The Privateer

by Josephine Tey

  ‘There can’t be more in the world,’ said Jack.

  ‘No,’ agreed Henry, beginning to take a proprietary interest, now that feeling was coming back to him. ‘It’s a nice little nest-egg, isn’t it? And a whole arsenal upstairs to prime with it. They have no moderation, the Dons, have they? A very wholesale race.’

  He got to his feet and propped himself up on his still-shaking legs. ‘I feel as if I were out of bed for the first time after a long illness,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘you’ll certainly never be nearer death’s door. Let us go and eat. That is a very fine meal your wholesale Spaniards left us.’

  And Henry found, as everyone does after escaped peril, that he was ravenously hungry. His body, in its reaction from imminent death, craved food, and love-making, and sleep. And since he could have neither the sleep nor the love-making, he made do with food. Food and drink.

  But he saw to it that the barrels in the wine-store were not broached that night. And he set sentries and arranged for their relief every hour. Somewhere in those black forests under the fading moon were the Spanish garrison, waiting for their destruction. And when that great blaze of annihilation did not come, the Spaniards would, if they were not utter poltroons, try other methods of discomfiture.

  But day came, and there was no sign from the forest. The sun rose into a clear, ardent morning with an on-shore wind that whipped the channel into scarves of white where the shoals streaked it. They ran up the Union flag as soon as the light came, and presently the ships came in, floating in calm procession past the fort and dipping their colours in salute to the flag on the fort. And for the rest of the day all seven crews were busy transferring the great store of powder, muskets, swords and ammunition from the fort to the ships. On the following morning, still without hindrance, they transferred everything else that was useful to them; more especially the contents of the larder and the wine-store.

  ‘Do themselves well, don’t they?’ said Bluey, looking at the sugared fruits, and the delicately cured meat, and the kegs of brandy. ‘No salt pork for the Dons!’

  When the fort was stripped of all but its fixtures, they spiked the guns, took down their flag, and left the place as silent as they had found it.

  ‘Where do you think that garrison are, Captain?’ asked Kinnell, the one-time bos’n, who was now mate in Bernard’s place, as they set sail for Maracaibo.

  ‘Waiting for us at Maracaibo, I expect,’ Henry said.

  Although he would never say so to Kinnell, he was not very happy about the prospect. And he was even less happy an hour later, when the Fortune grounded gently but firmly in mid-channel. They got her off by hauling, and the smaller Gift scraped by her to try the channel in her stead. But even the Gift touched the bottom, and it became apparent that of the seven ships only the two smallest—open-decked schooners—could make the passage and come to anchor opposite Maracaibo.

  ‘The channel does not stay the same for six months together,’ said the Frenchman who had been with l’Olonois, dismayed by this set-back to his piloting; and Henry could not blame him; the Frenchman had been of incalculable help to them already.

  He looked at the virgin country ashore, his mind searching it for the means of oblique attack. But he would have no guide to that country, as he had had to the backwoods of Puerto Bello, as he had had to the sea approaches of Maracaibo. He would go into it blind, pathless. He could do it with a chosen fifty, but what hope was there that the ships’ crews as a whole would follow him in so toilsome and risky a ploy? They liked their risk without toil. They liked to go roaring in to attack in full face of the enemy, taking the chance they had counted on. To hack their way through primitive country for days on end, perhaps, just to lessen the risk, when they could sail comfortably to the scene of battle in their own boats, would seem to them the wildest absurdity. It would have to be the boats, and frontal attack for once.

  But he would see to it that the attack was as little frontal as he could make it.

  Through the channel they came in their boats, therefore, and out into the great spaces of the Lake of Maracaibo, a burnished glory under the midday sun; and the wind took them down to the town.

  It lay by the water’s edge, its neat wharves reflected in the sea, but behind it stretched a wide half-moon of huddled suburb, infinitely more squalid than the slave suburbs of Puerto Bello had been; and Henry, looking at that barrier between the town proper and the forest, was comforted for his lost hopes of attack from the rear. If they had come that way they would have had to fight their way through that mess of housing; and he remembered too clearly what the street-fighting in Puerto Principe had been like to want any more of it.

