Pirate Freedom

by Gene Wolfe

  Yet none of those things are important. What matters is what He thinks. What He thinks is so. IN THE MORNING I told Capt. Burt-how many steps along the trail, and how many along the Spanish road.

  We had only just gotten on the Spanish road when we heard the drums. They were not Native American drums, but snare drums, beaten to keep soldiers walking in step. We hid in the jungle, whispering that nobody should shoot until they were all in front of us.

  It would have been a good idea, but somebody saw a chance to kill the officer and took it. He shot, the officer was bowled over like a rabbit, and the fat was in the fire. After that it was just a wild fight.

  We won, I would have to say, mostly because we had more men. There were probably about a hundred fifty Spanish. Maybe two hundred, but it could not have been more than that. We had about six hundred, counting the Kuna. The Spanish bugged out before long, the men who had been at the back of their column forming up, firing a volley, and retreating for all they were worth. The Kuna were after them like hounds, but we held up and tried to get our men back together. It would have been fun to chase those Spanish soldiers, sure, and we would have gotten quite a few. The thing was that if we had we might have run into more, which would have been bad.

  Some of our guys did chase them, actually. For an hour or so, as we got organized again and tramped on down the road toward the stockade, we could hear shots in the distance. Some of that was the Spanish shooting at our Kuna, but not all of it was. Our buccaneers were dead shots with a musket or a pistol.

  Naturally the Spanish in the stockade knew we were coming after that. They had a couple four-pounders and three or four swivel guns, and everything loaded and ready. There were various things we could have done if there had been time, but there was not. The town would hear the shooting-had probably heard it already-and tell the fort, and the fort might send more soldiers.

  Capt. Burt and I went out, with me carrying a flag of truce, and I called on the officer in charge to surrender. If they did, I said, everyone would be spared. But if they did not, we were going to massacre every man. The officer showed himself above the pointed logs and said no way, which was what we had expected. I dropped the flag, three dead shots we had told off to do it killed him the moment my flag hit the ground, and we charged.

  Eight of the strongest men I had tried to smash the gate with a log. That gate held, but our guys were jumping up, grabbing the points of the stockade, and pulling themselves over. By the time the log had hit the gate twice, we must have had a hundred men inside the stockade, including me. Each of the four-pounders got off one shot. I do not think all the swivel guns fired, and I know most of the soldiers who tried to shoot between the points died before they could pull the trigger.

  Here I ought to say how brave I was, killing Spaniards left and right and fighting it out cutlass-to-sword with a Spanish officer.

  Only none of it happened. I am a whole lot prouder of what I really did, which was save the lives of the slaves. Those Spaniards had eight slaves in there to do the work, five Native Americans and three blacks. Our guys were killing everybody, and they would have killed them if I had not stopped it. The Native Americans were Kuna and Moskitos. I freed them straight off, and they grabbed muskets and bullet boxes right away-there were plenty of those lying around by then.

  I found Big Ned and showed him to the black slaves. It turned out that they spoke the same language, all four of them having come from the same part of Africa. We told them they could join us and be pirates like Ned, or they could go with our Kunas, if the Kunas would have them. Or if they did not like either of those, we would take them as slaves. They would have to work then, but they would not have to fight. All three decided to join us.

  There are a lot of bad memories when I look back on my pirate days. I have already written about some of them, and there are more coming. Just the same, there are good memories, too. Sailing the Windward, and a lot of times with Novia when I knew I loved her and she loved me. Marriage is a good thing. I will never say it is not. But it is God who makes you one flesh, not marriage.

  So this is one of the best memories, saving the slaves in the Spanish stockade. There were a lot more slaves in Portobello. I am sure some of them were killed, and we made some of the others be slaves for us. I could not stop the killing or talk Capt. Burt into freeing the black ones. (Most of them were Native Americans, and some were white.) So the stockade was the exception.

