by Dudley Pope
How were Mr Yorke and his party doing? They should be coming down the track to the village by now. There were no flashes of musket or cannon, so they had probably been delayed.
Dawn took so long! He wanted some light to come faster so he could see where the devil he was leading the boats, yet he wanted to hold on to the darkness to give them all something to hide in. He reached down under the thwart and brought out his cutlass, calling quietly to the oarsmen to do the same, but without breaking their stroke. They might meet Spanish fishermen along here rowing out early to their fish pots, and there was only one way of preventing them from raising the alarm: cut them down with cutlasses while their jaws were still dropping in surprise.
Rowing down the anchorage towards the castle was like entering a cavern. Outlined against the stars on his right, to the south, were high mountains – the ones across which Mr Yorke was coming; on the left, northwards, steep cliffs formed the other side of the anchorage. It was flatter at the far end, according to Mr Yorke: down there, round San Gerónimo, it was marshy. And for now it was quiet: just the distant metallic grating of tree frogs, the occasional splash of a fish leaping to escape, the gurgle round the boat’s stem sounding like a fast rocky stream.
Not like Gilleleje… Here it was so hot and humid that perspiration was streaming down his face and tickling as it ran down his back under his jerkin – and he was not even rowing. In a month or two they would be breaking ice off Gilleleje…
Secco had the men lined up along the side of the track in what passed for a military formation. They were still exchanging helmets with each other, men cursing blistered brows and trying for a better fit, and against the first hint of dawn in the sky behind them the shadows made them look like goblins. As soon as he saw Ned waiting to inspect them, he called the men to attention.
Secco himself looked exactly like a Spanish army officer: he had trimmed his beard to a sharp point, his moustaches now curved up and out like bull’s horns. Ned was delighted to see that Secco had relieved a Spanish officer at Old Providence of his army breeches. They were of a distinctive cut, bulging as though each leg between knee and thigh was inserted in a pumpkin. His hose were clean and his high leather boots, the tops folding over at the knee, were polished. The original owner, Ned reflected, would be proud of them.
As Ned complimented Secco, he proudly put on his helmet and showed that he had selected the one helmet that had the plume.
Thomas inspected him too. “You look like a Roman centurion,” he commented. “That helmet – I must say it’s well designed. A sword slash might lose you the tip of your nose, but that’s about the only part of your head that shows! And this sash!” He pointed to the red sash that Secco was wearing across his left shoulder. “What’s that mean – you’re a general?”
“No, a captain,” Secco grinned happily, wriggling slightly in his armour, and calling one of his seamen to slacken a strap on one side holding the breast plate.
Ned then noticed that Secco’s armour had shoulder pieces: like the overlapping pieces of shell forming a lobster’s tail, the armour covered the shoulder and half-way down to the elbow. Secco had more cunning then the rest of the captains: at Old Providence, although he did not have the slightest idea that Ned’s plan would involve him disguising himself as an army officer, he had appropriated everything he needed.
Ned continued to walk round Secco, impressed in the first light of dawn with the care the man had taken: like an actor with the most important part in the play (which he had), Secco had gone to a great deal of trouble, yet there was no sign that the breeches, hose, polished boots and flowing plume had been carried by open boat and then in a bag to this point in the mountain track to Portobelo which served as the Spaniard’s dressing-room.
“Well, captain,” Ned said, “let us inspect your men!”
Over to the east there was more than a hint that dawn was pulling back the black of night like someone stripping a blanket from a bed, but because they were still high above Portobelo the anchorage and town was still heavily shadowed.
The first man, standing to attention with a halberd by his side, looked as Spanish as Secco, except that his beard was trimmed square. His armour fitted him well, the helmet sat on his head as though he always wore one. He had a long sword hanging at his left side, and in a scabbard slung diagonally across his back was a short, broad-bladed stabbing sword, not more than eighteen inches long. The hilt was high on the man’s left shoulder.
