The Privateer

by Josephine Tey

  It had been Jack’s men on guard that night, Henry remembered; but it made no difference. Bribery was inconceivable. Even had the fierce pride of being ‘Morris’s men’ not sufficed, no man would give up his share of such prodigious wealth for a bribe; nor could any man of the guard hope to survive the rage of his fellows when the substitution was discovered. However it had been worked, it was not by suborning. And that was the one small scrap of comfort in an intolerable situation.

  They had used her to fool him.

  Had she known? Had she planned it?

  But no; she was too—

  He had almost said it: the unutterable word that had been used so lightly by Don Juan’s mistress. He pushed the word away, and thought up a more presentable one.

  She had no guile. Her lovely simplicity was without sin.

  She had carried back a king’s ransom on her pack-mule to Panama, but she had not known about it. Most certainly she had not known.

  ‘I shall have to stand the loss out of my share,’ he said to Jack, as they walked up the harbour.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jack, accepting it. Without the philandering with Don Vincente’s wife there would have been no duplicate chest for substitution. The thing must have been planned as soon as it was known that loot was to be taken out of the country in that chest.

  At ten o’clock the assessors began their work, and it went on for three days. And for every moment of those three days Henry waited for someone to remember some particular trinket and make application for it. But no one did. The habit of accepting the ‘lot’ was so ingrained in privateering souls that choice did not normally interest them. All they cared about was the total.

  Henry sat late on that first dreadful night, facing his humiliation. On the second night he sat late reckoning what each man’s share would have come to had the chest been still in their possession, and calculating what he must now add to bring each share to its proper total. Sick with shame and penitence, he calculated generously; so that it cost him nearly everything he had.

  And it was the final touch of wormwood in the gall when, at the distribution on the fourth day, the men broke into open protest at the smallness of their reward.

  ‘It is less than we got for Maracaibo!’ they said. ‘Less than for Puerto Bello!’

  ‘There were only five ships at Puerto Bello, and seven at Maracaibo,’ he reminded them. ‘Today we have more than thirty.’

  But they were in no mood to calculate coldly. ‘It is not enough!’ they insisted.

  ‘Every man entitled to either compensation or special award has had the full amount,’ Morgan said. ‘That is a first charge on both officers and men. After that what is left is shared out in the recognised proportions; according to the scale under which you signed on. Every man of the fleet has had his due share of the total; no more and no less. Do you want the widows’ share too?’

  ‘He’s right,’ said the saner ones. ‘Thirty-odd ships makes a deal of difference, come to think of it.’

  But the others nursed their grievance and preserved it in rum; and by evening, when they were drunk, they congregated in a noisy shifting gang under the balcony of their Admiral’s lodging and made open accusations. The officers had lined their pockets at their expense, they said. The officers had filched the best stuff.

  The final irony was supplied by the fact that a good third of the said officers were thinking the same thing of Morgan. Morgan had skimmed the cream, they said. Even divided among more than thirty ships’ crews, surely the wealth of Panama should have produced more than a wretched ninety pounds a-piece.

  ‘Let me tell them that you haven’t a penny piece,’ Jack said, moved by this injustice. ‘Let me tell them about the loss of the chest.’

  ‘And have them mock me for a fool! No! Let them think me knave if they want to.’

  So only a handful of captains came to the parting supper that Morgan gave that night; and these were men who knew him personally and who had served with him before.

  In the small hours of the morning, Cornelius, still playing cards in a wine-shop on the harbour front because sleep did not come easy to him these days, felt a small tug on his sleeve and looked round to find Romulus standing there.

  ‘Captain not come home,’ he said.

  ‘I expect he’s making a night of it,’ Cornelius said. ‘I don’t blame him.’

  ‘Better in bed. You come help.’

  ‘You don’t imagine he’d listen to me, do you?’ said Cornelius, going on with his game.

  But the boy plucked his sleeve again, and said: ‘You come help.’