  That just makes it sweeter. Someday I am bound to figure out why I am always getting into trouble. When I try to be bad, I get into trouble. When I try to be good, it is the same thing. We had a parish meeting this evening. This was because of a letter Bishop Scully sent to all the parishes advising us to get together with any parishioners who might have gripes or suggestions. Fr. Wahl and I talked it over and put an announcement in the bulletin. Tonight was the night, and the first part was pretty dull. People told me they liked my sermons (they are short), and some others said how much they appreciated having regular confession on Saturdays.

  When nobody else seemed to have anything to say, I told them I had been thinking about starting Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. Nobody would have to come, there would be a short prayer service-under half an hour, I said-and after that I would stay there as long as anyone wanted to stay and pray. I warned them that I would not necessarily be praying. I might read or write instead. But I would be there for as long as anyone wanted to stay.

  Nobody could believe it. They looked the way those slaves looked when I got Big Ned to come over and they saw him with his cutlass, and pistols in his belt, and the rag around his head where he had gotten hit with something. He talked to them a little in the African language, got out the leather bag where he kept his money, and showed them pieces of eight and some gold doubloons.

  Through it all their eyes got bigger and bigger, and they started smiling.

  That was how it was when we talked about Adoration and decided Tuesday nights at eight. But when the meeting was over and we were back in the rectory, Fr. Wahl told me I was going to get into trouble with Bishop Scully. He did not like Adoration, Fr. Wahl said.

  I said okay, Bishop Scully has a right to his opinion and I have a right to mine. He will not be in trouble with me.

  Here is where I did something mean, and I am sorry for it. I whistled as I went upstairs. I knew how Fr. Wahl would take it, but I did it just the same. I will ask him to forgive me for it, and I am sure he will.

  The thing was, I knew that Bishop Scully was going to have a lot more reason to be angry with me. I am going to dress like a layman and drive over to the airport one day soon, and he will never see me again. I know he will not like that, and I do not blame him for it. But he will not be quite so angry when he remembers I was the troublemaker who reinstituted Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and thought boys should stand up for themselves and what is right. I have just read over what I wrote about the stockade, and I do not think there is any reason to write more about that here. We formed up again and marched on the town, with the Kuna running ahead to look for ambushes.

  Out in the harbor, our ships were faking an attack on the fort. Tom Jackson was in charge of that, and from what I have heard he managed it pretty well. They would run in toward the fort, then turn away when they came in range.

  Then Novia saw smoke coming up from the landward side of the town, where some houses had caught fire. She made another run, only this time she meant it. The Spanish in the fort were short on men because of the party they had sent to reinforce the stockade, and they were expecting her to turn back when she got in range.

  Here I have to explain something about hot shot, which all the shore batteries I ever heard of use. You heat the cannonballs in a furnace near the guns until they are bright red but not white-hot. When you load the guns, you follow the powder with a dry wad and a wet wad. The dry is to keep the powder from getting wet, and the wet is to keep the hot ball from burning through.

  When you have done that, y
ou have to fire the gun pretty fast. Otherwise, either the hot ball will burn through both wads and fire itself, or it will cool down to the point where it will not start a fire on the ship it hits.

  That was why there was only cold shot in the Spanish guns when Novia made her run for the harbor. The other thing that helped her was that the guns were elevated way high to shoot at our ships when they were turning away. They had to be lowered before they would bear.

  Two of the Spaniards' five fifty-pounders were fired before they bore. One ball carried off the maintop, but that was all the damage they did. The rest could not be lowered before Sabina got off a good broadside. It killed quite a few soldiers and dismounted a gun. One of the other two holed Sabina at the waterline. It was serious and had to be fixed, but it did not start a fire or sink her. After that, the rest of our ships came in behind her. They had half crews, but even half of a pirate crew is big. With all hands hoy, there were enough to manage the sails and man the starboard guns.

