The Privateer

by Josephine Tey

  ‘How could they sail it into the forest?’ he said, to please the boy.

  ‘They sail it up the Tacuyo creek.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Twenty-two mile they sail it to where is a little’—he paused for a word and then tried one—‘pool?’

  ‘Lake?’

  ‘Little lake in the mountains.’

  ‘Is that where the garrison have gone? The men from the fort?’ He leant his head to the fort on shore.

  ‘Oh, no. Soldiers go to Merida, to new fort. Sit in crow’s-nest, like Governor.’

  ‘Is the Governor not with the ship?’

  ‘No, no. Governor sit in crow’s-nest and spit.’

  No one was more patient than Henry when he wanted information out of friend or foe, and in the end it was unravelled.

  The Governor had retired with his own personal fortune to a hunting lodge which he had built in the mountains. The lodge was situated in a tiny valley—a valley so small as to be almost a crevice in the rock, and it was impregnable. The path to it, narrow and almost sheer, admitted only one man at a time, and the owner of the lodge could sit on his veranda and pick off undesired visitors at his leisure. The place had been built and provisioned not against a possible English invasion, which was one of the last events that the Governor anticipated, but against an Indian rising; a matter which in any Spanish settlement was a constant source of speculation. His insurance against Indian massacre was now proving a godsend against English invasion. He had food and ammunition for months, he had his fortune intact, and he could sit there comfortably until the English went. Sit, as Romulus said, in his crow’s-nest and spit down on them.

  The ship, on the other hand, was there for the taking; lying snugly up one of the creeks, and guarded only by her crew—who were no doubt busy at this moment unloading the most precious stuff and bearing it to even surer hiding in the woods.

  Of the two prizes, the Governor and the treasure-ship, the ship was out of all computing the more important. But the ship represented only riches; the Governor was challenge. So Henry sent Joe Bradley to take the treasure, and he himself set out to test the story of the Governor’s invulnerability.

  A large proportion of the two hundred who went with him had also done that journey in rowing-boats along the coast at Puerto Bello, and in after years they were wont to argue when they met as to which was worse: the open boats in the sun, or the mountains of Maracaibo in the rain.

  For it rained.

  It rained all the way into the interior: solid, perpendicular rain; constant, leaden rain that fell with a loud single note like the buzzing of insects. The steady monotone got on their nerves, and their need to keep powder dry irked and fretted them. The rocks they climbed were slippery with moss, and their fear of breaking a leg and being helpless in this wild claustrophobic country damped their spirits and infected them with a caution foreign to their natures.

  And when at last they arrived at the Governor’s retreat and looked up at his eyrie, they found that rumour for once was true. The place was impregnable.

  By that time they had been three days without hot food, and they sat down to contrive a fire while Henry sent an ambassador to the Governor. But a man holding a straight flush does not need to draw any cards. The ambassador—another member of that unhappy town council of Maracaibo—proved non persona grata. Indeed, the Governor had not recognised his diplomatic status at all, and he came back with two bullet-holes in his soaking hat and another in his breeches. Nor would the meagre fires that the men contrived under overhanging rocks stay alight for more than a few minutes. Nothing would burn in this great sodden wilderness.

  Reluctant, Henry wrote off the Governor as a dead loss, and turned for home. At least he had verified the reports.

  But the way back had altered in the most frightening fashion in forty-eight hours. Streams that had been purling brooks dimpled by the rain were now wild torrents of angry water in which a man, even at the end of a rope, was whirled away and dashed against the rocks downstream. They tied up their broken ribs and spent depressed hours searching up and down the muddy banks of every little gully for a possible fording place. When they had achieved the long, difficult business of getting every man safely over, they were faced with a tangled wading of flooded and often indistinguishable paths before reaching the next torrent-filled gully and beginning the business all over again.

  Their powder was no longer dry, and they were as helpless against the enemy as they were against the elements. Indeed, it was from this fact that Henry, typically, plucked comfort from a comfortless situation.

  ‘Now I know that Spain’s sun is setting,’ he said, as he stood on the brink of a torrent on their fourth day of homeward travail, waiting for his turn to cross. They were still two days away from civilisation, and their clothes weighed them down like armour. The rain ran down Henry’s black, uncurled hair and shot in separate streams from the end of each lock to his rain-black tunic. But his eyes were bright and amused. ‘Fifty men with pikes could have made an end of us any time in the last seven days.’

