The Privateer

by Josephine Tey

  She came nosing her way through the reefs round Tortuga on a day when the wind was blowing the tops off the cobalt seas, so that the whole dark-blue ocean was shot with rainbow as the sunlight caught the spindrift. On the innermost reef, cruelly bright and clear in the pitiless light, was the remains of a ship, and they crowded to the side to look as the Fortune picked up her skirts and sidled past.

  ‘That looks to me like Jack Morris’s ship,’ Bluey said, watching the waves spout up from her broken bows. ‘I mind them dolphins as I mind my girl’s eyes.’

  ‘Your girl got eyes?’ they mocked, Bluey being no beauty.

  ‘The Dolphin, she was called, cause of them there dolphins at her bows. Or t’other way about. But that’s Jack Morris’s ship. Take my oath on that.’

  They looked at her with the slight embarrassment of sailors in the presence of a wreck. Bart, standing by Morgan, said: ‘She looks sort of ashamed, don’t she? As if she was naked and we shouldn’t be looking.’

  But they kept on looking, fascinated.

  ‘She can’t have been long there, or they’d have broken her up,’ Chris said. The seas, he meant. The seas combed over her tilted stem and rocketed into the air.

  ‘Well, praise be to Christ and all His angels, I don’t never have to go to sea again,’ Tugnet said, turning away. And that was the verdict of them all. They went below for their little handkerchief bundles and their fortunes of pearls, and when the Fortune anchored off the port they rowed themselves ashore. They did not want any of the problematical ransom for the Spaniards, they said. They had more riches now than they would ever spend if they had nine lives, and they wanted no more.

  ‘I’ll miss Bluey’s jew’s-harp,’ Bart said, leaning over the side, watching the boat pull away. Their farewell to him had been of the briefest; not because he had chosen to stay behind (in the weeks at sea it had become obvious that Bart was Morgan’s ally, and they had accepted the fact without remark and without rancour) but because casualness was their way.

  Henry wanted to say: ‘How long do you think it will be before they are penniless?’ but he did not know how much Bart himself had left of that heap of pearls. Bart had gambled like the rest, and it was understood that he had been unlucky; but to what extent Henry did not know. It warmed his heart, and would warm it as long as he lived, that Bart, with his fortune intact in his pocket, had elected nevertheless to sail with him.

  ‘Well, what now?’ asked Bart, at last; having watched the Fortune’s boat pull ashore, and having reviewed the ships in harbour.

  The Spaniards, with the exception of the mate, who was standing at their elbow, were locked up below. They were alone with their captives and the ship.

  ‘There will be a bumboat along presently, trying to sell us stuff, I don’t doubt. I’ll go ashore with it and see if I can muster a skeleton crew to take us as far as Jamaica. It can’t be more than two hundred miles from here, and the “trade” behind us all the way.’

  But the day wore on to noon, and then to afternoon, and no boat came out to greet them or to hawk their wares. They freed the cook and set him to cooking dinner for all on board, and dinner was almost ready before a sail came shooting over the water in their direction.

  ‘Too small and fast for a bumboat,’ Bart said, watching the light craft come. ‘Perhaps they’re going to arrest us.’

  The same thought had crossed Morgan’s mind, and he was therefore very scornful of Bart’s silly idea. What would they arrest a ship flying an English flag for?

  ‘Yes, mighty fast and official-looking to be just paying a social call,’ Bart said, glowering at the approaching boat.

  The boat lowered her sail and swept round to the ladder on the lee side with an effortless piece of timing that spoke louder of seamanship than of pen-and-ink.

  ‘Not so official,’ Bart said, in a more hopeful tone.

  There were three men in the boat, and they came up the ladder with no sign that any one of them had ever held a pen in his life. The first over the side was not very much older than Morgan; a spare, self-contained young man in good clothes that looked as if they had been made for him but were nevertheless not the clothes he habitually wore. Seaman ashore, said the clothes.

  The man looked from Bart to Henry and then said to Henry: ‘Captain Morgan?’

  And with the magic word ‘Captain’, Henry’s belief in his luck came back full and strong. He never forgot that Jack Morris was the first man to give him the title.