  After that, the fighting in the town did not amount to much. There were too many of us and too few of them who would fight. We looted the whole town and put the screws to anybody we thought might have money hidden away. That could be very rough.

  To tell the truth, I did not pay a lot of attention to it just then. I was running through the town looking for Novia, who was running through it looking for me. Finally we found each other and hugged and kissed and all that. And every time we thought we were finished, we did it some more.

  Eventually we went off looking for food and wine that was worth drinking and found an innkeeper hiding in his own cellar. We made him fix us a decent meal, telling him that if either of us got sick afterward we were going to shoot him. It was good, and between the two of us we killed a bottle of what he swore was his best wine.

  Somewhere in there I asked Novia what had gone on, and why she was not on the ship, and she said, "You think I would wait to watch you die through my glass, Crisoforo?"

  We went back to the Sabina to sleep, and that was when I found out she had been holed. The hole had been stuffed with hammocks and spare canvas, but she was taking on a lot of water. We rounded up some of the Spanish prisoners and put them to pumping. It was hard work, but better than getting your fingers cut off by somebody looking for money you did not have.

  In the morning we had a sort of meeting to talk about the fort-did we want to make another run for it, with the battery shooting at us, or would it be better to take it?

  I stood up. "It'll be cheap and easy to call on it to surrender, and if we do maybe they will. If they won't, we can storm it from this side. They won't be able to shift fifty-pounders around in time to use them on us."

  Pretty much everybody agreed with that, so that was what we did. Capt. Burt and I went out with a white flag just about like we had at the stockade, what I said was pretty much the same. The officer on the wall said his comandante had been wounded and could not come up there, but he wanted to talk about terms of surrender. Would we come in and talk with him?

  We said we would, and they opened the gates-very strong oak gates bound with iron-and let us in. As soon as we were inside, we were grabbed from behind. Our weapons were taken, and we were roughed up quite a bit. It reminded me of the Spanish who had taken my gold back on Hispaniola, and I got madder and madder.

  After a while, they carried the comandante out in a chair. His leg had been hit by a fragment of stone. It had laid the leg open, he said, and broken the thighbone. "So you see, Senors, I am quite incapable to fight you. My men, however, will fight to the last drop of blood, and we shall be reinforced within a day or two, as you will see."

  Capt. Burt wanted to know about that.

  "You have not the gold that was to arrive here. Had you taken it, we should have seen you loading it. Thus it has not arrived. You met with a company of my men in the forest? I think it must be so."

  I said that we had met more than a hundred Spanish soldiers before we got to the stockade.

  He smiled and nodded. He was middle-aged and beefy, and he needed a shave. I hated him from the minute I laid eyes on him.

  I told Capt. Burt what we had said, and he said, "They were going out to meet the gold. I should have guessed it, Chris. The officer in charge of transporting it must have heard the shooting and turned back."

  The comandante chuckled, so I knew right then that he spoke some English. Still talking to Capt. Burt, I said, "Our men will be rushing this place any minute, Captain, and when they do, we'll be shot. How can we stop them?"

  He must have caught on, because he just shrugged.

  "You," the comandante told me in Spanish, "will tell them not to. You will tell them they must surrender. An army is marching on this place to defeat them, and you will die at once if they attack it."

  There was more palaver, and the upshot was that I was marched up on the wall by an officer and two soldiers, knowing I would probably die up there. Portobello is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. I should already have said that, but I will say it right now. It is a death trap and the Devil's port, a place where healthy men get sick and die in a month. Just the same, nobody could ever imagine how lovely it looked from the top of that fort up on the little hill overlooking the harbor. A west wind was blowing, the sky was blue, and the sun was just getting hot and flashing on the blue water.

  I had a good look all around, and waved in case Novia was watching the fort through her glass. After that, I took a couple of deep breaths, and wondered whether they would throw my body outside the fort or down into the courtyard.

  The officer poked me in the ribs and told me to start talking to our men.

