by Brian Eames
“Very well. Lead on.”
Two hours later the path wound on over steep terrain. They trudged through massive fields of boulders that X explained provided excellent cover should the English ever be foolish enough to try to attack them.
“Ten men could hold off an army,” he said. “And we are more than a hundred strong.”
Kitto would not have been able to keep up were it not for Van and Akin. The boys stood astride Kitto so that he could drape an arm over each of their shoulders. Together they forged their way. Even so, the going was difficult, and just when Kitto thought he could endure no more, the rise of the hillside tapered off. Up ahead of them Joseph called out to someone farther up the trail.
“A village ahead,” Akin said, catching a glimpse of some huts in the distance.
A few steps in front of them Sarah gave out a sharp cry. She stopped cold, her hand raised to her mouth. Kitto and Van caught up to her.
“Mum! What is it?” Kitto said. Sarah was looking farther up the trail.
“Is it . . . is it real?”
There in a grassy clearing, perched atop the shoulders of a very tall black man, was Duck, with the monkey Julius in his arms.
“Duck!” Kitto yelled.
“Julius!” Van said.
Duck turned and saw them: his mother and brother, walking out from the Jamaican jungle.
Duck shrieked and tossed Julius into the air before hurling himself from the man’s shoulders. He hit the dirt belly first but bounced up grinning. Duck ran for them.
They were all running now, Sarah and Kitto and all of them.
Sarah was the first to reach Duck. The little boy leaped into her arms and would have knocked her over backward had Kitto not been there to throw himself into the embrace as well.
“Oh, Mum! I thought I might never . . .”
“Duck! Duck, can it be!” Together they hugged one another and wept.
“I am so sorry, Duck!” Kitto said. “I left you alone on the ship.”
Duck pulled back from the embrace, grinning.
“I wasn’t alone! I had Julius!” He turned and made a kissing noise. Julius ran forward, leaped up to Kitto’s head, and walked over to Duck’s shoulder.
“Hey! You’re my monkey, remember?” Van said, snatching Julius away and nuzzling their foreheads together.
“Mum, don’t cry,” Duck said, but Sarah could not stop the tears. Duck wiped them from her cheeks.
“We thought we would never see you again,” Kitto said. “We thought maybe Morris had hurt you.” Duck reached out and gave Kitto’s nose a tweak.
“I was too fancy for old Black Heart,” Duck said. “And I knew you would come find me, Kitto. I always knew it.”
Kitto felt his heart swell. If he could only live up to the person his brother knew him to be, what great things could he do with his life?
Farther ahead in the clearing X had snatched his hat away to plant a huge kiss on a tall, dark woman. She also wore a man’s tricorne hat, but it was knocked to the ground by the kiss. X lifted the woman into the air and whooped.
“Nanny! I am home, mon amour!”
“Where you been, you mad pirate!” Nanny said, flashing a brilliant smile of white teeth.
Amos paraded Bucket on into the village.
“Feast!” he called. “Kill a pig, quick! We must have a great feast!”
Kitto stood. He pulled Sarah to her feet and tousled Duck’s matted hair.
“Come on, family. Let us find a cool spot in the shade. We have many stories to tell.”
Duck wrapped an arm around Kitto’s waist, and so doing he felt the dagger at the small of his brother’s back.
“What’s this?” Duck said, and pulled the dagger out. The blade was sheathed in the reed covering that Ontoquas had made.
“You know it,” Kitto said.
Duck smiled as he cast the reed sheath aside and slashed the dagger through the air as if it were a sword.
“This is the one Da gave you!” he said. Kitto nodded. Splashes of sunlight played off the polished steel.
“There is a lot to that dagger, as it turns out,” Kitto said.
It belonged to my birth father, my birth mother, my father who hardly thought me capable of wielding it . . . My mum used that dagger to save me from a certain death by the sharks, and it has put me in league with a notorious pirate who might have taken my life when I was just a lad. And still, I do not think that dagger’s tale is yet told.
“Much indeed,” Sarah agreed. The motion of Duck’s arm ceased, the dagger poised in the air. He lowered it slowly.
“You know something, Kitto?” Duck said.
“What?”
“Da. He would be so proud. Of us, I mean,” Duck said.
Kitto felt tears rising into his eyes. He reached out with each hand and gave his mother and his brother a squeeze.
“I am sure of it, Duck. Very proud indeed.”
