Pirate Freedom

by Gene Wolfe

  I would be lying to you if I said there was no rape and no torture, but I did not do it and did my best to stop it. As well as I can remember I succeeded twice.

  Here I ought to say more about torture. I have been skipping over things, I know, and I would like to skip over that. I am not going to do it here because I understand very well how useless it is to make a confession that does not confess.

  Besides, I know that a lot of things are considered torture now that would just be punishments on a ship. A sailor would be keelhauled, for instance. It meant that he was tied to rope looped around the ship's waist and dragged under water, beneath the keel, and up on the other side. When he came up he would be half drowned, and half skinned by the barnacles, too. If he did not die, he might be given a week or two in chains to recover. When he was a little stronger, he would be returned to his duty, and nobody called it torture.

  We burned our prisoners, dropping live coals onto their faces and roasting them over fires. We cut off men's private parts and raped their wives before their eyes. We tied ropes around people's heads, stuck a stick through the ropes, and turned that stick until their eyes came out and hung down on their cheeks-all this to get them to tell where they had hidden money, or where somebody else had.

  We did all that, and while we did it we knew that if we were captured by the Spanish we might be treated the same way. The Spanish often tortured a Native American slave just to make their other slaves fear and respect them.

  When I was looking for Hoodahs-it was the third day we were in Maracaibo, and we were getting ready to sail-I went to the inn where I got him, thinking he might have gone back there because he knew where something would be hidden. I did not find him-or any gold either-but I found the bodies of his old master's sons. One's head had been split with an ax or a hatchet. I think it was the only time I saw a human face divided like that. The other had been dismembered, it seemed while he was still alive-his arms and legs hacked off, and the rest left to bleed to death.

  Let me say something here about the Spanish and their king that most people today do not know. Not even most pirates knew it. When a Spaniard got a land grant from the King of Spain, he had to swear that he would protect the Native Americans whose land he was getting and teach them Christianity.

  Hardly any of them did it. The Native Americans were taught Christianity, yes. But it was not done by the men who got their land. It was done by priests and brothers, Jesuits, Franciscans, and Dominicans. They protected the Native Americans, too, as much as they could. Mostly that meant protecting them from Spanish laymen.

  After reading this, you are bound to judge people like Capt. Burt, Hoodahs, and me pretty harshly, and I am not saying we do not deserve it. No doubt God will judge us with severity. But God will not forget that the times in which we buccaneers plundered the Spanish Main were not like these times, and that the men we tortured for gold would have tortured us for sport.

  All of us had known that Maracaibo was rich. It turned out to be richer than any of us had expected. We loaded our ships and two Spanish ships that had been in the harbor, and headed off to Jamaica with so much gold and silver, and so many tons of cacao beans, that I expected Capt. Burt to give up his plan and head home to Surrey.

  He did not, but before I get into that, I want to say something more about Maracaibo. The Spanish made two mistakes there (in my judgment) that were characteristic of them, the kinds of things that let us operate as freely as we did.

  The first was being too confident of their defenses. They envisioned one kind of attack and defended against it. When somebody does that, his enemy sees he has done it and adjusts his plans. It is not enough to guard against the obvious move and let everything else slide. If the colonel I talked to in the fort had patrolled the shore of Pigeon Island, he and his men would never have been caught like they were.

  The other is that the loss of the city was not one man's fault. It was the fault of just about every Spaniard there except the soldiers under General Sanchez. (They were the ones who died, more than any of the rest; but at least they were not tortured.) General Sanchez had eight hundred soldiers left after we took the fort. There had to be at least five thousand men capable of bearing arms in Maracaibo, and a lot of them had muskets, pistols, or swords. I doubt that there was even one who did not have a knife or an ax. If those men had been organized and led against us, we would have had to get out and get out quick. They were not. I doubt that as many as a hundred of the five thousand fought us. They depended on the soldiers to defend them instead, and the soldiers tried to do it when they should have been attacking us. If they had hit us hard when we were drinking and looting, they would have driven us back to our ships in short order.

  Was that colonel at the fort stupid? Maybe he was-I fooled him, after all. But I spoke his language at least as well as he did, and he had no reason to suspect me. The north end of the island was the obvious place to land, and that ambush he had planned was well thought out. If we had walked into it the way he expected, we would have been wiped out. He was not stupid, he was careless.

  As I write this, it is Christmas Eve, and that is what I plan to preach about at midnight mass. Before I get back to Maracaibo, I should say that my homily seemed to go pretty well. I began by explaining that intelligence in God's service is a great blessing, but that we are not judged by it.

  "It is innate. For God to favor you because you're smart would be as unjust as it would be for Him to favor me because I'm tall. We're all born with certain talents-His gold, that the Master has left with us-and without certain others. If we are wise, we use our talents in His service. Every member of our choir was born with a good voice, and has wisely chosen to honor God with it. You can think of many other examples, I know.