  ‘My name is John Morris. Old John Morris’s son, if you ever knew my father.’

  ‘It’s your ship—’ Henry began involuntarily.

  ‘Yes, it’s my ship out on the reef yonder. And several good men besides. I don’t beat about with words, Captain Morgan, so I’ll tell you straight out that I heard you were looking for a crew. The Dolphin’s crew are looking for a passage out of this hell-hole, and we’d be very glad to sail with you if you’re bound for a British possession. Or anywhere, for that matter of it. This is my mate, Bernard Speirdyck, and his nephew, Cornelius Carstens.’

  The stocky, blond man bowed in a jerky continental fashion, and the boy with the thatch of taffy-coloured hair smiled.

  Henry, aware that his clothes were the best he could do with judicious confiscations from the Spaniards’ wardrobes and that he had never in his life commanded as much as a yawl at sea, was a little overcome. He wanted to blurt out: ‘You mean you’d sail under the command of a tyro like me?’ But his unfailing vanity shook him to rights. ‘You’re not only captain of this vessel, you’re the owner,’ his vanity reminded him. ‘You’re the owner of one of the fastest craft of her size anywhere in the world today, with a clean bottom and well found, and you’re a very desirable person to be acquainted with.’

  So to John Morris he said that dinner was ready and they were about to sit down and they would be honoured if Captain Morris and his friends would join them. It would be sea fare, since they had not yet replenished, and not as good as Captain Morris would get ashore, but if he did not mind salt pork they would be glad of his company.

  ‘Mind!’ said Jack Morris. ‘You don’t seem to understand, Captain. We are on our beam-ends. We are on the rocks even more hopelessly than the poor Dolphin out there.’

  And Henry, who if the positions had been reversed would never have confessed to any such state, loved him for his frankness. As they went below it occurred to him that dolphins brought him luck. A Dolphin in Bridgetown brought him the Fortune, and now a Dolphin in Tortuga was providing him with a crew. He must remember dolphins when he was in need of luck.

  Over the enormous meal of meat and strong drink that they thought suitable for a tropic afternoon, Henry explained that he was looking for an English authority to take custody of his prisoners and eventually accept ransom for them on his behalf. Where was the nearest English official? Jamaica, presumably?

  ‘Here,’ said Morris, and began to laugh.

  ‘In Tortuga!’

  ‘He must meet our Elias, mustn’t he, Barney!’

  ‘But Tortuga’s French!’

  ‘Not just at the moment. The Spaniards threw them out not long ago. But when we took Jamaica from the Spaniards they fled out of Tortuga in a panic to defend San Domingo against becoming a second Jamaica. And in walked Elias Watts with wife and family. He’s living up at the castle; with his wife and brats and a battery of four guns, one of them workable. Making a success of it, too. Very popular, our Elias is. The French will be back in no time, of course, but until then Elias is the official governor.’

  Elias Watts, however typical a piece of English colonial history, did not seem to Henry a very safe deposit for his prisoners. He still wanted to go to Jamaica, where he would find English officials of a more permanent type; officials who would not only accept his prisoners and give him his due share of their subsequent ransom, but would also supply him with letters of marque as a privateer.

  ‘They are not very fond of privateers in Yamaica yoost now,’ Speirdyck said. ‘Ever
y time a privateer slap Spain in the face, Spain come and slap Yamaica. The planters they do not like that.’

  ‘Ay,’ said Morris. ‘They yell for help and say the Spaniards are treating the seas like their own, and then when we do account for a few Spanish privateers they yell because Spain is offended and comes and burns a village or two. They can’t have it both ways.’

  ‘These planters,’ the Cornelius boy said, pausing in his swift, silent consumption of food to speak for the first time, ‘they care for nothing but their crops. They do not care what Spain does to poor sailors or how many innocent men are rotting in Spanish prisons. For them it has never been a holy war.’

  ‘I know someone who would think it a holy war,’ Morgan said suddenly. And then, a little dashed: ‘But he is away off in Barbados.’

  ‘What’s Barbados!’ said Morris, whose world was the sea. ‘Just a biscuit toss. I could find my way there blindfold, any time out of the hurricane season. If it’s letters of marque you want, let’s go to Barbados and get them. Who is your man in Barbados? Goodson?’

