The Privateer

by Josephine Tey

But the days went by, and the plan grew tighter and neater, and still no ship brought Mansfield into shelter at Isle of Pines. Nor did any ship that put in have news of him. And in the end they sailed without him; sailed east, through the endless small islands, to the Gardens of the Queen. To port lay the great bulk of Cuba, five times the size of Jamaica, well settled, well fortified, and solidly Spanish. But the islands along its south coast were anyone’s ground; an adventurer’s paradise. And it was among those islands, close under the lee of Cuba, that they hid their ships before they took to the boats for their inspired impertinence.

  The landing was done at night, on deserted beaches, so that it should be unheralded and so that the forced march over the hills could be done for the most part in daylight, and therefore at the necessary speed to bring them down to the plain before the following dawn.

  Henry had left nothing to chance, and his crew made merry over the detailed arrangements (‘Is it you I give my hand to when we meet in the Grand Chain?’ said Bluey to his companion on the thwart as they pulled away from the Fortune), but his care was justified, and one by one the boats slid up the dark sand in the appointed order at the appointed time, and the men went to cover in the order in which they would set out on the march as soon as it was light. Charlie Hadsell, being the authority on the country, led the advance party, and the rest followed on his heels; each man carrying his own ammunition and enough food for two meals. The soldiers in the Fortune’s crew had suffered much during their weeks as seamen, both from unaccustomed tasks and too accustomed comment, but now they came into their own. The seamen, improvident as always, ate their food when the pangs of hunger prompted, and arrived at the midday halt destitute. They also arrived footsore. And the still limber soldiers laughed at them as they ate their dutifully conserved rations.

  Early in the afternoon, in a small sudden valley, they came on a shack where a man and his wife were living with two children: a baby and a boy of seven. And it was here that they made their first mistake. They took the man with them for safety’s sake, but left the boy.

  It was Hadsell who made the second and more serious mistake. He lost his way; and, being Hadsell, refused to admit it. By the time that the error was so patent that even Hadsell could no longer support an appearance of libelled virtue, the damage had been done and they were two hours late on schedule. The dawn overtook them still struggling along bridle paths and through unexpected streams, sweating and cursing, blistered and chafed. And when they cleared the last ridge and looked down on the town it was nearly eight o’clock.

  Very clear and neat and bright-coloured lay the town, all gay tiles and dazzling wash, like a child’s toy. And very active indeed was the town that they were to have taken by a surprise attack in the dawn. Trumpets sang and horsemen galloped and fugitives ran from the cattle-black plains into the shelter of the city; and from the other side of the city a trickle of laden mules showed how the rich and the provident were already sending their treasure to hiding in the farther hills.

  The privateers, English and French, gathered on the slope and stared. Bluey took the boots from round his neck, and hobbled to a rock. ‘We wasn’t expecting a reception committee,’ he said, ‘but if there’s a pair of cloth slippers in that town ten thousand Dons won’t keep me out of it.’

  A whine came through the still morning air and something fell with a brisk crash through the trees below them. Then three more whines and crashes in quick succession.

  ‘Cannon!’ said Bluey. ‘God love us, a battery. And me with nothing but a pair of bleeding feet and a musket.’

  But Henry was looking at the smoke of the discharged cannon where it floated up from an orange-grove between them and the town.

  ‘He’s a fool, whoever he is,’ he said. ‘He should never have taken those guns out of the town.’

  ‘Who is responsible for this?’ the French wanted to know.

  ‘It is too early for inquests,’ Morgan said.

  ‘But someone must be punished for the blunder.’

  ‘The blunder, gentlemen, was to under-estimate the heart of a seven-year-old.’

  ‘Seven-year-old what?’

  ‘Boy.’

  ‘You mean a child reported our coming?’

  ‘If you doubt it, look at his father’s face,’ Henry said, nodding to where the Spanish settler was standing, still a prisoner. The man’s face shone with glory.

  ‘If it had been my luck to get a son like that,’ Henry said, ‘that is how I should look too.’