  "Saint Thomas Aquinas was a genius, and Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us of Jesus more than any other saint. I would not be surprised to learn that Saint Teresa of Avila was the most extraordinary woman since the Holy Mother. Have any of them gone to a better Heaven than Brother Juniper? I promise you, they haven't-and they wouldn't want to. Many saints were just children when they died-Saint Agatha is the one I think of first, but there are a lot of others. Bernadette was a plain village girl, and so was Saint Joan.

  "Examples like the ones I just gave could be trotted out all day, but you saw much better ones when you came into church. Wise men from the east were called to witness the Incarnation. So were shepherds. Shepherds and wise men, both called as witnesses.

  "So am I called. So are every one of you, or you wouldn't be here. Many of you are smart, I know. I know, too, that I'm not. I'm a plain man and not always a good man, a man who in a rougher age might've been a pig farmer or a pirate. Knowing it, I'm very happy in the knowledge that God does not put me down because I'm not a genius. He asks me to be careful- something every one of us can do. If I'm careful to learn the will of God for me and careful to do it, then I'm one of the witnesses Jesus wants.

  "You see, it doesn't matter whether we're captains or just ordinary sailors. The wise men went away and told others that Christ had come into the world. The shepherds did the same, spreading glad tidings of great joy.

  "You and I can do it, too. If we know what Christmas means and where true happiness lies, then all we have to do is to wish others a Merry Christmas. And mean it.

  "I wish you a Merry Christmas, you good people of Holy Family. A Merry Christmas to us, one and all." HERE I SIT, tapping my teeth with the end of my pen. I feel sure I have forgotten half the things I wanted to write about Maracaibo. No doubt that is for the best.

  In Maracaibo I understood why Capt. Burt had wanted two hundred marines. He could have held them together and kept them from looting until the Spanish had been beaten, not just driven from the city. General Sanchez could have held his Spaniards together, too, and hit us hard that evening. I have already said what would have happened if he had. Was he a bad general? I doubt it. He had known, I think, what he ought to do. But he had worried much too much about
what people might say if he left the civilians to escape-or be captured-on their own. Some of those civilians had been men of wealth and position. (I know they were, because we captured some of them.) They would have yowled like cats to the governor in Caracas that Sanchez had not protected them. From his viewpoint, he had been smart.

  A plain general, one who thought of his men on the battlefield and not of the governor and what the governor might say and do, would have beaten us. Year in and year out, the Spanish thought too much about governors and about Madrid. In the end it cost Spain an empire that covered a quarter of the world.

  31

  To the Pacific

  This time we went to Port Royal to refit. Now Capt. Burt had a major win for us to talk about, and we were turning men away by the second day. Each ship was to sail when ready. We would meet again at the Pearls.

  The Weald was the first to put out. At the time, I thought nothing of it. Somebody had to be first.

  We were keeping the Spanish ships we had taken at Maracaibo, and Red Jack was made captain of one of them, which meant I lost him. It also meant the crew got to elect a new quartermaster, and they picked Red Knife, a Zambo Moskito. I thought I was probably going to have to shoot him before the year was out. In a day or two, I found out that he and Hoodahs were great buddies, so I relaxed quite a bit. I never did shoot him, or have a reason to, either. Red Knife was as steady as they come, and as tough as they come, too.

  Perhaps I should say here that it takes a while to find out that two Native Americans are friends. It is when one looks at the other and they both understand. If they are friends, they are a team, and you do not hear their signals.

  The Pearls are beautiful islands. I have probably said that already. There are Native Americans there, but we never did find out what tribe they belonged to. They hid, and if there were any on an island we landed on, they would be gone in a few hours. At first I thought they had been raked over good by Spanish, and perhaps they had been. Later it came to me that they might have been raked over just as hard by people like us. They had learned that whites had guns, and that a lot of whites would shoot them just for practice. That was all they needed to know. When the last ship got there, we set out.

  If I were to tell everything that happened as we sailed south, I would never be through. Our policy was not to rob any ship that did not look big and rich, and not to take any town, no matter how small it was. We followed those rules all the way south to the Strait of Magellan, and followed them even more strictly for a long time after that. We watered where nobody was, if we could. If we could not, we said that we were English merchants come to trade. We traded for supplies or bought them. All this was so nobody would get alarmed, not from any reformation. We wanted water and supplies, and no trouble. By and large, that was what we got.

  People who have not done it talk loosely of going around the Horn. It means rounding Cape Horn, the south end of South America. The good thing about the Cape Horn Passage is that it is not tight. You have a lot of gray water between you and the Cape, and between you and the ice. The bad things are that it is hundreds of miles longer, and the icebergs are even worse. The Strait was worse still, or that was how it seemed. Ice and storms and contrary winds. Novia and I had a big fight, and she said she would kill me if she were not so tired, and I said I would kill her if I were not. In another minute or two we were in each other's arms, me laughing and she crying.

  In five more we had forgotten what our big fight was about. All this was on a deck that seemed like it was dead set on throwing both of us into the sea.

  I know we lost men in the Strait. Some fell from the rigging, and some were washed overboard. I should know how many we lost and what their names were, but I do not. It is all a long nightmare that passed while I was awake. Six men, at a guess. Or eight.

