The Privateer

by Josephine Tey

  ‘This gentleman is going to lend me his shoes,’ Henry said. ‘Will you assist him to remove them?’

  Bluey was delighted.

  ‘With your honour’s permission,’ he said, bowing with a flourish, and having removed the shoes, brought them to Henry and held them for him with a burlesque of servitude.

  ‘There you are, Harry boy!’ he said. ‘And the nicest pieces of shoe-leather I ever did see. Might as well have a pair for myself while I’m about it. What about yours, Cap’n?’

  ‘Presently, presently,’ said Henry. ‘You can line them up in a row and choose at your ease when the ship’s ours. Is Timsy there? Timsy, you stay with me and Bluey. Bart, you take the rest for’ard and deal with the crew.’

  He had chosen Timsy to stay with him because if anyone in the gathering was likely to start a massacre it was Timsy.

  Intoxicated at having the after-guard in their hands so easily, they discarded caution with a whoop. Bart snatched the lantern from where it hung and they went roaring into the fo’c’sle like a tidal wave.

  ‘Rise and shine, my hearties, rise and shine!’ shouted Chris, as if he were routing out his own crew; and tore along the narrow alley-way of the noisome catacomb, slapping rumps, tweaking toes, and pulling hair.

  Some of the men packed in tiered layers on the filthy shelves were drunk; more were sodden with sleep and half-poisoned by their own exhalations. Only three were alert enough to combat an enemy on the threshold of waking. Two reached under their canvas-bag pillows for pistols; but one pistol misfired and the other disappeared under a one-man avalanche which was Tugnet. The third man to be quick-minded was the boy who had played with the dog on the beach. He came at Bart with a knife.

  ‘No, son, no,’ said Bart in his kind-uncle tones, hitting the boy’s raised arm across the biceps with the side of his open palm. This is an exceedingly painful thing to have happen to one. The boy yelled, and the knife flew from his hand and grazed the mulatto’s forehead. The mulatto dropped the club he was carrying and came at the boy with his open hands. The man whose pistol had misfired used the butt of it on the mulatto’s head. And in another second the fo’c’sle was a writhing mass of fighting humanity.

  Bart lost the lantern in the mêlée, and when he had recovered it and held it aloft to survey the result he found the boy sitting on the mulatto’s head.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘so you can take care of yourself, after all, son!’ and he looked round to see how the others had fared. No one was dead, it seemed; not even one of the Spaniards, although several were looking the worse for wear. In the recovered light the invaders drew off and stood covering their captives.

  ‘Tie them up, boys,’ Bart said. ‘And you,’ he added to the boy, ‘you get off that brown man. He’s the best man with dogs this side of Cape Verde.’

  ‘Dogs?’ said the boy, getting up and looking with interest at the bleeding mulatto. ‘Ah, pardon, pardon.’

  ‘Speaks English like a native,’ mocked Tugnet.

  ‘Pretty smart altogether for a Spaniard,’ Bart said, mopping the mulatto’s head.

  ‘I Portuguese,’ said the boy.

  ‘Well now! Practically an ally!’ they laughed.

  ‘I Manuelo Sequerra.’

  ‘Maybe, Manny; but you’re going to be tied up like the rest,’ they said.

  He submitted with good humour to their binding, and apologised to the mulatto for the ‘accident’ to his forehead.

  ‘It was this gentleman that I try to kill,’ he said, indicating Bart in explanation.

  There were fewer men in the fo’c’sle than they had expected, and they were bound in matter-of-fact fashion in the persuasive presence of half a dozen pistols. Once trouble seemed to be on the point of breaking out again when one of the drunk Spaniards spat in the face of the man who was tying him up. But the man merely hit him across the face with the back of his hand and went on with his knots. Their triumph was so great that their good humour was invincible.

  ‘She’s ours!’ exulted Bluey, as they met in the cabin again. ‘She’s ours!’

  The ship’s officers, together with their passenger, had been shut into the tiny after-cabin. This led out of the cabin proper, and was an ideal prison, in that its only windows were two small ones high up, overlooking the half-deck.

