by John Drake
But if Silver had won the fight, he lost the argument. Walrus did not return to Savannah. Flint had his way. He would not listen to Silver's warnings as he would have done in the past. He would not listen because there now stood between the two men a prickly hedge of mistrust and anger. This was a great pity. It was a very great pity indeed. In fact it is barely possible to put into words how great a pity it was - especially and tragically for Long John Silver - because Silver had been absolutely right and Flint had been wrong.
* * *
Chapter 20
21st June 1752
Aboard John Donald Smith
The Caribbean
Mr Eustace Crane, captain and part-owner of the West Indiaman John Donald Smith raised his cutlass in a trembling hand and squinted against the fierce sun as he judged the distance. His ship thrashed along with every stitch set and the wind humming in her taut rigging. There wasn't another knot to be got out of her, while the pursuing enemy was coming on like a race horse.
Captain Crane was sick with fear and the broad blade of his cutlass shook, for he knew about the pirate, Flint. Indeed, every man, woman and child in the Caribbean knew about Flint. In particular, they knew that any man daring to make a fight of it got sliced like pork. But Crane feared ruin even more, and he feared the pitying contempt of those more fortunate than himself, and he balanced the hideous images of death and mutilation with thoughts of his family in Bristol, turned out of doors by the bailiffs and cast upon the parish as paupers.
And now, Flint's ship was no more than a pistol-shot astern, with the sea boiling under her bows and her wake twining and joining with John Donald's. There never had been the least possibility that John Donald could outrun Flint's own darling Walrus, for the latter - a rake-masted Yankee topsail schooner - was built purely for speed, while the West Indiaman was a fat, cargo-carrying box, with masts and sails added as an afterthought.
And once Walrus got alongside, then God help a poor sailorman, for Crane had counted her fourteen guns and he could see at least a hundred armed men crammed on board of her. He stared at them in horror, where they jostled merrily for place as they prepared to board. The speeding schooner was heeled far over, dipping gunnel-under with the weight of bodies crammed along the rail, and white water surged thigh- deep among them. They cussed and swore, and they laughed at the wetting and the sight of Crane and his wobbling cutlass, for not another man Jack was to be seen aboard John Donald Smith.
Flint himself leapt into Walrus's main shrouds and called out to his crew: Long John, Billy Bones, Mad Pew, Black Dog, George Merry, Israel Hands, and all the others. The wretched Crane heard every word.
"Look at them, the sons of bitches!" he cried, pointing to John Donald. "They never dared fire a gun, and now they've run below, shitting their shirt-tails as they burrow in the ballast to hide!" A roar of laughter came from his crew, and they nudged one another and thought their captain no end of a wit.
But Flint had made a nasty mistake. John Donald's decks looked empty only because her people were laid between their guns, behind musket-proof screens of junk and anchor cable that had been raised above her bulwarks. Flint should have spotted that, for it was man-o'-war fashion to build barricadoes. It took time and effort and interfered with the smooth running of a ship. It was not a thing to do without a purpose.
In that instant, down came Captain Crane's arm, and five gun captains jumped up and applied glowing matches to a battery of six-pounders. There followed some long seconds as priming powder smoked and fizzed into life and hot flame darted busily into the thickness of the iron breeches.
There was surprise and anger among Flint's men. The stupid, like Tom Morgan and George Merry, pointed out what was happening and roared in outrage as if at some piece of broken faith. The clever, like Flint and Long John, dropped smartly on to Walrus's canted deck and grovelled into the planking, trying to squeeze themselves into the seams alongside the caulking.
With a thunderclap bellow, a gout of flame and a vast jet of white smoke, the first gun went off. Three of its fellows joined in, pizzicato, and the fifth fired three seconds later. The guns were expertly laid: chocked up high at the breech, to play downwards upon the open decks of a ship closing upon her weather beam. Crane had served King George in his youth. He'd fought Frog, Dago and Dutchman, and he knew his business well.
In all five guns the load was "langridge": shards of iron, old bolts, bent nails, lengths of chain, musket balls - whatever came to hand - and every last scrap of it that could be crammed down the barrels without bursting the guns. Such a broadside was useless at any but the closest range, for it was entirely without accuracy and would scatter and lose its capacity to kill. But Crane was well aware of that, which was why he'd waited until his paint was all but rubbing up against Flint's.
