PIRATE: Privateer

by Tim Severin

  Hector glanced at her sharply. ‘The same Captain Blackmore who’s been pestering you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ve too kind a heart, Maria. It’s a pity the sea didn’t take him. Covetous swine like that always seem to float to the surface.’

  Maria said nothing. She doubted she would ever see the captain again, and was relieved and glad that the children were safe.

  They turned out on to the High Street and Maria let out a gasp of dismay. Nothing could have prepared them for the sight on the far side of the road.

  A great swathe of Port Royal had vanished. Where once had been a long frontage of shops and dwelling houses, only two blocks remained upright, and even they were battered and damaged like the stumps of broken teeth. Much more shocking was what lay immediately behind them: the sea itself. The High Street was now part of a new waterfront. The flood had advanced right into the city, drowning everything in its path, and had not retreated. Here the city resembled the victim of an accident left lying face down in the shallows. Partly submerged buildings were all that was left of what had once been the commercial district. Some still showed their upper floors, but many were reduced to nothing more than a buckled roof or the jagged edge of a broken wall sticking up from the water.

  For a long moment they stared, too appalled to react. Finally Jacques spoke. ‘How could the tidal wave have done this?’ he asked.

  ‘With the help of the earthquake,’ said Hector soberly. The tops of larger structures were still discernible – King’s House, the courthouse, even the Marshalsea prison. But dozens of warehouses, workshops, taverns, sheds and lodging houses had been engulfed. So too had the Three Mariners where Bartaboa had perished. The ruins of Fort James and Fort Carlisle, the two massive bastions that had once guarded the harbour, were now two small stone islands a hundred paces from land. The tidal surge had wreaked havoc with the shipping. Sloops, wherries and merchant ships lay where they had been dumped when the water retreated. Some had been carried inland and left stranded on top of buildings now under water. Hector recognized the shattered remains of the Speedy Return, lying over on her side. A little farther on was the Swan. The frigate was upright, her spars intact. It must have been her masts he had seen from the top of the gun battery. She had been carried a good fifty yards into the town and deposited on the remains of a government storehouse. The venerable ship had broken her back as she settled. The Swan would never sail again.

  Human scavengers were picking through the flotsam along the edge of the water. Maybe they were searching for food, but more likely they were looking for valuables washed ashore and stripping corpses if they found them. Hector felt a pang of revulsion, but then he remembered that when he and his friends had fished the Vipers they too had profited from a calamity.

  A familiar figure caught his eye. A man dressed in a black coat and wearing an old-fashioned wig was standing at the water’s edge with his back to him and looking out over the scene of desolation. Hector recognized Mr Reeve, the Governor’s secretary. He went over to speak to him.

  ‘How many people lost their lives?’ he asked.

  Reeve turned, and the sadness in his face was replaced by a look of pleased surprise. ‘Mr Lynch, I had not expected to see you alive.’ He noticed Maria standing with Jacques and Jezreel. ‘And that must be the lady you were talking about. I’m glad you’ve found her. It is wonderful that you were spared.’

  ‘The Marshalsea is well built. It saved us from the initial shock. Afterwards we found refuge from the flood on Morgan’s Line.’

  ‘You were lucky. The prison is now under ten feet of water.’ Reeve passed a hand wearily across his face. ‘No one would have imagined this nightmare.’

  ‘What happened to produce such havoc?’ asked Hector.

  ‘The land gave way. It slid sideways and downwards and the sea swallowed it up,’ said Reeve. He made it sound so simple and so inevitable.

  ‘I saw the sand in the High Street turn to gruel.’

  ‘People are fleeing in whatever boats still float.’ There was despair and resignation in the secretary’s tone.

  ‘Is no one staying on to organize some relief? asked Hector.

  The secretary shrugged his shoulders. ‘You can’t blame them. There is no food, little shelter, and as you can see from those vultures over there –’ he indicated the looters – ‘there is precious little law and order.’

  Reeve treated Hector to a conspiratorial look. ‘Let us derive some satisfaction from the appalling calamity. As far as I am aware you and your companions drowned when the Marshalsea prison slipped under water.’

