The Privateer

by Josephine Tey

  The San Luis’s crew, watching in horror this destruction of the flag-ship, found the Fortune bearing down on them, and took it to be another fire-ship. Without waiting to take a second look, they beached their ship under the guns of the fort and set fire to her. If she was going to burn, then they would do the burning, and they would do it where they could step on shore first.

  But the Marquesa’s crew was made of better stuff. The Marquesa took on the Fortune, the Gift and the Dolphin, and kept them busy for nearly an hour before striking her flag to them, and when she had surrendered they filed one after another past her battered bulk and cheered her.

  Then they lowered their boats to join the boats from the ships bearing the treasure and the prisoners, which had been lowered as soon as the Magdalena had blown up. But it seemed that the drowning Spaniards did not want to be rescued; indeed, they resisted it with fury. And the puzzled English, dragging struggling men into the boats, said to each other: ‘What is it? Do they think we keep thumb-screws on board?’ They learned afterwards that it was not fear of torture that made the Spaniards prefer death to rescue, but that they had all sworn an oath not to surrender on any conditions. At the time their seeming perversity merely exasperated their rescuers.

  ‘Aah, you silly bastard,’ said Bluey, hitting a man over the head with a piece of broken thwart and hoisting the stunned creature over the gunwale with no tender hand, ‘if you must go to Heaven, do it in your own time, not mine.’

  It was not the Spanish dislike for safety that made them desist in the end, but the fort on shore; which, now that there was no danger of crippling a Spanish ship, began to fire with a fine impartiality on rescued and rescuers alike. So the English ships left those who still remained in the water to swim to shore or cling to wreckage in the hope that their own countrymen would rescue them, and drew back a little into the lake again. They had still, somehow, to navigate those straits in front of the fort; and since the fort had now been strengthened by the complete crew of the beached San Luis, it was unlikely that they could solve the problem by taking the fort.

  But there were other methods.

  All next day the Spaniards in the fort watched boat-loads of English being rowed ashore to the beach behind the point. Boat after boat, heavy with men, wallowed from the distant ships to the shore and came back empty; until the Spaniards marvelled that seven small ships could carry such an army.

  What they could not see at that distance was that the ‘empty’ boats going back to the ships were carrying a full load of men lying hidden in the bottom. That no one at all was being left on shore.

  ‘Little did I ever think I’d row you as a passenger,’ said Bluey to the large Tenerife, lying relaxed between his feet.

  Up at the fort there were no ‘passengers’. Everyone spent the day dragging the guns from the sea side to cover the land approaches, in piling ammunition, and in levelling various inequalities in the ground outside the fort so as to deprive the attack when it came of any possible cover.

  They reckoned that the attack would come in the half-light after sunset.

  But after sunset came the turn of the tide; and on the ebb came the English ships, floating past the fort in the half-light, silent and ghostly. For the first time since he went adventuring, the little Fortune did not carry Henry into action or lead her consorts to their work. The English ships were led out to sea by the twenty-four-gun Marquesa, Spanish ship of war, with Morgan on her quarter-deck.

  And it was the Marquesa’s guns that gave the fort the mocking seven-gun salute in return for the belated and out-of-range cannonading that was all the sweating and outwitted Spaniards could manage by way of protest.

  And it was in the Marquesa that he came back to Port Royal.

  ‘You’re not deserting the Fortune altogether, are you?’ asked Jack, after he had been conducted round all five decks of the Marquesa in Port Royal harbour and they were coming ashore in the very elegant little cockle-shell that had been her Captain’s private property. ‘Twenty-four guns isn’t everything.’

  ‘I’m tired of that poky little cabin in the Fortune,’ said Henry, who had vastly enjoyed the luxury of the Marquesa’s living quarters. ‘Besides,’ he said, catching Jack’s sideways glance at him, ‘I love a ship that fought well.’

  ‘She’d have fought a deal better,’ said the unimpressed Morris, ‘if she was a bit handier. That hulk of guns and wood-carving couldn’t get out of the way of a piece of driftwood. I wouldn’t have her as a gift.’

  ‘You’re not being offered her,’ Henry said, good-humoured; and then, with a sudden descent to gloom: ‘Anyhow, she will have to be sold.’

  ‘That shouldn’t worry you,’ Jack said. ‘You’re a planter from now on, aren’t you?’

  ‘If I’m not arrested,’ Henry said, still gloomier; and went away to Kingshouse to take his medicine.

  And this time it was no jam-coated purge.

  ‘Maracaibo!’ said Sir Thomas, pacing up and down the room with a quite unwonted vigour. ‘Merciful Heaven, Harry, what madness moved you to an adventure like that! When the news first came in, a matter of ten days ago, I refused to believe it. He is rash, I said; he is even mad; but so far it has been a very methodical madness. He would never institute an attack for which he could find no vestige of excuse! Have you an excuse, Henry Morgan?’

  ‘Not one that would satisfy their lordships, I’m afraid. But does it matter?’

  ‘Matter?’

