The Privateer

by Josephine Tey

  ‘Mr Boobyer, you put away your saw and come down to the Dolphin with us,’ Henry said.

  ‘I don’t have to stump as far as the Dolphin for good liquor,’ Mr Boobyer said, and produced a bottle. Then he climbed into the loft above his workroom as neatly as if he had a pair of feet instead of two wooden pegs, and brought down the price of the wood in good English currency. Henry could have embraced him.

  ‘If they get rid of Modyford,’ he said, as they went back to the harbour, ‘they could do worse than appoint your Mr Boobyer as Governor. He doesn’t waste any energy balancing himself on a fence.’

  They felt very rich as they walked into the hot town again, and Henry lingered in front of the shops as he had lingered on that other visit, planning wardrobes for himself. But where on that previous occasion it had been an academic delight, it was now a very present form of torture. He need not wear his Spanish clothes any longer; he had money in his pocket, and he could walk in and buy the best the island had to offer. But the Fortune needed the money. He was poorer personally in the matter of money today than he had been that day weeks ago with a gold coin in his pocket.

  But in all other ways infinitely richer, he reminded himself. So what did it matter that he must wear his Spanish clothes a little longer?

  He would be at sea tomorrow, and there would be no cool grey eyes there to look him over and judge him by his garments.

  ‘Anyhow,’ he said aloud, ‘they would take too long to make them.’

  And Jack Morris, who had understood every unspoken word of this self-communion, and who had known all his life what it was to have the ship come first, finally rendered his allegiance.

  Henry’s method of compensation was to over-pay the ferryman who took them out to the Fortune. In what way this should comfort him for not being able to buy himself clothes, he could not have said. If he could not be elegant, he could be large.

  The crew were gathered round the ladder watching them come, and it endeared them to Henry that their interest seemed to be first for the future of the Fortune, and only secondly for the barrel.

  ‘What did they say, Captain?’ they shouted, hanging over the side.

  ‘Are we privateers?’

  ‘What luck, sir?’

  ‘Did they make you a knight. Captain?’

  When they heard that they had no official standing, there was a loud groan, frank opinion of the Governor, and franker suggestion of what they would do to him and what he could do to himself.

  ‘He may not be Governor much longer,’ Henry said; and found that the news about the changes at home, after the erratic manner of rumour, had, even in harbour, passed them by.

  The news of Cromwell’s death shattered their unanimity.

  ‘Well,’ said a man named Wish, in a Sussex drawl, ‘the old bastard’ll be havin’ a deal of explainin’ to do at this moment.’

  ‘Oliver Cromwell was the greatest man who ever lived!’ a Lincolnshire man called Benrose said.

  ‘He was a damned murderer and a king-killer,’ said a third.

  ‘Oh, go roll your barrel,’ said Morris.

  And they rolled the cask away for’ard, the fight growing louder and wordier at every step.

  ‘There will be murder,’ said Morgan, ‘if that is how they feel about it sober.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Morris said comfortably; ‘there’s seven Royalists to every Cromwell man.’

  ‘I’ve never asked you how you feel about it, Jack?’

  ‘About them beheading the King? I suppose I was too young to care much, and too much out of England for it to concern me very close.’ And as they went down to the cabin he added amiably: ‘But I hate their damned Puritan faces.’

  Toni put a meal in front of them, and hastened away to make sure of his share of the barrel. They ate largely, but in silence.

  ‘There’s always piracy,’ Morris said at last.

  Henry did not even bother to smile.

  After another silence Henry said: ‘Perhaps if I had played my cards better he might have listened. If I had been cooler. He might have given you the letter-of-marque, if I had only thought of it.’

  ‘He wouldn’t give his own brother a letter-of-marque today.’

  ‘He might have risked it for a Morris. Someone of reputation in the islands.’

  ‘He isn’t going to put his name to any commission against Spain only to find that a treaty with Spain was signed a month ago. You never had a hope with Modyford.’

  Henry scraped his plate and pushed it away from him. He sat back in his chair, pushed his long legs out under the table, and lay there glooming down his nose at the debris.

  ‘Of course,’ he said suddenly in the quiet tones of one to whom a great revelation is being vouchsafed, ‘there is nothing to hinder me from defending myself.’