  ‘So; and now?’

  ‘I suggest that we send a party round behind that battery to deprive that silly fellow of his cannon and leave the road clear for us. After that, we shall send a message into the town to make an offer: we will refrain from a siege if they surrender their cattle.’

  But while the battery was being tendered harmless, it became evident that siege was not in the Spaniards’ minds. They believed in counter-attack. As the privateers came down en masse towards the town two troops of cavalry came trotting out, formed into line, broke into a canter, and came charging at the astonished invaders. The sailors, taken aback, hesitated and made as if to run for cover. But to the soldiers this was an old story, and they reacted automatically to the stimulus. They dropped to their knees, primed and loaded their clumsy muskets with unhurrying fingers, propped them with an artist’s care, took a leisurely aim, and fired. The charging line wavered and broke, and fled away to either side like a river meeting a rock. The soldiers took down their muskets and began to reload while the cavalry circled backwards to reform. The sailors, heartened by this demonstration, recovered their presence of mind and imitated the soldiers. And the cavalry, coming back, were greeted with something that was to become famous as a destroyer of far finer formations than the gallant defenders of Puerto Principe: the withering blast of steady English musketry. It was too much for them, and they did not attempt a third charge. They fled for the shelter of the town.

  And on their heels came the once more confident invaders. Not as a mob, but in formation, with colours and drum. They had come to demand the surrender of a town, and they would do it decently and in due form. But the town did not wait for parley. The town began firing as soon as they were within range.

  ‘The hasty, excitable bastards,’ said the English. ‘Can’t they be still for a minute and listen?’

  So they drew off a little, and Morgan sent in a messenger. Let the Spaniards give them two things: free entry into the town, and a guarantee that they could drive off all the cattle they needed without interference, and no harm would come to the life or private property of any of the inhabitants.

  The Spaniards’ answer, translated into the vernacular, proved to be: ‘A likely story!’ So the English, hungry and exasperated, began to fight their way into the town, street by street; snatching food from the empty houses as they went. A bedridden old man in a room on the outskirts told them that the Alcalde had been killed leading the cavalry charge, and the Bishop had taken over the volunteer infantry he had raised—seven hundred of them, according to the invalid—and was in charge of the town. He had sent all women and children to safety in the church.

  Morgan blessed the Bishop for his common-sense, and discounted the seven hundred. From the size of the place, at least half of that number must be slaves and coloured men. They would be into the heart of the town by noon.

  But it was nearly evening before they debouched into the main square and found the Bishop, very magnificent, waiting on the steps of the church to make formal surrender, and by that time a great many of their number were lying dead or wounded in the shadow of the silent streets. The Spanish method of house-building—the tiny grilled windows, the back-of-the-house-to-the-street—was ideal for defence, as the invaders had found. Exmeling and his assistants were busy.

  Morgan, very angry at being made to fight for something he had not particularly wanted, was stiff with the Bishop. His terms, he said, had been honest ones; but his price now was, of course, higher. As well
as the beef, and the salt to pickle it, he would demand a money ransom as the price of not sacking Puerto Principe.

  Alas, said the Bishop, there was no money in the town.

  ‘No,’ said Morgan, ‘it went out by the mule-load this morning. You will get it back by noon tomorrow. If there is not enough to make up the sum, the balance will be contributed from the private property of the citizens. Meanwhile you will order your men to provide a meal for three hundred and fifty within an hour from now, here in the main square; and you will send out food for another fifty to the French who are picketing the approaches to the town. And now, direct me to the Alcalde’s house.’

  The house, which stood on the square, bore evidences of a hasty gathering together of valuables, all of which were now either in church with the Alcalde’s women-folk, or safe in the farther hills. But it was not for valuables that Morgan had come. It was neither silver nor jewels that he planned to take out of Puerto Principe. He found what he had come for in the Alcalde’s office, a neat, cool room at the end of the courtyard. In the Alcalde’s desk he found it: a list of seventy names. Above the list was the heading: Enlistments For The Projected Expedition Against Jamaica: The Puerto Principe Contingent. That this contingent of seventy had not been bubbling over with desire to go in arms against the English in Jamaica was witnessed to by the tidy-minded Alcalde, who had added after each man’s name, for his own private information, the reason why the man had consented to be pressed.