  He had expected the garrison from the fort at the channel to be snugly settled down in the castle at Maracaibo, and as they drew in, he looked up at the redoubt with its bristling gun-mouths and waited for the reception. But the strip of water between the town and the boats went on narrowing, and still no volley greeted them. That the water-front should be empty of people was understandable, but that the fort should let them come so far unchallenged was very strange. Had they mined the beaches, and grudged the ammunition for even a token defiance?

  Then Manuel’s caressing voice just behind him said: ‘I think it is that even Spain grows ashamed of the Spanish flag.’ And Henry, whose whole attention had been concentrated on those waiting gun-mouths, lifted his glance to the tower, and saw that the staff was bare. The fort was deserted.

  ‘Well,’ said Henry, ‘it can blow up at its leisure. We are not being entertained with any powder-trains today.’

  He had chosen to land on the beaches rather than in the harbour, partly because the reception would be hottest at the centre of the town and partly because the beaches gave him a wider front for simultaneous disembarking. But now that the opposition was not to come from the orthodox direction—from the castle—every man dropping over the bows to shore felt his steps weighted with question. Where was the booby trap in all this?

  But they advanced up the beach, wary and step-picking, and arrived safely on the road level, and there they took heart again. If it was merely that the Spaniards were waiting in the town for them, that was nothing. They had dealt with Spaniards in towns before now. They began to sing. And singing they marched into the town.

  Into a silent and deserted town.

  One by one they ceased to sing, defeated by the silence. Until presently the only sound was the tap of their drum as it kept time to their marching feet. Their eyes slid sideways at the blank windows, alert for ambush. But the windows stayed blank. The closed doors frowned on them, and nothing moved in the shadows. A chicken pecking in the dust looked so alive, so natural, that it was a relief. They called each other’s attention to it, and laughed at it as they passed. But that was the only living thing that met them in all their march from the beaches to the harbour front. They came out into the wide paved space and the unbroken sunlight and stopped breathing short. No one could ambush them here. But even here the silence lay thick and eerie. A shutter slatted back and forth in the wind, and a curtain bellied out and sank back again. No human being but themselves moved in all the dead town.

  Here and there were the signs of flight: a child’s shoe in the roadway, a stable door left open, a burst bag of flour left to spill itself on the street. It was panic that had emptied the town, not ambush. And some of the atmosphere of that panic still hung in the silence and inhabited the deserted houses so that a man’s skin crept at his neck.

  ‘Well,’ said Henry to his crew, ‘it seems that we have the choice of dwellings for our stay.’ And in the bustle of choosing their billets some of the strangeness was exorcised. They went in and out of the empty houses with the curiosity of children; marvelling at this, debating the use of that, mocking at something else. Any privateer found to be keeping loot on his own behalf invariably lost his share of the general loot (any other arrangement would have meant chaos and would make privateering unprofitable for both captains an
d men), but a great variety of articles of no value found their way into English and French pockets before night. A dress for a doxy, a toy for a child, a crucifix for a shrine.

  Henry decided to make the Mayor’s house on the harbour-front his headquarters, and since it was a large place and fine, he suggested that the others should share it with him; that they should make a captain’s mess of it. Bradley, Rogers and Ansell were pleased and agreed. But Nick Gaytor, the newcomer, took a long look at the pillared coolness of the Mayor’s rooms, the carpets, the silk curtains, the flowers in the stone tubs in the courtyard, and said: ‘Much too fine for a plain sailor-man. I’ll leave you to play gentleman, friends, and stay with my men in the priest’s house.’ He spat loudly on the tiles in the patio and went away; and it seemed that he took the other newcomer with him, for One-eye Johnny Toplass was found next day to be also occupying the priest’s house by the church.

