The Barbary Pirates

by William Dietrich

  “I’ll skewer you if you try to jump!” I warned him, my rapier aimed again at this throat. “Steer into that side canal there, before they get off another volley!”

  We turned into a small channel that cut across the island by a different path. Maybe we could lose our pursuers in the liquid labyrinth that was Venice. This narrow tributary was dark, the houses seeming to lean in. Only the water gleamed.

  A lantern appeared behind as the gondolas in pursuit followed us. We could hear the furious thrashing of their oars. I fired my rifle again at the lead boat and its light danced, but didn’t go out. Someone fell into the water, and more guns fired back. Bullets pinged off the stonework and we involuntarily flinched. “Wish I could see to aim for their gondolier,” I muttered as I reloaded.

  “Please leave us out of this, signor,” our own said with quavering voice. Realizing he was a logical target, our gondolier was driving us with more ambition than customary. Dark buildings zipped by as if he were powered by Fulton’s steam. Shutters were banging open as occupants leaned out to see what was going on, but everything was in shadow. What they observed was a parade of racing phantoms, our nearest pursuer less than fifty yards behind. The occasional twist or low bridge prevented either of us from getting a clear shot.

  Bells began ringing, but no authorities came to our aid.

  “I’ve got an idea,” said Fulton. He was eyeing a gondola unwittingly coming the other way, beginning to drift as its gondolier paused in confusion at the echo of shots and our own maddened pace. As we passed them the inventor reached out and neatly snatched the scull from the confused boatman, leaving him to drift into the path of our pursuers. Fulton clambered to the bow of our boat.

  “What’s your plan?”

  “Wait for me on the far side of this bridge.”

  The bridge was a low arched stone one, typical for the city. As we came to it, the American suddenly thrust the oar down, planted it on the bottom of the shallow canal, and vaulted himself onto the roadbed above. We slid under him, and I ordered the gondolier to halt on the bridge’s far side. The boat skewed as we stopped and then slowly backed toward Fulton. Meanwhile the inventor had jammed the pole of his captured oar into the stone railing he had just jumped over, and was prying. “I wish I had a fulcrum.” Then there was a grunt and a crack.

  We heard curses in three languages as the lead gondola of our pursuers collided with the one we’d left drifting. There was a cry and another splash. Then our assailants came toward us again, and Smith, Cuvier, and I readied to give a volley.

  “Wait for my command!” whispered Fulton, who had hidden behind the balustrade.

  The enemy boat was speeding for the bridge, pistols and swords pointed at us in a bristling hedge that just caught the starlight.

  Then, with a groan, the stone railing gave way. Blocks as heavy as anvils were levered off the bridge lip by Fulton and fell just as the gondola was passing underneath, crashing into the vessel and snapping it to pieces. The occupants tumbled into the water.

  The inventor, oar still in hand, leaped from the other side of the bridge to a water-washed porch and scrambled toward our boat. “Fire at the next one!” he ordered.

  I liked his cool head.

  So when the second attacking gondola came out of the gloom, slowing at the sight of comrades thrashing in the water, we let loose a volley: Cuvier’s two pistols, my rifle, and Smith’s blunderbuss all went off at once. There were screams, more oaths, and the second pursuing boat tipped as dead and wounded spilled into the canal.

  “Now, now, go for the harbor!” Fulton cried as he jumped aboard. Our gondolier sculled as if he were on fire.

  “Nice work, Robert,” I congratulated.

  “It’s all in the leverage. Archimedes showed how it could be done. ‘Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth,’ the old Greek said.”

  “Clever bastard, wasn’t he?”

  At the next bridge, where the canal narrowed because of the structure’s abutments, Fulton had us stop while he wedged the extra oar at an angle widthwise across the canal behind us, just at water level where it could catch a gondola’s bow. “That will block the rest until they chop it away,” he said. “It may give us enough time.”

  Then we hurried on, our gondolier panting.

  “Being with you is proving to be consistently dramatic, Monsieur Gage,” Cuvier said, in order to say something. He was getting quicker, I noticed, at reloading.

  “Bloody exciting,” Smith agreed. “Who are those devils?”

  “Egyptian Rite, I assume. Or their hired mercenaries. Anxious, persistent, and hostile. Lucky they didn’t cut us off.”