  ‘Now we see what she is carrying,’ they said, but Henry said no; first they must tidy up ashore. Fetch the fresh meat and the dogs. The off-shore wind would take them out now, without waiting for dawn.

  There was some argument as to who should go, but they were still large with delight, and the impartial dice did the rest. They accepted Henry’s ruling about using the wind. They had stopped calling him Brains from the moment when he had climbed that rope to the ship’s stern.

  Those who were left explored the ship as children rejoice in a new toy. They found that she was Dutch built; a fact which explained much that had puzzled them when they had discussed her round the fire. More especially her light, low poop, almost level with the waist, and her lack of burdening ornament. She had been built by a people whose harbours were small and shallow; and she had been built for trade, and therefore for speed in a competitive business. That she was Dutch built explained, too, the comparative smallness of her crew. The Dutch designed ships that could be sailed satisfactorily with two-thirds of the normal crew for the tonnage.

  Whatever her original name had been, she was at the moment the Gloria, but Henry planned to change that at the earliest possible moment.

  ‘Tomorrow we’ll sling a man over the side, and we’ll call her—Fortune.’

  Gradually a new, less welcome, thought seeped into their exuberance. They had inspected her cargo (wood, as they had anticipated) and admired her armoury. They had even routed down below the water-line to reckon what gunpowder stores she had. But so far they had come on no strong-room. They mentioned the lack to each other, casually at first, and then urgently. When the longboat came back they were still searching for it.

  ‘Bring the captain here,’ Henry said, when they had ransacked the cabin without result.

  They unlocked the after-cabin and dragged the captain out. But the captain had either been coached by his passenger or had recovered his nerve. He pretended not to know what they said.

  Chris produced a knife and opened it with a flick of his wrist. He thrust it within an inch or two of the captain’s throat, and moved it in half-turns so that the light from the hanging lantern glinted on it.

  ‘I’ll teach him English,’ he said.

  ‘You and your knives!’ Henry said, contemptuously. ‘Bluey, fetch the steward here. I never knew a steward yet that didn’t know more about his master’s business than the master knew himself.’

  Bluey came back to say that the steward wasn’t one of the men in the fo’c’sle. He slept in the galley, it seemed. But they had all seen the galley and there was no one there. When a terrified and half-suffocated steward was at last dragged from the flour-bin in the galley they greeted him with appreciative laughter and treated him as a hero. Who would have thought, they said, that the man to beat them would be a steward?

  The unhappy wretch, finally unnerved by laughter that he did not understand, made no bones about telling them where the strong-room was. It was in the little dark after-cabin that the prisoners were occupying. He showed them where it was, and told them were the captain kept the key. And they all gathered round to learn what their fortune was.

  There was neither gold nor silver. But there were pearls.

  Rivers of pearls. Cascades of them.

  The iron box was opened on the cabin table when the key had been turned again on the prisoners, and the share-out began. And went on, and on. Round and round went Bart’s hand, dropping pearls one by one on the twelve small heaps; and the twelve small heaps ceased to be very small, and grew to be heaps of a size that made their eyes first shining and then blank with sheer incredulity.

  ‘Eight odd,’ said Bartholomew at last. ‘Four of you’s
going to be unlucky.’

  ‘Unlucky!’ Bluey said, staring at his heap. ‘What’s an odd pearl! Give it to Chakka.’

  ‘Throw mine overboard,’ Tugnet said, running his fingers through his heap.

  ‘If you’re all satisfied,’ Henry said, ‘we’ll free the middle watch and put them to the business of taking her out to sea.’

  That led to a discussion as to where they should sail.

  And by the time they had actually sailed it had led to something like open warfare. Henry wanted to sail the ship straight to port and have her declared a prize by an English Admiralty Court.

  ‘Have her disallowed, you mean,’ they said. ‘And all of us flung into jail, as likely as not!’

  ‘Even if they allow it,’ they said, ‘they’ll want their percentage. By the time they’ve passed all their quirks and pretences on you, what is there for a poor seaman?’

  Their distrust of the law was all-pervading.

  This dismayed Henry; but what shook him to the soles of his new Spanish shoes was their plan for the future of the ship. They planned to sell her, if that proved easy; and if not, to sink her.