  This was satisfying enough, but when Henry turned over the paper and found what was attached to it, he nearly laughed aloud. The attached document was a letter from Havana, from the Governor of Cuba. The Governor congratulated the Alcalde on his success in the recruiting business, specified the numbers contributed by the other districts of the island, and detailed the plan for eventual concentration before attack. Contingents from the mainland, said the Governor, would arrive in the next few months. Those from Vera Cruz and Campeche would rendezvous at Havana, those from Puerto Bello and Cartagena at St Jago.

  As Henry’s eye lighted on the word Puerto Bello, the breath came out of him in a silent laugh that was praise and prayer and amusement and satisfaction all rolled into one. The road to Puerto Bello was open.

  Henry slept that night in the bed of the dead Alcalde; and the only ghost that haunted his slumbers was the image of Bartholomew Kindness, working his heart out as a slave on the fortifications of Puerto Bello. In the morning he was brusque with the delaying tactics of the Bishop, who was patently hoping for rescue from the capital.

  ‘Havana is three hundred miles away,’ said Henry, ‘and I have enough men to hold the roads from there for weeks.’

  So the Bishop gave up, and the mules began to file back into the town, and herders were mobilised to drive the cattle down to the coast, and salt was weighed and loaded on to the mules that had brought back the treasure. But about one thing the Bishop stuck his toes in. He would not produce the boy who had brought the message warning the town of their arrival; and the never very shockable Henry was shocked to his soul when he discovered that the Bishop’s refusal was due to the Bishop’s belief (which he apparently shared with all his flock) that it was their intention to torture the child.

  ‘Great God, what minds!’ said Henry. And to the Bishop, who was once more reporting his inability to find the boy: ‘I wanted to meet the boy because I admire him. Is that too much for a Spanish understanding? Because if I had a son I should like him to be just like that.’

  The Bishop looked first surprised, then doubtful, and ultimately relieved, and the boy was at last produced. Morgan was dining with his fellow Captains at the Alcalde’s house when the child was brought to the house by his father. It was the fourth and last night of their stay in Puerto Principe, and the meal had an air of celebration. Tomorrow they would bundle and go, following the cattle-drive down to the sea, and they were mellow with achievement and good-fellowship. They received the astonished child with acclamation, piled cushions on a chair until they reached a convenient height, and set him among them at table.

  ‘Do you know why we have sent for you?’ Morgan asked him, in Spanish.

  ‘My father says that it is to do me honour,’ said the child. ‘But that does not seem to me likely. I have been a thorn in your foot when you were in a hurry. Why should you want to do me honour?’

  ‘Because you had courage and resource, and the English admire all who have courage and resource.’

  ‘In that case,’ said the child, ‘may I have some of the honey-cake?’

  They plied him with dainties, and toasted him in English, Welsh, and Spanish; in rum, wine and brandy; and he sat eating composedly and watched the laughing, unaccountable English making their incomprehensible gestures. By the time their mellowness had grown blurred and a little fuddled, he had fallen asleep where he sat. And Morgan, still sober, picked him up and carried him outside to his waiting father. For a moment, as he saw the limp body in the Englishman’s arms, the man’s eyes widened with dread.

  ‘I am afraid he is going to be very sick tomorrow,’ Morgan said. ‘We have allowed him to eat everything in sight.’

  And the man let his breath out again, and smiled.

  ‘You are a good man, señor,’ he said.

  No one, so far, had ever called Morgan that. He handed over the child half-amused, half-embarrassed.

  ‘Good-night,’ he said. ‘I envy you your son.’

  And went back to spend the rest of the night at table. For they were leaving at dawn and it was not worth while to go to bed.

