The Privateer

by Josephine Tey

  There was an animal stirring beyond the door, but no sound of human voices.

  ‘Is anyone there?’ Henry called.

  There was silence for a moment on both sides of the door: a silence so complete that even the drops that fell from the roof to the floor sounded loud and petulant.

  Then beyond the door a voice cried: ‘English! English!’

  It sounded like the voice of a man seeing heaven opened.

  Morgan flung back the bars and pushed the door open. The smell of damp straw—straw made damp by unnameable exudations and trodden into pulp with age—was suffocating, but from this obscene bed human forms were struggling up into the light of the torches. So ragged and insubstantial they were that it seemed that they wavered in the wavering light; as if they were part of the shadows.

  ‘Bart,’ said Henry, suddenly afraid. ‘Bart! Are you here?’

  ‘I’m here, Harry boy,’ said Bart’s mild voice a yard from his right foot. ‘But don’t touch me. I’m crawling.’

  ‘Bart!’ said Henry, on his knees in the filth, a great rush of relief and thankfulness pouring through him. ‘Bart!’

  ‘I knew you’d come sooner or later, Captain,’ said Bart, his sunken eyes bright in the light of the flare. ‘That couldn’t be Bluey you’ve got with you, could it?’

  Bluey was crying openly. ‘Here!’ he said, shoving his torch at the man nearest him. ‘Hold that.’

  He bent and picked Bart from the straw as if he were a child, and carried him up the stairs to the light and the air, the man following with the torch.

  Two others had to be helped, but the remaining eight walked out of their prison like jaunty skeletons, macabre in their rags. These were all that was left of the Santa Catalina garrison. Eleven men.

  ‘They took Major Smith and his second to Panama a year ago,’ they said. ‘We don’t know what happened to them.’

  They had no nails, most of them; or what was left of the nail was invisible in the broken finger-ends. They had been carrying stone with their bare hands. The skin of their bodies, blistered in the first unaccustomed heat, had flayed into open sores that had had no chance to heal. Their bones stuck through the polluted flesh. They were crusted with dirt.

  Bart was a little heap of limp bones held together by his spirit.

  ‘The good thing about having no flesh left on your bones,’ he said, as Bluey laid him down in the clean early-morning air, ‘is that the mosquitoes leave you alone.’

  The crews were breakfasting in the courtyard of the castle when the survivors filed up into the light, and they rose to their feet and cheered. But the cheer died away uncertainly as they took in the state of their countrymen, and though they hurried to the prisoners with question and reassurance and succour, an odd silence fell on the bulk of the men. They made no more motion to eat, and their eyes went from the filthy and tattered skeletons to the well-fed Spaniards herded weaponless at the far end of the courtyard.

  Morgan, coming up from the dungeon, walked into this odd silence; and recognised it. Once, long ago, he had heard it in a crowded tavern; and he still remembered what those three bodies looked like, torn apart by the bare hands of a crowd that had gone berserk.

  He walked through the men as they sat about on the ground, their half-finished victuals before them, and found no reassurance. They were so far beyond the moment that they did not even make way for him; they looked at him without seeing him.

  He did not need, in any case, to have their state of mind translated to him. There was murder in his heart too.

  It needed only a pistol-shot to explode that charged silence into action, and he would have on his hands, on his head, and on his reputation a massacre of unarmed men.

  Before he could consult with his captains, or suggest that they draw off some of their men as soon as might be, a voice said loudly:

  ‘Eleven men! Eleven!’

  It was a voice high with hysteria, and it stirred the motionless crowd like a wind. In another second they would be on their feet.

  ‘Give the Spaniards back their swords!’ shouted Henry; and that gave them pause.

  They waited to see what this might mean.

  ‘They didn’t give our men a chance, Captain,’ a voice said. ‘We’ll take them as they are.’

  ‘Not while you are under my command.’

  But the most heart-felt protest came from the Spaniards; they did not want their swords back. They were prisoners, unhurt, and doing very nicely. It was monstrous to make them fight now. The crews looked at their plump faces, and kicked the food-plates out of their way as they got to their feet.

