The Privateer

by Josephine Tey

  But the nervous occupants of the fort continued to spray them at intervals with assorted metals during their three hours’ wait, and they were all too busy finding small shelters to sleep.

  ‘Another mistake,’ Morgan remarked. ‘There should not be any unevenness in the ground inside gun range. Don’t they ever think one move ahead?’

  In the half-light of dawn he challenged again, hoping to avoid the certain casualties of frontal attack. Frontal attack was against all his instincts, but in the final resort no method other than frontal attack would take the fort on Santa Catalina.

  This time there was no answer to his challenge; neither verbal nor ballistic. A great silence hung over the fort. They watched it grow clear in the half-light and strained their ears to listen to that eerie silence.

  A trick, they said, it’s a trick.

  ‘Well, trick or no trick,’ Morgan said at length, ‘we have to assault, so let us to it.’

  They rose from their burrows and bankings and came at the fort with a concerted yell. But no guns spoke and no soldier moved on the ramparts; so that their loud defiance tailed away into doubt and their pace slackened as they came up to the walls. What trap was this?

  Then Manuel, always at his best when other men were still rubbing the sleep from their eyes and wishing it were yet night, walked up to the gate and said with a fine flourish of mockery: ‘In the name of his Majesty King Charles the Second of England and in the name of every single Portuguese I command you to surrender.’ And he slapped the gate with a contemptuous hand.

  And the gate swung ajar at the impact and creaked gently shut again.

  While they were still thunderstruck, Manuel kicked the gate open and walked into the fort. They came pounding after him to rescue him, but there was no need for rescue. The fort was deserted.

  ‘The bastards are still using our guns,’ they said, pointing to the royal arms on the cannon.

  ‘But where are they?’ asked Bradley.

  ‘Over there,’ said Morgan, pointing over the battlements at Bluey’s ‘calf’. Across the tiny strait was the second island, so sheer as to be impregnable; and above it floated the flag of Spain.

  ‘We’ll blow them out of it,’ Morgan said.

  ‘We can’t,’ Morris pointed out. ‘They’re out of range.’

  ‘Let them stay!’ said Bradley. ‘It will do them good to look at the English flag every morning.’

  ‘Leave Spain on our doorstep? No! We’ll give them a nearer view of the flag. Cornelius, take a message to the ships for me. Tell them—’

  ‘The channel is too shallow for even a small ship, if that’s what you intend,’ Bernard said. ‘You cannot use ships to bombard.’

  ‘I don’t want the ships to bombard. I am going to blow them out of there with their own guns. Tell Mansfield that I want wood. All the wood he can send me. No, wait. I’ll write a letter. We have all the time in the world.’

  He sat down at the commanding officer’s very fine table and wrote a junior officer’s report to his senior. It was thanks to Mansfield and Mansfield alone that the island was theirs, and all his Celt tact was devoted to making the old man feel that, although he had been absent at the last, he was the author of their victory. He explained, as a suggestion for Mansfield’s approval, what he intended to do and inferred that he was doing only what Mansfield would have done if he had been there.

  When the letter had been sent off he sat for a few moments looking round the dark little room, so safe and so comfortable.

  ‘All night they had,’ he said. ‘All night. And they didn’t even blow the place up behind them.’

  ‘There’s a man here with a basket of yams, Captain,’ said that admirer of zeal, Mr Benrose, master gunner, appearing at his elbow. ‘What shall we do with him?’

  ‘Buy the yams, of course.’

  ‘Buy them. Captain?’

  ‘Yes, certainly. Here is the money. And tell him that we can use anything else they care to bring us.’

  ‘Isn’t that, if you’ll excuse me, Captain, a bit unnecessary? Paying, I mean. We can just take them, surely.’

  ‘Surely we can. And in half an hour every portable delicacy in the island would be well hidden; and they would have to be beaten half dead before they would tell us where. Tell him we’ll buy their produce at the usual rates.’ And as the disapproving Benrose was going: ‘Oh, Benrose. The usual rate will be a third less than he asks, if I know the Spaniard.’

