by Dudley Pope
“You talk like an artilleryman,” Heffer grumbled, his tongue flickering across the front of his teeth.
“No, as a seaman,” Kent said cheerfully, as though to soothe Heffer. “The best way of planning the defences of a place is to picture yourself having to sail in to attack it. Which batteries could do you the most harm here? You’ll find I’m right – this is the one that matters. What are you going to call it – Cromwell’s Bastion?”
Heffer flushed but said nothing: apart from not knowing what was happening in England, he was far from sure of the buccaneers: these two, the leaders, were a whimsical pair; quite irresponsible, of course, and one could not be sure if they were serious. “Cromwell’s Bastion” sounded well enough, but…
“We brought you twelve culverins and five 3-pounders back from our raid on Santiago,” Ned said. “Where are you placing them?”
Heffer hurriedly changed his plans and hoped the two men could now be talked out of the proposed inspection which he had himself arranged, but which put all the emphasis (and most of the guns) on the battery out at Gallows Point. “I was proposing to put eight culverins in the battery opposite this house, to cover the approaches,” Heffer said smoothly, finding it easy to change his plan, “and the remaining four culverins at Gallows Point, to cover the seaward end of the entrance. Then I thought the five 3-pounders would go well at the anchorage end of the entrance.”
“Mere saluting guns,” Thomas said with a contemptuous sniff. “3-pounders simply make a bang…”
“You brought them,” Heffer could not resist pointing out, but hurriedly added, “and of course we are grateful.”
Ned said: “Once the batteries are built, complete with magazines, sleeping quarters, water cisterns and kitchens, we can always change the guns for larger ones as we capture them from the Spanish.”
Thomas slapped the table and said heartily: “Quite right, Ned, quite right: with the batteries there, we can always replace the guns. Come on then, let’s look at the sites.”
Outside the sun was blinding, reflecting up from the almost white sand. “Wait,” Heffer said, “I’ll send Rowlands for horses.”
“Not for me; I want to walk,” Ned said.
“Nor me,” Thomas said, patting his stomach. “I need some exercise. Diana’s complaining about my weight.”
Heffer, who hated the heat, also hated the sensation of walking on soft sand, and had planned at most a quick canter round the sites of the batteries, relying on the buccaneers’ unfamiliarity with horses to avoid a detailed inspection. Now he followed the two men, gesturing to his ADC. “We’re walking, Rowlands. You, too.” The youngster was getting puffy faced, and from his bloodshot eyes and lethargy in the mornings, Heffer suspected he was drinking heavily. He wished Rowlands would get rid of that sulky look while the buccaneers were here.
Ned and Thomas walked the hundred yards to the water’s edge and then stopped, facing southwards towards the Spanish Main five hundred miles away. On their right the sand-spit went on to form the entrance to the anchorage; on their left the sand-spit continued until it merged with the mainland, which went on for about fifty miles to the eastern end of the island. Behind them was the great, almost enclosed anchorage, and beyond that the mountains rising higher and higher in gentle ridges to form the distant eastern spine of the island, the Blue Mountains.
The Caribbean was calm; wavelets slapped the sandy beach and occasionally a silver flash caught the eye and showed a large fish leaping out of the water to land among its prey, or a small one trying desperately to escape. Hunter or hunted came up like an arrow rising from the sea and falling amid a shoal of smaller fish which had been innocently feeding, unaware of their danger.
“Watch out for your ankles,” Ned said, gesturing at the holes which pocked the beach like small coney burrows. “I’ve never seen so many land crab holes. Plenty of land crab for dinner, eh General?”
“Er, land crab? No, I haven’t tried it. I thought these were rat holes.”
Ned and Thomas stopped, staring at the general, hardly believing their ears.
“I thought you said your men were starving?” Thomas said.
“They are. You know we need grain, salt meat, vegetables…”
“Yet you don’t bother with one of the great delicacies of the West Indies!”
“Why, are land crab different from the ones found in the sea?” Heffer asked huffily.