  ‘But you are three to our one!’ said the Spaniards, the swords hanging limp from their palsied arms.

  ‘Mercifully,’ was all Morgan said.

  So the English took their price for the skeletons who had died on the fortifications of San Jeronimo. And this was one of the things that they did not talk about afterwards.

  ‘The Garrison consisted of one hundred and thirty men, of whom seventy-four, including the Commandant, were killed,’ said Morgan’s official report.

  His report of the taking of the great fort at the narrows was no more expansive, although that was an orthodox exercise of war. When they had marched through the panic-stricken town—women fleeing to the convent, men fleeing to the forest, and five hundred militia making themselves scarce in the direction of Panama—they were faced with the reduction of Fort Triana, and that they accomplished by a combined operation. The sailors swarmed up their scaling-ladders while the ex-soldiers exhibited once more their prowess in musketry and picked off the defenders as they swabbed their guns or tried to repel the climbing sailors. Before they had finally proved the irresistibility of this combination, the officer commanding the fort decided to salvage at least his dignity from what was like to be the wreck of his command, and offered to surrender on condition that he might march out his garrison with their colours flying.

  This did not please either troops or sailors, but it pleased Morgan. He had never any liking for frontal assault. Life was always a wonderful thing to him; sparkling with possibilities; and to throw this unique and irreplaceable thing away offended his very soul. To die on the glacis of a barricade was never any ambition of Harry Morgan’s.

  By afternoon, therefore, they had two of the three fortresses in their hands; and they decided to leave the Gloria, the fort on the far side of the narrows, until tomorrow. For the rest of the day they would take over the town. Morgan sent Cornelius, in a sloop, to tell Jack Morris that by the day after tomorrow the narrows would be open and he could then bring up the ships from where they were lying at Bogota.

  ‘I hope they won’t blow the boy out of the water; but I think she’s too small and too fast to be hit by gun-fire,’ he said, watching the tiny craft growing small in the direction of the open sea; and forgot all about the unreduced fort until two hours later, when raised voices and pointing hands and marvelling exclamations called his attention to the opposite headland.

  Above the grim bulk of the Gloria was floating the English flag.

  ‘They’ve surrendered!’ they said, gaping. ‘They’ve surrendered of their own accord!’

  ‘I hardly think,’ said Morgan, ‘that they had an English flag waiting to be run up. Someone has been persuading them, it seems.’

  The someone proved to be Cornelius. ‘We did it on the spur of the moment,’ he explained afterwards. ‘We moved in close and said that Fort Triana had been given honourable terms, and we were prepared to receive their surrender on the same conditions.’

  So Fort Gloria surrendered to five Englishmen and a Hollander. And Puerto Bello, the impregnable, the pride of Spain, was in English hands.

  Presently, of course, an attempt at rescue would come across the Isthmus from Panama, but Morgan did not wait for that to arrive. He sent out some of his best marksmen to camp themselves as comfortably as possible on either side of the first suitable defile they came to on the Panama road; and to wait there
until such times as they could give the advancing rescue party a suitable reception. When that elegant gentleman, magnificent personage, and ardent devotee of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, Don Juan Perez de Guzman, Governor of the Province of Panama, arrived hot-foot with a small army to avenge the insult and drive the infidel back into the sea that had spawned them, an irreverent rain of infidel bullets halted him in his tracks and cooled his ardour to the point where he began to entertain the thought of ransom. Repugnant though the idea of ransom might be, it did mean that the English would go. That they had not come as the advance-guard of an invasion. That he, Don Juan Perez de Guzman, might go on living magnificent and unmolested as Governor of the Province of Panama, without having his peace, his security, and his prosperity sullied by a war. He made a camp on the farther side of the infidel-haunted defile, and began to negotiate. When he heard what the English wanted by way of ransom he thought for a moment that war could not be much worse. He refused to consider it. If he was firm the English would reduce their demands.