  ‘When we do have an excuse, and offer them evidence in the enemy’s own handwriting, the Spaniards merely say we are forging. We went to Puerto Bello “to anticipate the planned attack on Jamaica”. Let us say that I went to Maracaibo as reprisal for one ship’s captain and fifteen men hanged without trial in Havana.’

  ‘That would hardly be an appropriate excuse at this moment,’ Modyford said.

  ‘It is an appropriate excuse at any time, if the men are English,’ Morgan said, with a bite in his tone.

  ‘You misunderstand me. It is inappropriate at this moment to remember the misdeeds of Havana, because I have been busy patching up a local peace with the Governor. If one cannot have peace from the top down, then our only hope is to begin from the bottom up, and make our little local peace and hope that it may spread.’

  ‘And your Excellency thinks that the Governor of Cuba will respond?’ Henry asked, still dry.

  ‘His Excellency is of that opinion,’ Modyford said, still drier. ‘I am expecting Bernard Speirdyck back any day now, with the Governor’s answer.’

  ‘Why Bernard?’

  ‘When he took the Mary and Jane in cargo to Cuba, I gave him all the Spanish prisoners we had here, for repatriation, and a letter to the Governor. And now, God help me, I have a Spanish warship captive in the harbour, and more prisoners than we have ever had before.’

  ‘And thirty thousand pounds,’ said Henry, making an entry on the credit side.

  ‘Which we shall no doubt have to pay in compensation,’ Modyford said, refusing the bait.

  ‘Not if the Lord High Admiral smells it first,’ said Henry, unrepentant. ‘The Navy is so hard up, I understand, that they have to pawn the rudder to buy rope.’

  ‘Oh, go home to Elizabeth, you unprincipled disturber of the peace—’

  ‘What peace?’

  ‘—and don’t let me see you again until I can look at you without my choler rising.’

  ‘When will that be, does your Excellency reckon?’

  ‘You might try coming to dinner the day after tomorrow.’

  The chastened Henry went away feeling that, considering the enormity of his crime, he had got off lightly; and two days later he presented himself at Kingshouse prepared to help the Governor in the concoction of dispatches for home consumption. He had come by invitation, and to dinner; and he was surprised when the Governor kept him waiting. Was it possible that Sir Thomas was seriously angry? Was he being put in his place?

  When at last he was shown into the long library that the Governor ha
bitually used as a living-room, he had the impression that someone had just been pushed out of sight into the little parlour off it; and this surprised him even more. Lady Modyford had come back from England and was living out at Morant; which left Sir Thomas ample scope for intrigue if he had wanted it; but even at his loneliest the Governor had always had a reputation for austere self-sufficiency, and it was hardly likely that he was entertaining a surreptitious petticoat.

  Morgan watched him as he poured wine for his visitor; and thought that he had never seen that fine, cool face so distracted by private emotion. What could be moving Modyford to that extent?

  The Governor asked for Elizabeth, and inquired about progress at Morgan’s Valley, without giving the impression of being really aware of what he was saying. He even inquired about Henry’s health when he was in South America.

  ‘You escaped the fever?’

  ‘Yes. Four of my men died of it, and some have brought it back with them. But I have escaped so far.’

  ‘That is good.’

  He had never seen Modyford like this before.

  A small sound came from the farther room, and the Governor winced as though it had been a thunder-clap.

  Because he was sorry for him and anxious to relieve the unacknowledged tension, Henry broached the obvious subject for conversation: the matter of his own misdeeds. Since the commission given to him by the Governor had been granted at the request of the Council of Jamaica, he said, would it not be possible for the Council to take the beating? A council had a broad back and no individual feelings whatever—especially when they unanimously approved both of the Maracaibo expedition and of the thirty thousand pounds that were going to be spent largely in Jamaica. The Council would not mind being whipping-boy in such a good cause, surely?

  ‘We shall not need a whipping-boy,’ Modyford said.

  ‘Not need one? Why?’

  ‘Because we have been reprieved. And I wish with all my heart that it were not so.’

  ‘Who has reprieved us?’ Henry asked, watching the Governor get up and walk to that inner door.

  ‘One Manoel Rivera Pardal,’ the Governor said.

  Since this meant nothing to Henry, he was still at a loss.

  ‘You had better hear the story for yourself,’ Modyford said, opening the door and revealing the figure that was waiting there.

  It was Cornelius.

  The boy’s thatch of blond hair hung limp and lustreless, and his eyes were sunk in his head. He looked old and tired; at the end of his tether. He was clutching a woollen cap between his hands and twisting it in an odd, childish, not quite sane fashion.

  ‘Come in, Cornelius,’ Modyford said gently. ‘Captain Morgan is here now.’

  The boy came into the room, still wringing the cap, and sat down on the edge of a chair without taking his eyes from Morgan’s for a moment.

  ‘Cornelius came to me first,’ Modyford said, ‘because he could not find you. I told him that you were out at Morgan’s Valley but that you would be here to dinner in a very short time.’

  ‘They must pay for it, Captain,’ the boy said. ‘They must pay for it.’

  ‘For what, Cornelius?’

  ‘For the Mary and Jane. For Bernard. And the others.’