“I don’t know – ask the crab. But the point is your men can catch land crabs at night with lanterns as easily as breaking stained-glass windows.” Thomas watched Heffer and noticed the flush. “The crabs just walk about.”
“Nobody told me,” Heffer grumbled.
Ned shook his head impatiently, completely exasperated. “That’s the epitaph of the Western Design. ‘Nobody told me…nobody asked.’ Your stupid officers let their soldiers drive hundred of beeves and hogs into the mountains – and then kill the moriscos who know how to capture them. No meat to eat in a land where the cattle are numbered in thousands…
“No one has the wit to gather the fruit that grows on the trees or the vegetables which they trample on the land. You chased off all the fishermen and stole their canoes and now you complain you are starving. Can’t your damned silly men make fishing lines? Can’t they – or you – ask whether these are coney, rat or crab holes? Are buccaneers the only ones who dare go up in the hills and shoot beeves and boucan or salt the meat? How many men will a young steer feed? Your men should be living on fresh meat all the time – there’s so much to be hunted that you can kill daily so you needn’t salt or boucan it. Ah!” Ned broke off, angry with himself for losing his temper, exasperated with Heffer, although the beeves and hogs had been driven off before he had been made governor. “You’ll be running out of fresh water next!”
“We are” admitted Heffer miserably. “That big cistern on the mainland opposite has run dry…”
“No doubt it has!” Thomas exclaimed contemptuously. “It hasn’t rained for five weeks and I don’t suppose you rationed water. The Spaniards didn’t build that cistern for three thousand troops to use as if it was some magic Fountain of Youth! Have you rationed it now?”
“No – how was I to know it wouldn’t rain?”
“Just look out of the window from time to time” Ned murmured, and then said: “It’s too hot standing here – let’s go over and look at the first battery.”
They walked round the stunted shrubs fighting hard to grow knee-high in the sand, and insects buzzed up in clouds, whining and stinging. One or other of the men would occasionally stumble as the sand caved in round land crab holes. Ned paused for a moment to watch a pelican waddling along the water’s edge a few yards away, looking like a portly and beady-eyed prelate, slightly tipsy and wearing boots much too large but well polished.
The walls of the new battery, made of rough stone and mortar, were already three feet high and banked up with sand on the seaward side so that from a ship it would look like an innocent dune.
“I’ve fifty men working on this battery.” Heffer said crisply, striving to re-establish himself as the island commander. “I’m bringing in another fifty tomorrow or the next day to start on the magazines and sleeping quarters.”
“And the cistern,” Ned said.
“Oh yes, of course. Most important.”
“And the sloping area of catchment for the cistern,” Thomas said, “otherwise the rain will be lost in the sand.”
“Of course, of course,” Heffer said impatiently. “Well, now you can see our first battery.”
“The cistern will hold a hundred gallons per man?” Ned asked.
“Well, I hadn’t thought quite as much,” Heffer said lamely.
“That’s the minimum,” Ned said firmly. “Eight guns, five men to each gun, a couple of corporals and a sergeant, cook and a couple of powdermen: fo
rty-six. Four thousand, six hundred gallons.”
“But that’ll be enormous,” Heffer protested.
“There’s plenty of stone, and your men have nothing better to do,” Ned pointed out. “You sit in the sun for a couple of days without water – try that and you’ll insist on five hundred gallons a man.”
By now the three men, followed by Rowlands, had walked up the slight slope and paused to look over the top of the stonework. Fifty bodies were scattered inside an area which had been pegged out and marked with cord in the shape of the battery and its emplacements and buildings. Several of the men had strung their coats across shovels to make some shade.
“Splendid,” Ned said. “If only the Dons could see them now, sleeping peacefully like sheep. Come on, Thomas, it’s too hot for all this martial excitement. By the way, I see emplacements marked out for four guns, not eight, and no sign of a cistern or catchment.”
