CHAPTER XIII. TORTUGA
It is time fully to disclose the fact that the survival of the story ofCaptain Blood's exploits is due entirely to the industry of Jeremy Pitt,the Somersetshire shipmaster. In addition to his ability as a navigator,this amiable young man appears to have wielded an indefatigable pen, andto have been inspired to indulge its fluency by the affection he veryobviously bore to Peter Blood.
He kept the log of the forty-gun frigate Arabella, on which he served asmaster, or, as we should say to-day, navigating officer, as no logthat I have seen was ever kept. It runs into some twenty-odd volumes ofassorted sizes, some of which are missing altogether and others of whichare so sadly depleted of leaves as to be of little use. But if at timesin the laborious perusal of them--they are preserved in the library ofMr. James Speke of Comerton--I have inveighed against these lacunae, atothers I have been equally troubled by the excessive prolixity of whatremains and the difficulty of disintegrating from the confused whole thereally essential parts.
I have a suspicion that Esquemeling--though how or where I can make nosurmise--must have obtained access to these records, and that he pluckedfrom them the brilliant feathers of several exploits to stick them intothe tail of his own hero, Captain Morgan. But that is by the way. Imention it chiefly as a warning, for when presently I come to relate theaffair of Maracaybo, those of you who have read Esquemeling may be indanger of supposing that Henry Morgan really performed those thingswhich here are veraciously attributed to Peter Blood. I think, however,that when you come to weigh the motives actuating both Blood and theSpanish Admiral, in that affair, and when you consider how integrallythe event is a part of Blood's history--whilst merely a detachedincident in Morgan's--you will reach my own conclusion as to which isthe real plagiarist.
The first of these logs of Pitt's is taken up almost entirely with aretrospective narrative of the events up to the time of Blood's firstcoming to Tortuga. This and the Tannatt Collection of State Trials arethe chief--though not the only--sources of my history so far.
Pitt lays great stress upon the fact that it was the circumstances uponwhich I have dwelt, and these alone, that drove Peter Blood to seekan anchorage at Tortuga. He insists at considerable length, and with avehemence which in itself makes it plain that an opposite opinion washeld in some quarters, that it was no part of the design of Blood or ofany of his companions in misfortune to join hands with the buccaneerswho, under a semi-official French protection, made of Tortuga a lairwhence they could sally out to drive their merciless piratical tradechiefly at the expense of Spain.
It was, Pitt tells us, Blood's original intention to make his way toFrance or Holland. But in the long weeks of waiting for a ship to conveyhim to one or the other of these countries, his resources dwindled andfinally vanished. Also, his chronicler thinks that he detected signs ofsome secret trouble in his friend, and he attributes to this the abusesof the potent West Indian spirit of which Blood became guilty in thosedays of inaction, thereby sinking to the level of the wild adventurerswith whom ashore he associated.
I do not think that Pitt is guilty in this merely of special pleading,that he is putting forward excuses for his hero. I think that in thosedays there was a good deal to oppress Peter Blood. There was the thoughtof Arabella Bishop--and that this thought loomed large in his mind weare not permitted to doubt. He was maddened by the tormenting lure ofthe unattainable. He desired Arabella, yet knew her beyond his reachirrevocably and for all time. Also, whilst he may have desired to go toFrance or Holland, he had no clear purpose to accomplish when he reachedone or the other of these countries. He was, when all is said, anescaped slave, an outlaw in his own land and a homeless outcast in anyother. There remained the sea, which is free to all, and particularlyalluring to those who feel themselves at war with humanity. And so,considering the adventurous spirit that once already had sent hima-roving for the sheer love of it, considering that this spirit washeightened now by a recklessness begotten of his outlawry, that histraining and skill in militant seamanship clamorously supported thetemptations that were put before him, can you wonder, or dare you blamehim, that in the end he succumbed? And remember that these temptationsproceeded not only from adventurous buccaneering acquaintances in thetaverns of that evil haven of Tortuga, but even from M. d'Ogeron, thegovernor of the island, who levied as his harbour dues a percentage ofone tenth of all spoils brought into the bay, and who profited furtherby commissions upon money which he was desired to convert into bills ofexchange upon France.
A trade that might have worn a repellent aspect when urged by greasy,half-drunken adventurers, boucan-hunters, lumbermen, beach-combers,English, French, and Dutch, became a dignified, almost official form ofprivateering when advocated by the courtly, middle-aged gentleman whoin representing the French West India Company seemed to represent Franceherself.
Moreover, to a man--not excluding Jeremy Pitt himself, in whose bloodthe call of the sea was insistent and imperative--those who had escapedwith Peter Blood from the Barbados plantations, and who, consequently,like himself, knew not whither to turn, were all resolved upon joiningthe great Brotherhood of the Coast, as those rovers called themselves.And they united theirs to the other voices that were persuading Blood,demanding that he should continue now in the leadership which he hadenjoyed since they had left Barbados, and swearing to follow him loyallywhithersoever he should lead them.