  When he was alone again his thoughts went back to the Spaniards.

  ‘They could have blown us all up,’ he thought. ‘It needed only one man with courage. A slow-burning train.’

  And it occurred to him for the first time that their entry to the fort had been much too casual and trusting. They should at least have searched for the train that was not there. He must remember that next time.

  7

  Morgan’s edict about paying for food was, of course, a counsel of perfection. It did not prevent men from taking produce as it pleased them in their comings and goings about the island.

  ‘Who made this farm, anyhow?’ they would say virtuously if the owner dared to protest. ‘Us English.’ Although the only crop that any of them had ever taken a personal interest in was chickweed for a cage-bird.

  But few remonstrated. The civilian inhabitants who farmed the hot little valleys were too thankful to be alive and free to be critical of their conquerors. All they did was to see to it that as much as possible of what they had went to the fort, where it would be paid for, before it was stolen by passers-by. So every morning a long line of slaves trailed through the gate of the fort bearing on their heads the best the island had to offer, and the difficult matter of provisioning was taken care of.

  ‘You will take us with you when you go?’ the slaves would say hopefully; for it was a popular belief among the slaves of all the Spanish dominions that life as a slave in an English colony was a bed of roses. Negro or Indian, the dream of their life was to be captured by the English.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll take you!’ the English said. ‘You’re the only thing of value on the island.’ And Wish, the Sussex man, seeing a negro bent almost double under a load, relieved him of part of it, saying: ‘Don’t strain yourself, black boy. I’ve got a share in you.’

  Never again was Morgan to experience the family-party air of their stay on Santa Catalina. This picnic air was due partly to the fact that the captains of the four ships were friends and understood each other, partly to the lack of booty to quarrel over, partly to the amiability of the climate, partly to the fact that their only casualties had been five wounded, partly to the lack of drink and the absence of towns, but mostly it was due to the fact that they were too busy to be invaded by grievances or jealousies.

  For the first few days they collected and transported timber to make the bridge of boats that Morgan needed to span the narrow strait; cutting and hewing fresh stuff when it was found that there would not be enough. Then they manhandled the guns from the fort down the slope and across the dipping bridge. The guns alternately balked and made mad rushes, after the manner of heavy, inanimate objects, and the men sweated and laughed and cursed and coaxed them with endless good-humour. They had nicknames for all the guns, after the immemorial habit of the English. ‘Whoa, Bess!’ they would say, ‘take your time, lass!’ or ‘Come up, Bow-legs, you bitch!’

  And as Morgan watched them his normally sombre eyes were bright with amusement.

  ‘Damn you, Tenerife, haul!’ he shouted at the huge, indolent sailor. ‘It’s not a stay-lace you’re pulling!’ And under cover of the laughter, to Jack Morris, who was standing beside him: ‘I wonder when it will occur to them that the slaves might be doing this!’

  ‘Why don’t you mobilise the slaves for it?’ Jack asked.

  ‘And have nearly two hundred idle seamen on my hands!’

  It was not until the last gun had reached sea-level and was being dragged on to the bridge that it did occur to any of them that their toil was
gratuitous, and then it was to Tenerife that enlightenment came. He straightened himself in the act of laying hold and said: ‘Why are we doing all this?’ and his mates stopped to consider what he might mean. Then the sheer absurdity of the thing struck Tenerife in full force. He slapped the butt of the gun with his open palm and roared with laughter. He looked up the slope to where Morgan was standing, and something in Morgan’s face caught his attention.

  ‘You fooled us, Harry Morgan!’ he yelled.

  It was the first time that his crew had ever dropped the ‘captain’ in favour of the affectionate familiar, and it was by way of being the accolade.

  Morgan looked down at the upturned faces, half doubtful, not yet either amused or angry.

  ‘I was merely taking thought for your property.’

  ‘Property?’ they said.

  ‘You want the slaves in good fat condition for the auctioneer, don’t you? No one will pay less for your carcases because they are a little underweight.’

