The Privateer

by Josephine Tey

  They listened to him in attentive silence, their wet clothes steaming in the sun; and Bluey put into words the feeling of every man in the crowd when he said: ‘Panama’s the richest town in the world, they say, and all I want out of it is a beef-steak!’

  Their minds were so filled with the anticipation of food that they failed to anticipate the sight of the sea. It took them unawares, and with the most surprising result. What not the thought of their survival, of the riches of Panama, nor of the food to come had done, the sight of the sea achieved. Their dead minds wakened into wild glory; wave after wave of mad cheering rolled to and fro along the ridge; and when their empty bodies would no longer cheer they stood there laughing like maniacs because there was the sea.

  It was a blue and smiling sea, if distant; studded with small islands and flecked with sails. The town lay at its edge, bright and shining and washed after the storm, very clear in the morning air, like the little landscape that Italian painters liked to put by the left ear of some Madonna. In the plain between the slope and the city the light splintered on the helmets of manoeuvring cavalry, but the English had no eyes for the troops. Just below them on the green plain were droves of cattle, placidly grazing. Fine fat cattle. Beautiful cattle. Magnificent cattle.

  They went down the slope singing, built their fires, and for the first time for seven days sat down to a meal. The half-raw steaks, still warm from the slaughter, slid down their throats without benefit of teeth. The fires looked gay and home-like—as the sea had looked. Their strung-up bodies relaxed, and one by one they lay back and slept; gorged and at peace.

  Only Morgan did not sleep. He lay in the meagre shade and tried to keep his thoughts clear. Presently he would have to face all the appurtenances of war: artillery, cavalry and foot. He looked round at the recumbent bodies: shabby, half-naked, untidy and worn; and reckoned as far as his unruly mind would let him. Reckoned their spirit against the power of Panama. Affection rose in him as he looked at them. They had cursed him, these last few days; cursed him for bringing them on a fool’s errand; there were times in the forest when some of them would have liked to kill him. But even in their sleep, he noticed, there was no supineness of spirit. Each man slept with his arms about his musket, and his ammunition to hand. Bart had even spread his coat over his as an insurance against a repetition of last night’s deluge before he wakened.

  Morgan’s eye lingered on Bart, and a more personal worry swam up out of the whirling ends of thought that filled his head. Bart had aged greatly since his servitude on the fortifications of San Jeronimo, and Morgan had wanted him to stay behind at Chagres, but Bart would have none of it. Indeed, he had been so hurt at the suggestion that Henry had wished that he had not made it. Now, looking at Bart asleep, he wished that he had insisted. This was no work for a man who must be nearly sixty. Bart should be back on the ship, sitting in the shade with his scissors and his measuring tape and his sail-cloth.

  He propped himself on his elbow and leaned over to draw the edge of the old man’s coat forward so that it made a shade for his face; and as he did it the light caught the emerald on his finger, and the direction of his thoughts changed. He lay back and smiled. Worried he might be, and uncertain with fever, but he had a notion that the state of Don Juan Perez de Guzman must at this moment be a great deal more feverish than his was ever likely to be.

  And in that he was right.

  When the fugitives from the stockades on the river arrived in Panama with the news that the incredible English, baffled by the shallow river, were now advancing through the forest, Don Juan sent out Indian irregulars to keep the English in the forest and had himself carried to the Cathedral, where he presented the Virgin with a diamond ring worth four thousand pieces and swore an oath to die in her defence.

  When the Indians came back to say that the English caught their arrows in mid-air and shot them back (with muskets, presumably) and were now through the forest and out on the savanna, and feasting on stolen cattle, Don Juan ordered that the Virgin should be taken out of the church and carried in procession round the town, attended by the complete fraternity of St Francis, the nuns of Our Lady of Rosario, of San Domingo and of the Mercedes, and all the images of the saints and patrons belonging to all these bodies. He was once more going through his collection of jewels with a view to further insurance (with side-glances now and then at the little pistol with its six bullets) when his cavalry commander, Don Francisco de Haro, came to say that if the English were feasting on meat after their ardours in the forest they would tonight be so dead asleep that they could be surprised and butchered where they lay, and the whole matter would be ended in an hour.