  Since it was never any use trying to get a coherent story out of Romulus, Cornelius good-naturedly gave up his game and accompanied him to see what he wanted. When he stood outside the door of the dining-room and the boy motioned him in, he said: ‘What is this? I can’t go in there! They’re at supper still. I can hear them talking.’

  But the boy threw the door open and led him in.

  Supper, it seemed, was over, after all. Of the entire party, the only ones who were not under the table were Ansell, Jack Morris and Morgan. It was Ansell who was talking. He was seeing how far he could count. At the moment he had got to five thousand four hundred and eighty-two, and was making heavy weather of it. Jack was neatly asleep in his chair. Morgan was sprawled over the table in an attitude of utter abandon and defeat.

  At long last Harry Morgan had managed to drink himself into insensibility.

  With the help of Romulus, Cornelius hoisted the limp bulk on to his shoulder and carried it to bed. He prepared to help Romulus with the undressing, but Romulus pushed him out and shut the door on him. The dressing or undressing of Henry Morgan was his sole affair.

  ‘I must try this again,’ Henry said when he wakened in the morning and found himself in bed. ‘It has always irked me to walk home after a party.’

  But his hard head continued to intervene, and in the month that remained of his stay in Chagres he walked to bed on twenty-two nights out of the thirty.

  16

  The fleet began dispersing the morning after the final share-out, and a new disgruntlement sullied that parting. The peace treaty with Spain had been ratified.

  ‘Ah, well,’ said the more philosophical, ‘the logwood trade is very profitable, they say. And who knows how long this peace will last, anyhow?’

  The others told each other that there were still eight months before the treaty would become operative, and they might as well make the most of those months. So the ships faded away over the horizon, by twos or threes, or singly, leaving Morgan with his friends. And in that more intimate atmosphere some of the family-party air that had characterised their early adventuring came back; but what would never come back was the light-heartedness.

  Soberly they sailed at last away from Chagres and the Spanish mainland; away from their unbelievable achievement. And it was in no twenty-four-gun frigate that Morgan sailed home to Port Royal; for his fine flagship was lying hopelessly aground in the Chagres river. He came home in the little Fortune; and it was in the familiar little stuffy cabin that he spent the long, fever-ridden days at sea. He would watch the figures as they came and went, never quite sure if they were real or not. Don Christoval de Rasperu came often, to sit at the table with his little toy dog a silken bundle on the cushion beside him, and talk about navigation and the deplorable thirst for oblivion that afflicted mankind so that they must get drunk.

  ‘But a man wants respite from life,’ Henry told him. ‘A respite from thought and feeling.’

  And Don Christoval would wag his elegant head and say: ‘It is too precious a gift, life, to waste even a moment of it.’

  Mansfield was there quite often, drinking wine, with little Henrik in the background. Henry knew that little Henrik was not real, because little Henrik had departed to England on the very morrow of getting his pay. He was going home to Holland, he had said; so he could not be in the cabin. But Bart was; and he was sure that Bart was real. He had had a dream about takin
g a sloop out from somewhere and burying Bart three miles out at sea where he would be comfortable and at home. But that was all nonsense, thank Heaven. Bart was here, alive and well. Poor Bart! with only five pearls left.

  Kinnell and Cornelius sailed the Fortune home between them, and worried endlessly about the man lying in the cabin. On his good days Morgan would come on deck and be his lucid and caustic self. But in no time he would be lying in the cabin again, watching unseen creatures come and go, and occasionally conversing with them.

  Kinnell grew so worried that during one of his Captain’s spells below he closed the Dolphin and asked Morris to come over. Jack came and looked and was dismayed, but had no remedy to suggest. His very individual reaction was to think that Elizabeth must not be allowed to meet him like that without being prepared. So Jack was first back to Port Royal.

  But nothing in Jack’s deliberately casual account prepared Elizabeth for the reality; for the slow-moving, thin man with the sallow skin and the eyes sunk deep in the haggard face.

  ‘Harry! My darling!’ she said; and ordered him to bed at once.