  Finally we broke from the narrow canal and glided out into the broader lagoon. The domes of the Basilica were a geometric symphony against the sky, and moored gondolas bobbed in the light chop. But how to find a ship in the middle of the night?

  Then a lantern glowed in the stern of a xebec.

  “Here, here! This is the one you want!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Our gondolier sculled briskly toward the Turkish vessel, anxious to get rid of us.

  Its Muslim captain, brown as leather and whip-quick, beckoned us closer. His sleeveless vest revealed muscle worthy of a skilled topman, and his dark eyes were lively as a rug merchant’s. “Row to the other side of my vessel, away from the city! Yes, come to Hamidou! I heard shots and suspect you need quick passage, my new friends!”

  We rounded the stern and drifted close to the other side. Half a dozen other sailors with close-cropped beards lined the gunwale, dressed in bloused trousers, bright sashes, and in some cases, turbans.

  “Gage, these are Muhammadans,” Cuvier objected.

  “And we need to go to Ottoman waters.”

  “Yes! I will take you where you wish to go for half what these Christians would charge you,” the entrepreneur promised. “No ship is swifter, no passage cheaper, than my Mykonos. But you have money, my friends?”

  “Yes, and we need to leave now.”

  “Then you need Hamidou! Dragut is the best sailor on the Adriatic and the Aegean. Look at my little arrow here. Fifty feet long, narrow and shallow, able to slip anywhere. My sails are black, so we move like a phantom.”

  “Do you know the island of Thira?”

  “Of course! I was almost born there! And for two hundred francs, we leave at this moment. For three hundred, we leave an hour ago!” He laughed. “The Christians will charge you three times that to go to Turkish waters. They are afraid of pirates. But I have nothing but friends!”

  “And why are you quite so cheap?” asked Fulton, with Yankee skepticism.

  “Because I go to the Aegean anyway. I take you to Thira, trade at nearby islands, and then pick you up to bring you back.” He nodded. “I, Hamidou Dragut, vow it!”

  “You’re a Turk?”

  “I am Greek, I am a Turk, I am whatever you want me to be. I sail with all faiths. Do not hesitate! Look—do you see the gondolas? They are looking.”

  I climbed the side of the hull and looked across the deck of his ship at Venice. Craft had emerged from the same canal we had and were sculling toward the moored gondolas, searching.

  “There are more of them than there are of you,” the captain said.

  “We’re hoping to slip in and out of Thira before anyone much notices.”

  “Then Hamidou is the man for you! I am a ghost. Invisible. A good smuggler.”

  “Not smuggle. Simply arrive and depart without official interference.”

  “Thira is a small island, with small bureaucrats. A word, a coin, and you will be secret enough. I know everyone. All are my friends.”

  His gaze flashed from one to the other of us looking for belief with the energy of a man who is used to doubt, because he doesn’t worry too much about truth or principle. In other words, I knew the type and recognized his usefulness. “This Dragut looks like just the rascal we need,” I told the others.

  “Trustworthy?”

/>   “Expedient.”

  We boarded, coins were counted out, and Dragut’s men sprang to quietly raise anchor and sails. The crew hauled on the lines in the dark with the surety that comes from long practice. None objected to our sudden nighttime departure, once they saw money. Even as the pursuing gondolas hunted along the shore, we drifted from Venice before first light blushed in the east, not daring to set a lantern. The water hissed under our keel, a dawn breeze carrying the smell of the city, and then the sails stretched as the wind freshened, rigging creaking. The boat leaned, came alive, and settled into rhythm. The city’s lamps began to fade behind us, disappearing with the last of the stars.

  We collapsed into sleep.

  I awoke at midmorning and inspected the craft we’d hired. Our xebec had two main masts and a mizzen, lateen sails, a dozen light cannon to ward off thieves, and a high, graceful poop we savants could relax on while the half-dozen Muslims worked the ship. There was a simple cabin below that Hamidou said we could share with him but which was too low to stand in. His crew slept on the open deck, and below a main-deck grating was the hold for sails, supplies, and cargo. Long, narrow, and shallow-drafted, it was ideal for poking in and out of the tight harbors of the Mediterranean.