  Morris thought this over, and smiled.

  ‘Trailing your coat, is that it?’

  ‘Yes. Trailing my coat. You don’t need any commissions and letters-of-marque to resist capture.’

  ‘No, but you need a deal of luck.’

  ‘I have all the luck in the world. And brains besides. And a whole stock of ball and powder that was loaded for the voyage from America to Spain and has never been touched. How many of your men were gunners?’

  ‘Twelve. And three more could probably serve them at a pinch.’

  ‘And we have the fastest ship in the Caribbean and the handiest. You can turn her on a groat. I can’t think why I ever bothered to ask the damned Governor for his piddling commission.’

  ‘It does make things easier afterwards,’ Morris said, amused. ‘They don’t always believe you when you explain how you came to sink a ship.’

  ‘I’m not planning to sink one just yet. We’ll look them over till we find a good new ship for you, first of all.’

  At this Morris sat back and laughed.

  ‘What amuses you?’ asked Henry.

  ‘The breadth of your ideas. It isn’t every man who designs to go “eenie, meenie, minie, moe” round the Caribbean till he finds the ship he wants to appropriate.’

  ‘Laugh as much as you please. But I promise you that one month from now we shall have a ship for you. And not any old scow, either. Something you will be proud to sail.’

  But as it turned out it was more than three months before Jack Morris took over the City of Seville. This was not because Henry had failed to make good his boast, but because the first ship they took was so badly mauled by a final and redundant feu-de-joie fired by that admirer of zeal, Walter Benrose from Lincolnshire, that she sank before they could board her; and all the Fortune got out of the engagement was the necessity of feeding thirty-seven rescued survivors for five days until they could be dumped ashore on an island. In the two months that separated this episode from the meeting with the City of Seville the life of Mr Penrose was hardly worth living. And his political friends among the crew, pinning on to the Puritans their referred resentment of Walter, went over en bloc with a fine flourish of illogicality to the Royalist cause.

  The hunting-ground for privateers was, of course, off the mainland of America; and it was there the Fortune headed as soon as she had rid herself of her wooden burden and taken on board what stores were urgently needed. She proceeded to saunter up and down from Cartagena to Campeche and back again, but except for the vessel sunk by the too-zealous Walter, the only ships she met were either English privateers, with whom she paused to exchange news, or Spanish men-of-war carrying tiers of guns and a crew the size of a town’s population, to whom they showed a clean pair of heels. And then one day, watering near an Indian village on the coast of Mexico, they were told by the inhabitants, to whom any enemy of Spain was automatically a friend, that a small Spanish warship was lying at Vera Cruz and was due to sail home before the beginning of the hurricane season. Any time in the next fortnight, they thought, she would be sailing.

  She came up over the horizon on a thundery morning five days later: a brigantine carrying eighteen guns. The Fortune loiter
ed under half her sail across the empty sea, and watched her hopefully. The Spaniard changed course like a terrier sighting a rabbit and came bearing down on her. The Fortune waited until she was sure that the English flag was plain and visible to them, and then, crowding on sail with every sign of panic, she fled before them. Towing, incidentally, a quarter ton of sea-anchor, to prevent her from falling over the farther horizon before the Spaniard caught up with her. As they began to close the distance she picked up her sea-anchor and with her recovered speed crossed to the windward side of the Spaniard’s bows, so that the Seville had to come up on her port side and the Fortune had the wind.

  ‘What do you make the range?’ asked Henry of Morris, watching the Seville draw level with them. ‘Are we inside it?’

  ‘Good God, we could shake hands with them!’ said Morris. ‘Draw off a little or she’ll blow us out of the water at that range.’

  ‘She has to be tempted,’ said Henry.

  ‘She can be tempted just as well just inside extreme range; which was what we planned,’ Morris said, watching in agony.

  In action their positions were strangely reversed: Henry being as detached as if he were not personally concerned at all, Morris in a fever of foreboding.

  ‘Do you think they are not even going to challenge us?’ Henry asked with interest. ‘And we an innocent English ship with our gun-ports closed and our minds on our business.’

  ‘All that matters to those bastards over there is that we are English and defenceless and there are no witnesses.’