  And to her dismay he went.

  ‘I should have gone to see the Governor,’ he said, lying flat and still, with his strong hands spread out nerveless on the counterpane. ‘To report. But I shall feel better tomorrow, and he will understand.’

  ‘There is no haste,’ she said. ‘It is not to Sir Thomas that you will be reporting; and Colonel Lynch can wait.’

  ‘Lynch!’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Drink this.’

  ‘Lynch!’

  ‘Yes, but don’t get into a fever about it. It hasn’t quickened the Modyford pulse at all, so it needn’t quicken yours.’

  ‘Dear Bet,’ he said, a smile in his eyes; and drank what she gave him. ‘So the chickens are coming home?’

  ‘They’re home and roosting,’ she said. ‘And the only really worried person is poor Colonel Lynch, who, as far as Jamaica is concerned, is in a minority of one.’

  ‘The damned psalm-singing Puritan,’ Henry said, and fell asleep.

  In the sitting-room she found Jack waiting.

  ‘Did you tell him?’ he asked.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I ought to take the Dolphin’s crew up to Kingshouse and beat the liver and lights out of that—that—’

  ‘That damned psalm-singing Puritan,’ supplied Elizabeth.

  ‘Yes. It’s a Spaniard’s trick to invite a man on board ship and then arrest him when he’s your guest. An Englishman should be ashamed even to think of a method like that.’

  ‘He was afraid,’ said Elizabeth. ‘He’s a poor thing, and he was afraid. Afraid that—that someone would take a ship’s crew and stop him.’

  There was a moment of silence, and then Jack said, in a gentler tone:

  ‘You do know, don’t you, that it is only a matter of time before—before his turn comes?’ He leaned his head towards the inner room.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think he knows it himself. He said that the chickens were coming home to roost. But he is too tired to care.’ She waited a moment, as if debating with herself whether or not to put something into words; and then said: ‘Is it only the fever, Jack, that has—has so sucked him dry?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Jack, too hastily. And then, realising his slip, added: ‘That and the heavy burden. The responsibility. They’ll tell you that Panama was taken by thirty-two ships and fifteen hundred men. But that’s only a manner of speaking. It was taken by Harry Morgan.’

  ‘Dear Jack,’ she said.

  ‘At least I didn’t have to tell him about the canes,’ she said. ‘I was so afraid he would ask.’

  ‘Is it very bad?’

  ‘It couldn’t be worse.’

  ‘Cocoa too?’

  ‘Yes, everything. Dead and brittle with the drought.’

  But in the morning, when Henry heard that Modyford was a prisoner on board the navy frigate in the harbour, bound for England, that he was not even to be allowed to come ashore and say good-bye to his wife, he got up and dressed himself in the best garments that the little Port Royal apartment could produce, and went to Kingshouse. It was one of his good days, with his thoughts coming pat off his tongue in the most appropriate form; and the delighted servants, clustering round the library door and fighting for the best eavesdropping places, reported that never had the normal phrases of polite conversation managed to be so blistering.

  When Colonel Lynch ventured to ask what the reward of his adventure was likely to bring to the Admiral personally, the Admiral was heard to say:

  ‘Nothing like fifty-thousand-pounds-worth.’

  Which was the sum that Lynch was understood to have lent the King in return for his Governorship.

  And when the new Governor ventured to hope that the usages of civilisation had been employed towards the prisoners in Panama, the Admiral said Oh yes; that the prisoners had been openly arrested, not kidnapped, and had never been held incommunicado.

  Somewhere about the ninth round, when the new Governor was almost out on his feet, Henry asked that he might be allowed to visit his friend Sir Thomas Modyford on board the frigate before she sailed. But Colonel Lynch could still think. To a man who had crossed Panama and taken a capital city with a handful of men, spiriting a man off a ship would be child’s play. So Henry was not given permission to see his friend.

  But Sir Thomas was allowed to send letters ashore.

