The Privateer

by Josephine Tey

  ‘Would it be possible for me to have that book tonight?’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ said the boy, abashed. ‘If you wish it. Admiral. I shall send it round to your lodgings as soon as I reach home. I am sorry from my heart that you had to learn about the book in this uncivil fashion—I had thought that you would have known about it—and if there is anything that I can do to contradict its influence, please believe that I shall be very glad to do it.’

  ‘Good-night,’ said Morgan, and went out into the night.

  Into a night blacker than any he had yet experienced.

  He had thought that the ultimate in suffering had been reached that night in Chagres, on that hot, damp night when he had at last managed to drink himself insensible. But even that night in Chagres had been nothing like this: this absolute in misery.

  He went up to his room at the Dolphin and sat staring at the opposite wall, while Romulus moved about preparing him for bed. When a footman came with the book he said: ‘Go to sleep, child. I shall not need you again tonight.’ But Romulus sat down in a corner, prepared to watch with his god.

  It was worse, far worse, than he had expected. There was no silliness too great for Exmeling to set down; no atrocity too hideous for Exmeling to invent. It was a monumental absurdity: a ‘pirate tale’ such as seamen spin for illiterates over a tavern table in return for a drink; but it was also extremely readable, and it had the fascination of the frightful. One turned the page to find what new horror might be in store on the next. Little Henrik had found the perfect formula for selling a book.

  Morgan learned something that night at the Dolphin. He learned that helpless anger is by far the most destructive of human emotions. It mauled and tore him. It consumed him like a furnace. It shook him in its clutches as a cat shakes its prey.

  He did not know which he longed the more to kill: the creature who had smeared him with this filth, or the fools who had believed him.

  Had they no minds? No critical faculties? Did they think that the achievements of Puerto Bello, and Maracaibo and Panama were possible to an undisciplined rabble?

  Could they not see the absurdity that lurked in every invention? He had burned Panama, it seemed. Did they not even pause to consider whether a man would burn the city he had crossed a continent to capture?

  Did the relish with which the tortures were described not waken doubt in their presumably educated minds?

  If their minds were not capable even of this simple analysis, then surely the sub-title was a sufficient guide to the credibility of anything that the book might contain. ‘The Englishman Is Devil Rather Than Human,’ said the sub-title, addressing itself to the Hollanders at the end of a bitter war with the English.

  And yet this revolting, this loathsome piece of ordure-throwing was ‘the rage of the town’.

  He sat with the book on the table in front of him, and watched the candle burn down. Sat and writhed.

  He was still sitting there when the dawn came, staring at the cold guttered wax that had borne so fine a flame.

  17

  ‘You cannot reach the wretched Exmeling,’ Modyford said to him, ‘but you can extort very substantial damages from the English publisher. After recent sales, I do not doubt Mr William Crooke’s ability to pay.’ He looked across at Morgan’s exhausted face and was moved to further speech. ‘Shall I tell you what interested me most in the Dutchman’s work? His admiration for you.’

  ‘Admiration!’ said Morgan, very bitter.

  ‘Yes. He fights desperately against it, but it overcomes him continually. He is a poor little nobody, Exmeling; the kind of man whom no one notices in a room; but he passionately wants to be a Henry Morgan. He hates you because you are all he would like to be and never will; but the admiration for what you are is stronger than he is. It seeps through his tale in spite of himself. I found it extraordinarily interesting.’

  ‘I am glad that your Excellency was entertained.’

  ‘Poor Harry! You feel defiled, don’t you?’

  ‘I am defiled.’

  ‘Yes. But at least there will be vindication.’

  ‘Did you ever know a vindication that overtook a vilification?’ Morgan asked.

  And Modyford had no answer. Nor had Henry expected one.

  The damage to his reputation was irreparable, and they were both too intelligent not to recognise that fact.

  ‘When do you see the Commissioners?’ Modyford asked.

  ‘On Monday afternoon.’

  ‘I hope you have ammunition for the contest.’

  ‘I have three out-size pieces of artillery.’

  ‘I am glad to hear it. What are they?’