As the two of them left Heffer and walked back along the beach, they could hear the general screaming almost hysterically at the soldiers, waking them violently – kicking, judging by the yells of pain – and accusing them of everything from drunkenness to treason and threatening to hang every tenth man as a warning to the rest of the garrison.
“I don’t envy him,” Ned said, swerving a few steps to avoid a wave surging higher up the beach. “His men verging on mutiny, officers completely unreliable and mostly stupid, and he doesn’t know if or when a ship will suddenly arrive bringing orders, let alone supplies.”
“If the army has thrown out Richard, he may not get orders for years!” Thomas commented. “In the meantime we aren’t getting our batteries built…”
“We will: I have a feeling that he wasn’t joking back there when he threatened them with the noose.”
“What a position for a Roundhead general to find himself in!”
“Just wait until he finds out who we are,” Ned said grimly. “I want to watch when he discovers he was saved by a pair of Royalists! And let’s hope it’s soon; I’m getting bored with our new surnames.”
Ned tapped Thomas’ arm as they turned across the sand to pass Heffer’s house, skirt the fish market and reach the jetty, where they could signal for a boat to take them back to their respective ships. “Don’t be too harsh with the poor fellow. He’s at least admitting to himself that his garrison of apparently God-fearing Roundheads are really jail sweepings. We knew that, but he couldn’t accept it because he genuinely thought Cromwell, Puritanism, the New Model Army, the Western Design, being sad on Sundays, all had magically transformed this dross into pure gold”
“On the other hand,” Ned said with ironic emphasis, “he has seen what he considers real scum – people like us, with our former servants, truly wicked men and women who swear, blaspheme, rarely if ever go to church, never spend an hour at prayer, live in a state of sin with our women – sail out, and bring him a cargo of grain, capture a Spanish city and give him guns, powder and shot… The poor fellow’s world has been turned inside-out!”
“Well, I still think he’s a psalm-singing hypocrite and I don’t trust him!” Thomas said flatly.
“We don’t have to, but you must admit the best way of getting this place fortified so that we can use it as a base is to give him guns and shot in exchange for him building the batteries.”
“And you’ve just seen the soldiers at work!” Thomas jeered. “Wait till I tell Diana: she can’t stand the man! She’ll want to go off to find our own island to fortify as a base.”
“You talk as if he was my hero – hey, what’s happening now?”
A horse was galloping along the track from the eastward towards the general’s house. The rider was an officer, his style betraying a fairly recent acquaintanceship with horsemanship.
He stopped a few moments at the general’s house, where the sentry pointed to Ned and Thomas. Two or three minutes later the officer, his face soaked with perspiration and almost wide-eyed with excitement, reined up in front of the two men with a jerk as though trying to pull off the horse’s head.
“The general – quickly, where’s the general?”
Thomas wagged a finger at the man, pulling at his carefully trimmed black beard with the other hand. “I’m hard of hearing young man,” he said querulously. “Did I understand you to say: ‘Excuse me gentlemen, but can you direct me to the general?’”
“Er – well, yes sir.”
“You seem in a hurry – are you going to trouble the general with some footling emergency?”
“Yes, sir, indeed! Please, where is the general?”
“Before you gallop off you had better tell us what the footling emergency is: we command this island’s naval forces.”
“That’s just it sir!” the officer exclaimed. “The Spanish fleet has been sighted and –”
“Coming from which direction?” Ned asked quietly.
The man turned on his horse and pointed eastward along the coast. “There, sir, from Point Morant.”
“How many ships?”
“The message doesn’t say, sir; it’s been passed from post to post: just that the Spanish fleet is coming!”
“You haven’t actually seen it then?”
“No, sir.”
Ned pointed westward towards the artificial hillock intended as the battery. “You’ll find the general over there, rousing his defences.”
The man thanked him and galloped off, leaving Thomas cursing and coughing in the cloud of dust. “What clodhoppers!” he exclaimed. “They pass a warning half the length of the island – God knows how many men have been galloping – which doesn’t say how many ships!”
