Pistoleer: Pirates

by Smith, Skye

  "We women should have been taught ship sense years ago,” Venka pointed out. If other men from the village had heard her say this, they would have scoffed at the idea.

  "Amen to that,” Teesa replied. She had picked up many Christian sayings from her best friend Bridget and Bridget's little brother Richard, especially the naughty sayings. Or at least they used to be her best friends until their father had been re-elected to parliament and he had moved the whole family away from Ely to live in London. "If we have five new ships this size, then the men will have no choice but to use women as crew during the sea voyages. Besides, it will be good practice for when we sail to Bermuda."

  She was right of course, not about the women being needed for the new ships, but about Bermuda. The reason they were buying the new ships, was because once they were re-rigged, the clan would still have enough men to sail all of them. "Cleff,” Daniel interrupted the lesson, "What do you think about Bermuda rigging one of the Swift's jolly boats so that everyone, including the women, can practice with it in Wellenhay's ships pool?"

  "That would be good so long as the rig was kept a secret until after we have bought all of our new ships,” Cleff replied. "The boat the Swift tows already has a mast. The women could do the work of rigging it and converting the sail."

  "Aye,” Daniel replied, "and if she sails like a crabwalk, then we could add swing leeboards to the gunnels, in the Dutch way."

  There was no answer from Cleff, for Davey had the two women in the bow practicing their signals and Cleff's full attention was on teaching Teesa how to read the signals and steer the ship. Daniel pulled both of his wives closer to him. The two of them had rarely left his side since he had returned from the Caribbean. The three of them now lived together in Venka's house and slept together in Venka's big bed. Teesa had moved out of Venka's house and into Sarah's house. Not just to give the threesome more privacy but to calm the mother-daughter rebellion.

  The tradition of the Frisian clans was that the men worked the ships, the herds, the hunting and the fishing. The women worked the house, the planted fields, and the gathering of food. Any family inheritance such as the home was passed from mother to eldest daughter. When a girl became a woman, the clan would gather and build her a house. Not that these were houses in the town sense, the brick sense.

  Theirs were traditional Fen's houses. The terp foundation was a flattened mound of silt and rubble built up to be at least a yard higher than the garden that surrounded it, so that the floor would stay dry during the seasons of high water. The houses were quick to build and rebuild, and each time one was rebuilt the mound was made higher by the rubble of the one being replaced.

  The area of the terp limited the floor area of the house, and also limited the weight of the building materials. The great weight of stone and brick would just sink into it. Not that there was any building stone in the Fens anyway, although there was more and more fired brick being used in some of the dryer villages. Someone from a dryland town would call a Fens house a stick and wattle thatch hut. Call it what you will, they were dry and warm and easy to keep and easy to replace.

  In the Caribbean Daniel had seen many similar houses, although they used palm fronds rather than woven rushes, and the tropical walls were kept thin to keep a cooling breeze blowing through the house, rather than thickened with wattle to keep the bitter North Sea winds out. Moving to a tropical island would be easy for his clan, because here in the Fens they already lived like tropical people. What was prompting their desire to move to the tropics was that the North Sea winters were getting longer and colder every year. In winter, life was hard in the Fens ... hard and boring ... boring and dull.

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  The Pistoleer - Pirates by Skye Smith Copyright 2013-14

  Chapter 13 - Buying up old ships in Boston in October 1641

  Cleff and Daniel spent most of the afternoon climbing all over the line of ships that were pulled up on the mud flats along the entrance to The Haven near to the village of Fishtoft. The longer a ship was idle, the faster it rotted, so they spent their time on the ships that showed signs of recent repairs or tarring. Spotting the best of them went fast enough, but then there was the painstaking work of poking their knives into likely planks searching for sponginess that would decry wood rot.

  Eventually they decided which four were the best of the lot, though they had come to buy only one, or perhaps two. Which of the four they would actually buy would depend on price, which led them to the next step of finding the owners. Luckily the Fishtoft mussel men who were working the mud flats were also the ship minders, and for a few coins one of them offered to take them to the four owners. Since the owners all lived in Boston, it was decided to row the Freisburn up the Haven and up the River Whitham.

  Once aboard the ship, their guide noticed that the oarsmen were all women and froze in his tracks. His misgivings of traveling in a ship manned by women were eventually lulled by wondering how much free ale he could drink while telling luridly sexual fantasies about being at the mercy of such comely oar-wenches. In truth, the closest he got to the oar-wenches was standing beside Davey on the bow as he pointed the way to the youngest and prettiest tiller-girl he had ever seen or was likely to ever see again.

  The early October sunset caught them just shy of Boston but they were near to the house of the first owner, so they set up camp on the closest dry bank to the owner's house and built some small cooking fires. They had fresh eels to eat, caught in the nets which they had towed up the river behind the ship. Meanwhile Daniel, Cleff and the guide discussed the state of the local shipping businesses, which was bad, and then tossed ideas around about how to get a low price on one of the four ships. The discussions lasted all through the eel meal, but ended when they were shushed by the women trying to fall sleep after spending the last hours pulling on oars.