  The city had disappeared, and we were alone on the sparkling Adriatic. “Good morning!” Hamidou greeted. “I will get you to Thira two days faster than any captain in Venice!”

  We ate a breakfast of couscous and lamb—the crew’s leftovers from the night before—and took stock. The nice thing about a scrape with danger, I decided, was that we four savants had developed the fellowship of shared peril. We had the exhilaration that comes from escape, and the camaraderie that comes from relying on each other for our lives.

  I, with my rifle, tomahawk, and sword, was considered the veteran. I’d been in battles, and this granted me an assumption of competence and courage. It’s why men work hard to become dangerous.

  Smith, cheerful at this opportunity to see more of the world than the bottom of a canal ditch, took an avid interest in the working of the Islamic ship and a dedication to cleaning his blunderbuss. He fired it once for the sailors, the kick punching him backward, and its roar made them jump and cry in wonder and delight. The bullets kicked up a spray on the sea.

  Fulton had sewn a patch on his wounded bag and was fitting metal tubes to extend the pipes, half filling the bag with seawater and squirting it at Cuvier in a spray he adjusted by tinkering with the nozzle.

  “You’re constructing a fountain?” the Frenchman asked.

  “I’m making a dragon. I need to find some oil on Thira.”

  Cuvier, when not recording expenses and compass readings in his journal, proudly showed his new pistols to Hamidou Dragut. The pair had a fine time with mock duels, pacing the length of the xebec before turning and firing with clicks of hammers, like boys.

  “These pistols are as pretty as a houri!” our captain exclaimed. “This is good, because death should be elegant. I would be kissed by weapons like these, or the American’s pretty sword, and bleed happily. You are gentlemen of taste and refinement.”

  The truth was that we felt cheerful. There’s thrill in cheating danger. We were swashbucklers, out for scientific fame. Bonaparte’s required journey was a diversion to a Mediterranean where all colors are brighter, all meals slower, all evenings more languid, all women more mysterious, and all cities more ancient. The wind was warm, and the limoncello liqueur we bought was ambrosia from the islands, sweet and sharp as honeyed ice.

  For me, the conversation with Napoleon about his Little Red Man had ignited a hundred memories and unanswered questions. I remembered Bonaparte’s bold stay alone in the granite sarcophagus of the Great Pyramid, lying like a dead man and emerging from its dark chamber with hallucinatory visions. I’d been embroiled in a deepening puzzle ever since—first the medallion and the pyramid, and then the Book of Thoth in the tunnels of Jerusalem and the City of Ghosts. Magnus Bloodhammer had dragged Norse myth and North America into the tangle, and all this musty legend pointed to some ancient beginnings forged by strange god-men with powerful knowledge, long forgotten and only half rediscovered. There were secrets that had been anxiously sought by conquerors from Alexander to the Crusaders, and a weird, dark history that interwove with our more conventional one. Each time I thought the mystery had finally slammed shut, another door would open. Each time I thought the Egyptian Rite was out of my life, it would unexpectedly reappear. Each time I thought I’d fought or tunneled my way to some final conclusion, yet another quest became necessary. It was dangerous as the devil, and I grieved for the friends I’d lost along the way, but it was also as intoxicating as a temptress or a chest of gold. I was becoming the master, I realized, not of electricity as my mentor Franklin might have hoped, nor commerce as my father desired, nor even war as Napoleon might instruct, but of a story with snakelike twists that hinted where we’d come from. It led back into the fog when time began. While Smith and Cuvier looked to rocks for the answer, I was the scientist of myth, the investigator of the improbable. Fate had woven me a career out of fable.

  Dragut was curious, of course, why four European scholars (I benefitted from their company by being lumped with them) would want to coast round the Peloponnese of Greece and fetch up at a rocky island on the rim of the Aegean. Thira had no city, no commerce, and no ancient ruins of any note. “They are poor and pious, on an island the devil made,” he said. “It is one of those places in the Mediterranean where nothing is.”

  “We study the history of the earth,” Smith told him. “Thira is dramatic.”

  He shrugged. “I allow it is steep. But what need of history?”

  “Men learn from the past.”

  “Men are slaves to the past, always trying to correct old errors. Trust in Allah, my friend.”