  Don Juan considered this a wonderful idea; and was very much disappointed next morning when his cavalry commander came back to report that Morgan had had the same idea.

  ‘He had his men roused at two o’clock in the morning,’ reported Don Francisco, frustrated but admiring. ‘An Englishman who thinks is a very dangerous animal, Excellency.’

  This was the final, insupportable straw. Don Juan made a complete sweep of all that he valued (‘all my jewels and relics collected in my pilgrimages’, as he reported sorrowfully to Madrid) and divided them between all the other images in town. (‘Hedging his bets’, as Jack said later, comparing the dazzling Virgin of Don Juan’s devotion with the after-thought-upon saints and madonnas.)

  And then, denuded of all but faith, he prepared to honour his oath to die in defence of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception at Panama, by taking the field at the head of his troops.

  When Morgan saw the troops he could hardly believe his eyes. It was like a child’s game on some nursery floor. All laid out, neat and bright and orthodox and static. Cannon in front, infantry behind, and cavalry on either flank. He had lived so long in a guerilla world that he had forgotten that war could still be waged like this.

  ‘Ain’t they pretty?’ said Bluey, sucking his teeth.

  And truly they were pretty. Their clothes were bright-coloured, their metal glittered, their guns gleamed, their horses shone, their banners flowered in the sun.

  There was only one thing lacking in this brilliant array; as Don Juan did not fail to report to Madrid. It was the thing in which the sad-coloured thousand facing them were so rich: heart. More than fifteen hundred of them, said Don Juan, were arrant cowards and not Spanish at all; and the Spanish, on the other hand, had no faith in the arms they had to fight with. A carbine, they felt, was no match for a musket, even at odds of six to one; and anyhow they had not fired anything at all for years except some fowling-pieces in their off-time. The gunners were in even worse shape; they were frankly terrified of the temperamental monsters they were required to fire. The heretical English seemed almost friendly compared with a mass of metal that might blow up in their faces.

  The heretical English were at that moment hearing their own version of the Mass, and commending their souls to their Maker. As firmly as they believed in nothing in this world they believed in the next. So they knelt on the soft savanna grass and recited their prayers, demure and trusting as children.

  ‘I gave strict command that none should move without my order,’ wrote Don Juan to Madrid; but even trained troops will not stand to be fired on from the scrub on their flank. The Spaniards had considered that scrub to be impenetrable; but the English, who had bested a dry river and a virgin forest, were in no mood to be defeated by some scrub. Jack Morris’s crew sat comfortably in the dense cover of the little hill and picked off the troops below them at their leisure. This was entirely contrary to the book of the rules, and Don Juan was dismayed. But Don Francisco came to his help.

  ‘I told you the animal thinks, Excellency. We must not give him further time to think. Let me charge him with my cavalry. He has no cannon, and we shall not give him time to reload his muskets after the first volley. We can mow his troops down.’

  And once again Spanish cavalry came charging to their lesson on English musketry. It was not one volley that met them. As
the front rank fired, the second rank took their place; cool and deliberate, as if they were shooting for a prize. And when the second volley had been fired, the third rank had their turn. The thundering line of horse which a moment before had seemed a wave of destruction that nothing could stop broke, and withered, and died along the whole front of the English line as the surf dies against a rock.

  Don Francisco, looking at his shattered squadrons as they cantered back to safety, decided that orthodox methods were too expensive. He came to Don Juan with a new suggestion.

  ‘A herd of cattle!’ said Don Juan, shocked to the soul. ‘But that is a most—a most ungentlemanly method.’

  ‘It is a question of living as plain men or dying as gentlemen,’ said Don Francisco, tart from his lesson in musketry. ‘It is for your Excellency to say.’

