The Privateer

by Josephine Tey

  ‘Your comrade was a thief, it appears.’

  A torrent of contradictory information and comment greeted this.

  But Morgan was suddenly very still. A trail of smoke from the boucan fires had provided the stimulus he needed. For a moment he was back in that camp in Barbados, with the wild pig roasting, and the boucan drying, and Bart doling out his day’s purchases. And he knew now who the man was.

  It was Timsy.

  Timsy, who had helped him to capture the Gloria. Timsy, the born killer with a child’s passion for candy. Timsy, who had gone overside at Tortuga with a fortune in pearls in his pocket.

  ‘If the man has committed murder,’ he said, ‘he will be put in irons and sent back to stand his trial in Port Royal.’

  ‘Aaah!’ they yelled. ‘You want to save him. You are cheating us. When he is back in Port Royal you will let him go.’

  ‘On the contrary, he will almost certainly hang.’

  ‘Then hang him now! Let us see him hanged.’

  ‘You can go to Port Royal and see him hanged. The Law does not concern itself with the ordinary citizen’s convenience.’

  ‘Law!’ they yelled. ‘We want justice, not law!’

  ‘You will get both, I hope. What you are asking at the moment is neither one nor the other. There is law in the islands, and if a man does wrong he will stand trial for it before a properly constituted court. You are all at liberty to be present at the trial and to provide witnesses against the man.’ He saw out of the tail of his eye that Tom Rogers had materialised at his side. ‘I am handing over the man to the custody of his own Captain, and he will be sent back in the sloop that is sailing for Port Royal the day after tomorrow. I shall ask Captain Gascoone, as the senior Captain among you, to arrange for witnesses to be sent at the same time to state your case.’

  ‘And you think an English court will condemn their own man!’

  ‘Certainly. Would not a French one do as much?’ As this gave them pause, he added: ‘We come of civilised races, the French and the English. Let us not descend to Spanish ideas of justice.’

  Their rage had sunk to grumbling by the time Pierre Gascoone arrived, and they allowed Timsy to be pried from their clutches and handed over to his Captain, who sent him under escort to the Gift.

  ‘I won’t waste any tears over Timothy Hare,’ Tom Rogers said, Watching him go. ‘He was always more trouble than he was worth. Half crazy, I think.’

  But Morgan was miserable.

  He sat late, that night, by the dead fire in front of his tent ashore, unable to sleep. And presently there was a stirring in the bushes and Bluey’s voice said: ‘Beg pardon, Captain, but can I speak to you for a moment, sir?’

  ‘What is it, Bluey?’

  ‘You’re going to let him go, aren’t you, Captain?’

  ‘No, Bluey, I am not.’

  ‘But Captain, it’s Timsy!’

  ‘Yes, I know. He must stand his trial, just like anyone else.’

  ‘But they’ll hang him, Captain. They’ll hang him, sure’s death.’

  ‘Yes, I am afraid they will. His victim was innocent.’

  ‘But he doesn’t have to get to the Port, Captain. He could just disappear quietly over the side some night. There’s plenty of islands where—’

  ‘No, Bluey. He is going to Port Royal. He is going to be tried in public, to show all the French, and all the Islands, that English justice is what it represents itself to be.’

  There was silence for a little, while Bluey was apparently trying to understand his Captain’s point of view. In this he failed, it would seem.

  ‘I suppose I just don’t see it your way. Captain.’ And then he added unhappily: ‘He thinks you’re going to let him go. Captain. He won’t understand. Couldn’t you just talk to him and—and—well, explain things somehow to him?’

  ‘What good would that do?’

  ‘He wouldn’t think then that you did it without caring. I mean, if you explain to him why it has to be, he won’t think we’ve just let him die without it mattering to us one way or the other.’

  ‘I see. I’ll think about it, Bluey.’

  And having thought about it, he went next evening to see Timsy, sitting in irons in the Gift’s fo’c’sle.

  ‘You’re going to let me go, aren’t you, Harry?’ he said, his wide, unadult eyes searching Morgan’s.