  Henry regretted this break in their unity, but had no time to worry about it. And in any case, as Ansell pointed out with Kentish good sense, it might be a pity to be separated, but it would be worse to have Gaytor with them. What worried Henry was the bareness of the town. It had been stripped clean of all that was valuable, from the Mayor’s plate to the trinkets of the Madonna in the church. Even the warehouses were empty—the warehouses of which he had hoped so much. This was El Dorado: the place where the gold stuck to the soles of a man’s shoes; fabulous El Dorado. And all he had for his pains was an empty little town with the shutters flapping in the wind and the warehouses gaping and void.

  That there had been organised evacuation of goods was obvious: only the domestic flight had been hurried and individual. And that being so there must be a hiding-place; probably one single hiding-place. A cave somewhere? A building in the forest?

  But there was no one to tell him.

  At the earliest possible moment he must get back some of the missing population.

  ‘Why the wholesale flight?’ he said to Jack in the morning, picking up the child’s shoe from where it was still lying in the dust.

  ‘You said they were wholesale,’ Jack reminded him.

  ‘Yes, but why not wait and hear our terms?’

  ‘I expect they remember l’Olonois,’ Jack said dryly.

  So patrols of twenties and thirties were sent out to find some inhabitants and persuade them that this was not invasion à l’Olonois. And presently embarrassed sailors began to herd weeping women from their inadequate retreat in the forest. Their children hung howling to their skirts, and neither mothers nor children were coherent on any subject. When asked where their husbands were, the women with one accord said that they had no husbands.

  ‘Even l’Olonois couldn’t be responsible for nearly fifty widows,’ Henry said when he had reached the forty-eighth widow in two hours. And he waited hopefully for what the wider sweep might bring in.

  By nightfall thirty-four of the ‘widows’ had been reunited with their husbands, and the husbands had been relieved of the various valuables that they had been found guarding in their various caches. But real progress came only when the slaves began to trickle back. The slaves needed no persuasion to talk. They owed no loyalty to Spain and no love for their masters; and being slaves, with little interest outside the household that numbered them as a unit, there was nothing about their masters’ business that they did not know. Negro or Indian, they talked; and talked with pleasure. Here were the English: the fabled English who had walked into the heart of Cuba and walked out again unhurt, who had taken Puerto Bello and lived in it for a month; the English who hated the Spaniard as they themselves hated him; here were the wonderful English in Maracaibo, and the slaves, negro or Indian, were glad. What did the English want to know? They had only to ask.

  From the most intelligent of these—a tall, middle-aged Indian—Morgan learned all he wanted to know. The Governor, who lived in the castle, had organised the evacuation of valuables. In this he had used only the troops under his command, and no one in town knew just what he had done with the stuff. But he and his men had sailed in a ship to the fort of Gibraltar at the other end of the lake, so the townsfolk had taken it for granted that the goods were in the hold of the ship. He had taken with him such of the important men of the town as were his friends, and had left the leading ‘opposition’ citizens to their fate.

  The Indian gave a list of those deserted rich ones, and told where they might be found, and they were duly gathered in for ransom.

  And that being done, Henry prepared to go after the Governor.

  The ships, stalled below the bar, were brought up to Maracaibo by the proper channel, and provisioned, and a week later he set sail for Gibraltar, nearly a hundred miles away. With him went Ansell, Bradley and Rogers, but Jack he left behind with the two newcomers. When Jack protested (‘I always get the baggage-train job! I did at Puerto Principe, and again at Puerto Bello!’), Henry pointed out that he must have someone he could trust in command of the captured town.

  ‘You can trust Joe Bradley!’

  ‘Not as I trust you.’

  And with that Jack had to be content.

  And away sailed Henry in search of a ship that held, crammed into its one hold, enough wealth to buy a kingdom. But when he came to Gibraltar, there was no ship there. There was a fort, certainly; a very superior and impressive-looking fort; and this time it was occupied, if they were to judge by the Spanish colours tumbling in a brisk breeze round and round the mast. But in the harbour there were only fishing-boats, and in the roads only a small ketch.