“A main-gauche,” Ned commented. It was the first time he had seen one worn, and he noted that the man need only reach his left hand over his left shoulder to grip the hilt.
Secco nodded. “You have your long sword in your right hand and this sturdy little chap in your left. You swing your opponent’s sword to one side leaving his whole body open and step forward and jab with your main-gauche…”
The next man had a musket in his left hand and the rest for it in his right. Hanging diagonally across his chest was a strap from which hung a dozen wooden tubes, looking like whistles with wooden plugs in the ends.
Usually known irreverently as the Twelve Apostles and each holding the exact measure of powder for the musket, they were well-carved. The musketeer would take one and pull out the wooden plug, pour the measure of powder down the barrel, ram home a wad and follow it with a ball and another wad.
The musketeer would then take the flask which was slung over his shoulder by a thin strap. The flask, usually triangular, the top forming a spout and with a lever on one side, contained the priming powder, which was finer than the gunpowder in the Apostles. He would fill the pan of the gun and then, with the musket barrel placed in its rest, which was about four and half feet high, he would be ready to fire – once he had blown on the slow-match a few times to make sure that the burning end was glowing and hooked it on to the serpentine. By now, Ned reflected, two or three minutes would have passed, more if the man was clumsy.
The next man also had a musket and a rest but no Apostles: instead he had two brass flasks, one larger than the other but of the same shape as the first musketeer. He would load his musket by using powder from the larger flask to pour down the bore of the gun and from the smaller flask for priming.
No wonder impatient but wary men like buccaneers – who better than most knew about damp, rain and high winds – preferred pikes and cutlasses. Slow-match, which had to be lit and looped into the serpentine so that squeezing the trigger swung it over and pressed the burning tip of the match into the priming pan, needed only a light drizzle – a proverbial Scotch mist – to douse it, while a high wind could blow away the priming powder.
As if reading his thoughts, Thomas grumbled: “Only good for frightening horses, these things, and then it has to be a fine day. Pity the Dons at Old Providence didn’t have wheel-lock muskets – thank goodness that at least they had those few pistols.”
“At Old Providence you were praising matchlocks,” Ned reminded him. “I remember you were scathing about wheel-locks.”
“Who would trust a spring and those pyrites?” Thomas said gloomily. “Who would trust anything out in the open that relied on sparks or slow-match? Oh no, a cutlass and pike for me.” He looked at the musketeer’s waist and saw he was wearing a Spanish sword. “A good blade?”
“Toledo steel,” the man said confidently. “This ’ere musket’s just ’n norniment!”
Ned had expected the man to be Spanish and was startled by the London accent. The man grinned and, guessing the question Ned was about to ask, explained: “Cap’n Secco reckoned I look more Spanish than some of his own men.”
“You do, too,” Ned admitted.
The rest of the men in armour and helmets were armed with muskets, halberds or pikes. Seven or eight feet high, the pike was a weapon with which they were familiar, although several of the men commented that because the Spanish model had so much ornamentation on the head,
it was not as well balanced as their own. Few liked the halberd, cursing the weight and asking who needed a combination of axe, pike and tomahawk all fitted on one pikestaff. “The axe gets in the way of the pike if you want to jab, the pike unbalances the tomahawk if you want to cut, and the axe won’t even slice boucan,” one of the men complained to Thomas.
Thomas was sympathetic. “Yes, it’s very Spanish,” he said. “While you’re trying to decide whether to chop, hack or stab, the enemy runs you through with a sword!”
With Secco’s soldiers inspected, Ned went on to look at the guns. The men hauling them – or, for this part of the journey, hauling back on the ropes to stop the guns running away down the hill – wore only breeches and were barefooted. Secco had explained that Spanish soldiers hauling guns across tropical mountains would not be expected to wear jerkins and hose, and those who had been in the Main for a year or more would certainly prefer to be barefooted: Spanish army boots were heavy and hot, and a long march like the one from Panama to Portobelo would cause huge blisters, quite apart from keeping the bootmaker busy repairing soles.