  Hector took the hint but still hesitated. ‘Eventually the authorities will catch up with me. They have long memories.’

  ‘Not this time, Mr Lynch. All the files and records kept in King’s House have been lost. Even poor Mr Balchen who arrested you is dead. His body was taken out of the wreck of the Swan less than an hour ago.’

  Mr Reeve held out his hand in a gesture of farewell. ‘I suggest you and your friends find yourselves a small boat capable of making the crossing to another island – I wish you and Maria a happy life together.’

  Hector gazed out over the desolation that had once been Port Royal and the broken remains of the Speedy Return. Her jolly boat was still chocked on deck amidships. The pink lay at an angle, and it would be easy enough to slide the jolly boat into the water. It was large enough to carry the four of them away from Jamaica. He could salvage his charts and navigation instrument from the cabin, and sail away just as he had done when he fled from de Graff. He shook hands with the Governor’s secretary, turned and made his way towards Maria and his companions. The spring had come back into his step. He would carry his luck with him, the same luck that had brought him and those closest to him through the catastrophe of Port Royal. Already he was thinking about wind directions, currents and sea distances, calculating the best course to steer to a port where a larger ship would take them onward. As for a final destination, that was for each one of them to decide. Perhaps in the American colonies in the north, or perhaps on the shores of the Indian Ocean where, it was said, flourished a new Utopia, a free country called Libertalia, honestly governed by resourceful men.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  The first shakings of the Great Earthquake of Port Royal were felt shortly before noon on Wednesday, 7 June 1692. It was described as a rolling, rippling motion of the ground. Residents of ‘the wickedest city in the world’ were not unduly alarmed. They were accustomed to the occasional earth tremor. But this first shock was followed by two more tremors of greater magnitude, now estimated at 7.5 on the Richter scale. The packed-sand surface of the streets rose and fell ‘like the waves in the sea’. Great cracks opened and closed in the ground. Pedestrians were thrown off their feet. People slid into holes and fissures. Famously, a merchant named Lewis Galdy slipped into one crack in the ground, was washed out by the following tidal wave, picked up by a boat in the harbour and brought safely to land. Others were not so lucky. Some two thousand people – about a third of the population – perished. They were crushed under collapsed buildings, drowned, or entombed alive. A gruesome aspect of the flooding was that the shallow-buried bodies in Port Royal’s cemetery were dislodged. These decaying cadavers were found floating alongside the fresh corpses in the harbour. There was huge structural damage. The entire waterfront of Thames Street with all its wharves and taverns slid into the water. Forts collapsed as their foundations gave way. Row upon row of commercial and residential buildings, extending for several blocks into the town centre, either fell or were submerged by an inrush of the sea. The tsunami effect capsized or wrecked ships in harbour, including HMS Swan, a naval frigate carried into the town and dumped there. At first the sea had retreated, up to a mile in places, then came surging back as a six-foot wall of water. Like the fictional Hector Lynch, the Anglican rector of Port Royal, Dr Emmanuel Heath, hoped to find refuge by climbing up on to the battery at Morgan’s Line. He ran towards it and was sho
cked to see the tidal wave bursting over the fortification.

  The date of death of Lord Inchiquin, the Governor, has been changed to add colour to Hector’s predicament as a prisoner in the Marshalsea at the time of the earthquake. William McMurrough O’Brien, second Earl of Inchiquin, had in fact died in January of that year. But it is correct that he had once been a prisoner of the Barbary corsairs, like Hector (see my novel in the Pirate series, Corsair). The future Earl was ransomed on a payment of 7,500 dollars.