A NOTE ABOUT THIS BOOK
The world of 1678 was caught in the midst of a huge global shift. Since the late 1400s, Portugal and Spain had pretty much split the Western world between them (check out the Treaty of Tordesillas, 1494). Spain claimed all of the Americas except for Brazil—which Portugal had already staked out—and Portugal claimed all of Africa. This was a wonderful arrangement for the Spanish and Portuguese, but a horrifying one for Native Americans and the inhabitants of West Africa. Spain had hit it rich quick by conquering Native American kingdoms and stealing (as well as mining) the incredible quantities of gold and silver located there. Portugal, after being initially disappointed at discovering little gold or silver in Africa, had nonetheless found the continent teeming with an incredibly precious resource: humans. By trading goods they brought with them from home (often metal items like nails or pots and pans), the Portuguese found that African leaders they encountered were happy to give up members of enemy tribes who had been captured in battles. Portuguese traders took these people across the Atlantic Ocean and sold them to their countrymen in Brazil and to the Spanish in other areas of Central and South America. Humans were desperately needed for labor in the growing plantations both countries had established there for growing crops like sugarcane, which grew far better in places like Cuba and Brazil than it did in Europe.
The three geographical points (Europe, West Africa, the Americas) formed a triangle, and the trade that revolved clockwise around the Atlantic Ocean is often referred to today as the triangle trade. Manufactured goods (metal objects, cloth, tools, etc.) left Europe for Africa where they were exchanged for human captives; these prisoners were shipped west across the Atlantic Ocean (this gruesome leg of the journey is often called the Middle Passage today) and forced to work. The efforts of their work (chiefly sugar, after mining silver and gold became less profitable) headed on other ships back to Europe, where it was sold for a profit. Part of that profit was spent on more manufactured goods (metal objects, cloth, etc.), which were loaded onto ships bound for Africa. And so the cycle continued, over and over.
By Kitto’s time, the rest of the countries of Europe had long grown tired of watching only Spain and Portugal get rich. They wanted part of the action. The Dutch were the first to find an avenue to another source of great wealth—spices—which they mostly got from islands in modern-day Indonesia. (It is odd to think that Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands—countries that no one would call huge global players today—were immensely wealthy and formidable in 1678.)
The people of the British Isles had not stood idly by either. By the time of this story, the people of today’s United Kingdom had elbowed their way into this trade of slaves, sugar, and spices. Through its success in this trade, the UK would grow so large that by 1800 it was an empire “on which the sun never sets.”
Ontoquas speaks several words in her native Massachusett language throughout the story. As a member of the Wampanoag tribe, she is a descendant of the Native Americans who first welcomed and provided critical aid to the “pilgrims” from Europe who arrived in Ply
mouth in 1620. By Ontoquas’s time, however, tensions had built up between the native peoples and the new arrivals. When English settlers began taking over tribal lands without permission, the tribes of the area banded together and began to attack English settlements. The result was called King Philip’s War, a catastrophe for the Wampanoag people. This conflict resulted in the death of roughly 40 percent of the tribe. Many of the surviving Wampanoag people were sold off by the settlers into slavery in the West Indies, explaining how Ontoquas (and Black Dog) might have ended up so far from home.
Massachusett Words
netchaw: brother
nippe: water
nitka: mother
noeshow: father
quog quosh: make haste, hurry
suckis suacke: a clam, clams
tunketappin: where you live
wawmauseu: an honest man
weneikinne: it is very handsome
wompey: white
Alexandre Exquemelin was a real person who is on his way in this tale to writing a bestselling book about pirate history that will be in print for centuries. Little is known about the man. He was likely French by birth but spent time in Amsterdam, and his famous book was first published in Dutch. Throughout the tale he sprinkles his speech with French and Dutch words and phrases.
Exquemelin’s Garbled Tongue
allons-y (French): let’s go
ezel drol (Dutch): donkey turd
helemaal niet (Dutch): no
jongen (Dutch): boy
krijgt die schoft (Dutch): get that child of unwed parents
mes amis (French): my friends
moeder (Dutch): mother
ongelooflijk (Dutch): incredible
venez, les petites filles (French): come, girls
vous vous réveillez (French): you wake up
Today’s Caribbean islands were densely populated with African slaves by about the mid-1600s. In Jamaica, these captives were forced to work primarily on sugar plantations. Jamaica is a large and mountainous island, and throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, vast areas remained uninhabited and very difficult to access. Escaped slaves would make for these regions, banding together with other fugitives and forming colonies. Some of the colonies grew quite large. The people were called “maroons” from a Spanish word that means “living on a mountaintop.” The character of Nanny in this story is based on a historical person who lived somewhat later. She was the leader of the most significant maroon colony in Jamaica’s history. She organized attacks on plantations and is credited with freeing hundreds of slaves from bondage. Today Nanny is considered a national hero in Jamaica.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
History of the Bouccaneers of America by Alexander Exquemelin was published originally in Dutch in 1678. This bestselling eyewitness account was translated into several languages and is still in print today. In the original version of the book, Exquemelin claimed that Henry Morgan had been an indentured servant as a young man. Outraged, Morgan sued the publisher for libel. He won the case, and the subsequent editions of the book made no mention of the claim. Other interesting books about pirates include The Pirate Primer: Mastering the Language of Swashbucklers and Rogues by George Choundas, Pirates by John Matthews, and Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates by David Cordingly.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I read this manuscript to Jack and Keyes when I was not yet through with it, and their excitement and suggestions helped me get it gritty. And some weekday mornings when they bicker at each other over the kitchen table, I like to think, “What would Spider do?” That has been . . . educational. Hayes continues to be a monkey, so there has been inspiration aplenty there. Jesica is my Sarah: my lantern, my optimist, the one whose glow keeps me from the rocks. Whenever I began to think #1 was a fluke, she was there to lighten me up.
