Only Life That Mattered

by Nelson, James L.

  There was a hole through the top, an easy way up on to that platform, but she had never seen any of the sailors use it. Rather, they had clambered out onto a smaller set of ropes that ran from the lower shrouds up and out to the edge of the top at a near forty-five-degree angle. Climbing over those meant hanging backwards from them as one made his way over the rim of the top.

  “What now, Captain?” Anne asked.

  “Well, ma’am, if you would go into the top, it would be best if you was to climb through that hole there, which we call the lubber’s hole.”

  “Lubber’s hole? A disdainful name. I have never seen any of the sailors use it.”

  “No, ma’am. That’s why we call it the lubber’s hole. A proper sailor goes over the futtocks, which is them short shrouds there. But, ma’am, you ain’t a proper sailor.”

  “Indeed I am not. But like a proper sailor, I say, ‘Sod the bloody lubber’s hole.’”

  Anne smiled at the master’s visible shock. Such a coarse bitch I am, she thought. Is it any wonder he thinks he’ll have me betwixt the sheets by voyage’s end?

  Then with three quick steps she was up the futtocks and over the edge of the top, no easy task in skirts, which were a terrible nuisance.

  And if the master objected to her brashness, Anne guessed that the view of her legs and underthings afforded him as she hung backwards on the futtock shrouds more than compensated. In any event he followed her with never a word about it.

  It was magnificent up there, with the horizon making a great unbroken arc as far around as she could see before the view was blocked by the lovely curve of the sails. Below her, the run of the deck from the bow aft, the long line of wake running down her side. How very narrow the ship looked from up there, far too narrow to remain upright, as if she should just tip over under the weight of her masts.

  The motion, too, was unlike any she had experienced: a plunging back and forth, much more pronounced than it was on deck, along with a circular kind of swaying as the ship rolled, pitched, yawed, and the height of the mizzen top above deck exaggerated every move.

  “Oh, sir, I see why you men love sailing so! Is there anything more magnificent than this?” Anne cried, and though she was addressing the master, she was talking to herself.

  “Indeed, ma’am. When the weather is fine, it is a wondrous thing.”

  She spent the rest of the voyage soaking in as much as she could of shipboard life. She watched her husband working high aloft and sweating at the sheets and halyards with his fellows, smiled at him as he shot black looks aft at her, unhappy with the attention she was receiving from the master but unable to do anything about it. Her world was the quarterdeck and his the forecastle head at the bow, and as long as she was a passenger and he a sailor before the mast there was nothing that could change that.

  Six days out and they raised New Providence, low and green on the horizon. Anne remained on deck throughout the day, watching with eager anticipation as more and more detail of the island revealed itself, gratefully accepting the master’s offer of the use of his telescope to scan this place she had so long dreamed of seeing.

  Nassau, the pirates’ haven. Wicked, depraved Nassau.

  The breeze failed with the setting sun and it was not until late morning of the next day that they stood in between Hog Island and New Providence, threading their way through the tangle of shipping there.

  “Sir,” Anne said to the master. She was standing on the quarterdeck, as usual, dressed now in fine, demure silk and taffeta, a parasol protecting her fair skin from the tropical sun that beat down on them. “Sir, pray, you had said there was not much shipping bound for New Providence, but I perceive a great number of ships here. More than ever I saw in Charles Town harbor.”

  “Bah,” said the master. “It’s those rogue pirates, do you see? They’ll have a ship, and when they are done with her, why, they’ll just let her rot.

  “To be sure they careen their vessels, by which I mean they take them up on a beach and roll them on their side and thus get at the weeds grown there. They have to, have to keep them fast, or else they’d never be able to run their poor victims down, or escape from the men-of-war. But beyond that the lazy dogs will do nothing. So these ships here, cast-offs, old prizes, rotten pirate ships. Wreckage, no more.”

  Anne nodded her head. Fascinating. Her first lesson in piracy.

  “There’s not half the number now as there was,” the master continued. “This new Governor, this Woodes Rogers, he’s making a clean sweep, fore and aft. He come here with a pardon from the King. Full amnesty to them will forswear the pirate life. Half the villains here have accepted his pardon, and half have lit out before he hangs them. But they are still a vicious lot of rogues, to be sure.”