  ‘No, Timsy; I am not.’

  ‘But, Harry; but, Captain—’

  ‘I came to see you for that very reason: to tell you why I can’t let you go. You believe I would if it was in my power, don’t you?’

  ‘But you can. Captain. You can.’

  It was hopeless from the start, of course. It was no more possible to make poor Timsy understand than it had been to make Bluey see some reason in the course he was taking. He went away from the Gift with Timsy’s agonised cries in his ears. ‘Harry! you can’t! You can’t! If you send me to Port Royal they’ll hang me! Harry, you don’t have to. You don’t have to!’

  And when the sloop sailed with the dispatches for Modyford, the dispatches he was so proud of—the evidence that he had promised to obtain about the proposed invasion of Jamaica, and his account of the taking of Puerto Principe—it carried also one prisoner in irons on his way to trial at Port Royal.

  And Henry watched it go, soberly, his schoolboy elation about Puerto Principe almost dead within him. He could not hope that his own men would understand any better than Bluey the abstractions of equity. They would believe only that he had sacrificed a fellow-countryman in order to placate the French. So he watched the little ship bear away his triumphant dispatches, and was conscious only of a bleak feeling under his ribs.

  He was growing up.

  10

  ‘It’s a good thing we’re five hundred miles from Port Royal,’ Jack said, watching the pay-queue snake along the beach at Isle of Pines, ‘or we’d never get a man of them to the mainland of America.’

  The ransom from Puerto Principe had worked out at fifteen pounds a head, and to men whose only coin for months was either a luck-piece or a dud this was riches. Balked of the opportunity for immediate spending, they fell back on their second love, and gambled from morning till night. If they won they celebrated, if they lost they drowned their sorrows; and there was not one of the nine captains who did not breathe a sigh of relief when at last the anchors came up and the ships filed out on their long journey to the mainland.

  Eight well-found ships followed the Fortune out of the roads at Isle of Pines, but the Endeavour was not one of them. Mansfield was still unaccounted for. And of the nine captains only three knew their destination: Morgan, Jack Morris, and Charlie Hadsell. There was to be no gossip, blown seed-like on the wind, to warn Puerto Bello behind its smug fortifications. So it was not until weeks later, down off the American coast, that Morgan faced his colleagues with the proposition that they take Puerto Bello.

  It was almost summer by that time, and the ships, loitering at the rendezvous, creaked and sweltered. Canvas flapped irresolute in the hot air, and men pursued a piece of shade across the deck with an ardour they had never brought to the pursuit of women. One by one the ship’s boats ferried the various captains to the conference on board the Fortune, and Henry set before them the best meal that Toni’s galley could produce; feeling, rightly, that to stomach Puerto Bello would require some preliminary cushioning.

  But, as it turned out, two-thirds of them took the dose with every sign of pleasure, with laughter and admiring oaths; only the French gagged. The French would have none of it.

  ‘It is insane,’ said the French. ‘The place is notorious. It is the boast of Spain, the fortifications there. No one would survive such a foolhardy expedition.’

  ‘But I have told you: I have no intention of trying to force the place. We take it from inland.’

  ‘A hundred miles in small boats, and then nothing but pistols and cutlasses against a town with three fortresses!’ said the French. ‘No! No, indeed; we thank you, but no!’<
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  And from that nothing would move them; not even Henry at his most persuasive. Not even the dazzling pictures he painted of the wealth of Puerto Bello, the port of the Isthmus, the funnel through which drained all the riches that Panama, the capital, had gathered from the Pacific coast of Central America, moved the practical French to any noticeable degree. It was an insane project, and they would have none of it.

  And that evening he watched a third of his fleet crowd on sail to catch the heavy airs and float gracefully into the darkness and out of his ken.

  ‘Let them go,’ said Jack. ‘I feel more comfortable when I don’t have to watch the ground in case I tread on someone’s toes.’

  But Henry was hurt.

  ‘After Cuba, they might have trusted me,’ he said, sulky and injured. And then, recovering, he flung an arm round his friend and said with sudden relish: ‘But ah, how sorry they are going to be that they did not come with us.’