  ‘The Queen of Spain’s commission to Manoel Rivera Pardal to wage war against the English for five years; found in Pardal’s cabin in the San Pedro y La Fama. A commission from the Governor of Cartagena to the same effect, from the same source. And the dispatches of Don Juan Perez de Guzman, Governor of Panama, to the authorities in Madrid.’

  ‘Don Juan’s dispatches!’

  ‘Yes. We intercepted them.’

  ‘Will they prove useful?’

  ‘Well, he boasts about how clever he was in burning Panama before we could get to it. That will interest their lordships, I hope.’

  It interested their lordships very greatly, as it proved.

  Quite the most bitter reproaches that Spain hurled at the Court of St James’s were reserved for the barbarism of the pirates who burned Panama, and the touching pride of Don Juan in this same destruction was a matter of sober delight to their lordships.

  But they were inquisitive on other matters, and intolerably long-winded.

  Had Henry received Sir Thomas Modyford’s dispatches announcing the ratification of the treaty with Spain before he left his fleet rendezvous en route to Panama?

  No, Henry had not.

  Did the word Commander-in-Chief, in his commission from the Council of Jamaica, refer to his fleet, or was it a military commission permitting him to make war on land?

  And so on.

  And so on, through many summer afternoons; with the river light wavering on the ceiling and the Spanish ambassador sitting in an attitude of polite unexpectancy at the end of the table.

  The cherry-leaves in the gardens were red before their lordships decided that there was nothing they could profitably or legally do to Henry Morgan. The Spanish ambassador would have to be disappointed.

  The direct result of this whitewashing was an intimation that Admiral Morgan might now present himself at the Whitehall levee, and for eight successive mornings Morgan, dressed in his best, stood among the waiting crowd in the ante-room while the King moved down the line talking to a chosen few before disappearing to the outer world and his day’s occupation. On the ninth day, bored by this vain repetition, he was late, and had just reached the outer door as the King began his progress down the line. And this time Charles’s black eyes did not skim over him in passing. Charles stopped in the doorway.

  ‘Admiral Morgan,’ he said. ‘I hear that you have been waging peace in the Caribbean.’

  Not sure whether this was reproof or jest, Morgan bowed and was silent.

  ‘I understand that sailors hate walking, but if a short walk in the park would not bore you unbearably, I should be glad of your company.’

  So Harry Morgan went out to walk with his King in the park. And it was very soon apparent that this was no affair of a moment’s impulse. Charles wanted to know about Jamaica. Poor Sir Thomas Lynch was very gloomy, he said, because they could not spare ships from the navy for the defence of Jamaica, and now he had no privateers for its defence. The privateers refused to come anywhere near Jamaica, because he confiscated their ships and set them to planting; they had all gone to Tortuga in the hope of commissions from the French.

  ‘Sooner or later privateering must come to an end, Admiral. How are we to settle the men on the land and at the same time defend the island against possible attack?’

  Henry said that tha
t was simple. Make no attempt to settle the men on the land. Let them be free to go into the logwood trade, using Port Royal without let or hindrance, and they would be there for use as a fleet whenever they might be needed.

  ‘Sir Thomas is not very happy in his Governorship, he tells me. And yet he is a worthy man.’

  Morgan said that Jamaica needed more than worthiness in a Governor. It needed someone above faction.

  ‘Someone from England, you mean.’

  Yes, Morgan meant just that.

  ‘And whom do you suggest?’

  But Morgan was not to be caught in that snare. He had been so little time in England, he said, that he might be excused from answering that.

  And Charles looked amused. ‘You fence as expertly as you fight, Admiral,’ he said; and asked if the Admiral proposed to go back to Jamaica in the near future.

  Morgan said that the choice was not his, since he was unfortunate enough to have a law-suit on his hands.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Charles, contemplative. ‘The malice of small persons. So much more destructive than war. I wish you well, Admiral.’ And he went back to talking of Jamaica; its crops, its climate, its possibilities.

