Hunt for White Gold

by Mark Keating

  Devlin looked about him to the men and the ship he had known for a year now. Her wounds from the battle at the island, now scars, gave him pause. To step aboard another – to captain the Talefan, to cheat on Shadow – brought the guilt of betrayal to a part of him. He was thankful to see the welcome bulk of Black Bill lumbering towards him, to pull him from his brief melancholy.

  ‘Bill!’ Devlin’s voice sang. ‘What goes on?’

  The mariner’s boots clumped to his captain’s side. ‘All’s well, Cap’n.’ He looked down to his empty pipe and began to fumble through his outer pocket. ‘We have food enough for six weeks. With good eating.’

  ‘But it wouldn’t hurt to pick up a little fresh timber on the way.’ Devlin elbowed his sailing master’s side as they walked to the entry port. Hugh Harris was already clambering down to the boat.

  ‘We’ll keep behind. Eyes to your masts,’ Bill affirmed. ‘They’ll be looking for Shadow not a wee brig.’

  Devlin rested on the gunwale, looked out to the Talefan laying to the North. ‘That’s the game of it. If eyes are upon us at Charles Town they’ll look for our black and red girl. She’ll be fast, Bill. We’ll make a half-sail. Give you a chance to keep up until we reach Ascension.’

  ‘Aye.’ Bill lit his pipe slowly, ignoring the world as he drew the bowl into glowing life. ‘Patrick,’ he said at last. ‘There be something you should know. I been of a mind to bring it up for a time now.’ He looked hard to his captain. ‘About Peter.’

  Devlin had grown to know Bill well over the past year. A serious man. Drank less than most. Walked the decks at night alone, smoking his pipe over the taffrail watching Shadow’s wake crawl behind them. His confidence was rarely bestowed.

  ‘What about Peter?’

  Bill stared out to the mountains of Madagascar as he spoke.

  ‘That time. At The Island. With the land in sight. Peter Sam … and I to confess true,’ he lowered his head, drawing deeply on his pipe. ‘We changed sail, Cap’n. Headed South. Leaving you to yourself.’ He sighed out a cloud of blue smoke.

  ‘I believe you may have known that, Cap’n,’ his usually growling voice was smooth and tinged with shame. ‘But I wanted to be sure you knew. Before you went after Peter and all. Before you gave me the Shadow to command.’

  Devlin took Bill’s left forearm in both his hands. He shook it once then backed himself through the port, his feet already upon the ladder. The hours on The Island flashed through his mind. He looked up into Bill’s round face.

  ‘But you came back, Bill.’ He minded his footing as he descended, looking up once more before the final drop to the jolly boat. ‘You came back, and you would again.’

  Devlin sat down with Hugh at the sheets. Slipping off his coat and hat he welcomed the two crewmen at the oars, men he had never seen before and who eyed him warily.

  ‘Take me to America, boys!’ he cried. ‘There be a man waiting for me to end his days!’

  Bill watched the boat fight through the waves until he could no longer hear the slap of the oars. Since the month they had been shored in the east he had not seen Devlin so charged. Idleness did not suit him. Horses have need to run.

  He came away from the gunwale and made his way up to the helm, barged through the men too slow to jump out of his path.

  ‘Make sail!’ he bellowed. ‘Move your arses! Your cap’n is waiting! We’re going to the Caribbee! Put your hearts away you sons of bitches! We’re back to the Indies!’

  On the cliffs above the town of St Augustine, to the north of the bay, a man with a telescope watched the Shadow begin to turn south-west, her grey sails full.

  The man lowered the brass tube. He had sat with the scope resting on his knees, watching the ship for the past hour. Occasionally he stretched his back and dipped into his canvas satchel for some goat’s cheese and the flat salty bread that he had endured at first and then grown ravenously fond of.

  He pulled the cork from his leather flask of Arrack, making a note to refill it at one of the taverns on the way back to the guardhouse.