  “I have no doubt,” said Anne.

  They stood on, into the harbor, taking in sail as they worked toward a clear place to anchor. Anne could see James Bonny up aloft, his skinny posterior pointing skyward as he bent far over the fore yard, handing the sail.

  The master put on a great show of bellowing commands to bring the vessel to anchor, being manly for Anne’s benefit, and once the anchor was down she was not surprised to find him seeking her out.

  “As a gentleman I am honor-bound to warn you, Miss Cormac, that it ain’t safe for a woman alone in this place.”

  “As I have said, sir, I shall be visiting my brother, who keeps a small farm in the interior of the island. I am in no doubt but he is ashore now, watching our arrival, and will be at the dock to greet me.”

  “But if he is not, ma’am, I would entreat you to consider staying aboard, under my care.”

  Under your care indeed, you randy old dog, Anne thought. There was a certain wantonness about a young woman traveling unescorted, and Anne imagined that the master took encouragement from that, as well as from her other brazen displays. But before she could politely decline, the mate stepped aft. “Anchor’s holding, sir. I’ve veered half a cable. And the new fellow, that Bonny, says he’s ruptured himself.”

  The master, the mate, and Anne looked forward. On the forecastle head James Bonny was doubled over what Anne thought to be an excessively histrionic display of agony.

  The master sighed. “Bloody convenient, eh? All right, let us pay the rogue off and see him ashore. He has a mind to go a-pirating, I’ll wager.”

  “Oh, sir,” said Anne, “if you are sending that poor fellow ashore now, perhaps the boat could bear me as well?”

  And so they went ashore, James and Anne Bonny, to set foot in Nassau for the first time.

  They wandered away from the dock and along wide Bay Street that fronted the water. The taverns, the rickety inns and smattering of shops, the men and women in their outlandish, brightly colored clothing, the smells of cooking and rotting fish and the briny odor of the sea, the hot sun, the laughter and singing, it was mesmerizing to Anne Bonny, like a place from a story book, a wicked fairy tale for grownups, a place beyond laws, common or statute.

  In her excitement she hardly noticed James Bonny, whining at her elbow, and took little notice of his complaints about the improperness of it all, the villainy of that town, his concerns over how he would protect her virtue in such a place. His voice was like the screaming of the cicadas back home: loud, grating, high-pitched and incessant, but easy to ignore after a few moments of listening to it.

  “Anne . . . we needs secure some kind of lodging . . . before you are off on your sight-seeing . . . I can’t carry our things all bloody day . . .”

  That complaint had some validity and so Anne stopped where she was, an intersection where a sandy dirt road branched off from Bay Street and ran between a smattering of ill-conceived wood frame buildings, the bright paint peeling off their shutters.

  James Bonny dropped his seabag and Anne’s small chest filled with all the things she had smuggled from her father’s house. He took off his battered, wide-brimmed hat and wiped his brow with his sleeve. “Just like I reckoned, not a place fit for a lady to stay, not a on
e on this whole damned …”

  “I am terribly thirsty, James. Let us go to that place there and have something to drink.” She pointed across the street to a two-story building on the opposite corner. A few small windows looked out over the road. A sign above the single door read “Ship Tavern.”

  “What, there?” As they considered that establishment the door swung open and a great bearded hulk of a man staggered out, his hat askew, his coat half off. He managed a few steps down the street before he fell in a heap on the dusty road and lay there, unmoving.

  “Yes, there,” said Anne. “It looks as reputable a place as any in this town, and they may have rooms to let as well.”

  “If you are thirsty, Anne, I can fetch . . .” James Bonny began but Anne was already half way across the street before he finished the thought, leaving him with nothing to do but pick up their worldly possessions and hurry after her.

  She stepped boldly across Bay Street, marched up to the door of the Ship Tavern and pushed it open. After the brilliant afternoon sun she was nearly blind in the gloomy interior. She could make out a smattering of tables, a bar against the far wall. The smoke of a dozen pipes hung in layers beneath the low ceiling and swirled in the current of air created by the swinging door.