My official readers aided me greatly. Chief among them is Natalie Bernstein, the librarian extraordinaire at the Paideia School. Among other things she helped me tone down from a PG-13 rating the scene where Ontoquas liberates Bucket. Then of course there are my kid readers. They are all turkeys, but I feel I should acknowledge them, either in alphabetical order, or in the order of how many Charms Blow Pops they begged me for throughout the year. They are: Linden H., Keb B., Erin M., Analla R., Sam B., Daywe M., David C., Grace H., Hector G., Sophia W., Nick V., Aiden O., Isabella C., Leo S., Alex W., Elijah H., Camille J., Aree P., Jack R., Sophie S., Jack P., Laney C., Liv C., Lucinda “Coop”, Julian S., Hanna Z., Nora S., and Eliza G. Thanks as well to Jonny Poulton for putting up with my distractibility. Andy Sarvady and Gary Bannister each offered creativity and experience to assist me in marketing, and I am grateful to them both.
Neither this book nor its prequel would have been possible without my agent, Carolyn Jenks, as well as the creative force that is the team at the Carolyn Jenks Agency: Jonathan Hu, Siah Ruh Goh, AnneMarie Monzione, Michael Tucker, Rebecca Hartje, Phoenix Bunke, and Eric Wing. I have been fortunate to work with such an accomplished editor as Paula Wiseman with Paula Wiseman Books/Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. Her suggestions helped me to see this project with fresh eyes and make it more accessible to more readers out there. Many thanks, too, to Laurent Linn for his design skill and for getting the fabulous Amy June Bates on board for cover art. Heather McLeod did an amazing job of sleuthing for errors in the copyediting phase. Thank you, Heather, but please don’t tell my students how many grammatical and usage errors I make.
Final thanks must go to Henry Morgan for living such a thrilling and ethically dubious life. Don’t worry, H., I’ll dwell on you plenty in the final installment of this tale.
Brian Eames has taught elementary students for fifteen years at the Paideia School in Atlanta, Georgia. He read early drafts of The Dagger X to his classes of ten-to twelve-year-olds. The Dagger Quick was his debut novel. He lives with his wife and children in Atlanta. Visit him at brianeames.com.
A Paula Wiseman Book
Simon & Schuster
Books for Young Readers
SIMON & SCHUSTER • NEW YORK
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Also by Brian Eames
THE DAGGER QUICK
SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2013 by Brian Eames
Jacket illustration copyright © 2013 by Amy June Bates
Title page background and chapter head illustrations copyright © 2011 by iStockphoto.com/Thinkstock
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Also available in a Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers paperback edition
Book design by Laurent Linn
Map illustration by Drew Willis
Jacket Design by Laurent Linn
Jacket Illustration Copyright © 2013 by Amy June Bates
Map Art Copyright © 2013 by iStockphoto.com/Thinkstock
The text for this book is set in Minister Standard.
1013 FFG
First Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers hardcover edition November 2013
Library of Co
ngress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eames, Brian.
The dagger X / Brian Eames. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Paula Wiseman Book.”
Sequel to: The dagger Quick.
Summary: Twelve-year-old Kitto Quick, stranded with his stepmother, Van, a Wampanoag girl, and a baby rescued from a slave ship on the very island where Morris hid valuable spices, learns powerful secrets of his past. ISBN 978-1-4424-6855-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
[1. Pirates—Fiction. 2. Survival—Fiction. 3. People with disabilities—Fiction. 4. Identity—Fiction. 5. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 6. Islands—Fiction.]
I. Title.
PZ7.E119Dak 2013
[Fic]—dc23
2012040713
ISBN 978-1-4424-6856-6 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-4424-6857-3 (eBook)