by Jan Needle
“Christ, Will,” said Sam, “what are they doing?” There was a flash, a whoosh of grey-blue smoke and sparks, a thud that rolled across the intervening sea. Sam was answered.
“They’re scuttling,” said Will, and his voice was low with shock. “Good God, Sam. Look at all those men on board. Good God, we’ve got to save them!”
Kaye was beside them then, and almost beside himself with fury. He was screeching out abuse and spraying spittle. “Save them, the bastards? Save them? We’ve got to save the ship; we’ve got to get on board and put the fires out! Gunning! Lay on to her! Henderson, rake the decks! Shoot the bastards if they try to board us. Shoot them in the water!”
“Boarding party!” shouted Sam. “Taylor, gather up some men! Hugg! Tilley! Choose your people! Get small arms from the gunner’s mates! Mr Savary! Where are you, man! Where is Mr Savary!”
Savary appeared, in full uniform and smart, followed by his three men, in full fig. The effect was spoiled rather when one of their hats blew off in a gust from round the mast to go flying overside, but they looked like soldiers, no argument. Most of the opposition, though, on the Spaniard, had sadly disappeared.
Captain Kaye was roaring.
“I want to ram her, Gunning! At least to lay along her, double quick. Can we grapple? I want to get my men on board and strip her of her cargo! Get up to her, man, get up to her!”
Gunning, drunk as a lord, was delighted. He was waving his drinking arm about, endangering his helmsmen’s lives with the black bottle, essaying little dancing steps as the quarterdeck went skew.
“She’s on fire, man, and there’s a black squall blowing!” he shouted. “Aye, I’ll lay along her if you want to lose your shrouds, and then your masts, and then the lot when all her powder blows! If it’s suicide you’re after, Capting, then we’re your men, eh boys?”
Smoke was pouring from the Spaniard’s hatchway, but there was a marked lack of flames and fire so far. Bentley, assessing it as a sailing problem, considered Gunning right on every count. The Spanish ship was rolling fit to die, sliding beam-on to the seas with no one, presumably, at the helm. If Biter went along her, she would be crushed and smashed up by the roll, and she’d lose her masts inevitably. As to boarding her by boats — well, madly dangerous, as the sea went madder by the minute, but do-able if needs must. What for, though? They could not take off treasure in the open boats, and soon she would blow up.
“We need the boats to save the men, sir!” he shouted at Slack Dickie’s face. “There’s a dozen of them in the sea, sir! Twenty! I’ll launch the yawl! Mr Gunning, heave her to!”
“Fuck the men!” screeched Dickie. “The sharks can save ’em! Fuck heaving-to! Gunning, do your duty! Ram if you have to! I want that treasure off!”
Big John laughed harder, but he gave no orders that would heave her to or close up to the galleon. He was hauled hard on to the wind, spilling it from almost every sail, almost every leech ashake. The Biter punched and juddered, hurling spray across her deck from bow to stern, and men stood about, uneasy. They could not hear it, but they knew some row was going on. They were waiting for a resolution.
Angus, though, would wait no longer — and would do the captain’s bidding. Shockingly, the Scotchman ran onto the quarterdeck as if invited, and bellowed something in Kaye’s ear that Bentley did not catch. Kaye, startled, said something back, and looked aft to where the brothers, and a knot of other men, stood round the lightest cockleshell, which was the captain’s dandy skiff. As Angus arrived, they lifted it and swung it neatly onto the bulwark cap, then flung it bodily onto a rising wave. They had prepared it, unnoticed among the clutter on the deck, and jumped on and off the rail like monkeys, getting into her. The lifting sea slid back, the oars were out, and on the instant the skiff was dancing on the crests, as light and buoyant as an empty brandy bottle. In her were the three Scotch brothers, a man called Dusty Miller, who had once fought with them and later had palled up, and little muscle-barrel Morgan, who hated everybody because he’d been torn off from his wife, and loved to fight and bully, which made him a natural in their company. They did not bother with a mast and sail, the wind was now so hectic, but they lifted her across the seas like whalemen on the chase.
“They will board her for me!” Kaye said to William, triumphantly. “They will take her as a prize and douse the fire. We will hold station till this squall blows out!”