  ‘Is that the Governor? No, there’s a man who is just going to be Governor. A good Cromwell man,’ said Henry, trying to keep his lip from curling. ‘The great under-propper of the Roman Babylon, Cromwell says Spain is. I think Sir Thomas Modyford will be prepared to fight the Lord’s battles to the extent of letters of marque. His estates in Barbados are not as handy to Spain as the Jamaican ones are, so he can serve the Lord, and Cromwell, and himself at the same time. There’s just one thing. The Fortune will have to be victualled to take us back there, and I haven’t a penny until I get the ransom for the prisoners.’

  Bart looked up from his plate and said: ‘If five pearls are any good to you, Harry, they’re yours.’

  ‘Five!’ said Henry, involuntarily.

  ‘Yes,’ Bart said, shamefaced. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Bart, I’m ashamed of you. Who was the lucky one?’

  ‘Not any one of them specially,’ Bart said. ‘They just went little by little. I’m still better off than I was before,’ he added; and then, looking up at Henry: ‘Much better off.’

  Because Henry for once had no words ready, Morris said: ‘Five pearls wouldn’t get us far, but you can turn your prisoners over to Elias and get credit in the town for them. I hear you have an important one. On security like that Tortuga with supply you with anything you like to ask for.’

  ‘I see my late colleagues have been talking.’

  ‘Fluently.’

  ‘I think when we have dined, Captain Morris, you and I had better go ashore and have a talk with your Elias.’

  And so it came about that Don Christoval de Rasperu found himself being welcomed on the most infamous and disreputable of all the Caribbean islands by a worthy British matron of the most domestic type: a kind little woman who fussed over him, wiped her son’s running nose, and lamented the shortage of gunpowder all in the same breath. Her husband accepted the custody of the crew on condition that he might put them to ‘honourable employment’ until such time as ransom was forthcoming for them. Tortuga swarmed with men of all nationalities, but not one of them would do what his lady called ‘a hand’s turn’ on the island. They were prepared to be blown up, drowned, maimed, starved, and overworked at sea, but at the sight of a spade or a hoe they blenched. As long as the Spaniards were prepared to work for their keep, Elias was prepared to be responsible for them. For their health, that was. For any escapes from the island he could by no means hold himself responsible. He had no space to imprison nearly forty men, even if any of the Castle locks had keys. And with the sea at their doors escape was an ever-present possibility. But he would try to make their stay so pleasant that a normal return to Spain in due course would appear to them more desirable than turning themselves adrift on an unfriendly ocean.

  The two sea-captains shared family dinner at the Castle, which was enlivened by the sneezes of one child and the proud recitation of the nine-times by another, admired Elias’s highly ornamental battery, took a friendly farewell of an amused Don Christoval, and went down to the port to profit from the unbridled boastings of Chris, Tugnet, Bluey, and company.

  And so next day, the third since the Fortune’s arrival at Tortuga, a two-way traffic was being conducted over the ship’s side. Boats brought stores in quantity and took away prisoners in batches. The prisoners shook hands all round before they left. They had had a wonderful time, they inferred. Short of a permanent pension, give them a cruise as prisoners of the English any day.

  Only two made a scene. One was the boy who had played with the dog on the beach at Barbados, and the other was the ship’s cook. The boy said that he, Manuel Sequerra, was a Portuguese, that he had done nothing against the English, and that in any case he wanted to sail with the Captain Morgan, who was his beau ideal of what a commanding officer should be. Toni, the cook, said that he was a Neapolitan, and as such had nothing to do with these insane wars that everyone was always indulging in; a stove, he inferred, was of all things the most international; it was inconceivable that he, Antonio Toscanelli, a Neapolitan and an artist, should be left to rot on Tortuga.

  Since they were still short-handed on the Fortune, and since one of the men drowned on the reef had been the Dolphin’s cook, neither Manuel’s tears nor Toni’s dramatics were necessary. Henry was very glad to have them. Toni was a very bad cook, but he was cleaner than most, and drank hardly at all.