  The place was crowded: bearded men, their long hair tied in queues and clubbed, wearing the blue jackets and wide-legged trousers of sailors, or battered silk coats, once-fine breeches, and silk stockings. Bare feet or square-toed shoes, even a few silver buckles, every strata of the pirate community was gathered there in the Ship Tavern.

  The smell of the place wrapped around her, reminiscent of the ship she had just left—pipe smoke and unwashed men, cooked meat, tar. But also the tangy smell of strong drink, and perfume as well, for as her eyes adjusted to the gloom Anne could see that she was not the only woman there.

  It was a filthy, mean, dangerous, and unwholesome place. It was everything she imagined Nassau to be.

  Anne stepped boldly through the door, swept across the floor to the bar. She could see heads turn, could feel the eyes on her. She might not have been the only woman in the tavern, but she was the only one who did not look like a prostitute, and, in fact, the only one who was not.

  She stopped at the bar, turned with a flourish, and looked back across the room. James Bonny was struggling through the door under his load. He deposited it on the floor and hurried over to his wife, as if she might be violated in the three seconds it took him to thread his way between the tables.

  “Anne . . .” he said in a low tone.

  “Rum,” said Anne, loud. “That is what you sailors drink, is it not?”

  “Well, yes, sailors . . .”

  “Let us have some rum then! A whole bottle of it!” She turned away from the room, away from the many eyes that were watching her. “Publican, pray, a bottle of rum here, and two glasses.”

  The publican considered her over folded arms. He had the look of a man who had seen plenty in his time and was not impressed by much of it, but he pulled a bottle from under the counter, set it down with two glasses.

  Anne tipped the brown liquor into her glass and into James’s as well, then without asking or being asked topped off the glass of the man who stood on her other side.

  She lifted her drink, and, with a nod, bid her husband do the same, which he did, reluctantly. “To a new life in New Providence!” she said and someone in the dark tavern called out “Hear her, hear her!”

  She put the glass to her lips, tipped it back the way she had seen men do it. The liquor burned, the fumes swirled in her nose and down her throat. She felt as if she might gag, but she fought it. Tears welled up in her eyes. It was a sensation like none she had had before, burning, noxious, and at the same time sweet, thrilling, warming her from the inside as it went down.

  Rum. It ran like a river through the West Indies. It was a trade good, a medicine, a refuge, an easy pleasure for rich and poor alike. It was a staple of the pirates, as much as food and water. It was the taste of heedless abandon.

  She poured herself another glass. And that was how her new life commenced. Woodes Rogers looked out the window of his office in the governor’s house at the work being done to the walls of the fort.

  It was with an inner smirk that he used the term “governor’s house.” He doubted that that title had ever been applied to a more pathetic structure than the one he now occupied. It was not even a house, really, but a small stone building inside the small fort that overlooked the western entrance to Nassau Harbor. It had been built as an officers’ barracks, but for lack of anything better Rogers had taken it over as the governor’s official residence.

  The captain and lieutenant of the small company of soldiers that he had brought with him from England lived in the other building within the fort. The troops were housed in their tents, no great hardship in such a climate.

  The governor’s house was a shambles and the fort was a shambles. Soon after taking possession they had cleaned it out, removed most of the debris, and evicted the few hopeless drunks and madmen that had taken residence there. The soldiers and settlers were housed within the limited safety of the fort’s walls. But the entire structure was crumbling. As a shelter it was barely adequate. As a fortification it was useless.

  Under the hot Caribbean sun, under Woodes Rogers’s critical eye, soldiers and hired men labored at rebuilding the walls against the possibility of Spanish attack. The hired laborers were pirates to a man, men who had accepted the King’s pardon and were playing at honest work.

  Not that they were working over hard. Half of them at any one time were sitting down, and half of those sitting were asleep. They were all drunk. It was pathetic. But that was the laboring population from which Rogers had to draw.

  Behind him, Ben Hornigold poured another drink, smacked his lips loud and sipped.

