Hunt for White Gold

by Mark Keating

  The hull heeled away from the grey streaks. The spars started to creak and labour with the turn and Devlin watched the sun sweeping to the stern, then hanging behind them. The helmsman steadied his tiller when the binnacle by his right knee read ‘W.S.W.’

  Devlin swung off the gunwale and looked over the bow, watching the bowsprit rise and fall before the horizon, now scattered with islands, glowing almost white.

  For three days and nights they had sailed to keep the Bahamas far to starboard, passing almost two hundred miles east from New Providence, shouldering Abaco, Eleuthera and at dawn, Cat Island. The Talefan ploughed steadily south, invisible to all patrols but the petrels, the albacore and dolphin. To sail from Charles Town straight to New Providence was risky. The northern waters were full of hunters. It was best to keep Providence over the western horizon, then run down to the 24th parallel and turn back, as they did now, to reach the shallows, the white waters where the men-of-war could not go.

  Come up through the cays, through the soundings by the threes – perfect for the Talefan’s keel. It meant many miles added to their journey but a safer course. And besides, Devlin had one more stop to make before the game could begin.

  Dandon stepped up to his friend and captain on the flush deck of the fo’c’sle, observing him in thought or calculation as he stared at the hazy protrusions in the distance. The ship leant to leeward in her course, the stays protesting, and Dandon weaved in his walk as the deck angled against him. He swung himself beneath the halyards and steadied himself on Devlin’s shoulder.

  ‘Are you sure this is a wise course, Patrick?’ he asked through the light rain thrown up by the dipping bow.

  ‘I can show you again, Dandon,’ Devlin made a triangle with the sweep of his hand. ‘Once we reach Dead Man it’ll be shallow all the way north back up to Providence. We’ll mark up along the Exumas. Be able to pluck the fish up from the jolly-boat. And no warship can find us. Lay to that.’

  ‘Oh that I grant, Captain. It is the other course I was after referring to. Dead Man itself.’

  Devlin looked ahead, contemplative again. The warm soft wind plucked at his black hair, unhindered by bow or bag.

  ‘We have fifteen men from this ship who do not belong. I don’t want them coming into Providence with us. We have enemies enough.’

  ‘But to leave them there? And us down to fifteen souls then ourselves? That leaves us awful weak, Patrick.’

  ‘The Shadow will pick them up. Bill was to make for Dead Man and meet us there.’

  Dandon looked suddenly healthy and pink. ‘To join up with? Oh, grand joy, mon capitaine aventurier! Praise be!’

  ‘No,’ Devlin looked out again. ‘We will have no time to wait for the Shadow. I’ve given enough time to divert on this course and keep our hides out of sight. Besides …’ He turned to look along the deck. Beneath the bulwarks men dozed or carved their own fancies into the wood, or played cards on Indian rugs stretched across the hatch.

  ‘It’s been almost two months without a sniff for our lads. These Talefan men have not signed. They’re not us. Not one of us. I couldn’t trust them to stand.’

  He looked up at a couple of Talefans languishing barefoot in the rigging, grabbing some breeze and shade from the fore topsails.

  ‘And what of us?’ Dandon drawled, and waved an arm towards the six-pounders on deck, always loaded and ready, and now corked with tompions to prevent the sea slipping into their mouths. ‘Am I to be privy to some greater plan other than sailing into a naval fleet with only fifteen men and these eight pea-shooters?’

  Devlin slapped his friend’s arm and called for a fiddle to the deck behind him. ‘Now you’re thinking true, old friend! That’s the tale of it! Fifteen men and eight little ladies against the whole of Providence! We haven’t a hope in any of it!’ He checked himself. ‘Make it two fiddles!’ he demanded. ‘And lively now, Hugh!’

  Hugh Harris sprang up from the aft companionway, already plucking on his fiddle. He was joined a moment later by Sam Fletcher’s wailing scrape. A guitar appeared uninvited and, where men a moment before were lolling and masticating idly, a Saturday night in Boston now jigged upon the deck scattered with rugs and bottles.