Consequently, well over half a hundredweight of jagged fragments tore into Flint's boarding party, and cut like a thousand lancets. They took off fingers, thumbs, buttocks, faces, knees, elbows and limbs. They threw men down, they opened them up, they blinded, castrated and disembowelled. They ripped out livers and kidneys, lights and pipes, and spewed them hot and slimy on the deck. Thirty men were struck dead on the spot and fifty wounded. The remaining sixty-five whole and untouched men stood wavering in the smoke-reeking slaughterhouse of Walrus's waist, up to their ankles in the wet meat that had recently been their shipmates.
A cheer came from John Donald Smith as the smoke cleared and her crew saw the dreadful work done by their fire.
"Muskets, boys!" roared Crane, and showed the way by sheathing his cutlass and seizing a sea-service Brown Bess.
At a range of ten feet, Crane let fly and saw a bloodied figure throw up his arms. Dropping the long gun, Crane hauled out his pistols to empty them at the enemy. Mad with excitement, the John Donalds took up their small arms and set to. There were three dozen muskets ready and waiting, plus half a dozen of blunderbusses, and a brace of pistols for every man aboard.
This crackling, battering fire, hard on the heels of the dreadful broadside, knocked the heart out of Flint's men, and all those still able ran below; some beshitting themselves and digging into the pebbles of the ballast, just as their captain had said only a few moments ago.
With the helmsman hauling in his own entrails hand over hand, howling like a broken-backed dog, Walrus's tiller pleased itself where it lay, and the twelve-foot bar slammed and banged to either beam. Finally, with her aftermost sails drawing harder than her foresails, Walrus herself decided that she would bring herself round, bow into the wind, and wallow dead in the eye of it, sails flapping, blocks rattling, and offal, excrement and wounded men slithering across her decks with every roll.
Meanwhile, John Donald Smith held her course and ploughed onward at a steady seven knots, a very creditable speed for her, which goes to show that Eustace Crane was as good a seaman as he was a gunner - and a desperately poor tradesman. For if Crane hadn't made so many bad guesses, and so many times been deceived, then he'd never have found himself in the position whereby his all and everything was risked in this one voyage. And in that case, he'd never have laid in extra guns and powder, and spent time drilling his crew and making ready for a fight. And in that case he'd have given up the ship to Flint, as so many sensible men had done before him, in order to keep a whole skin and live another day.
Instead, Eustace Crane and the ship of which he was part owner sailed onward and eastward, and in due course dropped anchor in Bristol, and turned a most excellent profit on her voyage.
Afterwards, for the rest of his life, it was Crane's pleasure, whenever he was in congenial company with his back to a good fire and the rum-punch going round, to tell the tale of how he'd driven off that bugger Flint and ruined half his villainous crew. It was the strict truth, and Crane had every right to be proud of it. But even his best friends never really believed him.
* * *
Chapter 21
21st June 1752
Aboard Walrus
The Caribbe
an
Smoke and flame filled the waist as Walrus received John Donald's fire. Laid flat on his face, Long John Silver was kicked sideways by a terrific blow as men and wreckage fell all around him. He couldn't see the length of his own arm for the smoke, and for the moment he was deaf from the massive concussion of five cannon less than a dozen yards from his head. But he could still smell: and a hot stench of burned meat and hair filled his nostrils.
He tried to sit up, shoving at the weight pressing him down. The weight - and the smell - was Mad Pew the Welshman, who lay across Long John, mouthing in his mother tongue, and scorched from brow to breast by muzzle-flash. The face was black, the hair was gone, the eyes were white and blank. Mad Pew was now blind Pew.
Long John heaved Pew clear and tried to leap to his feet. He couldn't. Something was wrong. Then the smoke cleared and Long John gaped in dismay. His left leg was hideously mangled between hip and knee. The great bone of the thigh gleamed in the depths of the wound, blood sprayed outward, and the remnant of the leg hung by ragged straps of skin and meat.