  “No, I couldn’t raise old Vane for the life of me,” Hornigold continued his report. “He’s still out there. So is this Stede Bonnet and Teach as well. But they know now you means business. That word is spread. They know you ain’t going to run like a puppy if they come sailing in.”

  “Good.”

  Rogers was pleased with old Ben Hornigold. Hornigold had not just accepted the King’s Pardon, he had agreed to join with Rogers in routing the pirate threat from Nassau.

  Easy for him, he was a wealthy man who had already made his fortune on the account. Rogers knew better than to ask he return that stolen booty. Let him keep it; he was more valuable to England as a privateer than his stolen fortune would be sitting in the treasury. He was the kind who would be loyal to the side he thought would win. For now that meant Governor Rogers.

  “Do you think Vane will return?” Rogers asked.

  A merchant ship, the John and Elizabeth, had come limping into Nassau some months earlier, and her master had a message for Woodes Rogers, given him personally by Charles Vane. The message was an unequivocal threat.

  From most, such a threat would have been mere bluster, but not from Charles Vane. Vane was a madman. Vane was a man who had beaten uncooperative merchant captains to death with his bare hands, a man who had stuffed oakum into his victims’ mouths and lit it on fire, had put a thin cord around men’s heads and twisted, twisted until their eyeballs burst from their sockets.

  A threat from Vane was worth considering, even for Woodes Rogers, a man who would not be intimidated.

  Rogers had dispatched Hornigold to hunt Vane down. Hornigold had been gone so long that Rogers reckoned he had gone back to the pirating life. But the day before, Hornigold had returned, his pledge to the governor intact.

  “Vane return? That I can’t say. Are you afraid, Governor?”

  “No,” said Rogers, and it was true.

  “Well, revenge, it’s a costly thing, you know. Don’t know if Vane will care to do it in the end. And he ain’t sailing a man-of-war. His men have to agree as well. Faith, his men have to agree to damn near anything he wants to do, unless they are in a fight, or chasi
ng, or running. It’s the way with the pirates, as you know. I don’t think young Calico Jack Rackam is of a kidney to sail right in here and burn your ship just for the pleasure of Charles Vane.”

  “Hmmm.” Calico Jack Rackam. Rogers had not heard that name before. He tucked it away in his mental catalog.

  One of the men working on the wall had produced a bottle of rum and was passing it around. Rogers wondered if he should go out and put a stop to such egregious behavior. He was walking a razor’s edge between maintaining discipline and not pushing so hard that these men would just piss on their pardons and go pirating again.

  A self-conscious cough and a soft, “Beg pardon, Governor?” and Woodes Rogers turned toward the door. There was a young sailor standing there, a skinny fellow with a weak chin and a few uneven patches of whiskers on his face.

  “Yes?” He would have to appoint a secretary to intercept this kind of intrusion.

  “Sir, beg your pardon . . .” the young sailor took a step into the room. He held his hat in front of him, like a tenant farmer addressing the Lord of the Manor.

  If only all of these bastards were as cowed as this one, Rogers thought. “What might I do for you?”

  The sailor’s eyes darted toward Hornigold and back again.

  “Whatever you have to say you may say in front of Captain Hornigold. He has my complete confidence.” The former pirate nodded, poured himself another glass.

  “Well, Governor, I had heard . . .” the young man stammered, “that is to say, it was my understanding . . . I thought you was willing to pay, sir, for information, about them that was going back to their pirating ways . . .”

  Rogers nodded. He had made it known that he would pay for such information. He deemed it necessary, as loath as he was to do it, as disgusting as he thought such a man must be who would take him up on the offer. “That is correct. What have you to say?”

  “Well, sir . . .” Eyes darted at Hornigold again, but the old man was firmly planted in his chair and showed no signs of leaving, so the sailor went on. “Sir, I heard . . . overheard, that is to say, one Nathaniel James saying as he was fixing to go on the account, and the King be damned . . . beg your pardon, that was what he said. Said he would be sailing within the week. And another by the name of Billy Oglethorpe, he cursed your name, sir, something wicked, and says he’s for pirating too, once he’s careened his sloop, sir.”