  And sorry they were. Very sorry indeed.

  The English took two hundred and fifty thousand pieces-of-eight out of Puerto Bello; together with treasure worth half as much again. For that they paid in blisters, bites, sweat, sunburn, wounds and heat-stroke; but only eighteen of them with their lives. And in after years they were accustomed to refer to ‘that time at Puerto Bello’ as a kind of paradise; a whole month of ease and fat living. Indeed, the only part of the exploit that left any permanent mark on them was the boat trip. A hundred miles in open rowing-boats under a tropical sun is no pleasure jaunt, and there was not one of the four hundred who did not wince in remembering it.

  Henry would have brought the ships fifty miles nearer if he could have chosen, but there was no wind to sail them. And to hang about the coast waiting for a wind was to put the mainland on its guard, and so deprive them of their trump card. So they toiled the whole hundred miles in the boats, watching the green, secret coast slip by with a maddening slowness; setting a rag of sail hopefully when the air stirred, only to take it down a few minutes later and take to the oars again. Every hour the oars weighed more, moved more clumsily in the rowlocks, and came more reluctantly out of the water. It was like rowing through treacle with a piece of mast. The colourless light, constant and pitiless, beat off the sea in their faces; and the blazing heat, constant and pitiless, beat down from the sky on their defenceless bodies. At noon, for two hours, they put in to the shore and lay like dead men; indifferent to the million stinging insects as long as they were for a little in the shade and it was not their turn to man an oar. Evening came like a pardon; and night was a haven that taught them the meaning of salvation.

  It was on a still midnight, half-lit by a rising new moon, that they came to shore for the last time, and left their boats behind them. In front of them was the wet green forest, and beyond the forest was the Beautiful Port of their ambition. And to lead them through the swampy woods to their goal they had the ideal guide: the maroon who had brought the message from Major Smith. The maroon nowadays led an uncertain existence as assistant to Toni (whose temperament had all the violence of the would-be artist), but there was nothing uncertain in his knowledge of the forests through which he had escaped; nor anything uncertain about his joy in being the means of retribution. He had a long account chalked up against the Spaniard.

  At three o’clock in the morning, the maroon led them into a clearing and said that this was as far as they could go. They were now behind the town; and less than five hundred yards in front of them, through the screen of trees, was the inland one of the three forts: San Jeronimo. It stood by itself on a small promontory jutting into the bay, and commanded the town as the two other forts, on either side of the harbour entrance, commanded the mouth of the bay. It was a quadrangular redoubt of stone with a great wooden door on the land side. In front of the door was a flat paved terrace where a sentry was always on duty.

  Morgan wanted that sentry, and the maroon offered to bring him in if a volunteer would go with him. Out of an immediate press of volunteers Morgan chose the one whose guile, grace, impudence, courage and complete ruthlessness made it likely that he would not only be able to approach the sentry without announcing his presence, but that he would bring back the man as expected. So Manuel went with the maroon, the two slim, dark figures melting into the forest without a sound; and the others, with the sailor’s infinite capacity for casual slumber, curled themselves up on the hot, damp ground and relaxed. They roused themselves half an hour later to inspect the gibbering captive who stood propped between an amused Manuel and a grim maroon. Manuel had used the same technique as a very young Henry Morgan had used to silence the watchman on the Gloria: the padded hand over the mouth and the knife in the small of the back. The suddenness of it all had been too much for the wretched Spaniard, and only the solid grip of his captors kept him erect at all. He babbled all he knew at the first asking. The fort was undermanned: only a hundred and thirty men all told. There was ample powder and ammunition. All the guns were trained out to sea. He was due to be relieved at dawn.

  They gave the shuddering creature a drink—much to his surprise—gagged him, and set his face towards the fort again; and with him went the attacking party: two hundred men who planned to take San Jeronimo with sword and pistol. With sword and pistol, and one other weapon. Henry had never forgotten the Gloria, and tonight he planned to repeat on a larger scale the technique that had proved so successful in capturing a ship. Round the shoulders of each member of the advance party, therefore, was coiled a rope, and to the end of each rope was bent a grapnel.