By now it was light enough to recognize a man’s face at four paces, and Ned turned to Secco. “Very well, it’s time your men were marching and the wheels of those gun carriages were turning!”
A couple of orders hissed in Spanish had the hundred men in armour forming up in four files on the track, Secco at their head and the fifty without helmets at the rear. Those at the guns – the first of the falcons, only ten yards behind – stood ready, a man crouching at each wheel to remove the rock that acted as a brake.
Saxby was in charge of the guns and was dressed in the nearest Mrs Judd and her women could get to a Spanish officer’s uniform, presumably copying the real one owned by Secco. “These breeches,” Saxby grumbled. “Don’t know how the Dons can abide wearing ’em, all puffed out like a flouncy skirt.”
“You look very handsome,” Ned said soothingly, “and more to the point, none of the guns has run away with you, yet.”
“Yes, sir,” Saxby said heavily. “Downhill is the hard part.”
The second half of the buccaneer party was two hundred yards behind. There was no doubt that they were buccaneers: most wore boots which were simply strips of hide secured by thongs, while their jerkins had more holes than material. Breeches were of a style unknown to tailors and which originated on board the ships, depending on the skill of the boldest man with scissors and needle. Hats with brims and without were made of felt or wild animal skins. Most men were armed with cutlasses, although some had curving cavalry sabres, and the majority had pistols stuck in the top of their breeches. All had powder flasks and water bottles, and a few wore small satchels on their back filled with boucan. Yet, Ned noticed, for all their ragged clothes and assorted weapons, they had a purposeful look about them; they knew where they were going: there was no hint of a rabble of camp followers, eager to snatch any booty left behind by the soldiers.
“Keep at least five hundred yards behind,” Ned told Leclerc, who was in command. “When the Spaniards see Secco’s force, your men must still be out of sight.”
The men in the armour of a Spanish company of infantry had begun to march down the track, stirring a cloud of dust, and a couple of moments later the wheels of the first falcon began their rumbling.
Thomas tapped Ned’s shoulder and gestured towards the eastern sky, now lightening quickly as a hint of cherry washed some distant clouds. “This is really the beginning,” he said happily as the two men walked down the hill. “The fleet will be leaving the Bahia las Minas and Jensen’s boats should be coming into the harbour now.”
Suddenly Ned could smell wood smoke. At the foot of the mountains Portobelo was at last stirring: just below them the women were lighting their cooking fires to start the day, and a couple of minutes later he could smell onions frying. Onions! He sneezed, and realized that Secco’s men were raising the dust on the track. It was ironic that he was sneezing: he had expected rain to turn the dust of the track into sticky red mud which would bog down the guns. Portobelo, lying beside this range of high mountains, was notorious for its heavy rainfall. But instead of heavy, rolling clouds there had been (so far, anyway) star-studded skies with every promise of a fine cloudless but scorching day as soon as the sun lifted over the horizon.
Very quickly it was light enough for him to see Secco’s men some distance away. They looked smart, the occasional glint from armour warning how fast the sun was rising. The guns were rolling smoothly down the hill, the men leaning back on the ropes. Seamen knew how to take the strain…
The Griffin should be under way now, leading the little fleet out of the Bahia las Minas as Thomas had commented. He pictured the ships, their sails barely filling in a light breeze. Then, in spite of himself, he imagined Aurelia and for the first time felt fear. If anything happened to her… He should never have left her with the ships. But where else? She was far safer in the Griffin than here, and he would worry about her just as much – probably a good deal more if she and Diana were waiting in one of the boats now left hidden along the banks of the Rio Guanche.
“Not far now,” Thomas said as the two of them walked along the edge of the track where the hill began to drop away sharply to the town. The rooftops of Portobelo were now so close that Ned felt he could hurl stones down on to those chimneys from which wisps of smoke curled like kettles beginning to boil in a cold climate. In the heat of the Tropics, he thought irrelevantly, the sign of boiling water was a juddering lid, not clouds of steam.