  “I trust you to sail this ship safely to where we want to go.”

  “Yes! Put your faith in Hamidou, too! I will surprise you!”

  We caught a northwesterly maestro wind off the continent and surfed down the windy Adriatic, quickly passing the Austrian possessions of Dalmatia and then, as the breeze fell, coasting by Croatia, tiny Montenegro, and the western coast of Greece that was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. The wind gradually gentled, the sea a saucer of sparkle. Castles crowned rocky headlands, pastel villages lined aquamarine bays, and bulbous church steeples served as navigation marks between reefs and islets. The blue of sea and sky deepened as we sailed south, clouds sweet as cream.

  The seven Greek islands of the new Septinsular Republic, created when the Russians and Turks ejected French troops three years before, slid by like high green jewels: Corfu, Kefalonia, Ithaca. It was one of the leaders of this tiny experiment, charismatic Count Ioannis Kapodistrias, whom we were to secretly meet on Thira. There was cloud at the summit of Kefalonia’s Mount Ainos as we breezed by, and I could smell the pine from its shore. It beckoned like a green paradise, but we had no time to tarry. We were going to a place dry and largely treeless, and more like Creation when the world began.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Thira, that Greek island that the Venetians call Santorini, rises sheer from the blue Aegean like a wall of jagged chocolate, its volcanic cliffs topped by whitewashed villages that cling to the crest like frosting. Thira is actually an archipelago of half a dozen islands, the broken remnants of an ancient crater. We sailed into its caldera drunk from wind and the dazzling sunlight of the Aegean, all colors brighter, all edges sharper, the babble of our sailors foreign, our mission misty, and my scientific companions as anticipatory as if they were on holiday. We were in legendary Greece, cradle of democracy, edge of the Ottoman Empire, in a place that looked as if it was created yesterday and could be remade by an explosion tomorrow. Our destination island was a crescent that enclosed a seemingly bottomless bay four miles wide by six long. Across this bay was the smaller island of Thirassia that represented, Smith told me, the opposite side of the old crater wall. In the harbor’s center was a small, l
ow, rumpled island as pocked as the moon. It was smoking.

  “This is what the world looked like when it began,” Cuvier said. “Rock and water.”

  “Look at the strata of those cliffs, Georges!” Smith exclaimed. “Eruptions laid down like rows of bricks! We can read them like a book!”

  “What shelter this would be for a navy,” Fulton added. “Cliffs you could cuddle under.”

  “Or the worst lee shore,” Dragut said. “There are days when the meltemi blows that you do not want to be in here, my friend. It can be an evil place.”

  “Evil? I can see the blue domes of half a dozen churches from here.”

  “Christian churches are no shield against the devil when Satan awakes.”

  “And mosques no shelter from an earthquake. Bad things happen to all of the pious, Dragut. The solution would be to use science to warn of disaster.”

  “No, worse things happen to nonbelievers, like savants and French revolutionaries. And no one can warn about the will of God. I put my faith in Allah.”

  “Cuvier,” I interrupted, “you described this as one of the oldest places in the world, but I’m not sure what you meant by that,” I said.

  “Oldest and newest,” the scientist said. “Old in that it’s like our planet’s beginning, raw and mostly treeless. New in that when that isle in the center belches, hot new rock comes out. The island destroys and remakes itself.”

  “It seems an odd place to hide anything you want to keep.”

  “And a forbidding place if you want to keep treasure hunters away.”

  We made for a small harbor at the base of the island’s cliff, the little port cast in shadow this morning by an escarpment hundreds of meters high. Fishing boats bright as toys bobbed by the rubble quay, their gay colors a contrast to the grim rust, brown, and gray striations towering above. The shoreline was so steep that Dragut could bring his xebec right to the short jetty. We hired donkeys for a slow, sure-footed trek up a switchback trail etched into the face of the somber cliff, the animals bristly, ears twitching, and their clop steady as we swayed. The route had no railings and was slick with manure, the donkeys blinking against the flies. Smith kept making us stop so he could peer at different clumps of ugly rock, as if willing the soil to speak. The cliff looked mute to me, and the view out to the other side of the vast bay was across an unnerving gulf of air. I was anxious to get off the precipitous trail.