“They haven’t the wits of our cane cutters,” Ned agreed.
“When you think of what we achieved with that motley crowd we took to capture Santiago…”
“We’d better hurry and signal for a boat,” Thomas said, “otherwise we’ll have Heffer hanging round our necks bleating about a Second Armada with all the fervour of a Second Coming. And the mastheads of our ships are higher than anything else round here – our lookouts can see right across the Palisades and along the coast.”
The boat put Thomas on board his ship the Peleus and then took Ned on to the Griffin, where his second-in-command, John Lobb, was waiting with Aurelia to greet him. Lobb obviously had news and Aurelia deliberately stood back while he reported.
Lobb pointed aloft and Ned saw a man perched high in the rigging. “There’s a ship in sight, sir,” Lobb said. “I’ve sent Green aloft with the perspective glass.
“One ship?”
“Just one, sir. Green is sure it’s a frigate.”
“A horseman’s just arrived at General Heffer’s headquarters with news from look-outs along the coast that the Spanish fleet’s in sight.”
“Aye, belike he has,” Lobb said phlegmatically, “but no one’s told them poor benighted soldiers that the Spanish ’aven’t got a fleet in these waters.”
“No, and it’s better they don’t know: they’ll keep a sharper look-out if they think the Dons can come any moment. Anyway, the Spanish king might send a fleet one day and scare us all!” He looked aloft and hailed the look-out.
“Green – what do you see?”
“She’s a frigate all right, sir, and just furling her courses as she comes abreast the Palisades: she’ll come in under topsails.”
“What flag?”
“The Union, sir, but no jack. She’s English built, too, I’ll take my oath on that.”
Lobb coughed and pointed across to the jetty. A fisherman’s canoe was just leaving with half a dozen men at the paddles and an army officer sitting in the stern.
The man whom General Heffer knew only as “Mr Kent” looked at Aurelia and grinned. “There’s your friend Rowlands – coming to warn us the Spanish are coming and asking Thomas and me to go over to
see the general…”
“I need a walk on the land,” Aurelia said, her French accent more pronounced than usual, and, Ned noted, her voice more attractive as a result, “and I’m sure Diana does, too. Perhaps the sight of us will take the general’s mind off the Spanish for a moment or two.”
“You must give up tempting Puritans.”
“It’s the only sport you men allow us,” Aurelia said demurely.
Thomas had seen Rowlands coming out by canoe and one of the Peleus’ boats delivered him and Diana on board the Griffin before he arrived. Diana was wearing a dress instead of the more usual divided skirt, a fashion she had started among the women in the English ships, and Aurelia commented on it.
Diana laughed and waved towards Thomas. “He assured me that one of the general’s officers has just ridden in to report the Spanish fleet is in sight, so I thought I would dress up to welcome them.”
“Always surprise the enemy, Ned,” Thomas rumbled. “Just when they’re expecting broadsides, fire beautiful women at them.”
“Or Mrs Judd,” Ned said referring to his former cook, who was now living on board the Phoenix, a prize they had captured and put under the command of Saxby, once the Griffin’s mate and before that the foreman of Ned’s plantation in Barbados. Mrs Judd was a very large woman; large in body, large in all her appetites and large in her generosity.
Green called down from aloft: “She’s an English frigate all right, sir, twenty guns and they’re run out – for saluting,” he added. “She’s not cleared for action.”
Thomas tugged at his beard. “No Commonwealth jack, eh…” He pulled out the tube of his perspective glass and looked seaward across the low peninsula of the Palisades. “Ah, there she is. I see they’ve been painting her up in the last few days. Well, if she brings good news for old Heffer, it’ll be bad news for us. There’s one thing about this island at the moment – sauce for the goose is bound to be poison for the gander!”
Because the frigate was running close to the beach on the far side of the long sand-spit they could not see the sea. “Looks as though she’s running on wheels,” Thomas commented. “A Mrs Judd-size carriage.”