Caribbee

by Thomas Hoover

CHAPTER TWENTY

  The sun emerged from the distant edge of the sea, burning through the fine mist that hung on the horizon. Katherine was standing on the high quartergallery, by the railing at the stern, the better to savor the easterly breeze that tousled her hair and fluttered the cotton sleeves of her seaman's shirt. The quiet of the ship was all but complete, with only the rhythmic splash of waves against the bow and the occasional groan from the masts.

  She loved being on deck to watch the dawn, out of the sweltering gloom of the Great Cabin. This morning, when the first light of day brightened the stern windows, she'd crept silently from their narrow bunk, leaving Hugh snoring contentedly. She'd made her way up to the quarterdeck, where John Mewes dozed beside the steering house where he was to monitor the weathered grey whipstaff, lashed secure on a course due west.

  Now she gazed out over the swells, past the occasional white- caps that dotted the blue, and tasted the cool, moist air. During the voyage she had learned how to read the cast of the sea, the sometimes fickle Caribbean winds, the hidden portent in the color of clouds and sun. She'd even begun practicing how to take latitude with the quadrant.

  Suddenly a porpoise surfaced along the stern, then another, and together they began to pirouette in the wake of the ship like spirited colts. Was there any place else in the world, she wondered, quite like the Caribbean? She never tired of watching for the schools of flying fish that would burst from the sea's surface like flushed grouse, seemingly in chase of the great barracuda that sometimes flashed past the bow. And near the smaller is­lands, where shallow reefs turned the coastal waters azure, she had seen giant sea turtles, green leatherbacks and rusty-brown loggerheads, big as tubs and floating languorously on the sur­face.

  The wildness of the islands and sea had begun to purge her mind, her memory. Fresh mornings like this had come to seem harbingers of a new life as well as a new day, even as the quick, golden-hued sunsets promised Hugh's warm embrace.

  After Barbados they'd made sail for Nevis Island, and as they neared the small log-and-clapboard English settlement along its southern shore, the skies had finally become crystalline and dry, heralding the end of the autumn rainy season. They lingered in the island's reef-bound harbor almost three weeks while Win­ston careened the Defiance and stripped away her barnacles, scorched the lower planks with burning branches to kill shipworm, then caulked all her leaky seams with hemp and pitch. Finally he'd laded in extra barrels of salt beef, biscuit, and fresh water. They were all but ready to weigh anchor the day a Dutch merchantman put in with word that the Commonwealth fleet had begun preparations to depart Barbados.

  Why so soon, they puzzled. Where were Cromwell's war­ships bound for now?

  Wherever the fleet's next destination, it scarcely mattered. The American rebellion was finished. After word spread through Nevis and St. Christopher that Barbados had capitulated, all the planters' talk of defiance evaporated. If the largest English settlement in the Americas could not stand firm, they reasoned, what chance did the small ones have? A letter pledging fealty to Commons was dispatched to the fleet by the Assembly of those two sister islands. That step taken, they hoped Calvert would bypass them with his hungry army and sail directly for Virginia, whose blustering royalists everyone now expected to also yield without a murmur.

  Still, after news came that the troops were readying to move out, Katherine had agreed with Winston that they shouldn't chance being surprised at Nevis. Who could tell when the Commonwealth's warships might suddenly show themselves on the southern horizon? The next morning they weighed anchor, heading north for the first two hundred leagues, then steering due west. That had been six days ago. . . .

  "You're lookin' lovely this morning, m'lady." John Mewes' groggy voice broke the silence as he started awake, then rose and stretched and ambled across the quarterdeck toward the bannister where she stood. "I'd say there she is, sure as I'm a Christian." He was pointing south, in the direction of the dim horizon, where a grey-green land mass had emerged above the dark waters. "The pride of the Spaniards."

  "What is it, John?"

  "Why, that's apt to be none other than Hispaniola, Yor Ladyship. Plain as a pikestaff. An' right on schedule." He bellied against the bannister and yawned. "Doesn't look to have budged an inch since last I set eyes on her."