  When a ship has gone into the Strait four times and been blown back out three-which is what happened to us-the Pacific Ocean looks like paradise. Everyone on board expects more storms. Everyone expects to be wrecked, and sees the wrecks of other ships on rocks. There are fires at night on Tierra del Fuego, and everyone knows those fires have been lit by Native Americans who are following the ship, hoping to loot a wreck. It is a cold Hell.

  One morning the sun rises over a different sea to light a new sky. The storms are gone. The wind is warm and gentle. The sea is blue, the sky is blue, and the distant land shows blue mountains higher than anyone on board has ever dreamed of, mountains like the walls of giants.

  Wet bedding and wet clothes are spread or hung in every conceivable place. A topgallant mast is hoisted and lashed into place, and a Spanish flag run up it. The men off watch have their breakfasts on deck, take their time eating them, make jokes, and sing.

  And Novia, lovely delicate Novia with her dark eyes and irresistible smile, hands me a guitar I had almost forgotten I owned. I grin and strike up a lively tune while the whole crew cheers, and soon Pat the Rat has his fiddle. Novia whirls, a skirt I have not seen in months swirling about her flashing legs while her fingers snap like firecrackers-popping like little whips in place of the castanets she does not have.

  Red Knife is drumming an empty water butt with two belaying pins. Hoodahs chants, shuffles, and stamps. Big Ned swings Azuka in a wild reel he must have learned in Port Royal, for there is nothing of Africa in it-or else it is all Africa, about which I know nothing. My guitar and O'Leary's fiddle, Red Knife's drum and Novia's dance while the bare feet of fifty of the toughest men who ever pushed a boat into the water smack the planking in fifty hornpipes.

  I shout, "Down the middle, Jake!" and Jake touches his forehead without the least alteration of his flying steps. Dear, dear Lord!

  Perhaps, someday, in Heaven, you will consent… The Saddle islands lie off the coast of Ecuador. We had scurvy aboard by the time we put in there, and water was short. It is a place remarkable for turtles of great size. We feasted on them, on sea lizards so big they rivaled crocodiles, and on wild turnips and other greens. (There are seals there as well, but we had eaten seal in the Strait and had no stomach for more.) The shores of these blessed islands are nearly as barren as those of any place we saw in the Strait, but the mountains inland are covered with lush green jungle and ring with the sweet music of flowing water everywhere. It is said that two weeks ashore will mend any scurvy, and Capt. Burt was determined to remain for two weeks at least, so as to catch the treasure ships off Callao with a healthy crew in sound ships. I agreed wholeheartedly, and I believe that every other captain felt as I did.

  Here I should say that we did not know the precise date the treasure fleet would sail, only that it put out every six weeks or so, and that its sailings were never more than two months apart.

  We were seven vessels: Capt. Burt's Weald, my own Sabina, Rombeau's Magdelena, Gosling's Snow Lady, Harker's Princess, Red Jack's Fancy, and Jackson's Rescue. The last two we had taken at Maracaibo, renamed, and refitted at Port Royal. Weald was the largest of the seven, Princess the smallest, and Sabina the fastest in most weathers.

  These details are of no great importance. Yet I know that Capt. Burt must have thought long on them, and many others. Now I find my own mind clothed in his blue coat, and plan, consider, and suppose as he must have through many a long hour.

  The great matter now was to keep our crews usefully occupied and so out of mischief while our sick regained their strength. We careened the Fancy, scraped and tarred her, and made some small repairs to her hull. We drilled our crews at the sails and practiced turning on the heel and suchlike maneuvers. We drilled at the guns, as may be imagined, and took some target practice, too, though I for one begrudged every pound of powder we spent.

  Far better, so far as Novia and I were concerned, we sailed from island to island, sightseeing and exploring. This took some time, required a good deal of ship handling, and was, to us and I believe to most of our crew as well, endlessly fascinating. There are fifteen islands of considerable size in the Saddles, and so many small ones that I never succeed
ed in charting them all. We saw a turtle that must surely have weighed six hundred pounds, found places so lovely and so lonely that it seemed certain each was the loveliest spot on earth and the most isolated, and discovered a spring that rose in soil so barren that nothing-absolutely nothing-grew around it.

  At no time did we glimpse another human being, or even see any trace of one. At no time did we see or find the tracks of any four-legged animal other than the turtles and sea lizards I have mentioned. Hoodahs assured me that there had been goats and wild swine on the island he shared with Master. There was nothing of the kind in the Saddles, though there were many birds.

  One night I woke and could not sleep. A list of all the things that worried me that night would make dull reading, and I doubt that I could remember all of them now if I tried. Fretting and afraid that I would wake Novia, I went up on deck. The moon was full, and the warm night so calm no sail could have been of the least use. Boucher was awake and yawning, but every man of his watch slept.

  I stood at the gunwale, looked at the moon, and thought how easy it would be-how very easy and delightful-for me to quit the ship and not return. I could return to our cabin and get my musket and bullet bag, and with it a couple of pistols and my dagger. When I returned to the deck, Boucher and I would wake two of the watch and have them row me ashore. I would tell them to return to the ship and walk away. No one would question me or try to stop me.