Then he forced himself to look beyond Portobelo. The track ran along behind the town and then, finally having reached sea level, turned left to pass the landward side of Fort Triana and beyond to the Castillo de San Gerónimo. From Secco’s description, a turning off the track actually led into the town, but from where he stood the houses themselves hid it.
It would never work. He realized that the first moment he caught sight of San Gerónimo from this level: in the shadow of dawn it seemed huge and carved from solid stone, impregnable to the battering of siege guns, its own guns and gun loops able to blast away scaling ladders. Yet here he was with these puny falcons, guns more suited to firing salutes than fighting, and for all his brave talk, they were an armed rabble that needed only a Falstaff. Indeed, he was their Falstaff; all he lacked was a pot belly and a raucous voice.
He told himself that all the way from Port Royal to Old Providence he had not had a real plan for capturing Portobelo (or at least San Gerónimo), but his good luck at Old Providence had helped persuade him that he was a military genius: capturing a castle, most of whose garrison were believed to be several hundred miles away, was simple.
He had had the idea – not a plan, he jeered at himself, just an idea – at Old Providence; the capture of the two islands and its munitions had given him the basis for The Great Plan. It remained The Great Plan the whole time it took to sail to the Bahia las Minas, and was still a plan when the boats rowed on to the Rio Guanche. His confidence in it began to fade during the tedious climb up the hills towards the track. Not vanish suddenly, just slowly fade. Then they reached the track, and at the highest point he was too busy watching the men tightening the straps of their armour, checking that Apostles had powder, making sure that powder flasks were also full and that the measuring springs worked freely to worry about The Great Plan.
Then Secco had stepped out down the track at the head of the men, and still The Great Plan seemed – well, at least a good idea. Now, looking at San Gerónimo, it seemed childish, the feverish wanderings of a simple mind. It would vanish in a shouted challenge, the castle door slamming shut. A brace of cannon would wipe out Jensen’s boats as they approached and the echo of the shots would alert the Iron Fort, whose guns would be ready for the leading ships after Aurelia tacked towards the anchorage.
The Spanish gunners, seeing all the ships approaching, obviously would not be stupid enough to
open fire too soon and raise the alarm; they would wait until there were plenty of ships in the anchorage – after all, once they were inside, the Iron Fort could stop them sailing out again, and the guns of the Castillo de San Fernando, San Gerónimo and Triana could pound them all day, and all night, if need be. The guns in the ships? Mere squibs compared with those in the forts; little more than blunderbusses loaded with nails and bits of scrap metal.
The track, now only a thin layer of dust on cracked rock, jarred on his heels as he walked down the slope. Everyone – well, Secco, anyway – said Triana was a small fort, but even that one seemed damn’d big from here, only a few hundred yards away, while San Gerónimo looked a good deal larger than the fort he’d blown up at Santiago.
That singing was Secco and his men: he identified it from the words and rhythm as an old Spanish marching song, much of it bawdy, with several words he did not understand.
“Secco’s brighter than we gave him credit for,” Thomas murmured. “Or did you tell him?”
“No, I didn’t think of it. But what a wonderful way to put everyone off their guard! Singing soldiers heading for the castle after their long march from Panama!”
By now the dogs had started barking, dozens of them; then the goats, startled by the dogs, began adding their sharp bleating protest, and in turn some donkeys started braying, sounding like oxen having their throats cut. Suddenly a bugle or trumpet began sounding from the ramparts of Triana. An alarm? No, the notes were too strident but not urgent. It might even be reveille and simply a coincidence. Or, hearing the approaching troops and expecting a senior officer to be leading them, perhaps a wakeful trumpeter had used his own initiative. Secco would recognize it and know what to do.
At that moment Ned and Thomas passed the end of a row of houses just in time to see Secco’s men marching past the huge gates of Triana, and it was light enough to see that the little side door was open.