  She smiled. "Then that must mean we're nearing Tortuga. By the map, I remember it's just off the north coast, around latitude twenty."

  "Aye, we'll likely be raisin' the old ‘Turtle' any time now. Though in truth I'd as soon ne’er see the place again."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "'Tis home and hearth of the finest assembly of thieves as you're e’er like to cross this side of Newgate prison. An' that's the fact of the matter."

  "Are you trying to make me believe you've actually been there, John?" She regarded him carefully. John Mewes, she had come to realize, was never at a loss for a story to share—though his distinction between truth and fancy was often imprecise.

  "Aye,'twas some years past, as the sayin' goes. When the merchantman I was quartermaster on put in for a week to careen." He spat into the sea and hitched up the belt on his breeches.

  "What exactly was it like?"

  "A brig out of Portsmouth. A beamy two master, with damn’d seams that’d opened on us wide as a Dutch whore's cunny— beggin' Yor Ladyship's pardon—which is why we had to put in to caulk her . . ."

  "Tortuga, John."

  "Aye, the Turtle. Like I was sayin', she's the Sodom of the Indies, make no mistake. Fair enough from afar, I grant you, but try and put in, an' you'll find out soon enough she's natural home for the rogue who'd as soon do without uninvited com­pany. That's why that nest of pirates has been there so long right under the very nose of the pox-rotted Spaniards. Mind you, she's scarcely more than twenty or thirty miles tip to tip, but the north side's a solid cliff, lookin' down on the breakers, whilst the other's just about nothing save shallow flats an' mangrove thickets. There's only one bay where you can put in with a frigate, a spot called Basse Terre, there on the south—that is, if you can steer through the reefs that line both sides of the channel goin' into it. But once you're anchored,'tis a passing good har­bor, for it all. Fine sandy bottom, with draft that'll take a sev­enty-gun brig."

  "So that's how the Cow-Killers . . . the buccaneers have managed to keep the island? There's only one spot the Spaniards could try and land infantry, and to get there you've got to go through a narrow passage in the reefs, easy to cover with cannon?"

  "I'd say that's about the size of it. No bottom drops anchor at Tortuga unless those rogues say you aye." He turned and began to secure a loose piece of line dangling from the shroud supporting the mizzenmast. "Then too there's your matter of location. You see, m'lady, the island lays right athwart the Windward Passage, betwixt Hispaniola and Cuba, which is one of the Spaniards' main shippin' lanes. Couldn't be handier if you're thinkin' to lighten a Papist merchantman now and again. . . ."

  Mewes' voice trailed off as he glanced up to see Winston emerge at the head of the companionway, half asleep and still shirtless under his jerkin. Following after him was Atiba, wear­ing a pair of ill-fitting seaman's breeches, his bare shoulders glistening in the sun's early glow. When he spotted Mewes, he gave a solemn bow, Yoruba style.

  "Ku abo, senhor."

  "Aye, qu ava it is." Mewes nodded back, then turned to Katherine. "Now, for your edification that means 'greetings,' or such like. Since I've been teachin' him English, I've been pickin' up a few of the finer points of that African gabble of his, what with my natural gift for language."

  "God's life, you are learning fastly, Senhor Mewes." Atiba smiled. "And since you are scholaring my tongue so well, mayhaps I should cut some of our clan marks on your mug, like mine. It is a damnable great ceremony of my country."

  ''Pox on your 'damnable great ceremonies.' '' Mewes busied himself with the shroud. "I'll just keep my fine face the way it is, and thank you kindly all the same."

  Winsto
n sleepily kissed Katherine on the forehead.

  She gave him a long hug, then pointed toward the south. "John claims that's Hispaniola.”

  "One and the same. The queen of the Greater Antilles. Take a good look, Katy. I used to hunt cattle in those very woods. That mountain range over in mid-island means we should raise Tortuga any time now." He turned and began unlashing the whipstaff, then motioned Atiba forward. "Want to try the helm for a while? To get the feel of her?"

  "My damnable shoulder is good, senhor. I can set a course with this stick, or cut by a sword, as better than ever."