  ‘There is still time,’ Kinnell said dryly.

  But Henry went on looking superior and amused. And Henry was right. They came back into Gibraltar, into an ironically sunny afternoon that showed up their draggled state in a tactless clarity (which annoyed Henry very much more than the Governor or the floods), and in all the days of their struggling impotence not one Spanish musket had barked even a token defiance.

  Joe Bradley had come back that morning with a procession of boats laden with treasure from the ship in the creek, and the sight of it banished the last regret for the Governor from Henry’s mind. It was almost worthy of El Dorado.

  ‘If you don’t plan to take Merida too,’ Joe said, with just a hint of criticism, ‘it is time we were getting back to Maracaibo.’

  So they set sail; but it took them another two days, beating up against the wind on that great inland sea, to reach Maracaibo. They came into the roads late on a thundery evening, with the sunset lighting the heavy sky to a sullen glow, and dropped anchor with a feeling of achievement. As his boat lowered sail and lost way under the breakwater, Henry looked up and saw Jack waiting for him.

  ‘We got the ship, treasure and all!’ he called.

  But Jack made no answer, even by a sign. And Henry wondered whether it was that he had not heard what he said, or whether Jack, the normally imperturbable, was still hurt and sulky at being relegated to guard duties.

  Puzzled, he came up the breakwater steps and prepared to greet his friend. But before he could move the few steps towards him a woman flung herself on him, clawing at his face with her nails and shrieking unintelligibly. Her weight and the suddenness of her attack pushed him back to the wharf edge, and but for Jack he would have gone over. Jack pulled him to safety, and then, turning on the woman, struck her thrice in the face with all his force. This astounded Henry far more than the woman’s attack. Not only had he never seen Jack hit a woman, but he had never seen him out of control before. Now he looked half-crazy; furious and ashamed at the same time.

  ‘Jack!’ he said. ‘What is the matter?’

  The woman had sunk to her knees on the wharf, crying and blaspheming, and a woman from the little knot of spectators came up, timidly, as if she too might be struck, and took her away.

  Henry stared from the screaming, dishevelled woman to his friend, standing in angry embarrassment looking after her.

  ‘Did you have to hit her so hard, Jack? She is only a poor demented creature with a grudge.’

  ‘She must learn to confine her grudge to the proper quarter. It was no fault of yours.’

  ‘What was no fault of mine?’

  ‘That her daughter is dead.’

  ‘Her daughter? Is it someone’s fault that the girl is dead, then?’

  ‘Yes. Nick Gaytor’s men.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Rape.’

  ‘Jack! I trusted you!’

  ‘You didn’t tell me
what I was to do with two hundred men mad drunk on brandy.’

  ‘What brandy?’

  ‘The Governor’s wine-store.’

  ‘But there were guards on that.’

  ‘Yes. One-eye came and said why were the castle guards always Dolphin men; didn’t we trust them? I said you had arranged it that way; but they made an issue of it, and rather than have bad blood, I agreed to alternate the guard. Everything went normally till last night, when Nick Gaytor’s men were on duty.’ He paused a moment as if he found it difficult to go on. ‘In the Mayor’s house down in the harbour you don’t hear much of the town noises. It was only in the small hours of the morning, when Wat, my bos’n, came to fetch me, that I knew what was going on. By that time the town was a roaring hell. They had dragged people from their beds and were “persuading” them to tell where they had hidden jewellery. Most of the poor wretches weren’t well off enough to have any jewellery, but they were too drunk to think of a small thing like that. Some were good-natured enough and were dancing, but the drunker ones were sheer maniacs. One or two were tumbling women in the open street.’

  ‘Dolphins?’

  ‘No!’ said Jack hotly. ‘My men were like me, down by the harbour and asleep. I went down for them, and Wat, Ted, and I went back with a picket of thirty each and cleaned up the place. It took us three hours, and two of Nick Gaytor’s men are dead.’ He paused again. ‘But of course there was no way of undoing—’

  ‘Where was Gaytor?’

  ‘Getting drunk with One-eye in the priest’s house.’

  ‘Is—the girl—the only—?’