  Before the birds wakened, the silent half-light was filled with the beat of drums summoning the men to muster in the square, and before the sun was far enough up to clear the surrounding hills they were marching out.

  ‘I’d like to have seen what those señoras in the church looked like,’ Bluey said as they left the town behind them. ‘But at least I got me slippers.’

  He had two pairs. The ones he was wearing, of soft Spanish leather; and a jewel-trimmed satin pair which he had filched for a girl in Port Royal.

  They did the thirty miles to the sea on wings; and even the hard work waiting them on the beach was not sufficient to damp their spirits. Indeed, they faced the slaughter and dismemberment of a thousand head of cattle in a spirit of saturnalia, and for days the beach was a riot of carnage. Sweating and bloodstained they laboured, under the canopy of screaming birds: flaying, eviscerating, jointing. Jack Morris had brought up the ships at the appointed time from their hiding-place in the Cays, and they stood around waiting to be loaded. The barrels were floated ashore from them empty, and filled with the salted flesh. Higher up the beach were the slow fires where the choice bits, cut into strips, were being smoked into boucan. The wounded, who had been sent out to the ships in advance of the cattle-drive, made miraculous recoveries and found excuses for trips to the beach so that they might purloin the coveted marrow-bones.

  It was in the matter of marrow-bones that the first break in good temper showed among the labouring crews. Marrow-bones were perquisites, more prized than meat or offal, and the rage of the man who found his hard-won delicacy snatched from under his nose was in direct proportion to his growing weariness and the blue haze of flies in which he worked. The wounded were harried back to the ships, but tempers did not sweeten perceptibly with their disappearance. It was the fifth day of their orgy, and the beach stank in the sun, a mile of slaughter-house, when, with the suddenness of an explosion, uncertain temper flared into riot. ‘Salaud! Salaud!’ screamed a high French voice above the shrieking birds, and one part of the long beach became immediately black with men, as ants swarm to a point of interest.

  Morgan, who had been standing in the shade of the first trees, testing the samples of boucan brought to him, shouted: ‘Stay where you are! Not a man moves a step!’ and the sound of his voice stayed the men below him from their instinctive rush to the centre of trouble. They stood looking doubtfully from Morgan to the distant clamour, their butcher’s knives
in their hands, their ears still hearing that French challenge.

  Morgan, who wanted to go at once to the scene of the fight, was held there by the necessity of controlling them; if he moved, then they would move with him. But he was saved from having to resolve the situation, for the centre of trouble was moving rapidly towards him along the shore. Indeed, it seemed that the whole east end of the beach, the French end, was advancing en masse. In the heart of the human mass was a small swirl which proved as they came nearer to be a man struggling in the grip of his fellows. He was fighting like a maniac, in spite of the fact that a moment’s consideration would have shown him that with odds several hundreds to one against him it might be as well to go quietly.

  They dragged this whirling piece of human protest up to Morgan, and yelled: ‘This creature of yours has killed one of our men! He must be executed! He must be executed immediately!’

  ‘I have no power to execute anyone,’ Morgan said coolly. ‘But an inquiry will be held. Whose man is he?’

  He was one of the Gift’s crew, they said. And he had stabbed a Frenchman in the back with a knife. He must be executed forthwith.

  Morgan looked at the unlovely object of their animosity, and was troubled by a vague sense of familiarity. The man was caked to the eyes with dried blood but none of it seemed to be his; he had just not bothered to wash lately. From the brown-streaked face the silly, pale eyes, distended and shallow, stared with an animal fury. Surely, thought Henry, he knew those eyes?

  ‘Why did you take a knife to the Frenchman?’ he asked.

  ‘He stole my marrow-bones! He stole the whole of my first lot, and I found him making off with the ones I had saved today! Killing’s too good for him. He ought to be carved up bit by bit, like a bullock, only alive!’

  Yes, the voice went with the eyes. But whose voice, and whose eyes?

  The French clamour had broken out again. The man must be strung up. The sun could not be allowed to go down on a comrade unavenged, on an insult unpaid for.