“We must save the Spaniards!” said Will, and Holt, joining them, added his weight. Two boats were ready, he told the captain, and their crews would stand the danger. Kaye looked aloft, ignoring him.
“Where away the Spanish cutter? Ho! Man aloft there! Where away the bumboat?”
The thin cry drifted down, “Dead to l’ward, sir! And making heavy weather of it! I think she’s filling!”
Then there were shouts and cries from forward, as Biter’s second boat was launched. As it hit the sea it was turned turtle by the backwash from a wave, and five men went roaring overside. Bentley shot off to help his men, as ropes were thrown for them to grab, and oars and handspikes were used to keep the yawl from smashing into Biter’s side. Holt, his own boat safe on deck with Tilley looking on, was scanning the water near the Spaniard to see if he could spot swimming survivors. While Kaye had mind on other things: like profit.
“It’s going out!” he said. “God, Holt, I think the fire has gone out! There’s too much water going down!”
Certainly the flames and smoke had died. There was a wisp or two, but diminishing, not on the increase as it should have been. Seas were breaking across the galleon as she rolled, with white water visible when she presented her deck to vision from the Biter. They could see the sea in lumps, going pouring down the hatchway. If the bomb had been put underneath it, then it was in the swim indeed. And the dandy skiff was fast approaching. They were close enough to see the oarsmen pause, reach overside, and haul at something. One Spanish seamen, then another, was dragged in. In the Biter’s waist, a few men cheered. Sailors were sailors, anywhere. You saved them if you could.
“I hope the Scotch are armed,” Kaye gritted. “If those bastards try to fight.” He grunted. “Nay,” he added. “Not against Big Angus they won’t fight. The Lamont boys will kill them all.”
“Save them just to kill them,” Sam said lightly. But he thought, grimly: please God not, that’s all.
Gunning came rolling up to Kaye, still in a high good humour, his curls plastered to his dome, mouth slack and red.
“Well, Capting! Shall we chase his little cutter, eh? You’ve got a good crew on board the prize, almost, and I can’t get much nearer if you want to stay afloat. Or shall we send young Willie, when he’s fished his yawl out of the drench? He’s a good hand in a lickle scudder, he could catch him — if he’s got a week!”
Dick Kaye was in a turmoil. He did not want the cutter to escape, for he was sure she had the best part of the loot on board, the gems and stones and sacks of doubloons, too. But if he chased her in the Biter, the galleon would be lost in probability, and she was likely packed with solid silver, in the Spanish way. If they left her, they might refind her, or might not. The weather was exceeding dirty, and night must sometime fall. Will, the yawl recovered at no greater cost than a seaman’s rupture and a few lost teeth or so, was hurrying towards them.
“Mr Bentley, can you catch her, sir?” demanded Captain Kaye. “It is a long chase but a necessary. Or” — turning to Jack Gunning — “would it be quicker if we on board here clapped on sail and chased? What time is left? How much will she carry in this gale?”
Will said, “The cutter is two times faster than my yawl, sir. My yawl could carry but a wisp in this. I’d never catch her.”
“Ha ha,” cried Gunning. “A quandary, Capting! A quandary! What’s it to be from Providence today? All debts paid off, or lose the lot! How much canvas will she carry? How much are you prepared to risk!” Kaye’s face, indeed, Will found remarkable. It was contorted with a wild desire, or a need. His earlier reticence
at the illegality of fighting with this ship seemed swept away by mad determination. And Gunning was mocking him. Openly, and with a drunken joy.
“Oh, it’s such a lot to gain or lose!” he said. “Capting, what will our friend Eddie say? It is a quandary!”
Then Taylor, exploding from the hatch ten feet away, shouted, “Sir! We’re making water, sir! Those shots we took have started her! The ship is flooding.”
And Gunning roared, as if in full command: “Oh, man the pumps, you bastards! What a lovely tub! Oh, what a lovely, lousy arsehole of a tub! Man the handles! Pump!!”