  But it was not the English he was dealing with: it was a Welshman. And the answer that came back from Puerto Bello, deprived of its formality and official phrasing, said: ‘Just as you like, señor. We like Puerto Bello and have thoughts of staying here for good. It is the best base on the Atlantic coast.’ So Don Juan sent word to the city of Panama to collect the required sum as soon as might be, that the fair soil of Spanish America should be rid of the English pestilence.

  And the English settled down in the Beautiful Port to wait.

  The ships came sailing in through the narrows, their crews looking with amazement at the great forts with their silent guns, and Jack, stepping ashore, said: ‘I think I hear Drake laughing.’

  The recovered prisoners were housed in the very fine Spanish hospital and fed and cosseted and spoiled; not least by the Spanish ladies. They had had no idea, said the Spanish ladies, that any English prisoners were being tortured in Puerto Bello, and they were horrified that their countrymen should have been guilty of such reprehensible practices, and here is some fine fresh fruit for you, poor man.

  It was Morgan’s boast, and one of his pet vanities, that no ‘lady of quality’, in which term he included that lesser class known as ‘respectable females’, ever suffered insult from any man of his. And it pleased him that when he offered both the ladies of quality and the respectable females safe-conduct to the Governor’s camp on the other side of the pass they refused it and elected to stay in the town. Captain Morgan had very little experience of Spanish soldiery, they inferred, or he would not have suggested it.

  ‘Besides,’ said a dowager, shaking her diamond earrings at him, ‘if I left my home you would loot it even more thoroughly than you have already.’

  ‘Come, madam,’ he said. ‘We have levied, not looted.’

  ‘What is the difference?’ she said, tart.’

  ‘The difference is that you still have your earrings, señora.’

  When they were not loading the ships with merchandise from the great store-houses where it was waiting for transport to Spain, the victorious English amused themselves after the immemorial habit of invaders: they drank, wenched, stole, made friends with the children, learned the local songs, imitated their partners in the local dances, and were initiated by their victims into the niceties of the local game. The criminal tenth indulged their propensities to the limit of their power in the first two days, and by the end of the first week were all in jail. So that an odd kind of peace settled on the captured town, a holiday air. The seventy dead in San Jeronimo were strangers to the place—merely some of the Spanish soldiery to whom the Puerto Bello ladies had referred in such contemptuous terms—and no one wept for them. The town, with its cool arcades, its blazing fruit-stalls, its fountains playing in the sun, was a paradise, and both inhabitants and invaders settled back to enjoy it: the former because they were accustomed to it, and the latter because they were not.

  At the end of three weeks the ransom arrived from Panama, and with it came a letter from Don Juan Perez de Guzman. When the English left Puerto Bello, said the Governor, would they leave behind a pattern of the arms with which they had taken the town, so that Spain might have a chance of meeting them on equal terms next time?

  Morgan sent him a pistol and half a dozen bullets. ‘These are the weapons. Excellency,’ he wrote. ‘I am delighted to lend this sample to you until such time as I come to Panama to reclaim it.’

  He was pleased with this leave-taking, but it was Don Juan who, after all, had the final word. A messenger came back four days later and asked to see Morgan. ‘My master asks me to say that it would be waste of Captain Morgan’s time to come to Panama,’ he said, ‘for this is all that Captain Morgan will ever take out of it.’

  ‘This’ proved to be a gold ring set with a large emerald.

  ‘Some day,’ said Henry, contemplating the ring after the messenger had gone, ‘I really must think seriously of going to Panama. If he can afford something like this merely by way of a gesture, what would he not disgorge under a little pressure?’

  He put the ring on his finger, and looked with delight on it.

  The parting delight of the men, on the other hand, was to spend a hot and happy morning dismantling the forts at the narrows and tumbling the guns into the sea. They did it with laughter, and mocking farewell shouts as the unwieldy objects splashed like fat women, wallowing, into the crystal water. But San Jeronimo they did not dismantle. They blew up San Jeronimo; business-like and without laughter.