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  In the morning the guide went off to fetch the other three owners and once all four of them were together at the camp beside the Freisburn, the bargaining began in earnest to see which one of the ships Daniel would buy today ... buy for solid coins of gold and silver. Perhaps bargaining was not the right word, for it immediately turned into a strange auction where offered prices spiraled ever downward. Each of the men had realized that this was a golden opportunity to sell off an old fashioned ship at the end of the trading season in a dropping market.

  The bidding continued until Daniel became frightened that the four owners were about to go for each others throats, so he calmed them all by saying. "If you sell them to me, complete with all rigging, sailcloth, anchors and fittings at a tenth higher than the lowest price offered so far, then I will buy all four of your ships. I suggest a friendly deal with no trickery. Coins and bills of sale will be exchanged, but only once the ships are seen to be floating without leaks."

  Cleff cried "No" as loud as he could, to try to block the deal, for there was no way that their crew of women could sail the Freisburn and four similar ships all the way across the Wash to Lynn. He was physically pushed away by the four owners in their eagerness to shake Daniel's hand and seal the deal. "You fool,” Cleff was yelling as he broke his fall with his hands and then quickly rolled to stand up again. He was too late. The deal was sealed.

  Before noon a few small boats were following the Freisburn back down the Haven to Fishtoft where the ships had been pulled above the high water mark for the winter season. The small boats contained the owners and some of their men from Boston. Most of their crews actually lived in Fishtoft or just north of that village in Freiston. Once at the beached ships, the boatmen were sent running to call together enough of the crews to provide the brawn and the hands to launch the four ships.

  The first men to arrive were from Fishtoft and they set about building fires to heat the pitch. The owners were taking no chance that the drying hulls would leak and sour the sale, so all the seams were to be sealed with hot pitch before the ships were floated. The entire village of Fishtoft wandered do
wn to the ships out of curiosity or to say farewell to the ships that their men had worked for a decade.

  The resulting scene on the muddy strand was one that any passing barge would take for a village fete complete with ale, food, women, and dancing. Since the crew of the Freisburn were not expected to pitch in, they led the dancing. Even Cleff was in a good mood for it had dawned on him that some of these local men would help crew theses ships back to Lynn for a mere coin or three.

  When the folk from the other village of Freiston arrived, the fete really got going, for Freiston was another Anglo-Frisian village, though no longer much like Wellenhay. In truth, at one time it had been one of the largest Anglo-Frisian towns on the Wash. Many of the men and women looked like relatives of the Wellenhay clan, and so they would be if you went back a few generations, or even fifty generations, for that was how long ago the Frisians settled in these Fens.

  What had happened to Freiston was what had happened to most of the Frisian settlements over the centuries, and what Cleff, as clan elder, feared would happen to Wellenhay if they did not soon move out of the Fens. He feared that the clanswomen would marry wealthy Christian drylanders. In a clan where the property rights passed from mother to daughter, every clanswoman that left the village was another family lost to the clan.

  Not that you could blame the wealthy Christian men, for the Frisian clanswomen were handsome and useful and bore tall, fair children. Not that you could blame the Frisian clanswomen because a wealthy husband could offer her the life of a manor with a carriage and servants. The blame lay with Kings and Bishops. They coveted the common lands of the clans, and the easiest way to steal that land was to break up the clans. The Anglo Frisians had lost the Fens not through battle, but by the building of churches and abbeys and monasteries and priories ... like the old priory in Freiston.

  Unlike Cleff, Daniel did not just sit about fretting about the future and cursing the past. He was moving through his clanswomen telling them to recruit any single men who had the look of good Frisian stock to them. "Tell them that we need help in ferrying these ships to Lynn, and then see if you can seduce any of them into moving to Wellenhay and joining with you, and with the clan."

  The women were delighted by the chance to rebalance the numbers of men and women in Wellenhay. By the time the pitching was finished on all four ships, the women had recruited twenty men, and more than one of those men already had a satisfied smirk on his face. By the morning there would be more smirks, for the rest of this day would be spent rigging the sails and floating the ships ready for sailing to Wellenhay on the morning tide.

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  Well they would have set sail the next morning if the wind had cooperated. Cleff with his weather wisdom, had predicted a gentle northerly wind for the day's sail, and this to be followed by a bitter nor’easter storm. Instead the norther held off for another day and no one relished the task of rowing shorthanded into the wind all the way across the Wash, so they put the departure off for one more day.

  The clanswomen were not displeased at the delay, for this extra day happened to be market day in Boston. They boarded the Freisburn and rowed it back up river to Boston. The newly floated (but not yet paid for) ships were being minded by the mussel men as was usual, and each had an extra watcher aboard from the ranks of the Freiston men. This meant that the entire crew could dress up all skirtly and enjoy everything that market in Boston had on offer. Not that this was much different than was readily available to them in Lynn or in Ely, but the crew were country village women who were delighted to be somewhere new. After all, unlike their sea faring men, Boston was about the furthest any of them had ever been from Wellenhay.

  The women who ran the market were more than pleased at a chance of selling their wares to new and unexpected customers. The wives of the burgesses of Boston, however, were far from pleased by it. It was bad enough that they put up with the brash women who traveled with the market, without having their numbers doubled on this one day.