  Silently, in the last of the darkness, the men moved to their appointed places: Manuel and the maroon to the sentry-walk in front of the door, the rest to surround the fort close under the walls. Then Manuel took the gag from the sentry’s mouth and whispered: ‘Now then, little frightened one, shout as you were told!’

  It was a poor, feeble sound that came from the sentry’s throat, but it was sufficient in the silence of the coming dawn to attract attention from the fort. What was biting Diego? the fort wanted to know.

  Diego summoned some alto to give body to his first treble effort, and told them. An army of Englishmen were here in front of the fort and demanding admittance. They offered terms if there was no resistance.

  This, as Henry had reckoned, had one immediate result. Every man who was awake in the fort, and all those roused from sleep by the scurry, ran to the battlements on the land side to look over at the suspectedly mad sentry. And as soon as this had happened, twenty grapnels whirled round the heads of the advance party and twenty ropes went snaking out and up to fall over the deserted battlements. As the hooks settled home the first men went swarming up, and stepped over the wall unmolested. So did the next lot, and the next; the whole garrison being still engaged in hurrying to the point of sensation above the main gate. In less than ten minutes there were fifty Englishmen inside the fort with no more damage to their persons than some skinned knuckles. When another thirty had joined them they left twenty to guard the tops of the rope ladders and see that the rest arrived safely, and moved in on the occupants of the fort. They moved without care, sure that they would be mistaken by the Spaniards for colleagues. Not in their wildest nightmares would the Spaniards imagine that the English would drop into their impregnable fortress like flies alighting on a cake. So the invaders moved in on the garrison like fishers with a drag-net: mopping up the stragglers as they cornered them and advancing in force to hem in the men by the parapet above the gate. These last felt, unbelieving and dazed as the poor sentry had been, the press of a knife or pistol in their backs and remained transfixed, broken prayers trickling out of their slack lips. The completely unbelievable was happening, and they had no resources to deal with it.

  The grey light came as they submitted to being disarmed, and the sudden tropic dawn saw the great wooden gate being opened to receive the invaders’ main force. Henry, who had gone over the wall with the assault party, received his fellow captains with an air of doing host that Charlie Hadsell for one fo
und intolerable. But the rest were too elated to care, and too grateful to Morgan to be critical. And Henry himself had no thought to spare for Hadsell’s ill-humour; he had not yet achieved the thing he had come fifteen hundred miles for.

  Where, said Henry, to the still stunned Commandant, were the English prisoners?

  The Commandant had never heard of any English prisoners.

  ‘No?’ said Morgan. ‘Let me refresh your memory. Men from the garrison of Santa Catalina—Englishmen—were put to work on your fortifications here, against all civilised practice. Where, I ask, are these men kept?’

  If there were such prisoners, said the Commandant, it must have been on one of the other fortifications that they had been employed. He knew nothing of them.

  ‘The water defences were finished years ago. It is on San Jeronimo that the work has been done. Where are the men?’

  The Commandant was a small, fat man with an expressionless face, but a twitch in the flesh of his sallow cheek betrayed the agitated clenching of his teeth. The Commandant was very frightened indeed. He was also lying.

  ‘Very well,’ said Henry. ‘We shall search.’

  ‘The cellars are pestilent,’ said the Commandant quickly. ‘It is as well not to go near them. We had slaves there who died of plague, and we have—have closed the place up.’

  The cellars proved to be cool and sweet and filled with the heady smell of wine-impregnated wood. But below the cellars, deep in the heart of the ground, were dungeons; and the reek of the dungeons came up the slippery stone stairway with a force that made even their hardened stomachs heave. Into this noisome catacomb they descended by the flare of torches, picking their way gingerly down the treacherous steps that were slimed with moisture from the trickling walls. As they went down the smell of the place almost stopped the breath in their throats, and when at last they stood in front of a barred door and savoured the stench that poured out through the grille even Bluey mopped his forehead and looked sick. It was too sudden a change from the fresh greenery of the forest.