TWENTY-ONE
As Deb’s ship had sailed into the harbour of Jamaica on a pleasant, aromatic breeze, her heart had lifted with a sensation not unlike cautious joy. Kingston town was sprawling, ramshackle as seaports are, but the whiteness of the houses and the blazing greenness of the land behind was tonic after near three months at sea. Despite herself, she searched along the wharves and moles and outer buoys for Navy ships, and somehow felt she would not be surprised to see Will Bentley waiting for her, absurd though that might be. There were none, naturally, and he was not. The Squadron was at sea and ranging far to windward, in case the French fleet ever came. But it had been a fantasy, is all, so Deb was not cast down.
That started when they came up to the main dock wall, which already held two merchantmen. So far her view of the West Indies had been pleasantness indeed — warmth and weather such as she had never known, and scented, spicy air, even out of sight of land. But as they passed the two unloading ships towards their berth nearer the middle of the town, her eyes and nostrils were assailed with choking suddenness. It was shit she smelled, tons of it, mounds of it, rivers of it pumping across the decks from out the bilges down the sides, as the ship that had been offloaded of its cargo began the end of voyage clean-out. And on the other ship she saw bodies, though still alive and standing on their feet, black men and women and some children, most naked but some in caked and putrid rags. Some faces, though alive, looked dead, some were contorted, some shed tears. Round necks and wrists and ankles they wore chains.
“Slave ships,” said Captain Harding, at her side. “Thank your lucky stars, eh, maid? Thank your lucky stars.”
The slave wharves led on to the marketplace, a mud arena of pens and auctioneers’ small pulpits, which was fairly crowded at this time, with wagons, traps, and gigs manoeuvring like a market day at home. It shocked her that she thought of Stockport then because it was not beasts on sale today, but human beings, and she had a harsher pang, of shame and pity, that they had been brought to this. They were not animals, whatever some might say, and even at a distance, even despite the filth and reek, she saw bodies fine and muscular, men and women of amazing tallness among the normal run, and eyes that seemed to snap with pride and fire.
Deb, however hard she found it, with whatever trepidation she anticipated the next few hours or days, did not foresee the things that happened next to her. She felt pity for these people, certainly, but an expectation, knowledge absolute, that such things, such degradations, were naught to do with her. She was to be a servant, a five-year servant, with indentures, a place in house, and benefits in cash, a little land perhaps, when that time should be served. But once the ship was moored up alongside and the captain had left to see his agents or his offices, she found herself sweating in the marketplace, in the care of the first mate, the skinny man from Redruth with a glinting eye. Deb knew that he had been slighted by her indifference, but had no idea he would hold that to her disadvantage as a way of getting back. But now he smiled a certain smile, and Deborah was uneasy.
“Mr Godfrey,” she said, politely. “What happens now? I do hope I don’t have to find a situation for myself?”
He found this delicious. She was like a chicken to the slaughter, and he would make some guineas from her, also. Better than swiving, even — however lovely she might be.
“Nay, surely not,” he said. “You need me to make a transaction for you, med, and I am almost famous for it. See over there? Where those gentlemen are standing, upwind of the nigger pens? That’s where the lucky white folks go to be sold.”
His smile grew nastier as Deb digested this. But she could accept it as an ugly fact; she had known that Mistress Maybold was not doing it for charity. In fact, Laetitia had paid Captain Harding ten pounds “to take the harlot off my hands” in England, and Harding, a business brain, had sold her on to his first mate for thirty, which was the normal rate, but made the deal for Harding rather wondrous: forty pound profit, except for food and drink and bedding on the voyage, which was infinitesimal. Now young Godfrey — also on the up and up — was confident of getting thirty-five with little argument, plus the piquancy of vengeance, and could hardly wait. Across the square he had seen the vilest planter on the island, and had known Miss Snooty’s fate was sealed. From a proper, upright owner he might have pushed the price to thirty-seven, forty, with a maid as fair and young and strong as Deborah, but Alf Sutton was mean, and hungry, and had two hungry sons. At thirty-five he would swallow her like a shark. He would take her even if he did not need a female servant.