  I said, "They cannot hear me, Senor. They are too far from fear of your guns."

  He said to wave to them to come closer.

  "You should have brought Captain Burt up here." I was waving as I spoke. "The men are accustomed to obeying him, not me."

  "We will bring him here if we must. We will have to, because you will be dead."

  Clouds and blue sky are gifts from God, but He gave me something even better just then. He showed me that there was no railing for the inside of the walkway. On the outside there was the top of the wall, with spaces between the stones for soldiers to shoot through. But on the inside there was nothing. If you stepped over, you fell maybe twenty feet onto the stones of the courtyard.

  The officer started crowding me the way they will sometimes, wanting to talk right into your face. I kneed him between the legs. He must have gone over-when you knee somebody like that, he generally grabs the place and takes two or three little steps back-but I never saw him because I was slapping the musket out of the hands of the nearest soldier. When I had it, I brought the butt up and got him under the chin.

  The other soldier might have been bad news if he had stuck me with his bayonet, but he tried to cock the hammer, and I kicked him in the knee and shoved him over, too.

  After that I yelled to the men outside to rush the fort and I would open the gate.

  I never did, but before I get to that I ought to say something about those spike bayonets the soldiers had. We could have used them, and a few of us did. The main advantages they gave were more reach and a thrust like with a boarding pike. When we camped on shore, they made good candleholders, too. You just stuck them in the ground and put your candle in the socket.

  Only they had two big disadvantages. The main one was that even if you killed somebody with one he did not die right away. You could put one into somebody's chest, and sure, he was going to die. But he was going to a minute or ten from now, and not now. He would have time enough to stab you back, or cock a pistol and shoot.

  Like I said, I never did open the big gate. It was Capt. Burt who did that. Three people falling off the wall got everybody's attention, and he just went over and took down the bar. He did not let things like that rattle him, and it was one of the qualities that made him such a good leader.

  That night, just about everyone was for going after t
he gold. I could not believe it. I liked money as well as anyone-or I thought I did. But going after the mules and the soldiers who were guarding them? A couple of hundred soldiers minimum? When they would have at least a full day's head start?

  I thought it was crazy, and I said so.

  When the vote was finally taken, my side got maybe two hundred out of the whole eight hundred or so. One of the votes we got was Capt. Burt's, because my side had been his side, too. I am still proud of that. The sensible men voted with us, but there were not enough of us.

  At first the thinking had been that the mule train with the gold would head back to Panama. Our Kuna said that it had not. It had taken the road southeast into the San Blas Mountains, probably making for Santa Maria, a little town on the Pacific side of Darien. I never got to talk to anybody who had been with that mule train, but my guess is they thought we would head to Panama, and going east would throw us off.

  Nearly everybody wanted to follow the gold. We could march faster than loaded mules, they said, and would catch up to it. If we did not, we would take the town and catch them there. The men who had marched up behind Portobello would stay on the ships this time, and those who had stayed on the ships would march. Only all the captains would march again, just like before. The Kuna had agreed to guide us again. They had never beaten the Spanish before, and they were on cloud nine.

  I would have chained Novia up again. Or I think now that I would have or I might have. I never got the chance. She just disappeared. I left Bouton in command of the Sabina, telling him that he was to take orders from Novia if she came back to the ship. I knew she would not, but that is what I said. He was going to move some guns to heel the ship over and lift the leak out of the water, then patch it properly.

  I am not going to write about the march to Santa Maria. I could not make it sound as bad as it really was. I had thought the march to Portobello had been bad, and that Portobello itself had been bad, which it was. The march to Santa Maria was ten times worse. There were a hundred times when I simply could not believe that the Spanish were stupid enough, and tough enough, to ship gold across Darien to Portobello. Then we would find fresh droppings from the mules, which proved that we were on the right track. The only thing I know about mule droppings is that they are dirty and stink, but people who knew more (or said they did) said they showed that we were only a day and a half behind the mule train.