  He drank some of the spicy sweet wine, rewarding himself for his vigilance. He replaced the flask and the scope in the satchel then heaved himself up, flashing the departing ship a final horrible grin before turning to see two boys with butcher’s knives who stood blocking his path.

  They were natives. Wiry black fellows with bare bony chests. Young men. Too young to be anything else but hungry. Too young to know how to kill properly.

  The watcher rose to his full towering height, seven foot in his buskins, his breeches tucked in the knee–length boots.

  The two youths quaked somewhat at the sight of his frame, as broad as them both together. A glance passed between them and then they began their chatter.

  The watcher did not understand the words but he knew the sentiment. The boys laughed between themselves, their white teeth glowing behind their wide brown mouths. The watcher had known the laugh all his life.

  He kept his eyes on the rusty blades wrapped in twine and balanced in the boys’ hands as they finished their chortling and their deadly look returned.

  Hib Gow, for that was the watcher’s Scottish name, had fought all his days over that laugh, was used to it very well. His great slab of a head was uncommonly blessed with a proboscis – more monstrous horn than nose – that grew aquiline out of his huge square face. Hib was ugly, to be sure, but that had not mattered in his previous life, when his days had been spent with his head covered by a black hood.

  The cruelty his large nose provoked had led to a more scarred and mis-shapen visage than he might have grown up with, but the streets of Greenock had not allowed him to pass by without some punishment for being blessed with such a beak. A lifetime of beatings had not served to improve his looks. Broken face. Sunken eyes. A never-ending fury scarred across his face.

  He watched the two boys as they mouthed their strange language and rubbed their fingers together gesturing for coin.

  Hib would gladly have given them his flat bread and cheese if empty bellies were their only problem. He reckoned they had loftier plans for themselves that only his coin could realise for them.

  He pitied them for their greed and grasping hands. Their laughter had brought him back to Wapping and Tyburn, back to before the Hanoverian had wedged himself into the throne. All the way back to when Hib in his black hood was the crowd’s favourite.

  The hood was a pointless subterfuge, for his nose lifted the black cloth out of shape and the scaffold of his frame announced him more grandly than fife and drum ever could.

  ‘It’s Hib!’ the crones would cackle. ‘Hib’s doing it!’ the crowds would hum, knowing that he would give them a show, with a rope too short that would make the villain dance for twenty minutes rather than ten. And he would thrust aside any misguided tear-eyed fool who tried to pull the man’s legs to snap his neck.

  Hib gave them a choking, a hempen jig, a proper hanging. But then there had been the Jacobite rebellions. Damned politics had ruined the chances of a Scotsman to be good at an English job. They had taken away the killing, then blamed him, imprisoned him in the same cells he used to march past when he had needed to bleed his moods.

  It was neither his fault nor his doing. The man Ignatius had rescued him from his own noose when other bodies led to Hib’s doorstep. He had new life now, a foreign life. And a worthy letting of blood.

  His hand moved slowly to his belt and eased free the Estilete dagger. The two youths chattered even more at the sight of it. They rocked on their heels and began to wave their wretched blades at him, beckoning again for his coin.

  His dagger was worth more than the small purse he carried. They should appreciate that fact and sample it for themselves. Its Spanish blade was older than all of them, dark and tapered to infinity. How proud they should be to taste it.

  He checked them both, playing the blade in his palm. One boy had sharp, panicked eyes. He talked the fastest. He would not move first. The other had the wide eyes of the dam
ned, the brilliant whites making of his pupils just black spots in a desperate face.

  Hib’s next thought was how to clean his shirt in such a parched land. The mad stare had ended with the popping of a windpipe. A rush of air like a bellows flew out of the boy as he tumbled backwards. He would die slowly now.

  The second was already dead when Hib cursed the blood that gushed over his clothes. In a single twist he had pulled his dagger from the throat of the first and whipped it straight through the silk wrap of the second boy. A hard punch of steel to the gut. The boy had gripped Hib’s arm, imploring, begging as Hib damned him for the arterial spurt that soaked his waistcoat right through to his shirt.