Flint's face appeared, peering and prying.
"Why, John," he said, "they've limbed you!" He grinned wickedly. "So who's the better man, now, I wonder?" Long John still couldn't hear properly, but he read Flint's lips and he saw that Flint was smooth and unharmed. Not a hair nor fingernail disturbed.
"Bastard!" said Long John, and reached for the long pistol in his belt. But the ship rolled, the mainsail boom swung viciously across the waist, wreckage groaned, and Blind Pew shrieked and fell over Long John's arm.
"Later, John," promised Flint, as Billy Bones came up and hauled Flint to his feet.
"Fucking ship's in fucking irons, Cap'n," said Bones. "And the fucking crew is run below like a fucking shoal o' fucking washerwomen!"
"Billy-my-chicken!" said Flint. "Ah, Billy, my Billy! What poets are Pope and Milton compared with thee?"
"Fuck that, Cap'n - beggin'-yer-pardon!" said Bones. "But look at the fucking state of her. Look at the men -"
"Bah!" said Flint. "They'll not fight again this day. We'll be lucky to keep them off the rum." He lurched forward. "Follow me, Billy-boy, and we'll go below."
The two vanished down a hatchway, and soon there came the distant sound of pistol shots and clashing steel as Captain Flint and Mr Bones explained to the men that spirits were not to be issued until the ship was put to rights.
Meanwhile, on deck, the wounded threw back their heads and howled to the world for help. The world ignored them, but someone else did not. Selena came up from below and picked her way through the wreckage, eyes bulging at the awful things that slopped and slithered about her feet. She went from man to man, peering into their faces.
"Long John? Long John?" she said.
"Here!" cried a voice from a heap of dead flesh jammed between two guns. "Selena!"
She darted forward, pulled him clear, and gasped as he screamed in agony.
"Oh my Lord!" said Selena, looking at his wound. "We've got to get you below. The surgeon's got everything rigged and ready."
"No," said Long John. "Not that!" And he clung to her legs, grey-faced in terror. "You won't let that blasted sawbones take my leg, now, will you? Not you. Not that."
"Huh!" she said. "Never seen you afraid of nothing before."
But Long John was in terror to the bottom of his soul, and as best he could he cursed, shrieked and fought every inch of the way, while Selena single-handedly dragged and hauled his deadweight down below to the surgeon.
"You'll die, if I don't," was all she said.
"Ah, Mr Silver," said Mr Thomas Cowdray in his bloodstained leather apron and rolled-up sleeves. "I'd thought better of you: aut vincere, aut mori: either conquer or die." He shook his head. "I see that you have done neither!"
Mr Cowdray had once been an educated gentleman, and still was an excellent surgeon: quick, adept and intelligent, and nothing like the rum-sozzlers usually to be found afloat. He'd once practised at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, and there his brother surgeons had mocked him for his insistence on cleanliness, and on boiling his surgical instruments in a cauldron of water before use. Cowdray had claimed this to be a sovereign remedy against post-operative rotting of wounds, but when it was discovered that he'd learned it from a gypsy sow-gelder, he was laughed out of the hospital. His learned colleagues might have forgiven him the ludicrous source of his methods, but they could never - never - forgive him the superior results that he achieved with them.
His subsequent career - via gin, gambling, and relieving ladies caught pregnant without husbands - had taken Mr Cowdray away from England and to the West Indies, and so by easy stages to privateering, piracy, and finally to his current post as surgeon to Captain Flint.
Cowdray frowned as he saw the extent of Long John's injuries. He looked at the other wounded, made a judgement, and turned to his assistant, a mulatto named Jobo, chosen for strength, who also served as cook's mate.
"Silver next," said the surgeon, and a wild roar came from Long John, who did his best to climb out of the hold unaided. "Some of you lay hands on him and bring him here," said Cowdray.
Selena, Jobo and one or two of the other less-badly wounded, grappled with Long John and got him on to Cowdray's table. They cut off his breeches at Cowdray's command, and Jobo slipped on a tourniquet and twisted till the bleeding stopped.
