But what pleasure Le Tigre derived was shattered when he learned of what had happened at Porto Seguro.
He’d been coasting along the shore, heading back toward the bay, and was two days’ sail away, when his lookouts saw the column of smoke from a fire set on a lonely beach. They stood in to investigate, and there they found three of Croissant’s men, who had fled from their guns when they saw how hopeless it was to resist the Portuguese. They’d made it to this distant beach, where, with faint hope and much prayer, they waited to signal Croissant.
Le Tigre’s face did not show his anger. His expression remained cold and pitiless as he sat with his officers planning the destruction of the ships and men at Porto Seguro. He was in no great hurry: If he didn’t trap the squadron at its secure anchorage, he’d hunt it down from one end of this coast to the other, ship by ship.
Le Tigre chose a perfect night for his attack. Low clouds drifted to obscure a weak four-day-old moon; a gusty breeze troubling the bay set up enough noise across the water and in the rigging to confuse the men on watch and conceal the rattle of oars in oarlocks and the splash and drip of their blades.
More than the elements were propitious for Le Tigre’s revenge. After a fortnight of romancing in the tropics, Gomes de Pina had finally come round to his sense of duty and ordered that preparations be made to sail within the week. The first task the men undertook was to careen the ships, and they’d begun that morning with Consolação. She now lay heeled over in shallow water, held secure by lines rigged from her mainmast to the trunks of the nearest trees. Most of her crew slept aboard São Gabriel; a few were ashore, bedded down near her useless guns and equipment.
Cavalcanti had gone to his bunk on São Gabriel immediately after Padre Miguel conducted the night’s prayers. The padre had sailed over with Padre Aloysius in São Bento, but he had become so concerned with the laxities he was witnessing that he’d moved himself to the flagship to begin rehabilitating the morals of the marinheiros, under the eye of the erring fidalgo.
Other than Gomes de Pina, housed on the deck above, Cavalcanti was the only man to have a cabin. It was on the starboard side of the steerage, with a bunk and just enough space for a sea chest. Almost the moment he lay down he began to doze off, thinking of Jandaia and her people. It was not her innocence alone but that of all the Tupiniquin that charmed him. He’d begun to understand why the warrior Aruanã had seen no value in gathering dyewood: The Tupiniquin lived without money, property, and trade. They had no king, no church, but shared an easy and harmonious life, provided by nature with a plenitude of their needs. They were open and generous and gave freely of whatever they had.
A cry woke Cavalcanti — the shriek of a man surprised in the moment before death.
It was followed by the dull thud of footsteps on deck and the unmistakable sound of a boat grinding against the side of São Gabriel.
Cavalcanti swung off the bunk, and tore his sword out of its scabbard. He threw open the door of his cabin and stepped into the dark steerage.
Pilot Fernandes was there, fighting with three men.
Cavalcanti rushed to his aid.
“Normans!” Fernandes cried out.
The French were swarming amidships, and more were climbing over the bulwarks. How, in the name of God, had they got here? Cavalcanti wondered.
There were sixty men on São Gabriel at the time she was boarded, her crew augmented by men from Consolação. Within the first five minutes of the attack, twenty men lay dead; a group near the blasted forecastle were begging for quarter and getting none. Serious resistance to the Normans came only from the steerage, where Cavalcanti and Fernandes were fighting alongside others who had bedded down there.
The quarterdeck was a slaughterhouse. Le Tigre had stormed it with a body of his matelots, hacking at the dark shapes that stirred against the bulwarks and rushing to meet the few who were able to stagger to the fight.
And then Gomes de Pina appeared.
He stood on the quarterdeck, which was slippery with blood, bellowing his rage against the pirates. Though he had never before raised his sword in battle, he now used it with bravado, dispatching two Normans in quick succession. A third drew a line of blood along the fidalgo’s cheek, then swung his blade with such force that it broke Gomes de Pina’s sword at the hilt. The Norman drew back for the kill. For a split second the captain general looked at the useless weapon in his hand before hurling himself at his attacker. Pierced by the enemy’s sword, he collapsed in the scuppers, and died quickly.