  ‘Aah!’ they shouted, in one eloquent syllable announcing their perception of the sophistry, their appreciation of it, and their refusal of it. And one of them resolved the situation by calling: ‘They’re your slaves too, Harry. Come on and haul.’

  And Morgan came down through the patting hands and the jests as if he were the hero of a victory, instead of the man who had made them labour like slaves for the last five days, and took his place among them, and together they hauled the last gun over to the island.

  But the sight of that gun was too much for Don Esteban del Campo, safe but a little hungry on Bluey’s ‘calf’. He had watched the incredible English make their bridge and dismantle the fort, with a dreary envy of their persistence and their ingenuity. And now, when there was nothing in front of him but the prospect of sitting still and submitting to bombardment, he made his last retreat. He sent a messenger down to the bridge to say that if the conditions still included a return to Spain for all, then he would surrender; and presently the flag on the island was hauled down, and the prisoners began to file across the little strait.

  ‘Jesus!’ said the sailors, watching the endless stream of men from the tiny island, some of them farm-owners who had taken refuge in the fort, but most of them soldiers. ‘Crowds and crowds of them. Crowds and crowds. And all they could do was sit on their bottoms on a rock and hold each other’s hands!’

  When Morgan said as much, in more diplomatic terms, to the commandant of the military detachment, the soldier, a bright young man who did not look as though defence would be his natural choice, said: ‘Señor Captain, in the Spanish dominions we suffer from cousins. Sometimes it is nephews or uncles, but most often it is cousins. The English are new in America—if you will forgive the crude expression of a truth—and, with you, who captures also keeps. But Spain is already old in this new world, and the men who keep are not the ones who captured, but the cousin of someone at home who has the appointment in his gift. It will happen to England too, in time, that someone’s cousin keeps the land men died to win.’

  ‘I understand.’

  You must not blame Don Esteban. He is a charming man; much interested in horticulture and in the various species of moths. He admired very much the way the English had planted the island, more especially your fruit trees. The English have a genius for the growing of fruit trees. Perhaps it is that your sun is kindly, or perhaps it is that in your island no enemy comes every few years to cut them down.’

  It was Mansfield, once more upright, who took surrender of the island, and he was gracious enough to hand back to Don Esteban the sword the Governor proffered. That, he remarked afterwards, was as far as he would go in obliging a Spaniard. The prisoners were locked up in the fort and fed on the weevily biscuits that the ships’ crews, gorged on island goodness, had not needed.

  ‘Just look at that harbour!’ Mansfield gloated that evening as he stood with Morgan looking down at the lagoon. ‘What a base to work from! Do you see that harbour filled with fat prizes dripping emeralds out of every port?’

  ‘Yes, but out there,’ Morgan nodded towards the horizon, ‘a month or two from now I see the whole Spanish navy.’

  ‘Yes, yes. It is time we got back. Time we arranged for a proper garrison. I thought we should have a quarrel about who is to stay, but it seems that Captain Hadsell is not very happy in his subordinate position and would be glad to have a command again, even the temporary command of Santa Catalina. And the wounded must stay until they can come home in comfort on the ship that brings the garrison. Forty men should be enough to keep my little island until the garrison arrives. It will be a long time before the news reaches Panama, and longer still before the Spanish organise themselves into doing anything about it.’

  Morgan agreed about Spanish dilatoriness, and wished to himself that he did not have to leave Bart behind. Bart had had the back of his heel shaved off by a fragment of Spanish metal, and it was proving a bad wound to heal. It would be absurd to submit him to the unnecessary discomfort of the long and intolerably crowded voyage home, when he could come after them with his wound healed and in good condition a few weeks later. But he hated to sail without Bart. He had found a friend in Jack Morris, and a patron in Modyford, but the place Bartholomew Kindness held in his heart was all his own.

  ‘How long will it be before that wound is healed?’ he asked Exmeling.

  ‘Who knows? Who knows?’ said little Henrik. ‘It is the wrong time of the moon for wounds to heal.’

  So Harry resigned himself to parting with Bart until some favourable moon would reunite them. Bart himself made no fuss about being left, and seemed quite happy carving toy wooden animals.