  ‘Sink her!’ said Henry, hardly believing his ears. ‘But with a ship like this our fortune is made. We are set up for life.’

  ‘What would we do with her?’ they asked.

  ‘Get letters-of-marque, and use her as a privateer. Or, failing that, trade with her. There are cargoes for the asking all over the Caribbean, and fortunes for the taking.’

  ‘What! Work a ship in all weathers when we could be living like lords in Port Royal!’ they said.

  ‘Fortune! What’s a fortune to us!’ they said. ‘We’ve got a fortune.’

  ‘We’re only living for the day when we can be done with ships!’ they said. ‘What would we want with a ship?’

  And from that nothing Henry said could move them.

  So at last he said: ‘Very well. I’ll trade you my share of the pearls for the ship.’

  At first they thought he was joking. Then they thought he was mad. Then they remembered that he had once been called Brains, and began to wonder how they were being cheated.

  ‘It’s too big a share, the ship,’ they grumbled, with a fine inconsequence.

  Henry pointed out that they had been planning to sink her.

  ‘No,’ they said. ‘We were going to sell her.’

  ‘Very well. I’m offering you a fortune in pearls for her. Try to sell her—in Tortuga, I suppose—and you may find no bidders. There’s my bid, there on the table.’

  He emptied the little leather sack of pearls on to the table under their eyes; and, watching their faces, knew that he had a ship and was penniless.

  But his heart was filled with glory.

  He went on deck, and left them to their celebration. In less than an hour they were all roaring drunk.

  Sometime before dawn, prowling round the deck and listening to the riot below, he came on Bartholomew sitting all alone on the fo’c’sle head polishing a pistol.

  ‘Bartholomew! Can it be that someone is sober?’

  ‘Ay, I’m sober.’

  ‘I congratulate you.’

  ‘You needn’t. I’d like to be drunk as well as the next man, but my stomach won’t let me. A real trial my stomach is to me.’ And then, with sudden venom: ‘And the way that bastard is handling the wheel takes my appetite away.’

  ‘Can you sail her?’

  ‘I would sail her between Silla and Caribbees and not as much as scrape her paint.’

  ‘Get aft, then, and take the wheel.’

  Henry stayed there for a little, listening to the rush and creak of a ship dipping to the sea and thinking of his future, but presently he went aft to join Bartholomew, and they stayed there together in unspoken communion above the rioting ship.

  ‘Whose ears are you going to hang your pearls in, Bart?’ he asked.

  ‘Nobody’s ears. I’d as soon push them down their throats. All the trouble in this world started when women came into it—bar my old woman, of course.’ It was clear that Bartholomew was out of temper.

  ‘For a man who has just come into a fortune, you would seem to have a jaundiced outlook on life,’ Henry said, wondering whether that cottage in the Mendips was looking suddenly less desirable now that it was possible of realisation. ‘Does nothing give you pleasure tonight?’

  Yes,’ said Bartholomew, indicating the spread of canvas above them in the night. ‘That does.’

  After a pause, Henry said: ‘Will you sail with me, Bart?’

  ‘I’ll sail with you—Cap’n.’

  3

  A man may own a ship, but unless he is captain of a crew he goes where the ship goes. And not one of the men from that camp in the forest would go anywhere near a British possession as long as they had anything to do with the ship they had taken. They would go to Tortuga, they said. From that bleak and wind-swept little island off the north coast of Hispaniola they could get passage anywhere. It was a sort of clearing-house for the whole Caribbean; and, for those who needed it, an unfailing source of employment, lawful and otherwise. To the sheltering wing of the French and the gratifying tolerance of Tortuga they would go; far from Admiralty courts and the stinking English conscience and the curiosity of the official mind.

  So north away from Barbados sailed the Fortune, beating up through the islands into the north-east trade, day after blue-green day. Her Spanish crew worked the ship, and the victors lay about the deck in attitudes of ostentatious idleness. They ate, slept, and gambled; and were monumentally bored. The stores of pearls changed hands continuously. By early afternoon they were drunk. By night they were either moribund or quarrelsome.