  He let the body drop then wiped his Spanish dagger on the skirt. A noise made him look up at the rustling branches of a bush. There had been another, perhaps a girl who had urged them to it, now running home to her brothers. There was always a girl involved in such a waste of life. London had been the same. It had been easy to please himself at night in London’s inns when women were around. Always someone who asked for the blade if you looked too long at his girl. It was so easy to bleed his mood back then.

  It had been a while since Hib Gow had felt the pain in the base of his skull. The old pressure back as blood pumped at the sight of death. He twisted his broad thigh of a neck, trying to stretch the pain away, and rubbed a bloody palm to the throb. No good. The blood still slammed hard at the very bone of his head like a hammer blow.

  Get back to the guardhouse. Kick that pirate scum some more. That would calm the blood. That would scarify his mood.

  ‘It’s Hib!’ they used to scream. Those old toothless hags. ‘Hib’s to do it! It’s Hib I tells you! Look at his beak for God’s sakes!’

  He loped away, snapping some more of the flat bread with a powerful bite, forgetting about his bloodied clothes already drying.

  Aye, scarify his mood with another’s pain. That always helped. For a time.

  Chapter Six

  Providence Island

  Petition of merchants trading to different parts of H.M. Dominions in America to the King, 1716. (Extract)

  Sir

  Complain of severe losses occasioned by pirates sheltering in the Bahamas, so neglected by the Proprietors that they have been often plundered and ruin’d in times of peace, and during the late war four and several times taken and destroy’d by the enemy.

  Urge the securing of Providence under H.M. immediate government.

  These Islands are so advantageously situated that whoever is well settled and securely fortified there, may in time of war command the Gulf of Florida, and from thence be capable to annoy or obstruct the trade of other Nations to most parts of America.

  Fifty-five signatures follow.

  The flotsam and waveson had started the day before sighting the island. Captain John Coxon had been called to the fo’c’sle of the Milford, summoned respectfully by the bosun to attend to the spectacle of the dozens of barrels and hundreds of bottles merrily bobbing along beside them.

  The crew had shared whispers and winks at the tide of waste that grew with each passing hour. Their mutterings were silenced by the cold stare of the captain who tried hard not to contemplate the significance of these unofficial buoys marking the way to Providence.

  Providence Island. New Providence, now designated. A pirate kingdom. The filibusters and buccaneers of old had Tortuga. This new breed of ex-privateers and unemployed peacetime mercenaries had the Bahamas for their throne. And a fairer throne at that.

  Sixty miles square and sitting in the twenty-fourth parallel, it gave swift access to the Florida coast and with the trade winds running northwards a crew could reach the snaking inlets and fat ports of the Carolinas in five days or less.

  It had been almost a decade since the law’s writ had last run on the island, Whitehall being quite content to leave matters to a succession of Lords Proprietor who seemed ever more content to let the island fester.

  Said island, in absence of proper government, had thereby found its own ‘law’.

  British captains, whose letters of marque had promised them freedom to plunder as long as they fleeced only the Spanish sheep, found that the peace after Utrecht – the almighty treaty that ended the Spanish war – was a little too becalming and light of coin. Their country had been grateful in spirit but was at a loss what to do with them now. The privateers thus busied themselves in their own employment.

  Men such as Henry Jennings and Benjamin Hornigold became lords of their own creation once the crown had no further use for them. And who could blame them for naming an island called Providence their realm?

  But enough was enough for the Crown. With Spain fortifying in Florida the strategic placing of the island had made it attractive again and the strangulation of trade by the rovers that dwelt there would have to cease. But who to send? Who but a madman or a fool would undertake the task to rid the Bahamas of a two-thousand-strong pirate brotherhood?

  The Lords Proprietor and the Privy Council had found such a man. Half broken in spirit, fully broken in purse, this sailor had girdled the earth and fought in every war he had been pitched into. He had captured treasure galleons, sacked Spanish towns in the name of the Crown and suffered to have the entirety wrested from him through a danse macabre of lawyers and taxes. He had been perhaps as much a pirate as any of them if not for the letters of marque in his name that had been sealed by the king.