  ‘They call me hanging Johnnie,

  Away, boys, away!

  They call me hanging Johnnie,

  Hang, boys, hang.

  They say I hang for money,

  Away, boys, away!

  But saying so is funny;

  Hang, boys, hang.

  I’d hang the highway robber,

  Away, boys, away!

  I’d hang the burglar jobber;

  Hang, boys, hang.

  I’d hang a noted liar,

  Away, boys, away!

  I’d hang a bloated friar;

  Hang, boys, hang.

  Come hang, come haul together,

  Away, boys, away!

  Come hang for finer weather,

  Hang, boys, hang.’

  The petrels wheeled high above the little two-mast ship, cocking their heads to look upon the tiny dancing figures and screeching against the strange sounds that beset their fragile ears. Soon a whole cloud of birds circled and joined the dance, joined the song that for an hour of the glass was the only sound in the whole empty world.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  ‘Captain’ Seth Toombs

  Howell Davis, a Milford man, was a good chief mate when he was a merchant sailor. Half a year ago he sailed with one Captain Skinner and had almost made it to Sierra Leone aboard the sweetest little snow that was ever Bristol-made, when a black flag brought a blight to their harvest.

  Captain Skinner, rest his soul, shared the unfortunate fate of every man who forgets that the Lord had informed him when he was a boy that he shall reap what he sows.

  He found himself taken aboard the great pirate Captain England’s ship, and Skinner hoped to strike a bargain to save some portion of his lading, and a good deal of his blood.

  Once there he met a smattering of acquaintances who recognised old Captain Skinner as the very same who had denied them any wage on a cruise a year before, then sold them into service on a King’s ship where conditions were hard and hungry even compared to the near slavery of the merchant trade.

  Justice, to Skinner, was not kind. His wife would be spared the detail of it, for anyone who has ever had the chance to deliver a blow to a man who has wronged him can affirm just how sweet a lick of his blood can taste.

  Tied by his neck to the windlass, Skinner was bloodied by the crushing of broken bottles into his naked form or having bottles broken upon him, empty or otherwise.

  Then he endured several circuits stumbling around the deck, being whipped on and on should he falter or slip in his own blood to the boards.

  After a time, whilst he still retained the power of speech, he entreated through a foaming mouth to his former crewmates for an easy death.

  His old mates obliged with several shots to his face, then went about their trade upon his snow.

  That was how Howell Davis met and took the measure of a sang-froid pirate captain.

  Captain England, a generous man according to all who put pen to paper about him, gave Davis the snow, Cadogan, and set him on his way. Davis sailed to Barbados, with what scant cargo still remained for the merchants that owned the lading.

  The merchants and the magistrates did not believe the barefooted sailor when he told them of the tale, preferring the more obvious occurrence that Davis and his crew had turned pirate themselves for the best part of their goods and done away with the brave, resolute Captain Skinner.

  Assured that evidence would be forthcoming, Davis passed three months in the vision of hell that only an eighteenth-century prison can imprint on an innocent man.

  Someone may have apologised to him when he finally emerged like a ghost from his dungeon, but history affords us no such record, and a single extant yellow page only relates that after Davis was freed he thought long on his future and on those that had imprisoned
him – and on the truth that one may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.

  This was the story he relayed to Seth Toombs the second night out on their errand to Hispaniola aboard the Mumvil, for Davis had made his way to Providence to become a pirate only to find that he had arrived too late. But not too late for Toombs.

  Woodes Rogers had decided to send two sloops to trade with the Spanish, an illegal act for the navy but craftily avoided if the ships were privately manned. Unfortunately Rogers’ only available crew had their own ideas of what was and what was not illegal.

  And so it was that when Captain Finch found himself gently woken in his cot at midnight by the tapping of the cold blade of Toombs’s gully upon his forehead, it was Davis that stood by in the dark, aiming the captain’s own pistol into Finch’s bleary eyes.