  ‘We ought to sink them,’ Henry said virtuously. ‘Do you really want this ship. Jack?’

  ‘Here it comes,’ Morris said, his eyes on the nine gun-mouths studding the Seville’s starboard side. ‘Dear Christ, I wish I had lived a better life.’

  The broadside rocked their eardrums and reverberated on the heavy air. One ball carried away part of the rail on the port quarter, one sent a shower of splinters down on to the main deck from the mast, one tore a hole in the fore-sail, one went through the shrouds of the fore-mast and left them fluttering like a hoist of signal flags, and the rest sang over the heads of the crew and fell into the water beyond.

  They had not only been inside range: they had been so well within range that the Spaniard had overshot them.

  Their plan had been to close in immediately they had cajoled the Spaniards into emptying their guns on that side, but the Fortune’s lightness and speed frustrated them. She swept ahead of the Seville, leaving her own broadside undelivered.

  ‘Let her go,’ Henry said, ‘and bring her about. We have twenty minutes before they are ready again.’

  ‘But she’ll be turning yoost now to fire the side that is still unused,’ Bernard said.

  ‘Yes, but we’ll be back before she’s round. She has never seen the Fortune turning on a groat.’

  And back came the Fortune with her gun-ports open and swept at point-blank range down the helpless starboard side of the Seville. She had only five guns a-side, and instead of firing them as a broadside, she fired them individually, each at a target arranged beforehand. The five targets were gun-ports, and she hit four out of the five. The men on deck, at easy musket-shot, picked off the few men not engaged below with the guns. And then, as she bore away a little, willy-nilly, from the turning ship the Fortune witnessed an amazing sight. On to the deck from both forward and after-hatches poured the men from the Seville’s gun-deck.

  ‘What is it?’ asked the Fortune’s crew anxiously. ‘Is she going to blow up?’ They were much too close for that to be a pleasant prospect.

  ‘No,’ Henry said. ‘It can’t be that, or they would be throwing themselves into the water. They seem to be holding a protest meeting.’

  ‘Always great talkers, the Spaniards,’ said Bart, sucking a splinter wound.

  ‘Well, let’s use our other broadside before they recover,’ Morris suggested.

  But as they came up with her again they saw that the crew had overrun the poop and were waving bits of cloth in sign of surrender.

  ‘It’s a mutiny,’ they said on the Fortune.

  And while they watched, wondering, the Spaniard’s colours crept down from the masthead.

  ‘What is this?’ asked the Fortune’s crew, suspicious of this easy victory.

  ‘Do you want a boat, Captain?’ asked Kinnell, the bo’sun.

  ‘No; all things considered, we’ll lay her alongside.’

  So in the long oily swell and the subsiding wash of their contending the ships came together, and Henry, leaving Bernard in charge, stepped with Morris over the Seville’s rail to take possession; and to have the mystery of their behaviour explained to him.

  They had a runaway gun.

  One of the Fortune’s shots through the gunports had broken the retaining cable. This would have been bad enough in the regular swell of a sea, but in the broken water of their combined wakes the unpredictability of the free gun’s maniac chargings about the gun-deck had broken their nerve. No gunnery could, in any case, take place while the blind hippopotamus plungings went on. They had seen one of their number killed and one crushed by the runaway, and they had fled to safety and to surrender before the Fortune should begin to batter them at her own sweet will.

  ‘Why didn’t you sail her away?’ asked Henry.

  ‘Away from that?’ they said, with hand-wavings at the Fortune. ‘One might as well try to run away from a wasp.’

  But Henry, looking at the unmaimed ship, still marvelled; and Jack Morris said: ‘God save me from ever being at the mercy of a crew like that.’

  Their precipitancy was a little explained when it was made clear that three of the four men killed by musket-shot on the deck had been officers. The crew had come pouring up from the nightmare below to find no directing mind waiting for them. They had come from a small particular chaos to a larger, more general one, and their panic had swelled in sympathy.

  ‘Well?’ called Bernard Speirdyck, from his temporary command on the Fortune’s quarter-deck. ‘What frightens them?’

  ‘They have a runaway gun. My congratulations to the Fortune’s gunners.’