In fact, Alf Sutton always needed servants, and wanted females even more. When Alf had come from Yorkshire many years before he had had a wife, called Anne, a baby daughter, and no sons. He had brought out money raised by like-minded yeomen and some rising artisans in his parish on the edge of Halifax, made glassy-eyed by tales of golden grass and sugar cane that grew to six-foot piles of cash. Sutton had a mind and chin like granite, and had torn farmland out of Pennine uplands as few other men had had the strength to do. Papers were signed, which said that when he made his fortune, profits would accrue back in his homeland. He lied, and the men who’d given him the money lost it all. It was put round that Alf had died (as had his wife, in sad reality), two months after arriving in Jamaica, but even those who did not believe it knew that they had no redress. Go out there and be killed, by Alf, or fever, or the savages? They were Yorkshiremen. They learned and knuckled down.
Being bluff, and strong, and unafraid of any man, Alf Sutton had done very well in Jamaican society of that time. There were already well-established towns, but years of piracy and buccaneering had left it a dangerous and unlawful place. The Navy and the military, brought out originally to fight the Dutch and French and Spaniards for the easy wealth the western islands represented when the natives had been killed or shifted, finally brought some sort of order, first by sea then on land — a sort of order ripe for exploiting by ruthless and uncaring men. Sutton had obtained his first plantation by helping black slaves to slaughter its rightful owners, leaving it as derelict, then won position in white society by slaughtering those blacks.
In remarkably short order he had gained another wife, who had died in childbirth, and then a third. She had been forced into marriage by her family, borne Alf his second son, then had run away. Jamaica was a wild and trackless place, and thousands of black slaves had run over the years, to become Maroons high in the mountains where white men did not go. White women either, it was assumed, but Ivy Sutton’s body was not found, nor was she ever seen again. He did not care. He had had her, taken money off her father, and had got a son. Slave women could be forced, but he did not speak their language, and they were often sullen and ungrateful. White servants could be bought for three or five or seven years, but ran away. One, pregnant by him or either of his sons, once hanged herself.
When Sutton saw Deb Tomelty with Godfrey, he knew his God was in his heaven after all. He had dealt with Captain Harding and his mate before for contraband, and he knew they understood him well. Godfrey he admired as a rat, and guessed the whole sad picture (correctly) as they walked across. The other planters could see by Alf’s hard eyes that he would have this girl, so did not even pause to dream if they could try. All saw her bold eyes quail as she took in the picture, which amused them mightily. A maid of brain and spirit! Now there’d be some sparks!
Deb said, low, to Godfrey before they had
arrived: “I do not like what I can see here, Mister. If I have a choice in this, I would go somewhere else.”
Sutton was in his sixties, and squat and brown, and not unlike a toad. As she approached, his mouth came open, displaying broken teeth and coated tongue, which slipped out to lick his upper lip in deep appreciation.
“You do not,” said Godfrey. “Why, you foolish thing!”
Beside her, to the right, Deb could see crowds of filthy blacks being herded into pens containing open horsetroughs by men with whips and clubs. Other men, black men, held buckets and long canes, which whistled as they flew to cut black backs. There was whooping as the wash-down started. It occurred to her the slaves would need to look their best to fetch a price, even in this savage land. It sickened her, for many subtle reasons. She looked at the toad who’d be her master and felt sicker yet.
“Mr Godfrey!” he said. “Well met, sir. Sir, tha must read minds indeed. That is just the very thing for me, just what I wanted. How much?”
Deborah could not believe her ears. And then again, she could. His accent was country Yorkshire, which made her jump with recognition, and his attitude took her back to the Pennines, ditto.
“Tha mebbe fain fer’t bah me, but tha winna get thee knob in me, owd mon,” she said. “Keep tha dirty leerin’ to thasen.”
The planters all around them goggled, then laughter burst from many throats. Alf Sutton did not laugh, he scowled. He stumped forward up to Deb as if he would hit her, and Deb, eyes flashing, stood her ground. Inside though, her guts had turned to water. She knew this kind of man, Christ, how she knew them. If he got her into his household, she was done.
“Tha cheeky mare,” he said. “When we get home there’ll be a whipping, lass. Mr Godfrey. Two pound off for that. I’ll gi’ thee thirty, not a penny more.”