  What had happened to the ship? Had they unloaded the stuff into the safety of the fort, and then sunk her?

  And was it to Gibraltar that the garrison of the sea fort had fled, since it was not to Maracaibo? If so, then this fine fort with the rollicking flag was now packed with troops as well as with hypothetical treasure.

  So Henry settled down to parley.

  Ten gentlemen of Maracaibo, said Henry, at present living as his guests, were anxious that they should be ransomed by their friends at the earliest possible moment. Failing the ransom, he would be obliged to take them back with him to Jamaica, where they would of course live in comfort until the ransom was paid. In addition to this quite personal bargain, there was the further matter of the ransom for the town of Maracaibo. For a sufficient sum he would evacuate it on a given day, leaving it in all respects as he had found it.

  Two days passed in this verbal give and take, conducted on the English side by a sad member of the Maracaibo town council, and on the Spanish side by the Commandant of the fort.

  ‘Why not the Governor?’ asked Henry, when the hostage was reporting the fifth failure of his eloquence.

  The Governor was not there, the hostage said.

  ‘Not in the fort?’

  Almost certainly not, said the hostage. It was common gossip among the troops that he was not there.

  At that Henry stopped setting to partners and decided to take the fort without further delay. He would make a feint attack in force from in front, and take the place in the rear.

  But the worst of an individual technique is that sooner or later one’s enemy becomes acquainted with it, and anticipates it. ‘Harry Morgan’s way’ had become a byword in the Islands; the impudent plan and the oblique attack. And every last detail of the taking of Puerto Bello had been studied with a passionate interest by the still undisturbed Spaniards along the whole coast of two continents; not least by the Commandant of Gibraltar. The Commandant did not wait for the English troops to cut off his rear; he used his rear for retreat as long as he had a rear to retreat to. So the English came into the fort from the land side to find it occupied only by a battery of gunners who were blazing away at their colleagues of the feint attack in front. The gunners desisted with the unemotional air of actors interrupted during rehearsal, and fell to polishing their pieces with a detached nonchalance. It was not necessary to search the fort to know that they were defending nothing; that their performance was a ritual, a mere takin
g part in a play.

  Henry went back to the Fortune disgruntled. Another empty conquest!

  But if the fort was deserted, the water-front was busy. The Indians had come to trade; and the sea round the ships was gay with boats bearing fruit and vegetables, skins, hides and leather goods. On board the Fortune Henry, missing the waiting figure of Romulus at the top of the ladder, looked round for him, and saw that he was looking on at the trafficking between crew and vendors. But it was not the actual bargaining that interested him and caused that unwonted animation in his brown, carved face. His attention was on the boats lying idle while they waited their turn to come to the ship’s side; he was listening to the chatter of the waiting Indians in the further boats, and his face was the secret delighted face of a child creeping up on an adult.

  Henry moved over to him and said: ‘Do you understand what they say, Romulus?’

  But Romulus, fascinated by the talk and forgetful for the moment, now that he was in his own country, that he was a slave, made a slight, imperious gesture with his hand for silence without even turning his head to look at his adored master. This amused the master, and he waited patiently, like a snubbed child, until his small slave might be ready to talk to him.

  ‘They are my aunts,’ Romulus said at length; his English being still as prentice as his way with clothes was expert.

  ‘Uncles,’ suggested Henry.

  But it seemed that what Romulus really meant was something like cousins. The men were, in fact, from a tribe that had been neighbours of his own at Cape Gallinas.

  ‘They laugh because you know not where is the ship,’ said Romulus.

  ‘The ship!’ said Henry. ‘And do they know?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Indian know everything.’

  ‘What have they done with the ship, the Spaniards?’

  ‘They have taken it into the forest.’

  Henry’s heart sank. Some Indian chatter; half meaningless, half magic.