  ‘No. An old man they tortured died of fright. And a man whose hair they burned off is in bad shape.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘No unspotted glory,’ said Henry at length, and turned to walk up the wharf as if his feet were weighted.

  Nick Gaytor was still lying drunk on the priest’s bed when Henry dragged him into a sitting position and flung the contents of the water-jug over him.

  ‘Are you sober enough to understand what is said to you?’ he asked, as Gaytor’s wandering eye managed to focus itself on his face.

  ‘Harry, my friend! Welcome back, welcome back, Harry my friend!’

  ‘Captain Morgan to you, you unmentionable scum.’

  ‘Oh, now, Harry, is that friendly! Is that—’

  ‘Keep your mouth shut and listen to me, or, so help me God, I’ll pistol you where you sit and take my chance about it. You will collect your men as soon as they are sober enough to stand, and you will take them and yourself and your ship out of Maracaibo as fast as a wind will take you.’

  ‘Oh, it’s that way, is it? Don’t think you can play the Admiral with me, Harry Morgan. I’m a partner in this exped—’

  ‘If your ship is still here at noon tomorrow I’ll blow the masts out of her and leave you to get home any way you can. You’re a disgrace to your country, to your profession, and to the mother that bore you, and it would give me the greatest pleasure to hang you from the yard-arm. The best I can do is to see that the rest of the fleet are free of you and your jailbird crew.’

  ‘Aah, you make me vomit! You and your discipline and your rules and your guards and your piddling dole of drink once a day! What do you think my men came to Spanish territory for? A couple of trinkets and kiss-me-hand through a window? No! They came for the fun they couldn’t get in—’

  Gaytor’s shirt-band gave with a loud tearing sound as Henry twisted his collar and dragged him to his feet.

  ‘I took you on this expedition because you had the reputation of a good seaman, but all you have done is to blacken the reputation of the men unfortunate enough to sail in your company. You would turn the stomach of a Spaniard, Nick Gaytor, and it makes me sick to think that you were ever a man of mine, and sick to the soul to know that you are English, and mud for the Spaniards to fling back at us! You are to be out of here by noon tomorrow, and every last man of yours with you.’

  ‘If you think that I am going without my share of—’

  ‘Listen,’ said Morgan through his teeth. ‘I meant what I said about wanting to kill you. I’ve only once before wanted to kill a man, and I stopped that time because I was superstitious. There isn’t anything stopping me at this moment but my common sense, and my common sense is running out very fast. You be out of Maracaibo at noon tomorrow, Gaytor.’

  He released his grip from Gaytor’s throat and let him drop back on to the bed.

  ‘Come on, Jack,’ he said to Morris, who had been standing in the doorway, a silent witness of the colloquy.

  ‘My men may have their own views about that,’ Gaytor said, rubbing his neck and trying an attitude. ‘If they refuse to go, who is going to make them?’

  ‘The Fortune, the Dolphin, the May Flower, the Pearl, and the Gift,’ said Morgan, and banged the door.

  But by noon the following day no ships at all could sail from Maracaibo. No English ships, that is. For the Spanish navy that had been searching for Harry Morgan for the last six months had at last found him; and in the straits were those mighty and Royal ships, the Magdalena, the San Luis and the Marquesa; forty-eight guns, thirty-six guns and twenty-four guns respectively.

  And lest these were not sufficient to bottle him up, the fort at the narrows was once more occupied, its spiked guns replaced, and its ammunition stores replenished.

  They were trapped.

  13

  Henry’s reaction to this apparent impasse was characteristic. He sent a letter to the Spanish naval commander suggesting that he might pay the ransom for Maracaibo.

  ‘Do you expect him to!’ said Jack.

  ‘No. But the notion will entertain him for a day or two,’ said Henry, and sent to Gibraltar for the empty treasure-ship.

  ‘One more ship isn’t going to make any difference against three floating forts and a land one,’ Joe Bradley said.

  ‘One spare ship is going to make all the difference,’ Henry said. And when the treasure-ship arrived at Maracaibo, he looked at her lovingly and said: ‘Now we are going to make this sad little tub into a proud ship of war.’

  ‘Her gun-deck won’t bear more than four guns,’ said Kinnell, who had sailed her from Gibraltar. ‘And if it’s those heavy cannon from the castle you’re thinking of, sir, the deck won’t bear them at all. Not to fire them, it won’t.’