  So Morgan, having achieved the rehabilitation for which he had come to England, had now, on his own behalf, to struggle for a far more vital rehabilitation. The autumn mists hung about the trees and lay in the ditches, and his fever came back. That green and daisy-pied England that he had seen from a coach window seemed more compact of fantasy than any figment of his present fever. He had planned, during the hours of that summer journey, to take a coach once more across this jewelled perfection, to take a coach all the way to Wales, so that he might see Llanrhymny again. Now the roads of England were mire, and Llanrhymny merely a far place with a familiar name, and he yearned daily for the hot sun and the transparent seas and the wild fecund land of his adoption. He watched Romulus grow daily more wraith-like and if possible more silent, and by the end of November the boy’s daily question had the sound of a knell.

  ‘We go home tomorrow?’ Romulus would ask, day after day.

  ‘Not tomorrow, but soon,’ Morgan would say. ‘Very soon, Romulus.’

  And he would watch the child with foreboding. If they did not go very soon he might have to go alone.

  But out of this unhappiness there flowered unexpectedly two gratifications to be a solace to him. One was the lasting friendship of the boy Albemarle. (‘I had never suspected Christopher of the crusading spirit!’ Charles said, surprised by the boy’s ardent partisanship.) The other was the fact that his sturdiest and most instant defence came from men who had no cause to love him. Indeed, two of the captains who had been most bitter about the division of the Panama spoils wrote, one from Bristol and one from Portsmouth, to refute the charges against Morgan totally and absolutely. And there were other, even more unlikely defences.

  From the court of France, to Louise Kéroualle, came a letter from a young Spanish woman married to a Frenchman, who said that she had read in a Spanish translation a book purporting to give an account of the deeds of the English Admiral Morgan in Puerto Bello, and in view of the nature of this account she thought it right to send dear Louise a letter written by her mother during the occupation of Puerto Bello by Captain Morgan’s men; in the hope that it might help to save a brave man from being traduced.

  ‘We live very peaceably and comfortably, in spite of the English occupation,’ wrote the dowager to her daughter in Spain. ‘Indeed, to tell the truth, the last contingent of troops from home proved much more upsetting than Captain Morgan’s men—except that they did not hold us to ransom. The good sisters are very peeved because their fine altar-plate has been scheduled as part of the levy, but I still have my diamond earrings—as the wretch did not fail to point out.’

  But the most unexpected defence of all was forwarded from the Trade and Plantation offices. It had apparently been written to the writer’s specification by some clerk, and the faultless copper-plate contrasted oddly with the sense of what was written.

  To Whom It May Concern (said the communication)

  Seeing that a damned Dutchman seeks to asperse an Englishman whose boots he isn’t fit to lick, even if he is a bit too big for them, the Englishman, meaning the boots, this is to state that Captain Morgan is the damnedest scourge as to hard discipline that ever disgraced the sea with soldier notions. A man has more chance of raising hell round Portsmouth of a Saturday night than he ever has with Harry Morgan in the Indies, and if the writer ever meets the said damned Dutchman he will, so help him God, do things to him that Harry Morgan never thought of. He will do things to him that the Dutchman never thought of.

  Underneath the beautiful copperplate of this, in a large, painstaking, pen-and-ink scrawl, was the signature: Nick Gaytor.

  Morgan had builded better than he knew when he had in the end decided to let Nick Gaytor’s crew have their share of Maracaibo.

  This document had been addressed to the Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, and having gone round the Colonial Office and provided amusement for all the civil servants, it went on to Morgan, and thence to his solicitor, John Greene; who filed it away against that case in the King’s Bench at Westminster.

  But the case was, after all, settled by consent. Mr William Crooke had no leg to stand on, and had the wit to know it. He agreed to publish the next edition prefaced by a full retraction and apology, to fork out substantial damages, and to pay the costs of the man he had injured.

  ‘I ought to have taken him for all he had,’ Morgan said to Modyford, reporting the result. ‘I ought to have stopped the sale of the book.’