  It was Chris, that man with the face of an unfrocked priest, who kept them in order; and that was because Chris could drink immense quantities of neat rum without succumbing and because they were afraid of him. Even Timsy, who when drunk was a maniac, kept in some recess of his crazy mind a recognition of the lethal quality in Chris, and would stop in his tracks and whimper as the long, thin man got to his feet to correct him. When at last peace reigned because everyone else was insensible, Chris would pour a final mugful for himself and would fall asleep only one degree short of flash point.

  Only one man on board the Fortune had a harder head than Chris. And that was Henry Morgan.

  ‘You do not drink, Señor?’ Don Christoval de Rasperu asked him, as the ‘passenger’ was having his daily outing and they were walking round the deck together.

  Henry said that, on the contrary, he drank a great deal. But it went missing somewhere between his throat and his stomach. Which was a sad thing for more reasons than the obvious one. It snared one into drinking more than was good for one in the tropics.

  ‘It is sad,’ said Don Christoval, looking at the large, slack form of Tugnet lying unconscious in the evening shadow below the break of the poop, ‘it is sad to be given this precious gift of life and to find nothing better to do with it than seek ever for temporary death. Life embarrasses them, it would seem. They run away from it. They do their best to give it back.’

  Don Christoval de Rasperu had been sent from Spain to inspect and report upon the colonies on the South American seaboard, and Henry regarded him with the tender interest of a man for his latest investment. Spain might or might not be willing to ransom the crew of the Gloria, but for the excellent Don Christoval de Rasperu they would pay willingly and high. It was important that Don Christoval stay whole and healthy. Don Christoval therefore got the choice times of the day for his enlargement from the after-cabin, and if sometimes he forgot to go back when his appointed time was up, no one was officious enough to call his attention to the lapse. Unless it was the captain. Who, having got over his initial fright, and being now fairly certain that neither death nor torture lay in the offing, lived in a state of fret and fume that was melting the flesh from his bones even more effectively than the heat of the after-cabin. To be a prisoner on his own ship was bitter, but to take second place to a
passenger was gall and wormwood. The only person who did his best to make Don Christoval’s life a misery on board the Fortune was his fellow-captive and countryman, the late captain of the Gloria.

  The Spaniard with the dark ringlets was kicked daily by the Dorset man for his bad taste in having once made one of the Santa Marta’s crew; but that little matter of principle having been attended to, he was left in peace. Indeed, he sometimes fell heir to the dregs in the Dorset man’s mug because they shared an experience that was not common to anyone else on board.

  The mate of the Gloria was freed altogether, so that he might run the crew and attend to the navigation; and Henry became his pupil in the matter of chart and compass. Don Christoval, who was a mathematician, would make a third at these sessions; and he and the mate would compare and argue this still new science, Don Christoval full of theories and the mate stubborn with practice; and Henry listened and learned.

  This was his first real voyaging among the islands that he came to know so well—the magic, small, anonymous islands of the Caribbean. In endless permutations of innocence they stood about the empty seas fresh, it seemed, from creation’s dawn. The little bays with sand so white, so virgin, that it was one with the breaking wave; the reefs with their single rank of crazy palms, like some divine awkward squad. To a practical sailor-mind they represented shelter or a lee shore, as the case might be; fresh water, food, and refreshment of body; landfall or bearing. But long after they were commonplace he would pause in the ploy of the moment to stand astare, mazed with their beauty.

  And the Fortune was their equal in the mind of every man who sailed in her. She had been careened in America, and she handled like a dinghy. She would come about ‘like a lady going back for her prayer-book’, as Bartholomew said. And her speed in a following wind was such that her victors, used all their lives to the sheer dead weight that crusted the products of English and Spanish slips, could hardly believe it. It took only a week for boredom to drive the conquerors to the ship’s service, and they polished, spliced, caulked, cleaned, and painted with a proprietary pride; half-surreptitiously at first, as if it were beneath their new dignity as millionaires, then openly when no one remarked on their activities. Bart contrived a Union flag out of the store in her sail locker, and it was under the proper colours that she sailed into the roads at Tortuga.