  ‘Seven guns a side, I think,’ said Henry; ‘and a couple of light ones on the quarter-deck. And now go and tell the men to collect all the pitch, tar, brimstone and other inflammable stuff that they can find in the town. Dried palm leaves, thatch—anything.’

  ‘Inflammable!’ said Kinnell, and his face lighted. ‘Yes, of course! Yes, certainly. Captain; at once.’

  Never had troops or crews enjoyed themselves as the English at Maracaibo did for the next few days. They not only made Henry’s ‘sad little tub’ into a ship of war, they gave her a crew. They not only broke open gun-ports and provided her with ‘guns’ made from the long native Indian drums, but they made dummy figures to man her, complete with hats, swords and bandoliers. And Henry was amused to notice that at least one of these effigies was meant to be a portrait. He was greatly pleased by the sardonic leer they had imparted to his mouth, and the rakish tilt of his hat. Never had a fire-ship sailed under a more dashing commander.

  When the thing was finished, there was the matter of a suicide crew to man her; and in view of the wholesale nature of the volunteering, it was decided to draw lots for it. Two men to go from each of the six ships. Nick Gaytor’s men, being still in disgrace, were held to be unworthy of the honour of suicide for a cause.

  When the lots had been cast and the twelve heroes chosen, Henry addressed the men who crowded the market square and read them the letter he had received from the Spanish naval commander. The letter was in Spanish, but that all might understand he read it first in English and then in French.

  ‘I have put into commission again that fort which you took from a parcel of cowards,’ wrot
e Don Alonso del Campo y Espinosa, ‘and I am here to dispute your passage out of the lake. Nevertheless, if you surrender all that you have taken—treasure, slaves and prisoners for ransom—I shall grant you free passage and let you go back safely to your own country. If you decide to resist, I shall give no quarter to any man of you, but will make an end of you entirely.’

  ‘Well?’ said Henry, into the silence that succeeded the reading. ‘It is for you to decide. Privateering is a partnership, and it is for you to say. What shall I tell the Spanish commodore?’

  ‘Tell him—’ yelled a voice from the back.

  And a great storm of laughter drowned the sentence before it was finished.

  When Henry came down the wharf next morning, he found that they had put the finishing touch to the ship. They had given her a flag.

  ‘Not the Union flag,’ Bart explained, ‘because we didn’t like the idea of burning it. So we made her a flag of her own. Pretty, ain’t it?’

  The gay bit of nonsense flipped and wriggled above the lethal mass below, as if trying to be free of the mast before it was too late; but Bart looked at it proudly and the men with satisfaction. It was their answer to Spain.

  They had loaded her from the still great store of powder that they had taken from the sea-fort, and, with their tireless ingenuity, had devised fire-crackers in place of musketry. She was a floating menace, and they loved her.

  On the last day of April, with the slaves (willing and unwilling) in one ship, the prisoners for ransom (all unwilling) in another, and the treasure in a third, they weighed anchor and set their bows towards the sea. The three great warships were at anchor across the straits, directly below the fort; but as they saw the English fleet coming they up-anchored and hoisted sail so as to be able to manoeuvre.

  Breathless, the men in the following ships watched as the fire-ship closed the Magdalena. If those twelve men failed to keep the Magdalena stern-on they would be at the mercy of her soaring tiers of guns; and all their labour and hopes of the last week, and the lives of twelve brave men besides, would be lost in an instant. But the ship, with her light load and her handiness, followed the slowly turning warship, lessening all the while the distance between them until she was within musket shot. The puzzled Spaniards met her with a crackle of light arms, but the next moment she was alongside and grappling, and they saw her at last for what she was. Frantically they tried to fend her off with boat-hooks and pikes, but it was too late. She burst into a rose of flame, and the men on one side of her moved back from the blaze while twelve men on the other side dropped from her deck to the water. Thirty seconds later she blew apart in a great fountain of burning fragments that soared to the great ship’s topmost rigging and stuck there and burned. The Magdalena became outlined in flame, her yards dropped from their burning ropes and canvas to burn on the already burning deck. Panic-stricken, her crew came scrambling up from below and followed the original twelve to the safety of salt water. Her mainmast fell and listed her port side almost into the water. And just as the foremast was breaking out of the deck her magazine blew up. She settled slowly and disappeared altogether.