  Henry looked up at Modyford as the significance of this came home to him.

  ‘Is this our reprieve?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Merciful God!’

  Since the boy was without words, Modyford went on:

  ‘They were quite well received in Cuba, and allowed to trade their cargo. And Bernard was given a receipt for his prisoners and a letter of thanks from the Governor for me. Then two days out on the voyage back to Jamaica they met a ship flying the English colours and sent two men in a boat to her for news. As soon as the two men were on board, the stranger fired a broadside that crippled the Mary and Jane, so that she had to stay and fight. They fought for three hours. By that time she was on fire fore and aft.’

  ‘Did she sink?’

  ‘No,’ Cornelius said, although the question had been asked of Modyford. ‘They boarded us and put the fires out. We could not put them out ourselves because by that time we were too few.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Nine.’

  The Mary and Jane had had a crew of eighteen.

  ‘Was Bernard one of the nine?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How was it, Cornelius?’

  ‘A splinter in the throat. A big splinter. As thick as my wrist.’

  ‘And this ship. Who was she?’

  ‘The San Pedro y La Fama, Captain Pardal.’

  ‘What size?’

  ‘Ninety-six men and twenty guns.’

  ‘And a commission to wage war,’ said Modyford.

  ‘What!’

  ‘To be exact, two commissions.’

  ‘From whom?’

  ‘One from the Queen Regent of Spain, “for five years through the whole West Indies as reprisal for Puerto Bello”. And one from the Governor of Cartagena; which seems to be the San Pedro’s home port.’

  ‘What have they done with the Mary and Jane?’

  ‘They turned the nine of us loose in our longboat, and took the Mary and Jane to Cartagena,’ Cornelius said, still with those unwavering eyes on Morgan’s. ‘They have to pay for it, Captain. They have to pay for it.’

  ‘Never fear, Cornelius. They’ll pay.’

  ‘And you’ll take me with you to the paying?’

  ‘I’ll take you with me.’

  His thoughts went to Mary Speirdyck as he had seen her two days ago, sitting in her spotless little room above the harbour, playing with her baby son.

  ‘He is so like Bernard,’ she had said, laughing. ‘So like Bernard when Bernard is wakening up after a nap.’ And she had added, soberly: ‘This one will live. It is a green, kindly country, Yamaica; good to be little in. Not like Curacao.’

  How would Mary take this? This cutting in two of her life? This catastrophe on the threshold of happiness.

  And who would tell her?

  In the end it was Morgan who told her. And she neither wept nor blasphemed. She looked at her child in its cot, and said: ‘By the time he grows up men will have found how to live without fighting.’

  And Morgan went away envying her this small fragment of the future to which she could cling for salvation. For him there was only the present; and anger tore him night and day like a mortal disease.

  He took the Marquesa as his share of the Maracaibo prize-money, and repaired and refitted her with money that should have gone to the improvement of Morgan’s Valley; and when Modyford asked what he planned to do with her, Henry said: ‘I have an invitation to Panama.’

  And Modyford for once made neither criticism nor protest.

  On the contrary, he was lavish with Government stores; and more resigned than usual to the good-natured barbarities of the privateers-men who swarmed in Port Royal. (Their favourite ploy was to broach a barrel of wine in the street and make all who passed drink to the current toast.) It was almost as if he saw an end coming, and wanted, before that final line, whatever it might be, was drawn, to have done with half-measures, and compensations, and balances, and fence-sitting.

  His only comment was made when he learned the size of the fleet that Henry proposed to take out with him.

  ‘You won’t forget that peace treaty that they are still playing with in Europe, will you, Harry? If they ratify it, you will not be able to take any fleet out.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Henry said. ‘The fleet will be ready before the ratification.’

  But, as it turned out, it was a near thing.

  When Henry went to say good-bye to the Governor before sailing for his rendezvous in the Cays, he knew that letters had come by the ship which had touched at Port Royal that morning, and he cast an anxious look at the papers that littered the Governor’s desk. Modyford saw the glance and smiled.

  ‘Not yet, Harry. But any day now. I have had private letters.
Spain has been moved to concessions.’

  ‘What moved her?’ said Henry. ‘Puerto Bello?’

  ‘Oddly enough, yes. Or so I think. They have been hit so often and so dangerously that it begins to dawn on them that they can no longer consider themselves sole proprietors of the West. There seems to have been one good event to our mutual villainy.’

  But Henry was staring at the table.

  ‘What interests you?’

  ‘My name.’

  ‘You read upside-down?’

  ‘Oh, with ease. Would it be graceless of me to ask what your correspondent says of me?’

  ‘It is not a letter, Harry. It is a notice that was found stuck on a tree near St Ann’s Bay.’

  He handed over the paper, and Henry read it aloud; with some difficulty, because the ink had run and the script was foreign.

  ‘“This, from Captain Manoel Rivera Pardal, is to the chief of privateers in Jamaica. I am he who took Captain Speirdyck and carried the prize to Cartagena, and I am now arrived on this coast and have burnt it—” Burnt?’

  ‘Yes. Five of the little farms between St Ann’s Bay and Dry Harbour.’