It seemed that São Gabriel was lost. But then a miracle occurred.
When the struggle first spilled over São Gabriel’s decks, Brito Correia, the orphan from Santarém’s slums, had been terror-struck. He leapt to the shrouds and climbed the ratlines as swiftly as he could. And there he clung, shivering with fear as he saw the Consolação ablaze.
From his post in the shrouds, he witnessed Gomes de Pina’s desperate struggle, and at the moment the captain general was slain, the boy’s fear vanished, to be replaced by a consuming mania for revenge. He was too short to carry a man’s sword, but he wore a dagger at his side and drew it now, holding it between his teeth as he climbed higher into the rigging to get a better position. He watched the men fighting below, and chose the most ferocious combatant he saw: Le Tigre.
Brito let go of the shrouds, and light as he was, he slammed into the Norman like a cannonball. He knocked him off balance, and drove his knife into the side of Le Tigre’s chest as they went down.
One of Le Tigre’s men saw what had happened and swung his sword at Brito so violently that it bit a hole an inch deep in the railing in front of him; before he could take a second swipe, the boy had catapulted himself out of the way, leaping blindly through the hatch to the steerage.
Le Tigre was alive, and feebly ordered his men to fight on. But an officer on the quarterdeck realized they had made a mistake with São Gabriel: They’d boarded her with twenty-five men expecting no more than forty, but she’d obviously held most of the careened ship’s crew. They still might take her, but with Le Tigre wounded, the officer wasn’t prepared to chance it. Making certain Le Tigre was aided, he ordered a retreat.
Almost as suddenly as it had begun, this skirmish was over. Marinheiros ran to fight the fire in the forecastle; others worked their way over the decks with sword and pike, ruthlessly silencing wounded Normans who cried out in pain, while sparing a few who appeared most likely to survive-to be hanged at dawn.
But the battle had not ended. “Clear away those guns!” Cavalcanti ordered, at the starboard side. “Is there a gunner to speak?” A man answered. “Stand ready, then! Mind your powder with that fire behind!” Cavalcanti then leapt for the companionway to the quarterdeck. At the same time, Padre Miguel began shouting that the captain general was dead.
For the priest, the struggle had been a nightmare: He’d fled into Gomes de Pina’s cabin, where he huddled in a corner, moaning his most fervent prayers; opposite him, equally stricken, was the little princess, Itariri, wondering what demon had come to beset the ship. She was also outside now, wailing as she knelt beside the body of the fidalgo.
Cavalcanti didn’t pause to consider that he was now in command of São Gabriel. He saw Consolação burning; he saw the pirate boats in the water near São Bento, and those that held the survivors from the boarding party making for the beach. He swung over to the port railing and searched for the Norman’s ship in the dim moonlight, but he detected nothing.
He hastened back to the waist and was heartened by Fernandes’s cry that the forecastle fire could be contained.
“Ready!” the starboard gunner shouted.
Cavalcanti was pleased to see that others had been ordered to the two starboard swivel guns. It was still dark, but the conflagration of Consolação illumined part of the bay.
“Fire at the boats!” Cavalcanti ordered.
São Gabriel’s four starboard cannon flashed and roared, and sent their balls whistling toward the small craf
t. Black spouts of water burst near the boats, but it was impossible to see whether the shots had caused damage.
As São Gabriel’s cannon were being reloaded for a second round, suddenly the guns of São Bento opened up against her.
“Oh, dear God!” Cavalcanti cried at this certain confirmation that São Bento had fallen to the Normans. But swiftly his despair turned to resolution: He must unleash all the fury São Gabriel could muster against the men across the water and their ill-gotten prize. There were not men enough in São Gabriel to think of boarding and retaking the caravel.
He made a dangerous decision then — to set São Gabriel’s main and fore sails — mindful of the fact that the wind was in their favor and could move them to a better point of attack.
He gave orders, and men broke away from the gun and fire parties to cut the anchor cables or hurry into the rigging. Fernandes himself took the helm. All the while, the gunner and those with him kept up a cannonade though they were not in effective range.