  Captain Woodes Rogers. He had actually petitioned for the duty.

  He had been the only one.

  As day broke and the horizon undulated with the haunches of the island herself, Captain John Coxon paced the deck, unable to avoid watching the clothes, the chests and hogsheads that bounced off the lines of the Milford as she swept towards the aptly named Providence.

  Captain John Coxon. Post Captain. Veteran of two wars, wars for which every civilised nation had redrawn their maps. Now he was Captain John Coxon of the Company of Woodes Rogers, assailing Providence under the King’s Act of Proclamation against the pirates of the Bahamas.

  His father was a Norfolk parson. His elder brother had been given a bible but Coxon had been sent to sea at nine years of age with a bag of clothes and a commission. He had never been home again and was now forty-two, his father dead, John’s brother preaching in his stead.

  It was in the spring of 1712 that he had liberated an Irish sailor of a French sloop of war. He had smiled that first day when the Irishman stepped forward out of the line of captives to offer their services to the King’s officers rather than have them slaughtered for their lack of English. Coxon had subsequently received his Post-Captaincy for the level of intelligence he was able to provide his admiral whilst still at sea. The Irishman had saved many lives that day. Coxon had rewarded the man by making him his steward. More than that, Coxon, a stranger to the ballroom culture of his officer peers, found companionship in the young man who was not only literate but could also divine the mathematical intricacies of navigation as if they were psalms to be recited. Coxon had seen something of himself in the Irishman. For years he had felt his father had turfed him out to sea, to be rid of him whilst coddling his elder brother to follow along the path of righteousness. It had taken a decade for him to understand that his father, who had sensed the approaching wars, had sent the brightest of his sons to sea. God would be best served by good hearts and knowledge in the struggle against the Catholics. He had never seen him again, but Coxon had been grateful to his father when the wars had ended and he contemplated how he had slashed his own way through. Coxon had written his name on the world by dint of his victories at sea.

  Then it had ended. A few years working for the South Seas and India companies on peacetime half-pay followed. Then an illness, the African curse of dysentery, had almost carried him to the grave.

  Bedridden for a month, he had sent his steward and his ship home to England without him. It was a month of dying for Coxon in Cape Coast castle on Africa’s Guinea coast, from which he awoke to find t
hat his trusted servant had turned into a pirate – and a captain no less – and his beloved ship was lost. The Irishman whom John Coxon had taught to sail, taught to compare watch to map, peg to board, star to brass, was picking the pockets of the world and laughing at him the while.

  Now this scatter of breadcrumbs from a pirate island was leading them deeper into an unknown forest. Turn away, the waves whispered. Turn your tiller home, Captain. For your own sake and the sake of your unborn.

  See this debris, the tons of it upon the waves? This is us. We are legion. And this is our kingdom. We burnt your King’s ships the last time they came. We tore up his Proclamation of Peace. What can you do against us?

  Coxon climbed to the quarterdeck and looked to his ship’s wake. He gave a small nod to the helmsman who was also trying not to look at the spent goods ornamenting the sea.

  Coxon looked back to the ships of his fleet. This was the difference. This is what he could do.

  There, majestically cutting the waves, was Delicia, an East Indiaman of forty guns. The new Governor of Providence, Woodes Rogers himself, was her captain. That diving bow galloping through the sea belonged to the frigate Rose. Shadowing her on either side, a cable length away, skipped the sloops Shark and Buck.

  Altogether the Company mustered over three hundred able men and officers. Thrown in for good measure, by King George himself, were one hundred redcoats to establish a garrison on the island.

  Lastly, confidently, two hundred and fifty colonists had signed on, refugees and hopefuls from the final pages of the wars.

  They were Huguenots, Swiss farmers and German Palatinates who treated London as their second home and now went looking for ripe land in the Antilles.