  Toombs shushed Finch like an infant before he had a chance to blather some objection.

  ‘Whist now, Cap’n,’ he said and put a finger to his lips. ‘It’s time.’

  Finch looked about him in panic as more figures weaved in the dark behind the two men, monstrous in size as the single candle on his writing desk danced and warped their shadows.

  He heard the stifled pleadings of surgeon Murray in the darkness and the nervous giggling of the treacherous rats restraining him.

  Toombs, almost mournfully, patted Finch’s chest and sighed. He turned to address his men.

  ‘Davis and I are in command, lads. What say you all?’

  The howled agreement grew from the cabin and went through to the weather-deck and climbed up the masts to the top-men until even those on watch aboard the Buck, two cable lengths away, over twelve-hundred feet to windward, strained an ear and looked slowly to each other.

  The ships were anchored for the night but the two-man watch on the Buck could see the deck of the Mumvil buzzing with heads all over, and for them the distant cheer chilled the warm Caribbean midnight.

  The two men met at the larboard gangway, seeking comfort from the tell-tale sights abroad of them.

  More than half of both forty-man crews were reformed pirates, the rest being legitimate sailors and colonists, striving to improve their lot in the New World.

  Rogers had mistakenly believed his own ideals, that all men require is a bit of land, a little home, a little future and a lot of Government and they will be happy.

  Some however, like the dog that chooses to wander the streets and alleyways, like the horse that kicks in his stable and gnaws at his saddle, some men stand out in the rain, walk through the trees rather than along the path and believe that hearths are only for taverns.

  Captain Finch knew this and had always known this. He had traded on the Mumvil for five years and had seen them all. He kept quiet as the court around him now convened and each man grabbed a small part to play.

  He had read of the fates of those that resisted during such a night and had taken Toombs’s scarred face and swivelling eye as a man who knew a mood or two.

  He watched without recrimination as Toombs sawed free the bell and threw it as his feet with a dulled clang drowned out by a roar of approval.

  He was silent when he was lowered with the gig and the eight others who chose to remain part of the larger world. They picked up their wood and rowed to the Buck with jeers and bottles flying through the air all around them.

  Toombs had spared them, in part not wishing to be a monster to his new crew and in part using his wealth of experience that told him how survivors of a pirate will enlarge his terrible reputation until he becomes a giant gorging on islands as he strides across the seas with men’s livers running down his chin. And all to season their own cowardice in the affair with whole handfuls of salt.

  By the time the Mumvil was under way in the night, Finch would be a hero who could do no more than liberate the eight others from the cannibal rites he had witnessed aboard.

  Toombs watched the gig slop across the expanse between the two freeboards. There was only curiosity along the Buck’s larboard gunwale. No attempt to make sail. No busying at the guns.

  Mumvil’s cable was slipped. The forecourse cracked in and out as it fell, belly filling, spraying salt water in all eyes foolish enough to watch her drop. Toombs swelled his chest at the hum of the reevings through the blocks, his heart enraptured by the eagerness of the young men running around him.

  His men’s eyes were blinkered from the gallows, and they worked not for fear of the ‘captain’s daughter’ or a belting from the master, but in anticipation of the gold and drunken concupiscence that Toombs had promised them.

  He strode fore, shouting as he came. ‘Larboard tack ’til we’re away, boys! Get those jibs running!’

  She was fifty-two feet long and eighteen feet across the beam, the bowsprit almost as long as the ship. Only ten four-pounders were mounted but there were more in the hold, brought for trade.

  He had a ship again. A sloop. Half the woman that his precious Lucy was, but it was a start. It would do.

  He had sighed with a heavy heart when the young Porto had gesticulated wildly through his stilted English that the Lucy had been blown to firewood and that Devlin now commanded the Shadow.