São Bento, too, was now being maneuvered with her sweeps, but no attempt was made to shake out her canvas.
Shots from São Bento struck São Gabriel toward the stern, reducing her mizzenmast to a jagged stump. The spar crashed down with a tangle of lines and stays; railings and topside planking were torn away and splintering wood blasted across the deck, lacerating those who lay wounded.
When the axes bit through the third anchor cable at the stern and she was free, São Gabriel moved forward slowly and began to close with São Bento. Small shot from São Bento tore into São Gabriel’s rigging, snapping lines and ripping holes in the foresail but inflicting no serious damage.
When less than two hundred yards separated the two ships, São Gabriel belched a broadside of smoke and iron. One of the shots blasted through São Bento’s planking, low at the waterline, deep into her hold, where it smashed aside the lamps that hung there and threw a line of fire toward her powder magazine. The deck of the caravel erupted in flame as an explosion tore out her heart, toppling her mainmast and silencing all but a single swivel gun on her poop, which stopped firing moments later.
The men aboard São Gabriel could take no satisfaction from the destruction of São Bento. No one said it, but all knew that their countrymen — her commander, marinheiros, the cheerful, ruddy-faced Padre Aloysius — must surely have perished. Not far off to the right, Consolação still glowed in the dark.
Cavalcanti moved to Fernandes’s side. “Take her out,” he said. “Away from this infernal place!”
Cavalcanti laid a course for the Portuguese factory at Pernambuco, to the north, from whence they would proceed to Lisbon. But the southeast trade winds forced a change of plans. For a week São Gabriel fought contrary seas, taking so much water that the pumps were never unmanned. Finally Cavalcanti gave up, and turned the ship south to Cabo Frio. There, too, was a logwood factory, but the loggers received the São Gabriel coldly. They had hoped to welcome a squadron that would protect the coast against Norman pirates, not a single, broken ship with men worse off than they.
The crew repaired São Gabriel as best they could, and provisioned her with what little the loggers would give.
Pilot Fernandes saw that it might be weeks, even months before they could make passage to the north, and suggested that they sail with the southeast wind toward Africa. It would add hundreds of leagues to their journey but might offer a safer route, considering the state of São Gabriel and her depleted crew. The master included, there were thirty men, three boys, the priest, and the little princess.
They sailed for two weeks with fair weather and then were struck by a storm. Two marinheiros were lost in the black, blind tempest. The sky remained a threatening gray for most of the morning, but toward noon a weak sun broke through the clouds, and even this slight warmth and their first cooked meal in three days cheered the men, and they worked more keenly at repairing cracked yards, replacing rigging, patching sails.
For the next five days, São Gabriel was a quiet ship but for the ceaseless noise of pumps that were having little effect on the flooded hold. The ship rode so dangerously low that her crew feared she might yet founder before they reached land.
And then, early on the sixth day, there was a cry from aloft. Each man sought confirmation of the landfall and, when he had it, remained silent, his relief too great to be shared.
São Gabriel stood in toward the wide mouth of a river, passing a rufous-colored hillock on its northern bank. Fernandes, whom Gomes de Pina had mockingly spoken of as a “Guinea pilot,” knew where they were, for he had guided ships from this Guinea coast to the Cape of Good Hope itself. Now he ordered the leadsman to call the marks, and took the helm.
Several miles upstream lay the port of Mpinda, visited by the Portuguese since 1482, when the navigator Diogo Cao discovered it. The river was the “Nzere,” a word the Portuguese pronounced Zaire. This stretch of water and vast provinces to the south lay in the kingdom of the Bakongo people.
As São Gabriel moved slowly through the brown water, the crew suddenly began to cheer: Raised on the bank of the river was a marble pillar, symbol of their king’s right in this sanctuary.
Cavalcanti watched two boats approach São Gabriel’s anchorage at Mpinda. They were filled with men-at-arms, and in the lead craft, standing up forward, were two men Cavalcanti could tell bore the self-enamored look of petty officials swollen with the authority they claimed thousands of miles from Lisbon.