  Boston was a pious place. Saint Botolphs church, the one with the massive Stump tower, had been built by the Catholics but had switched to Lutheran after the Catholics were cast out by King Henry the Cock. During the reign of Queen Bess, and due to the Dutch influence along this coast, the church had become Calvinist. During the reign of James Stuart it had become Presbyterian. Presbyterians were Calvinists who rejected the management of the church by the king's hierarchy of bishops. Now in the reign of Charles Stuart, the more radical of the Presbyterians ... the Puritans were in control of the church.

  The Puritan vision of a godly woman was one who was nothing less than neat and silent. The neat and silent women of Boston were being pushed aside in the market by twenty boisterous women made more confident and brash by their recent shipboard adventures. In hindsight it was fortunate that this was not a day hot enough to allow the clanswomen to strip off their modest woolens. As it was, the gossip that was racing through the neatly silent women of Boston was that they were a band of Amazon sex fiends fresh off a pirate ship had come to seduce young men into joining with them.

  For the crew of the Freisburn it was a day of high spirits, of joy, of giggles and eventually, of confrontation. All morning malicious gossip swirled around them, and they had heard most of it, wickedly relayed to them by the brash market women in hopes of causing mischief. As usual the most wicked of gossip came from the mouths of the youngest of the proper women, and heaped upon the youngest member of the crew. Teesa was the easiest target for this harsh their derision because she was still dressed as a huntress, albeit she had been convinced to leave her bow and quiver on the ship. It was unfortunate.

  Unfortunate, not so much for Teesa, but for the two neat young women who broke their silence to publicly and loudly chastised her, and mock her for her manly attire. Poor Teesa tried to explain that she was working as a tillerman on a ship, and had no skirtly clothing on board the ship, but that just earned her even more mockery from the two 'propers'. A crowd gathered around to watch the fun, at Teesa's expense. Though a few young men were impressed enough with her grubby comeliness to listen with interest to her tillerman tale, the rest of the audience were eager to mock her.

  By the time Teesa's mother and aunt reached the end of the market where all of the mockery was happening, and out of curiosity pushed their way through the crowd to see who was being mocked, they were too late to see the two proper young women being tripped by Teesa and pushed down into the foul mud of the street. They were also too late to see the first man who tried to pull Teesa off the two girls receive her crippling punch into his goolies, or to see a second man receive her hunting boot in his shins. They did hear the angry girly screams, and the howls of pain, but did not yet realize that it was Teesa who was the cause of all the misery.

  To make a third and a fourth man keep their distance, Teesa pulled her eelers knife from its sheath, and anyone who has ever watched a Fens women filet an eel knows how wickedly long, wickedly thin, and wickedly sharp such knives are. It was at this point that Venka and Sarah broke into the circle of fighters, and all they focused on was that their much loved girl was being set upon by men, so they too pulled their knives and stood shoulder to shoulder with Teesa. Venka began shouting "Rapists, rapists. They are trying to rape my daughter. Help us. Someone help us."

  At this call for help, the two men in pain on the ground and two being held off by knives decided it was wiser to run away and save their explanations for a calmer venue. The rest of the men who had been watching were also made fearful by the public cry of rape and they disappeared backwards into the now burgeoning crowd. With the immediate threat now gone, the three women sheathed their knives.

  Only then did Teesa stand tall above the two sobbing, muddied girls on the ground, who were no longer neat nor silent. "If you were going to pick a fight in the mud, then perhaps you should have dressed like your brothers,” she hissed at them, and then pushed her way through the crowd and between the rows of market stalls, leaving her mother an
d aunt to help the muddied girls back onto their feet.

  That afternoon, a messenger arrived at the Freisburn's camp with a summons for the ship's Captain to attend a five o'clock inquest into his crew's breach of the peace, to be held at the Boston judiciary quarters next to the Gaolhouse across the church square from the Stump. After delivering the message, the messenger was more than pleased to join Daniel, Cleff, and the four men who had just sold their ships, in a tot of best Genever to celebrate the deal. The chat soon turned into a discussion about the Boston judiciary.

  The men had heard something about a girly fight in the market, and Daniel went off to fetch Teesa to explain herself. After hearing her side of the story, he thought it all good fun, and told the messenger that he would attend and would bring the girl in question to tell her story.

  The messenger did not agree with the decision. He had been sent by his father, William Ellis, who was a local lawyer as well as the sitting Member of Parliament for Boston. "My father says not to come,” young Bill warned. "The only reason there is to be an inquest is because one of the girls who was knocked down is the daughter of a local nob."

  "Who? Which noble?" one of the boat sellers asked.

  "Robert Bertie, you know, the Earl of Lindsey."

  "Shit. The lad is right to warn you off,” the owner grumbled. "Lindsey is a prat bastard and a violent man. Ex-soldier from the Holland wars, he is."

  "Worse than that,” another seller piped up. "He's the king's man ... the Lord Great Chamberlain no less. In charge of all the palaces and houses of Westminster, his is. My advice is to get all your women aboard your ship and hop it." The other sellers shushed him, for none of them had been paid for their ships as yet.