  His Excellency decided, therefore, to abandon the book of rules and overwhelm his enemy by some effective barbarism. To wit: the close-packed and irresistible mass of a bolting herd of wild cattle.

  ‘One must sacrifice the graces of life when necessity drives,’ said Don Juan, feeling smirched by this lowly stratagem. ‘At least we have the comfort of knowing that our sacrifice will be decisive. No man born of woman can stand still in front of a charging herd of cattle.’

  The old New Model could.

  And did.

  Cavalry, snakes, Indian arrows, starvation or charging cattle, it was all one to them. They knelt and fired into the brute mass as methodically as they would meet any other attack. By numbers. On the spot.

  As the front row of cattle succumbed to the volley, the beasts behind fell over them, and their combined bodies made a natural barricade that dammed the full weight of the charge. Those animals who were forced, by panic or by the impulse from behind, to surmount the struggling mass were daunted by the bright-coloured barrier that waited for them and fled along the line in search of escape. So that a black thundering river flowed harmless along the waiting English line, and the redcoats poured volleys in at their leisure. They would need meat anyhow.

  This seeming miracle was too much for the Spanish army. The rear ranks began to melt away.

  And in the silence that succeeded the drumming roar of the stampeding herd, Jack’s fore-top-ahoy voice yelled from the scrub on the Spanish flank: ‘Come on, Harry! They’re breaking!’

  As the English came on, ‘the retreat’ as Morgan said, also reporting to his superiors ‘became plain running’.

  ‘They left me there with one negro and one servant,’ wrote Don Juan to Madrid, ‘but I went forward alone to meet the enemy so as to comply with my promise to the Virgin to die in her defence. But my chaplain protested that this was not Christian. Twice I rebuked him, but on his protesting a third time I retired, it being a miracle of the Virgin to bring me off safe among so many thousand bullets.’

  The English, sore about that herd of cattle, pursued the flying Spaniards con amore, but Don Juan Perez de Guzman was not one of their victims. Don Juan got away to the hills, bad leg and all, and sat there writing letters to Spain.

  15

  That night the city of Panama burned.

  The proud Spaniards said that they had fired it to prevent its falling into English hands.

  The unimpressed English pointed out that the panic-stricken Spaniards were in such haste to blow up the main fort that they not only killed forty of their own men, but scattered burning fragments for a mile all round, and that it was this rain of burning brands from the explosion that set the roofs on fire.

  What is certain is that the English, who had looked forward to the delights of food and sleep, spent the hot, windy night in frantic efforts to put out the flames. No one would pay ransom for a burned-out town. But the wind blew, and the flames roared; and the ransom went down-wind and up with the flames. When dawn came there remained only the stone heart of the town: the courts, churches, convents, hospitals, stores, and the more palatial houses. The elegant little cedar-wood houses had perished along with the palm-thatched wattle of the slaves’ quarters.

  The stone-built part of the town, oddly Moorish in this far Pacific setting, was intact; and when Henry installed himself among the mirrors and damasks of the Governor’s house, he found the staff still there, and openly philosophical about this change of owners. The Governor, said Domenico, the black major-domo, had promised that ‘no harm would come to them because he had given the house into the Virgin’s charge’.

  ‘If no harm comes to you,’ said Henry, tired and caustic, ‘it will be because the English are civilised.’

  He looked at the great bed in the Governor’s room, piled high with soft pillows and hung with thick silk that would shut out a disappointing and importunate world, and every bone in him ached to lie down on that softness and sleep; and sleep, and sleep. Making himself walk away from it and downstairs again had the quality of a physical tearing, as burned flesh sticks to the thing that has mastered it. There could be no sleep yet for a man with a city in his hands. Even before he had chosen an office from the ground-floor rooms, the stream of callers began. Senior officers complaining, junior officers wanting advice, men wanting instructions. The long tale of incident; of the unforeseen and the unallowed-for. The incipient quarrels, the arbitrations. Burial parties, pickets, guards, deputations. Billets, commissariat, reconnaissance, medical supplies, lines of communication. It went on all through the long, hot morning, and far into the afternoon.