  ‘Send us over the captain of her, Captain,’ shouted Cornelius, ‘the crew want to hang him.’

  ‘They can’t. They’ve already killed him. My congratulations to the Fortune’s musketeers.’

  They cheered at this, but someone called: ‘Send him over anyway. We’ll hang him as he is.’

  On board the Seville the only dead apart from the three officers were the man killed by the gun and a man who had been pierced through the throat by a wood splinter. The man hurt by the runaway was now having his leg amputated by the surgeon. He had been dragged up on deck by one of the more self-possessed of his fleeing colleagues and was lying by the main hatch, where the surgeon, with that indifference to his surroundings which has come to be a characteristic of his profession, was laying out his knives and saws and needle-and-thread on a napkin. Henry, who had witnessed death in many forms on his voyage out from home—from fever, from accident, from delirium due to alcohol—had not so far seen any surgery performed, and he went down to the main deck to look.

  The leg had been crushed to pulp above the ankle and was a mere oozing mess, but the man did not appear to be in any pain. He looked dazed and indifferent. A friend was engaged in filling him up with rum as an anæsthetic, and Henry could not tell whether his dazed condition was the result of anæsthesia or of his injury.

  ‘He’s about ready,’ the colleague said in his own tongue to the surgeon; whereupon his friends held him while the surgeon sawed briskly through tibia and fibula and expertly sewed up the flaps of flesh. The man made no movement of protest, and the surgeon might have been trying a sock on him for all the effect it seemed to have on him. Henry, on the other hand, was acutely conscious of the sultry air that pressed all round him; air so heavy that the sweet sickly blood smell hung on it and lingered in his nostrils. What was worst was the sight of the foot in its green shoe lying discarded on dec
k. One of the bystanders was also fascinated by this detached part of his comrade. He picked up the shoe, shook the bloody piece of meat from it, and walked away with the shoe.

  This finished the more squeamish Englishman. He went to the side and was very sick.

  The whole of the Seville’s crew had been summoned on deck, and Henry addressed them from the break of the poop in his island Spanish.

  ‘You have surrendered without conditions after an unprovoked attack on an unoffending ship. You did not give us a chance to surrender; you proceeded to murder and sink us without so much as challenging us. It would be no more than justice to drop you over the side and leave you to the sharks. But England does not make war that way. Your three remaining senior officers will come with us to answer for their conduct before a British court. My mate here will choose from among you a crew to work the ship to port. The rest of you will be turned loose in your own boats with the necessary sails and oars and you will, I have no doubt, make the coast without difficulty.’

  Morris, whose Spanish was much more fluent than Henry’s, took consultation with the Spanish bos’n, who had confidently expected to be either tortured or killed outright, and was therefore in his first flush of gratitude and relief; and with his help picked out from the crew the most valuable and dependable members.

  In less than an hour the sheep had been separated from the goats, and the rest were put over the side together with provisions, water, and the invalid. The invalid had passed from his coma-like indifference to something that looked like plain fighting drunk. He had discovered that his shoe had been filched, and was filled with fury and indignation. To pacify him search had been instituted, the enterprising one found, and restitution made; and the invalid went over the side clasping the useless shoe in triumph to his breast.

  Morris took over the Seville with young Cornelius Carstens as mate, leaving the experienced Bernard to be mate of the Fortune and general sea-adviser to Henry; and the two ships made for shelter and provisioning among the South Cays of Cuba. In their search for a ship they had left this run for shelter much too late, and there were moments when it seemed that they would never see those delectable islands, those ‘gardens of the Queen’, at all. The sullen late-July days would break suddenly into shrieking tempest, in the black heart of which they would struggle with halliards that seemed to have an evil and furious life of their own; or they would be beaten to the deck by a solid weight of rain that was like the emptying of buckets. It was not rain at all, as the term is understood. The skies just turned to water and fell down. And wringing the wet out of their clothes in the sodden fo’c’sle, or going aloft to bend a new sail in place of the few sad ribbons that a hurricane had left on the yard, or eating cold tack because the galley fires had been drowned, they did not fail to point out to their master gunner that but for his zeal they would at this moment be snugly at ease in the south of Cuba.