  On the night before they sailed, very late in the evening, the mulatto arrived at the bottom of the ladder, having spent his last poor coins in hiring a boat to take him out. Indeed, he had not had quite enough, and the boatman was loud in his demands for the balance from the Fortune; the mulatto had promised that the few odd pence would be paid when he arrived at the ship, he said. The mulatto was in tears. They had sold the dogs to a man who was going to Cuba, and the man had no need of him. He was lost without the dogs. He had also lost every pearl that he had ever possessed, but that seemed hardly to concern him. He could think of nothing but the parting with the dogs that had been his life. If Captain Morgan also had no use for him, then indeed his life was at an end.

  ‘Manuel!’ shouted Morgan.

  ‘Captain! Sir! I come! I come!’ Manuel came plummeting to the deck with a swoop that gave the unnautical Henry heart-failure.

  ‘Kringle here has lost his friends the dogs, Manuel. He is—’

  ‘Amigo!’ said Manuel, throwing his arm round the mulatto and not waiting for further explanation. ‘And your heart is torn open and you are as if you had no skin. Come! I know. Come, and we will talk!’ And he led the weeping man away forward without a backward glance.

  ‘We didn’t need that mulatto,’ Bart said, watching them go.

  ‘I wouldn’t turn a dog away tonight,’ Morgan said.

  So the Fortune when she sailed with the tide in the morning, for the first time under her new name, was a happy ship. She had no pressed men on board and no prisoners. She was, on the contrary, the symbol of fortune and freedom to all on board. To Henry, who had taken her, and who had preferred her to riches. To Jack Morris, and his crew, whom she rescued from the beach. To Bart, who was Mr Kindness again and a person of importance in the world of the sea. To Toni, who was back in his own galley. To Manuel, who was sailing with his hero. And to a greatly comforted mulatto, who had strong hopes of taming a rat before they reached Barbados.

  Bernard Speirdyck, being a Hollander, took personal credit for the Fortune’s good points, and at each evidence of adaptability would say: ‘Ah, yoost look at her, yoost look at her! A Hollander down to her bilges.’ He called them ‘biltches’. And Cornelius, when reproved by his uncle for some shortcoming, would retire to the fo’c’sle and imitate him. ‘Ah, yoost look at him, yoost look at him! A Hollander down to the biltches!’

  Jack Morris made good his boast of being able to sail to Barbados blindfold, and the Fortune dropped anchor outside Bridgetown long before the mulatto had tamed his rat. Indeed, it was a little too soon for H
enry, who had secret qualms about the coming interview with Modyford. He kept remembering the elegant clothes and cool, expensive air of the man who had dined that day at the Dolphin, and wondering what such a man would think of his borrowed Spanish finery. Which, since he had no ready money, were all the clothes he still possessed. He longed to borrow that very fine bottle-green suit of Jack’s, but could not bring himself to suggest it. He would have to go ashore in his Spanish things.

  Bridgetown looked very neat and civilised in its green setting after Tortuga; and its familiarity after so many strange scenes made it seem oddly like home. And Henry, being rowed ashore, took comfort in the thought that Spanish clothes, however outlandish and open to misconstruction, were an undoubted improvement on denim breeches and a frieze coat. It was a thing to marvel at that only the other day he had trudged into this town carrying a kerchief bundle that might have belonged to Bluey or Tugnet. His affection for Bridgetown increased every time he remembered it. When Elias Watts had asked him where, in this new unstable world, a letter would find him, he had said: ‘The Dolphin at Bridgetown will always find me.’ The Dolphin had seen the beginning of his luck; it should witness the progress of it. Every now and then he would come back and trail his latest successes through the dark, cool room on the harbour front where he had spun his first gold piece.

  ‘Meet me at the Dolphin,’ he said now to Jack Morris, who had come ashore with him, ‘and we’ll drink to the letter-of-marque.’

  Morris had come ashore entrusted with one of Bart’s five pearls and instructions that he should buy drink for the whole crew with it. The crew had been promised time ashore as soon as the Fortune was proved acceptable to the authorities, but they had said: ‘Pad round Bridgetown with nothing in our pockets! Not us!’ And when the third mate had said couldn’t Mr Kindness treat them to the pearl’s worth just as well on shore, Bart had said dryly: ‘It’s drink I’m treating them to.’