  ‘You have,’ said Modyford. ‘Don’t you know anything about human nature? No one will buy a book to read about horrors if it is prefaced by the announcement that there is not a word of truth in any of them. They like to think that the horrors really happened. Do you think Lord Carlisle would be a good person to keep our Jamaican Governorship warm until Christopher is grown-up enough for it?’

  ‘Carlisle! Yes. Yes, indeed. Would he think of it?’

  ‘I understand that he is not too averse to the idea. There is a lady from whom he would be glad to be separated by the width of a sea or two, it seems.’

  ‘Excellency, is there anything in this world that you do not know?’

  ‘Go away and talk Jamaica enticingly to Edward Howard.’

  But alack, someone else had been talking enticingly to Lord Carlisle.

  ‘Oh, that!’ Carlisle said, when Morgan broached the subject. ‘Yes, I did think of it, but Johnny wants to go.’

  ‘Johnny?’

  ‘Johnny Vaughan. He aches, it seems, to be a Governor. And Tilda has got herself a new protector, so my need to fly the town is less urgent than it was.’ He caught Morgan’s expression, and said: ‘Don’t you want Johnny?’

  That was putting it inadequately, Morgan was appalled by the thought of Vaughan in Jamaica. But he could hardly say so to Carlisle.

  ‘He’s very biddable, you know,’ Carlisle went on. ‘He’s so afraid of being in the wrong that he will do anything to avoid it. You’ll find him quite easy. Anyhow, the King has agreed, so there is nothing much one can do about it now.’

  But it seemed that Charles himself thought that there was something that might be done about it.

  Admiral Morgan was summoned once more to Whitehall, and this time it was not to a levee, but to an audience.

  ‘You will no doubt have heard, Admiral Morgan, that Lord Vaughan is going out to replace Sir Thomas Lynch as Governor of Jamaica,’ Charles said; and cast a glance of secret amusement at the stony countenance of his most famous sailor.

  Morgan managed a bow.

  ‘Lord Vaughan is inexperienced in the duties of Governorship and ignorant of Jamaican affairs. I think it would be advisable to give him the assistance of a Lieutenant-Governor who is experienced in administration and has some acquaintance with the island.’

  It would indeed be advisable, said the unrelenting M
organ.

  ‘I know that with a young plantation on your hands your time must be very fully occupied, Admiral; but do you think that you might find sufficient spare time to undertake the duties of Lieutenant-Governor?’ asked the King, toying with the sword that was lying across the papers on his desk.

  Morgan stared at the sword, fascinated.

  ‘Your Majesty—’ he managed at last; and stuck.

  Into the silence Charles said: ‘You’ll have your work cut out with Johnny. He’ll slip through your fingers like water.’ And he lifted the sword from the desk.

  Morgan had still no words.

  ‘It is customary,’ Charles said, ‘to knight a man when he is appointed to a Governor’s place. I understand that you have been suffering sadly from rheumatism in our damp river airs, Admiral, but I shall not keep you kneeling for more than a moment.’

  Morgan knelt.

  ‘And that, Sir Harry, is an end of your privateering,’ Charles said, putting out a hand to help Morgan to rise.

  ‘Is that why Your Majesty did it?’ asked Morgan, finding his tongue.

  ‘No,’ laughed Charles, ‘though I should have liked to say that it was. I am sending you out to administer Jamaica because you have all the qualities. Jamaica is your own parish, and you are knowledgeable about it, but your horizons are too wide to allow you to become parochial about it. You are wonderfully popular, but you have the moral courage to risk that popularity if need be. You hate Spain, but you have the vision to compromise if it is to the larger advantage. And as an old privateersman, you seem to me the ideal person to deal with those back-sliders who may find the logwood trade dull. Bon voyage, Admiral. I would give much to be slipping down the river with you; out to those coloured islands that I shall never see. Spare a thought for me as you pass.’

  Morgan spared more than a thought. His eyes lingered a long time on the misty grey palaces of the north bank as his boat dropped downstream to join the ship that was waiting for him in the Downs. It was a clammy January morning, and he was shivering; but his heart glowed. With that sword-tap on his shoulder the King had completed his rehabilitation.