"You!" said Cowdray to Selena. "Take the broken leg and hold it out straight." She hesitated. "Go on, girl!" barked Cowdray. "Pick it up! It won't bite!" And he turned to the rest: " You - get up behind him on the table and wrap your arms round his chest. You - hold his good leg. And, you - hold his arms."
Cowdray reached for a sickle-shaped amputation knife, razor-edged on the inside.
"Rum!" cried Long John. "Rum, for the love of God."
"Later," said Cowdray, and dropped to his knees, facing Long John. He slipped his arm under the injured leg, which Jobo raised to receive him. He bent his elbow back around the limb so the curved knife sat beneath the thigh, tickling the taut skin. He set his teeth and he pulled with all his strength.
Long John howled like a damned soul as the knife cut skin, fat, muscle, tendon, nerve and blood vessel in one almighty slicing cut, right down to the bone. Cowdray leapt up, laid aside the big knife and swiftly ran a lancet around the bone, severing any remaining shreds of tissue.
"Jobo," he said, "stump!" And Jobo slid a pair of leather straps into the wound, and hauled on them, squeezing the red flesh towards the hip to expose an inch more of the bone.
Cowdray pounced with a fine-toothed saw and went through the femur in six sharp strokes, leaving Selena holding a severed leg: limp, heavy and dead. The vivid reality of its final separation from the living man caused her to drop the horrid thing and stagger back with her head spinning sickly. She was at - and past - her limits. She hurried away, groping for ladders, in search of fresh air.
Barely noticing her absence, Jobo kicked the dead leg aside and let loose his straps so the flesh swelled forward, burying the cut end of bone so it couldn't stick out of the stump when it healed.
"Slacken off!" said Cowdray, and Jobo let the tightness out of his tourniquet till little jets of blood revealed where the arteries lay. Cowdray caught each one with a long-handled hook, pulled it out and tied it off, leaving long threads trailing after the knots. Then off came the tourniquet and the operation was complete. It had taken less than two minutes, and Silver was still bellowing lustily, while aside from Cowdray and Jobo, every creature present was yellow in the face and sweating heavily.
But Cowdray wasn't quite done. He dressed the wound carefully with lint and linen, and finally added a woollen cap - like a short, fat stocking - to finish the job.
"Next man!" said Cowdray, and Jobo lifted Long John off the table and laid him alongside the others that Mr Cowdray was done with.
"Give him a pull of the rum, Jobo," said Cowdray, glancing down.
But Long John had to wait, for down the ladders there came a
second rush of wounded, bumping and howling and bleeding.
These were not victims of John Donald's artillery but of their own captain and first mate, who'd passed among the surly survivors and reasoned with them after Flint's style until Walrus's crew returned to their duties and the dead and the offal were heaved over the side, and repairs were made, and lines were spliced, and the decks were swabbed till no stains were left. Soon Walrus was sailing like a lamb, and all was jump-to-it discipline and jolly fellowship once more, since any man who chose not to be jolly was beaten senseless by Mr Billy Bones.
And all the while, Long John was left to bawl to his heart's content, and nobody paid him the least attention - not with a dozen more doing the same all around him, and a merry little company they made. All it needed was the Devil to join them, scraping his fiddle and beating time with his hoof, and all hands would have known themselves already transported to that very place which was their ultimate destination.
Hours later, delirious and hot, and with the raw stump swollen and hammering, Long John felt a bottle pressed into his hands. Exhausted as he was, he instantly tried to scream - for every touch was agony - but all that came was a harsh gasp. The rum helped a lot. It took away some of the pain, and what was left was blunted at the edges. Finally, after most of a pint had gone down, it brought unconsciousness.
After that, as far as Long John Silver was concerned, the river of time ran strange and dark: it fled the light, it went deep underground and it went round crooked ways. This was something to do with the rum and the laudanum that Mr Cowdray put in it, and it was something to do with a strong man's pride revolting at the thought of becoming a cripple. But mainly it was the natural consequence of a dreadful injury. At least the stump stayed clean and did not putrefy, otherwise Long John would have died for sure. The ignorant may have laughed at Mr Cowdray's boiling of his instruments, but it drove off the little demons that killed more men than hot lead or cold steel.