  And Morgan was glad in the event that he had not tried to take Bart with them. It was a much longer voyage home; a long, weary tack against a wind like a brick wall. And, between the captive slaves and the Spanish prisoners, the ships were overcrowded to an intolerable degree. Anti-climax set in and tempers frayed. No one sang any longer. Even Bluey’s jew’s-harp was silent. It was hell.

  But there was a sharp return to good humour and expectancy when at last the outline of Jamaica was clear on the horizon. And when they filed in stately procession—Endeavour, Fortune, Dolphin and May Flower—past the crowd on the battlements of Fort Charles, the enthusiasm of that crowd restored to the crews their island mood of achievement and well-being. The two French sloops had arrived nearly a fortnight before, and the whole of Port Royal had been waiting for this return. The waves of cheering that came over the water to them would have restored even the half-dead.

  Yet something was to please Henry even more than the cheers. When he joined Mansfield on the Endeavour to accompany him ashore, he found the Captain surrounded by congratulatory citizens, and while he waited by Mansfield’s side an old man plucked his sleeve and said: ‘My cherry-trees, sir: are they still there? I have wondered very often about my cherry-trees.’

  ‘Were you one of the settlers on Santa Catalina?’ Morgan asked, taken by surprise.

  ‘On Providence, sir. On Providence. Oh, yes; yes. I had a very pleasant, well-watered little place there. There are several of us here in Jamaica, settlers from Providence. I have wondered very often about my cherry-trees.’

  You will be able to go back and see for yourself now,’ Morgan assured him; and savoured this new, impersonal satisfaction.

  ‘Now, my little taker of prizes, we go to meet the lightnings,’ Mansfield said, when the crowd had lessened. ‘And you will come with me and hold my hand. I am not very happy in the presence of that uncle of yours who is not your uncle.’

  But the lightnings, when the culprits came within range of them, proved to be of the ‘sheet’ variety: a mere token illumination. It is not every colonial Governor who finds himself in a position to present a new piece of territory to his royal master. And when the Governor is also in the position of working his passage home, politically speaking, the opportunity is not one to be cast aside. Captain Mansfield was reprimanded for exceeding his commission, for
giving offence to a nominally friendly Power, and for using Government stores and endangering English lives in an expedition of his own devising.

  ‘We took the place without the loss of a life, English or Spanish,’ Mansfield said proudly.

  ‘The English took Jamaica without the loss of a life,’ the Governor reminded him smoothly.

  ‘And they’ve been worried by the danger of losing it ever since. They will have less to worry about now,’ Mansfield said, indestructibly complacent. ‘It needs only a hundred to garrison my little island, and the Spaniards will have no base in the middle of the Caribbean any more.’

  But it seemed that nothing like a hundred men were available at the moment. The military had been disbanded in view of the coming peace and had taken, more or less willingly, to planting. A proper garrison for the island would have to come from England. Meanwhile, however, a ship bound for the coast of Nicaragua to load logwood would drop off Major Smith and a small detachment to reinforce the forty men left on Santa Catalina.

  ‘Major Smith is a very able person, and will govern the island until such time as His Majesty appoints someone to the post.’

  ‘I don’t think Charlie Hadsell will take very kindly to being subordinate to a Major,’ Mansfield said to Morgan as the Governor turned away to pour out wine for them.

  But Henry was wishing that he could have seen that letter of Modyford’s to the Government at home. How much had Sir Thomas identified himself with the capture of Santa Catalina?

  It seemed that he must have identified himself pretty considerably with the affair, for he not only attended the auction of the slaves the following morning, but was himself a purchaser. The hundred slaves from Santa Catalina, having attained their life’s lowly ambition, were upstanding, confident and smiling, and were sold for fabulous prices. Not only did they lack the bewildered air, the animal helplessness, of the boat-loads fresh from Africa; they spoke fluent Spanish and were used to a planting life. Many of them were second-generation slaves, born in captivity, and all of them had lived a healthy life in a good climate.