And so, to condense all that Jeremy has recorded in the matter, Bloodended by yielding to external and internal pressure, abandoned himselfto the stream of Destiny. "Fata viam invenerunt," is his own expressionof it.
If he resisted so long, it was, I think, the thought of Arabella Bishopthat restrained him. That they should be destined never to meet againdid not weigh at first, or, indeed, ever. He conceived the scorn withwhich she would come to hear of his having turned pirate, and the scorn,though as yet no more than imagined, hurt him as if it were already areality. And even when he conquered this, still the thought of her wasever present. He compromised with the conscience that her memory kept sodisconcertingly active. He vowed that the thought of her should continueever before him to help him keep his hands as clean as a man might inthis desperate trade upon which he was embarking. And so, although hemight entertain no delusive hope of ever winning her for his own, ofever even seeing her again, yet the memory of her was to abide in hissoul as a bitter-sweet, purifying influence. The love that is never tobe realized will often remain a man's guiding ideal. The resolvebeing taken, he went actively to work. Ogeron, most accommodating ofgovernors, advanced him money for the proper equipment of his ship theCinco Llagas, which he renamed the Arabella. This after some littlehesitation, fearful of thus setting his heart upon his sleeve. But hisBarbados friends accounted it merely an expression of the ever-readyirony in which their leader dealt.
To the score of followers he already possessed, he added threescoremore, picking his men with caution and discrimination--and he was anexceptional judge of men--from amongst the adventurers of Tortuga. Withthem all he entered into the articles usual among the Brethren of theCoast under which each man was to be paid by a share in the prizescaptured. In other respects, however, the articles were different.Aboard the Arabella there was to be none of the ruffianly indisciplinethat normally prevailed in buccaneering vessels. Those who shipped withhim undertook obedience and submission in all things to himself andto the officers appointed by election. Any to whom this clause in thearticles was distasteful might follow some other leader.
Towards the end of December, when the hurricane season had blown itselfout, he put to sea in his well-found, well-manned ship, and before hereturned in the following May from a protracted and adventurous cruise,the fame of Captain Peter Blood had run like ripples before the breezeacross the face of the Caribbean Sea. There was a fight in the WindwardPassage at the outset with a Spanish galleon, which had resulted in thegutting and finally the sinking of the Spaniard. There was a daring raideffected by means of several appropriated piraguas upon a Spanish pear
lfleet in the Rio de la Hacha, from which they had taken a particularlyrich haul of pearls. There was an overland expedition to the goldfieldsof Santa Maria, on the Main, the full tale of which is hardly credible,and there were lesser adventures through all of which the crew of theArabella came with credit and profit if not entirely unscathed.
And so it happened that before the Arabella came homing to Tortuga inthe following May to refit and repair--for she was not without scars, asyou conceive--the fame of her and of Peter Blood her captain had sweptfrom the Bahamas to the Windward Isles, from New Providence to Trinidad.
An echo of it had reached Europe, and at the Court of St. James's angryrepresentations were made by the Ambassador of Spain, to whom it wasanswered that it must not be supposed that this Captain Blood held anycommission from the King of England; that he was, in fact, a proscribedrebel, an escaped slave, and that any measures against him by HisCatholic Majesty would receive the cordial approbation of King James II.
Don Miguel de Espinosa, the Admiral of Spain in the West Indies, and hisnephew Don Esteban who sailed with him, did not lack the will to bringthe adventurer to the yardarm. With them this business of capturingBlood, which was now an international affair, was also a family matter.
Spain, through the mouth of Don Miguel, did not spare her threats.The report of them reached Tortuga, and with it the assurance that DonMiguel had behind him not only the authority of his own nation, but thatof the English King as well.
It was a brutum fulmen that inspired no terrors in Captain Blood. Norwas he likely, on account of it, to allow himself to run to rust in thesecurity of Tortuga. For what he had suffered at the hands of Man he hadchosen to make Spain the scapegoat. Thus he accounted that he served atwofold purpose: he took compensation and at the same time served, notindeed the Stuart King, whom he despised, but England and, for thatmatter, all the rest of civilized mankind which cruel, treacherous,greedy, bigoted Castile sought to exclude from intercourse with the NewWorld.
One day as he sat with Hagthorpe and Wolverstone over a pipe anda bottle of rum in the stifling reek of tar and stale tobacco of awaterside tavern, he was accosted by a splendid ruffian in a gold-lacedcoat of dark-blue satin with a crimson sash, a foot wide, about thewaist.
"C'est vous qu'on appelle Le Sang?" the fellow hailed him.
Captain Blood looked up to consider the questioner before replying.The man was tall and built on lines of agile strength, with a swarthy,aquiline face that was brutally handsome. A diamond of great priceflamed on the indifferently clean hand resting on the pummel of his longrapier, and there were gold rings in his ears, half-concealed by longringlets of oily chestnut hair.
Captain Blood took the pipe-stem from between his lips.
"My name," he said, "is Peter Blood. The Spaniards know me for Don PedroSangre and a Frenchman may call me Le Sang if he pleases."