  ‘My dear Harry,’ he wrote, ‘Spain is demanding my head, but I hear that my countrymen are going to let me off with an eye-tooth. I am hoping that this token sacrifice will be held to be a general absolution and that you will be left in peace to tend your cabbages. You are young, and you are at the beginning of things still, and you have Elizabeth. But if not, I shall look forward to seeing you in London. No time is all loss that is spent in London with a friend.

  ‘You have rocked Spain to the foundations by the taking of Panama, and if, as I hear, it has cost you something in health, it has saved England from a long war with Spain. Or so I think. The realisation that even their Pacific coast is vulnerable will do more than anything to bring Spain to the point of compromise over the Americas. Panama has been for them the writing on the wall.

  ‘Your writing, Harry, my friend.’

  ‘God bless and keep you till we meet again.’

  It was a long time before they met again. Partly because the order for Admiral Morgan’s arrest was delayed, and partly because once it had come none of the new clique at Kingshouse dared to hurry the Admiral in the small matter of giving himself up. So Henry pottered round his place at Morgan’s Valley; put the Fortune into the logwood trade with Cornelius as master, in the hope of being able to recover the loss on his wasted fields; and was dosed with noxious fluids by every doctor in the island—for he was an impatient creature and a chronic doctor-hopper—in an effort to cure his intermittent fever. When he had spun out nearly a year of this pastoral life, Captain Keene came into harbour in his ship H.M.S. Welcome, and Henry decided that if he must travel to England under arrest, he might as well do it with Keene, whom he liked.

  Only the fact that Harry Morgan was going voluntarily kept the island from open revolt; and Lynch found himself in the odd situation of being grateful to him. Lynch had spent the last months trying, out of his great wealth, to buy himself into the island’s good graces. But the island was still flooded with privateering money and impervious to bribery. Colonel Lynch’s only recruit from the waterside proved to be Captain Charles Hadsell, who had turned out to be a sadly unsuccessful privateer. His attack with six ships on the town of Cumana, on the Venezuela coast, was notorious as the only failure in all the history of Jamaican privateering; and ‘Cumana!’ had become a Spanish taunt whenever English ears were within hearing distance. So Hadsell, who had spurned the Morgan flag in his prosperous days, was glad to creep into the opposition fold now that he was an object of scorn in his old haunts.

  The whole town turned out to see the Welcome
sail, with bands, and singing, and waving kerchiefs, and cheers. And Henry dragged himself up from the cabin so that he could stand on her quarter-deck as she sailed past the battery on the Point, and acknowledge the island’s farewell to him. After that he went back to his bunk, and let Romulus pile the blankets on him and dose him with rum till his mind and senses grew blurred and he could stop either thinking or feeling.

  The Welcome was three months at sea, in one of the worst voyages she had ever experienced, and when at last she came into calm water at Spithead, Captain Keene looked doubtfully at his passenger and wondered whether he should report on the health of the prisoner before they took him into custody.

  But it seemed that there was to be no handing-over to a guard. Admiral Morgan, said instructions, was to make his own way to London, and there hold himself at His Majesty’s convenience.

  ‘The damned penny-pinching housekeepers!’ said the Admiral. ‘They want me to pay for my own cell.’

  He had also to pay for his transport to London, but it proved to be one of the most rewarding expenditures that Harry Morgan had ever made. It was summer time; the beginning of July. And before his eyes as the coach made its slow way up to London was trailed the green, wild-rose loveliness of England. He had never seen it before: this ultimate loveliness of Nature; and he sat enchanted. ‘Home’ to him had meant Llanrhymny; Llanrhymny with its soft West air. But when Englishmen said ‘home’ this was what they meant; this incredible perfection.

  He tried to think of something that might challenge its incomparability: the liquid light of Caribbean seas, the flaming blossoms in the dust, the savanna grass, the jungle prodigality. But all these were lovely details in a picture; here the whole picture was composed of lovely detail; fresh and jewelled as an illuminated letter. He sat and watched it, hour after hour. England. This was what men meant when they said England.