don’t know him can smell the authority on him the way they can smell gin on the breath of a man falling out of a tavern. He is sixty-six years old, fat, and tired. And not for the first time in his flamboyant, buccaneering life, he is feeling not entirely in control of his destiny.

  The Highway is lined, three or four deep, along both sides, all the way down from Timothy Marr’s shop to the entrance of the St. George in the East churchyard. Many of those in the crowd have been there since the early morning, despite the cold.

  Harriott listens to them talking to each other, an energized whisper running through the gaps between people, smelling of fear, excitement, and anticipation. He thinks there are significantly more women here than there are men, and many of them look like they are on a bit of an outing. Their clothes are a bit more spruce than normal, almost Sunday best, faces are scrubbed, hair is hidden under bonnets. Dotted among the locals is the occasional group of wealthier types, with their new hats and smoother coats, down from London for a little crime tourism among the lower orders. These groups lean in among themselves and occasionally belt out a laugh, unaware of and frankly unconcerned with the looks of scandalous disapproval this provokes among the ordinary people of Wapping and Shadwell.

  Clouds of breath hang in the air over people’s heads. Vaguely, Harriott can hear the creaking of masts and rigging over in the dock, its ships shifting gently in the misty breeze. Up here on the Highway they are almost level with the top of the dock wall, but within this wall sit warehouses which hide the ships even from the raised point of the Highway. Only their intricate masts are visible. The sounds of their movements bounce off the walls of the great white church behind him, and Harriott thinks of an old warship making its way through the fog off Newfoundland, alone and lost.

  The bells of St. George’s ring one o’clock. Half an hour to go. He looks around for Constable Horton and soon spots him, standing within the crowd in his best clothes (the ones Constable Horton had stolen, unbeknownst to Harriott, in the desperate months after his departure from the navy. The jacket is pretty threadbare but still expensive-looking. Its legitimate owner was a city merchant with a big villa in Upper Norwood who had carelessly left a box of belongings on the steps leading to his front door when a starving, half-dressed, and freezing Horton had happened to be walking by). Within the crowd Harriott also sees some of the respectable gentility of Highway society, the shopkeepers and landlords and parish councillors without whom the organism would not function. There are even respectable brothel owners, their means of gathering wealth far less important to their neighbors than the simple fact that they own a business. For these people, ownership of a moneymaking instrument is itself a badge of respectability. The Highway is not so different from the great city.

  The minutes pass. Harriott’s mind wanders, back to America and a certain squaw, then to Indonesia via a frigate in the West Indies and a plague shipwreck on Mewstone Rock, followed by the capture of a xebeque off the coast of Barbary. The old magistrate’s memory is not fading, but the boundaries between the events in his life are bleeding into one another. His capacity for clear thought is in a race to the death with his old, lame body. One of them must give out before too much longer.

  Then there is a disturbance in the crowd down the Highway, around the Marr shop. The coffins are coming out of the house, all bar that of James Gowen, who has been buried separately. The crowd gasps, and a few women begin weeping quietly to themselves. A group of them near the entrance to the church let up a particularly loud wail. Harriott, initially skeptical of this feminine lack of rectitude, softens when he hears someone say this group includes the mother and sisters of Timothy Marr.

  It is only a few hundred yards from the house to the church. The coffins seem to bob around on the heads of the crowd as they make their way along. For a while, there is something approaching silence. Even the creaks from the dock seem to restrain themselves. And then, a woman—perhaps Marr’s mother—wails “God, oh God,” and that sparks off a new, bigger wave of muttering and weeping and shouting, and by the time the coffins have arrived at the church gates the mood of the crowd has changed into something louder and angrier. Vengeance is in the air as the mourning party enters the church: Marr’s coffin first, then his wife and infant, then his father and mother, then his four sisters, then his brother, then a group of friends and mourners, including Margaret Jewell. She is not crying. But she is as pale as a ghost. Harriott would have put her age now at nearly thirty. It has been a long week for the young girl with rebellious thoughts.

  Harriott follows some other luminaries and close friends into the church, where the Reverend Dr. Farrington administers the funeral rites with, Harriott feels, a somewhat warmer sense of fellowship than is quite appropriate for either the occasion or for a distinguished man of the cloth. The service lasts more than an hour. Harriott has been to more than his share of funerals, and knows this is rather over-egging things. He suspects Farrington of enjoying his time in the limelight of public regard. At the end, Harriott shuffles out behind a tall young man with a pronounced limp, almost as pronounced as his own.

  Outside
, the coffins are lowered into an empty grave, and there is a final vengeful shout, male this time, before soil starts to be emptied down onto the hard wooden coffins. Above, the hard white edifice of Hawksmoor’s church glowers at them all, and even the West End dandies in the crowd are shamed into a silence which is at least partly respectful.

  BOOK 2

  Morgan

  Thus they order for the loss of a right arm six hundred

  pieces of eight, or six slaves; for the loss of a left arm five

  hundred pieces of eight, or five slaves; for a right leg five

  hundred pieces of eight, or five slaves; for the left leg four

  hundred pieces of eight, or four slaves; for an eye one

  hundred pieces of eight, or one slave; for a finger of the

  hand the same reward as for the eye.

  JOHN ESQUEMELING, The Bucaniers of America, 1678

  MAY 1565

  They’d clapped eyes on the Spaniard’s body as soon as they’d walked up the beach. Reynolds had started muttering in that strange north country way of his as soon as they’d seen it, something about “cannibals,” a word Billy had never heard before, although it didn’t seem to be the time to be requesting definitions. The body was laid out on the sand, apparently ceremonially, and around its neck was the dark brown necklace of a slit throat. In the center of its chest was a cavity, from which the heart had been scooped out. Billy examined the thing from a few yards away, and came to the conclusion that the body had been placed there as a sign. It didn’t look like a particularly welcoming sign. Even in its eviscerated state it was obvious that this was a Spanish body; the little beard was a giveaway, and up beyond the tree line they also discovered the Spaniard’s helmet and breastplate and the remains of his leather tunic. There was even a little Bible.