  The colourful Laurens de Graff was real. It would be difficult to dream up such a swashbuckling figure. Contemporaries and historians describe him as tall, handsome, blond, courteous, gallant, a good duellist, and sporting splendid sweeping moustaches. He also had a vicious temper. By the time Hector encounters him, de Graff would have been a buccaneer–filibustier for some twenty years. A constant irritant to both the Spaniards and the English, he seized and robbed their ships, led daring raids on coastal towns, and evaded or outfought all the naval forces sent to capture him. Henry Morgan, well qualified to judge, described de Graff as ‘a great and mischievous pirate’ and sent a ship to hunt him down – also with no success. When the Nine Years War (1688–1697) spread to the Caribbean, both France and England courted de Graff, wanting him on their side as the guerrilla leader par excellence. De Graff favoured the French and was rewarded by Louis XIV with a commission in the colonial forces under Governor de Cussy based in Saint-Domingue. About this time, de Graff took a ship on an expedition to fish for a Spanish wreck on the Serranillas, part of the coral reef system then popularly known as ‘the Vipers’. In 1693 de Graff launched raids on the coast of Jamaica. How or where he ended his days is not known. One source claims that he was a pilot for Pierre d’Iberville on his 1699 expedition to Louisiana.

  Inevitably such a larger-than-life figure attracted numerous legends. Of his gallantry it was said that he sent his personal physician to tend the wounds of a Spanish captain he had defeated in a running battle. On another occasion he allegedly put a stop to an impending massacre when a force of buccaneers captured a coastal town and, finding no loot, were about to slaughter the inhabitants. The most romantic story concerns his second marriage (he was married firstly to Petronilla de Guzman in the Canaries). The tale recounts that de Graff insulted – or perhaps killed – the husband of a French woman of Saint-Domingue. In a fury she challenged him to a duel. De Graff was so impressed with her spirit that he proposed marriage instead. The name of the woman was Marie Dieuleveultor ‘Mary God Wills It’– not Anne-Marie Kerganon as in Hector’s tale. Like Anne-Marie, de Graff’s second wife is said to have been a daughter of a ‘fille du roi’, one of the female gaolbirds or orphans shipped from France to Saint-Domingue to boost the population in the colony.

  The ‘Island of Salt’ where Hector and his friends are marooned is an uninhabited island off the coast of Venezuela, now known as Salt Tortuga. In May 1687 eight runaways, thirsty and suffering from exposure, landed there from a small open boat. They were indentured servants on the run from Barbados and hoping to reach Curaçao. One of them, an English surgeon named Henry Pitman, wrote a book about the adventures that followed: a gang of pirates already on the island burned their boat and made off, leaving them stranded; they learned to survive on turtles, shellfish and wild plants; and eventually escaped from the island by capturing a vessel from another crew of sea brigands who had quarrelled among themselves. Daniel Defoe drew upon Henry Pitman’s experiences when he wrote the story of Robinson Crusoe – Defoe’s publisher lived in the same house in London as Henry Pitman – and I have done the same for the adventure of Hector Lynch.

  About the Author

  TIM SEVERIN, explorer, filmmaker and lecturer, has retraced the storied journeys of Saint Brendan the Navigator, Sindbad the Sailor, Jason and the Argonauts, Ulysses, Genghis Khan and Robinson Crusoe. His books about these expeditions are classics of exploration and travel. He made his historical-fiction debut with the hugely successful Viking series, followed by the Pirate and Saxon series. This novel returns to the Pirate series, and the world of Hector Lynch.

  www.timseverin.net

  Facebook.com/TimSeverinAuthor

  Also by Tim Severin

  NON-FICTION

  The Brendan Voyage

  The Sindbad Voyage

  The Jason Voyage

  The Ulysses Voyage

  Crusader

  In Search of Genghis Khan

  The China Voyage

  The Spice Island Voyage

  In Search of Moby Dick

  Seeking Robinson Crusoe

  FICTION

  Viking: Odinn’s Child

  Viking: Sworn Brother

  Viking: King’s Man

  Pirate: Corsair

  Pirate: Buccaneer

  Pirate: Sea Robber

  Saxon: The Book of Dreams

  Saxon: The Emperor’s Elephant

  First published 2014 by Macmillan

  This electronic edition published 2014 by Macmillan

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-4472-6657-0

  Copyright © Tim Severin 2014

  The right of Tim Severin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Map artwork by Neil Gower

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