  The men had all mourned for Toombs’s loss as he showed them the white wound on his cheek from the bullet gifted him from Valentim Mendes. It was only the luck that always followed him, so he told them, that the shot angled to travel out of his mouth, burning his lips. The blow that came after caused him more discomfort.

  He awoke hours later, he told them, to find that he had been betrayed by his new navigator. A former servant to an English captain that he had rescued himself from his indenture had repaid that favour by abandoning him alone on St Nick when his plans to kidnap Valentim had ended with the deaths of trusted men. One traitor was still alive. Devlin was still alive.

  How Devlin must have laughed to hear how the enraged Valentim, delirious from finding the will to hack off his own hand, ordered Toombs to endure the agony of having a sail needle twisted in his cheek, embellishing what would have been a faint memory into a four-inch scar that dragged up his face into a permanent sneer.

  It had taken half an hour for Valentim to determine that Seth Toombs did not know where Devlin would sail. By then both of their wounds had stopped bleeding and Toombs had to think fast if he was to survive and sail again.

  Toombs bartered for his life with the most valuable information he had and hoped that Valentim could see the worth of it, as he had just weeks before when he spared one of Bellamy’s old crew who had not sailed but who knew and revealed Bellamy’s latest plans.

  So Toombs told him of the letter. The secret of the making of porcelain, stolen and lost but now found and free again to tantalise the world. He withheld sufficient information to buy him a fishing boat and an escort to row alongside him.

  When he had rowed half a league he raised his mast and tossed his companions a bamboo tube. Inside was a rolled-up sheet on which he had written the name Whydah and her destination, the tale of the gun that held the letters and the name of the man in Charles Town that had sent them north with Bellamy. It was a name Valentim knew well enough to mark Seth Toombs as a veracious man.

  Now Toombs was back. Back amongst the silver waters where the gold flowed like wine. It had taken him almost a year to get here. He had heard of Devlin’s gold, had heard of the legend that should have been his.

  It was only a matter of time before he would have both.

  ‘Run out the log, Howell!’ he yelled aft to his new quartermaster. ‘No more than eight knots, boys! Trim all but the jibs!’

  They were on the Bahama Bank: three hundred miles of sandbank and north of the 22nd parallel with Cuba at their bow and Crooked Island to their stern.

  For now they would raid the stores and drink their fill as he had promised. Once the Buck was far behind they would rest up and wait for noon. He would consult Finch’s charts with Davis and reckon their next course. It was his limit of the ‘art’.

  But tonight he would fill himsel
f with rum and picture the expression on Rogers’ face when he learnt the fate of his illegal sloop-trading.

  He looked about his world. The endless ocean was still filled with hiding places where good men dare not go. Satisfied, he walked to the taffrail, slapping the back of the young man at the tiller and staring over the sloop’s wake, the Buck already just a twinkling buoy far behind.

  He spat on the rail and rubbed his spittle hard into her wood.

  ‘Good girl,’ he whispered lovingly, drawing a raised eyebrow from the timoneer. ‘Good girl.’

  Devlin could not drown an uneasy feeling; not with rum, nor with song and fellowship. He dragged his feet out of the cabin where a late supper had stretched into midnight, leaving a small company of his men to lap at their rum and poke at the chicken laid out for them.

  A funereal dolour had come over him. His humour of late often grew dark when the lamps were lit and his second bottle was half sunk. His eyes glazed in the lamplight. He was thinking too much on the year gone.

  His men were in good spirits for the most part. The year had gone well for them. They had pirated a few sloops here and there, mostly Spanish and Dutch trading between the lesser Antilles from Maracaibo to Antigua, and then sailed on to the charms of Madagascar, taking a few Porto merchants trading back from the Indies on their way. It had been a good drunken year. But something of it felt like a clock winding down, its key misplaced withal. The world was still wide enough but the pardon would end in September. Hundreds had taken it already, some had taken it and become hunters of men themselves, a course without honour amongst thieves. What then after September? What course then to set? The price of freedom seemed to grow more expensive with each rising sun.