  The most urgent business was to get into commission again the one ship left in the harbour—grounded by the Spaniards—and with her help bring back the ship which had taken all the rich inhabitants out of Panama with all their portable treasure. This gratifying job (they had not expected to find any ship at all for their use) kept the seamen busy and out of mischief for the next two days, and they sweated so heroically in this good cause (as much to spite the Spaniard as to recover the treasure) that on the third day Ansell took the ship to sea.

  Henry had just grown used to the thought that there would be no ransom for Panama, when Ansell came back to say that there was no hope of finding the escaped grandees or their treasure, since the ship bearing them had stood straight out to sea bound for Peru. He had, however, brought in three other refugee ships which he had found at the small islands off the coast, together with the refugees themselves, who had settled down to a normal luxurious existence in supposed safety on Tobago and the other islands in the vicinity.

  ‘Are your prisoners still on board?’ asked Morgan.

  ‘The men were on one ship, and I’ve unloaded them into the customs-house on the quay. They’re quite resigned to being prisoners. But the women want to go back to their homes now that they are here in Panama again. They say that you can ransom them just as easily from there.’

  ‘Of course they can’t go home,’ Morgan said, impatient. ‘They must go to a convent. The Rosario is half empty; they can go there.’

  ‘I wish you’d tell them that,’ Ansell said, shamefaced. ‘I don’t mind admitting they put the fear of God in me. I’d as soon have a mutinous crew in a ship on fire in a hurricane, as sail with that crowd of peacocks. You tell them yourself, Admiral, will you?’

  ‘I’ll tell them,’ said Morgan, very grim. ‘You send the men up to the Franciscans and ask the brothers to billet them in the chapel if they have no spare cells; and then bring the women ashore to the customs-house. I’ll see them there when I’ve inspected your captured ships.’

  The three captured ships, added to the one they already had, made a small fleet, and the possibilities in this so interested Henry that he had to be reminded of the existence of the women. He went to the customs-house with swift, impatient steps, prepared to be short with female preferences. The last week had sucked him almost dry: dry of vitality, of humour, and of joy in living. He had taken twelve hundred cursing and half-dead men across the Isthmus. He had fought a battle with them, and won it. He had wrestled with a burning city, and now he was saddled with the administration of a province. And he was suc
ked dry. His sick blood played traitor to his will, and every day or two he found himself having to deal with the world through a haze of unreality that was worse than pain. Intangible spider-web bonds that were strong as chains would hold him where he sat, so that getting up was like the tearing of cables. His thoughts stuck, or floated away beyond his control, so that the effort of forcing them into order sickened and exasperated him. Nor was night a respite. He lay in the soft cushions of the great bed, sleepless and weary, watching the hours pass. At dawn he would slip into an exhausted insensibility, and two hours later would be on his feet again to face another day of self-driving.

  He strode into the customs-house in no tolerant mood, and addressed Ansell’s ‘peacocks’ with bite and precision. This was one of his lucid days, and he made the most of it: it was luxury to have the words come neat and appropriate from his tongue without having first to arrange them in his mind. It was absurd, he told them, to suggest that they should be scattered over the town as it seemed good to them. They were there to be ransomed, and until they were ransomed they would stay where they could be found.

  But we can be found in our homes, they protested.

  He doubted it, said Henry. He very much doubted it. The town was open to the countryside, without barricade or fortification, as it had always been. The temptation to depart would be very great. And if they thought that he had men to spare for a separate guard on each of them, then they were wrong. It was ridiculous, he said—

  And stopped there.

  He heard the silence that flooded in on his broken sentence.

  What had happened? Had his fever come back? What had stopped his thoughts?

  He struggled with the silence, but had no power to break it.

  In a dumb panic he sought for the source of his distraction, and found it. It was the Madonna by the doorway to the quay.

  It was a living Madonna, for all her stillness and repose. Warm and alive, for all her calm gaze and her folded hands.