  11

  On the mere practical plane Henry was glad to be leaving Puerto Bello. It was now late July, with the hurricane season imminent; and Port Royal was eight hundred miles away up-wind. To lose a ship was at any time a hard thing; but to lose a ship loaded to the hatches with silks, linen, velvet, silver plate, carpets, swords, and jewelled baubles was unthinkable. So Henry watched his conquest grow small across the widening strip of water and had nothing in his heart but thankfulness. Even the men, calling ribald farewells, turned to the sea again with pleasure in their vagabond hearts. They had reached the stage when the lazy life in the sun-drenched patios had begun to pall, and their incurable English restlessness pricked them.

  ‘It is good we go,’ said Bernard, looking back at the dream-like loveliness. ‘And it is good that the Spaniards should keep the Americas.’

  ‘Good!’ said Morgan.

  ‘Men grow soft and weak there,’ said Bernard. ‘It is too much effort to think quickly, it is too much effort to stir oneself. So every day they grow more like animals. Without pride and without foresight. It is no place for white men, the Americas. It is as well to let the Spaniards keep it.’

  But Henry had other ideas about that.

  Bernard, of course, took an entirely personal view of the existing situation in the Caribbean, his interest being in trade and not in conquest. And now that he was about to be rich enough to buy that long-desired ship, he was willing to make a present of the rest of the world to anyone who wanted it. That Spain, unchallenged in the Americas, might object to his simple trading ambitions, was something that he did not, in his present liberal frame of mind, pause to consider.

  It was Bart who had the surer instinct about the American Spanish. He sat about on deck, criticising the hang of the sails (‘a fair disgrace the way that new cloth was put into that fore-sail there!’) and snuffing the sea air as if it were perfume.

  ‘They’re rotten. Captain, the Spaniards,’ he said. ‘They’ve gone bad. They don’t want to fight for what they have, but they want to kill anyone that takes it from them. They run up a surrender flag if you’re armed, and they make a slave of you if you’re not. They’re bad, Captain; bad.’

  And Henry, looking at the rescued prisoners, found it in his heart to regret their recovered lustiness. He would have liked to show them to Port Royal as they had been; in the full extremity of their humiliation. That was something that Port Royal would never be able to visualise for themselves.
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  But perhaps they would be impressed by the plain arithmetic of the thing. By the fact that the number of survivors out of a garrison of nearly a hundred was eleven men.

  When they did at last reach Port Royal, however, on a day of wild squalls and stinging rain, they found that the Port’s arithmetic was entirely devoted to their own exploit, and that the wonder of the conquest of Puerto Bello by less than four hundred men armed with pistols and swords had sent the whole place a little mad. Port Royal was not unused to the heroic: it had welcomed Captain Freemen after his taking of Tobasco, and Jackman home from his capture of San Francisco de Campeche, and many others from raids as daring. But none of these exploits had possessed the startling, the almost fabulous quality of the taking of Puerto Bello. The town was delirious.

  ‘My Governorship is in the most precarious condition,’ Modyford said to Henry, with his small, dry smile.

  ‘But have you not told them about the levies? Have you not sent them the papers from Puerto Principe?’

  ‘I was not referring to the Government. I was referring to the populace. With the smallest encouragement they would make you Governor tomorrow.’

  ‘And kick me out the day afterwards,’ said Morgan, who had vision as well as vanity. ‘They don’t love us so much when we are penniless on the beach,’ he added; and then, with a transition of thought: ‘I see you hanged the man I sent you from Cuba.’

  ‘Yes. The jury had no alternative. It was a knife-in-the-back affair.’ He looked at Henry’s withdrawn expression for a moment, and then added: ‘He was a poor type: not quite human; not, perhaps, altogether sane; but he achieved more in the manner of his death than he could ever be expected to in his life.’

  ‘You mean he died well?’

  ‘No. Although, as it happens, he did die well. I meant that his trial and condemnation in open court by his countrymen has done more for England’s reputation in the Islands than anything else in our history.’

  ‘It didn’t keep the French with us at Puerto Bello,’ Henry said nastily.