Port Superintendent Sancho de Sousa came aboard in the manner of a grand admiral, letting his armed escort precede him and line up on deck before presenting himself and his customs officer.
Sousa was a short, nervous man with thin hair and steel-gray eyes. “You are the captain?” he asked, after Cavalcanti had greeted him.
“The master,” Cavalcanti said. “The captain general, Gomes de Pina, is dead.” Sousa shifted a cold, suspicious look from Cavalcanti to Fernandes and then to the marinheiros near them.
“What you see, senhor,” Cavalcanti said, “is all that remains of a squadron the king sent to Terra do Brasil.”
The superintendent raised an eyebrow. “Santa Cruz?”
“The Normans attacked us at Porto Seguro. We lost two caravels, all the men in them, and our captain general.”
“When?”
“A month ago. We’ve also had a terrible passage to your port; there was a storm such as few live to tell of.”
Sousa murmured an aside to the customs official and then asked Cavalcanti, “Why did you come here?”
With a laugh, the master said, “Senhor, if our promised landfall was the shores of hell, we’d have accepted it!”
“Attacked by Normans, beaten across the Atlantic — terrible, terrible,” Sousa said. Then he added, “What proof, Master?”
“Proof? Of what, senhor? Come now, you can see the men and the ship, both broken. What further proof do you seek?”
The superintendent replied with another question: “Where is the rest of the crew?”
“Dead!” Cavalcanti said harshly. “They died fighting Norman pirates for their king.”
“Too often, Master, we have heard the same tale from pirates and mutineers.”
Behind him, Cavalcanti heard Fernandes say, “Ask him, senhor, if we are thieves or mutineers.” The pilot was pointing to Padre Miguel, who was standing on the quarterdeck.
Sousa observed the priest and, directly behind him, the Tupiniquin girl. “And this woman? What will she say?” he retorted.
“Our captain general is dead,” Cavalcanti repeated stonily. “I am in command. I am taking this ship back to Lisbon.”
The superintendent nodded his head rapidly. “Tomorrow, Master, we will return,” he said. “Until then, no decision.”
“We cannot land?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Then, the senhor superintendent would be good enough to remove himself and his escort,” Cavalcanti said. “Now.”
They were back the next morning, two boats again. Anot
her man, not the customs official, accompanied the superintendent.
The newcomer introduced himself only as Lourenço Velloso of Mpinda, giving no indication of his position ashore but politely asking Cavalcanti to repeat his story.
Velloso was six feet, several inches taller than the average Portuguese, with long, silky black hair, light brown eyes, and a graceful body. He was the most prosperous slave trader in Mpinda.
When Cavalcanti had finished speaking, Velloso turned to Sousa. “A reasonable report,” he said, with authority. “Would they have stayed the night if they were liars?”
“True, true,” the superintendent said quickly. “I sought your opinion, senhor.”
“Then you have it. Let them land or you’ll be answering to Lisbon for refusing to aid a ship of the king.”
“Never . . . I never intended this,” Sousa said, with alarm. He looked appealingly at Velloso. “Tell them what dangers our ships face between my port and Lisbon. Even you have lost cargoes to pirates.”
Rather than elaborate on his own misfortunes, Velloso began to inquire about Cavalcanti’s needs. Later that day, when they’d finally gone ashore, Velloso took Cavalcanti to meet the local native chief, who responded to the crew’s plight by sending cattle and a bounty of provender to the port. By week’s end, São Gabriel had been careened and the full extent of damage to her hull revealed. Velloso again offered help by organizing a party of natives to lead her men to the timbers they needed for repairs.
Cavalcanti quickly realized that Velloso’s aid was not given gratuitously. “A near-empty ship bound for Lisbon,” the slave trader commented casually. “Why not carry a cargo of slaves when she sails? That way you’ll not return to Lisbon a beggar,” he added suggestively.
Cavalcanti had flashed him an angry look: He needed no reminder of the disreputable homecoming that awaited him. But he promised to consider Velloso’s suggestion.
To help him make up his mind, the slaver offered an inducement: Five blacks were to be his alone — in exchange for the Tupiniquin girl.
Brazil Page 12