  "We'll see soon enough." He watched Atiba grasp the long hardwood lever and test it. "I just may need you along to help me reason with my old friend Jacques."

  "Hugh, tell me some more about what he's like." Katherine took another look at the hazy outline of Hispaniola, then moved alongside them.

  "Jacques le Basque?" Winston smiled and thought back. Nobody knew where Jacques was from, or who he was. They were all refugees from some other place, and most went by assumed names—even he had been known simply as "Anglais." "I'd guess he's French, but I never really knew all that much about him, though we hunted side by side for a good five years." He thumbed toward the green mountains. "But I can tell you one thing for sure: Jacques le Basque created a new society on northern Hispaniola, and Tortuga."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Katy, you talked about having an independent nation in the Americas, a place not under the thumb of Europe? Well, he made one right over there. We boucaniers were a nation of sorts—shipwrecked seamen, runaway indentures, half of them with jail or a noose waiting in one of the other settlements. But any man alive was welcome to come and go as he liked."

  Katherine examined his lined face. "Hugh, you told me you once tried to kill Jacques over some misunderstanding. But you never explained exactly what it was about."

  Winston fell silent and the only sound was the lap of waves against the bow. Maybe, he told himself, the time has come. He took a deep breath and turned to her. "Remember how I told you the Spaniards came and burned out the Providence Company's English settlement on Tortuga? As it happened, I was over on Hispaniola with Jacques at the time or I probably wouldn't be here now. Well, the Spaniards stayed around for a week or so, and troubled to hang some of Jacques's lads who happened in with a load of hides. When we found out about it, he called a big parlay over what we ought to do. All the hunters came—French, English, even some Dutchmen. Every man there hated the Spaniards, and we decided to pull together what can­non were left and fortify the harbor at Basse Terre, in case they got a mind to come back."

  "And?"

  "Then after some time went by Jacques got the idea we ought not just wait for them. That wed best try and take the fight back. So he sent word around the north side of Hispaniola that any man who wanted to help should meet him on Tortuga. When everybody got there, he announced we needed to be organized, like the Spaniards. Then he stove open a keg of brandy and christened us Les Freres de la Cote, the Brotherhood of the Coast. After we’d all had a tankard or two, he explained he wanted to try and take a Spanish ship."

  "You mean he sort of declared war on Spain?"

  "As a matter of fact, that's how it turned out." He smiled. "Jacques said we'd hunted the Spaniards' cattle long enough; now we would hunt the whoreson Spaniards themselves. We'd sail under our old name of boucanier, and he swore that before we were through nobody would remember the time it only meant cow hunters. We'd make it the most dreaded word a Spaniard could hear."

  John Mewes was squinting toward the west now, past the bowsprit. Abruptly he secured a last knot in the shroud, then headed down the companionway and past the seamen loitering by the mainmast.

  "And that was the beginning? When the Cow-Killers became sea rovers and pirates?" For some reason the story made her vaguely uneasy. "You were actually there? A part of it?"

  "I was there." Winston paused to watch Mewes.

  "So then you . . . joined them?"

  "No particular reason not to. The damned Spaniards had just murdered some of ours, Katy, not to mention about six hundred English settlers. I figured why not give them a taste back? Besides, it looked to be the start of a grand adventure. We got together as many arms as we could muster, muskets and axes, and put to sea. Us against the Spaniards . . ."

  "Cap'n, care to come forward an' have a look?" Mewes was pointing at the dark green hump that had just appeared on the horizon. "That looks to be her, if I'm not amiss."

  Winston turned to study the sea ahead of them. Just above the surface of the sea was the tip of a large hump, deep green like a leatherback turtle.

  "Aye. Maybe youd best order all hands to station for the afternoon watch, John." He reached back and kissed Katherine lightly. "Katy, the rest of this little tale will have to wait. We've got to get ready now. In truth, I don't exactly know how pleased my old friend Jacques is going to be seeing me again after all these years."

  As she watched him head down the companionway, she felt a curious mixture of excitement and unease. Now, all at once, she was wondering if she really did want to know what Hugh had been like back then. Perhaps, she told herself, there are some things better just forgotten.