"Good," said the gaudy adventurer in English, and without furtherinvitation he drew up a stool and sat down at that greasy table. "Myname," he informed the three men, two of whom at least were eyeing himaskance, "it is Levasseur. You may have heard of me."
They had, indeed. He commanded a privateer of twenty guns that haddropped anchor in the bay a week ago, manned by a crew mainly composedof French boucanhunters from Northern Hispaniola, men who had good causeto hate the Spaniard with an intensity exceeding that of the English.Levasseur had brought them back to Tortuga from an indifferentlysuccessful cruise. It would need more, however, than lack of successto abate the fellow's monstrous vanity. A roaring, quarrelsome,hard-drinking, hard-gaming scoundrel, his reputation as a buccaneerstood high among the wild Brethren of the Coast. He enjoyed also areputation of another sort. There was about his gaudy, swaggeringraffishness something that the women found singularly alluring. Thathe should boast openly of his bonnes fortunes did not seem strange toCaptain Blood; what he might have found strange was that there appearedto be some measure of justification for these boasts.
It was current gossip that even Mademoiselle d'Ogeron, the Governor'sdaughter, had been caught in the snare of his wild attractiveness, andthat Levasseur had gone the length of audacity of asking her hand inmarriage of her father. M. d'Ogeron had made him the only possibleanswer. He had shown him the door. Levasseur had departed in a rage,swearing that he would make mademoiselle his wife in the teeth of allthe fathers in Christendom, and that M. d'Ogeron should bitterly rue theaffront he had put upon him.
This was the man who now thrust himself upon Captain Blood with aproposal of association, offering him not only his sword, but his shipand the men who sailed in her.
A dozen years ago, as a lad of barely twenty, Levasseur had sailed withthat monster of cruelty L'Ollonais, and his own subsequent exploitsbore witness and did credit to the school in which he had been reared. Idoubt if in his day there was a greater scoundrel among the Brethren ofthe Coast than this Levasseur. And yet, repulsive though he found him,Captain Blood could not deny that the fellow's proposals displayedboldness, imagination, and resource, and he was forced to admit thatjointly they could undertake operations of a greater magnitude than waspossible singly to either of them. The climax of Levasseur's project wasto be a raid upon the wealthy mainland city of Maracaybo; but for this,he admitted, six hundred men at the very least would be required, andsix hundred men were not to be conveyed in the two bottoms they nowcommanded. Preliminary cruises must take place, having for one of theirobjects the capture of further ships.
Because he disliked the man, Captain Blood would not commit himself atonce. But because he liked the proposal he consented to consider it.Being afterwards pressed by both Hagthorpe and Wolverstone, who did notshare his own personal dislike of the Frenchman, the end of the matterwas that within a week articles were drawn up between Levasseurand Blood, and signed by them and--as was usual--by the chosenrepresentatives of their followers.
These articles contained, inter alia, the common provisions that, shouldthe two vessels separate, a strict account must afterwards be renderedof all prizes severally taken, whilst the vessel taking a prize shouldretain three fifths of its value, surrendering two fifths to itsassociate. These shares were subsequently to be subdivided among thecrew of each vessel, in accordance with the articles already obtainingbetween each captain and his own men. For the rest, the articlescontained all the clauses that were usual, among which was the clausethat any man found guilty of abstracting or concealing any part of aprize, be it of the value of no more than a peso, should be summarilyhanged from the yardarm.
All being now settled they made ready for sea, and on the very eve ofsailing, Levasseur narrowly escaped being shot in a romantic attemptto scale the wall of the Governor's garden, with the object of takingpassionate leave of the infatuated Mademoiselle d'Ogeron. He desistedafter having been twice fired upon from a fragrant ambush of pimentotrees where the Governor's guards were posted, and he departed vowing totake different and very definite measures on his return.
That night he slept on board his ship, which with characteristicflamboyance he had named La Foudre, and there on the following day hereceived a visit from Captain Blood, whom he greeted half-mockingly ashis admiral. The Irishman came to settle certain final details of whichall that need concern us is an understanding that, in the event of thetwo vessels becoming separated by accident or design, they should rejoineach other as soon as might be at Tortuga.
Thereafter Levasseur entertained his admiral to dinner, and jointly theydrank success to the expedition, so copiously on the part of Levasseurthat when the time came to separate he was as nearly drunk as it seemedpossible for him to be and yet retain his understanding.
Finally, towards evening, Captain Blood went over the side and was rowedback to his great ship with her red bulwarks and gilded ports, touchedinto a lovely thing of flame by the setting sun.
He was a little heavy-hearted. I have said that he was a judge of men,and his judgment of Levasseur filled him with misgivings which weregrowing heavier in a measure as the hour of departure approached.
He expressed it to Wolverstone, who met him as he stepped aboard theArabella:
"You over persuaded me into those articles, you blackguard; and it'llsurprise me if any good comes of this association."
The giant rolled his single bloodthirsty eye, and sneered, thrusting outhis heavy jaw. "We'll wring the dog's neck if there's any treachery."
"So we will--if we are there to wring it by then." And on that,dismissing the matter: "We sail in the morning, on the first of theebb," he announced, and went off to his cabin.
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