The Grove of Eagles

by Winston Graham

  As they came up the bow chasers of the galleys opened fire and two or three balls came aboard doing light damage. On our ship I suppose there were now seventy men waiting, crouching behind the bulwarks, lying prone on the quarter deck, up in the fighting tops, waiting.

  At almost point blank range our sakers began to score; one ball ploughed through a group of Spaniards; then the first galley swung against us, drawing in her oars and jarring along our side. Grappling irons were thrown and at once hacked away, thrown again; the second galley shivered against our helm; the whole ship reeled and soon the enemy was swarming over the side.

  Thereafter followed a bloody fight such as outweighed the capture of Cadiz. There was room for no manoeuvre, scarcely could we move back and forth a yard. On the quarter deck above the main cabins there was besides myself, Captain Smith, Major George, Lumsden and twelve others. Onto this deck leaped upwards of a score of Spaniards in armour attacking with a fury that seemed to stem from the defeat at Cadiz. Above our heads men fired and were fired on and then were attacked in hand to hand combat by climbing Spaniards.

  I stood almost touching shoulders with Major George and we beat off the first wave of men. All the time as he thrust and killed he was grinning like a wolf. Lumsden was the first to go, stabbed through the throat; the sailor beside me was then killed by a musket ball; but I wounded the man who had killed Lumsden. Four others died and the deck was slippery. Two Spaniards attacked Captain Smith and his black beard ran red before he disappeared among the trampling feet. Major George seeing the end near snatched up the harquebus he had laid beside the mast, and by firing the wheel-lock close against a pyramid of powder he set off an explosion which scorched the bandages on his face. Bangs like fire-crackers followed as the powder blew along the line of the fuse. A dozen English sailors leapt into the sea, but no others could move before a giant explosion blew all the middle of the ship away. A fountain of bodies and spars and burning sails spewed over the sky …

  I was lying beside the dead Captain Smith. Blood was still trickling gently from under his black beard. A weight was across my legs. Men were shouting, crying, cursing in three languages. Major George miraculously still stood upright, his right arm hung useless; his left he held up in a token of surrender. Three Spanish officers climbing over the side were in time to accept it and prevent him from being cut down. I lifted my head: the quarter deck was a shambles, a score dead and half as many grievously wounded; but it was not aslant; the great explosion while blowing the heart out of Peter of Anchusen had not yet begun to sink her.

  A Spanish sailor bent over me with his cutlass; it dripped spots of blood on my cheek before an officer called him away. I dragged myself from under a fallen body, putting my hand on Captain Jones’s shoulder to lever a sitting position; then I scrambled up and stood beside George.

  The whole centre of the ship was a mass of twisted wreckage and mangled corpses, more than half of them Spanish where they had been caught swarming into the hatches. All three galleys were around us and further fight was hopeless. The other three galleys were pursuing the little Maybird, but I saw her sails flapping, and then looking beyond you could just see movement from the rest of our fleet. But for us the wind had come too late.

  We were taken below; Victor and Lieutenant Fraser were unhurt. Twenty English were packed into the one cabin, some of them seriously wounded, and the door slammed. We crowded to the two portholes watching for sign of smoke or flame, wondering if we were to be burned alive in the ship. Presently we felt her begin to move, but it was not the movement of a vessel under sail. A slight pulse to the motion told us that one of the galleys had taken us in tow.

  As Peter of Anchusen swung round our view swung too and we could see Maybird, her sails billowing fitfully, still moving away; as far as could be seen only one galley was now pursuing her, and all the English fleet was converging from the other quarter.

  Running feet overhead and Spanish voices shouting; an older man by the door was dying; we dragged him towards the window to get more air. Major George’s right hand had lost two fingers and was badly lacerated; I tried to bandage it.

  So in the stifling heat of the small cabin we spent the rest of the morning. Although now under sail as well, we were still being towed for extra speed. It meant the English were in pursuit. Maybird, Victor reported from the other porthole, had evaded her pursuers at the last, but he could no longer see any other vessel except one galley keeping us silent company a cable’s length away. By the position of the sun we were steering west-nor’-west. I glanced out at this consort of ours and watched the regular unrelenting sweep of the oars. The future as I could see it now held no hope. The hideous improbable mischance by which we had been captured when sailing home after a famous victory and escorted by powerful warships was too much to bear.

  In the afternoon the wind freshened, and the galleys proceeded under sail only. Towards evening we altered course to north, and soon the land closed in.

  Another man died, and the two corpses were laid against the bulkhead. No one had brought us water yet, and the wounded were pressed for lack of it.

  When it was dark we could see the lights of a village quite close; we had entered a river or creek. We began to move more slowly and then came to a stop, with the rattle of our anchor chain and shouts from shore.

  At last the door was flung open. We blinked in the torchlight as we were led out for examination.

  I went into the room with Major George. Three officers sat at a table. The centre one, who was smooth-skinned and dark as a Moor, I later knew to be Admiral Don Juan Portocarrero himself. He looked an angry and a worried man.

  “Please to tell your name, your office, your nationality,” said the man on his left in an English spoken with so guttural an accent that unless one attended carefully the words were lost.

  “George. Major of Vere’s Own. English.”

  With a fan Portocarrero was stirring the air before his face. Insects droned endlessly round the flickering candles. There was a smell of cooking; we had had nothing to eat since yesterday.

  “You have a wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “And after that?”

  “Two sons.”

  “You have rich relations? Friends?”

  “No.”

  The questioning went on for perhaps another three minutes, then the English-speaking one translated what he had learned. The three officers conferred together in undertones.

  Portocarrero said something in Spanish which I understood. “For exchange.”

  As he was led away George glanced back at me out of his one bloodshot eye. “ So long, lad. If you’re in England before me, take a swill of good beer and swallow it for me.”

  I wondered what had happened to Victor.

  “Please to tell your name, your office, your nationality.”

  “Killigrew, secretary, English.”

  “You are married?”

  “No.”

  “Who is your father?”

  “John Killigrew.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “Cornwall.”

  “You have rich relatives?”

  “No.”

  There were horses moving in the stables under this room. The man on Portocarrero’s right had a scar from lip to eye which gave him a perpetual stare. Portocarrero, who had not taken his gaze from me since I gave my name, began to question me through the other officer.

  “What is your first name?”

  “Maugan.”

  “Have you been in Spain before?”

  I hesitated briefly. “Yes.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “I was brought here by force.”

  “When was this?”

  “Two and a half years ago.”

  “Were you exchanged or did you escape?”

  “I was … exchanged in the summer of ’ 94.”

  They discussed me in undertones.

  “If you are a scrivener for Sir Walter Ralegh, why are
you sent back to England now?”

  “I was wounded,”

  “But not seriously. You are the least wounded of them all.”

  “I was to escort back Mr Hardwicke, who is a cousin of Sir Walter Ralegh’s.”

  “And where are the messages you carry?”

  “I have none.”

  “Come, you must bear some report.”

  “No. Sir Anthony Ashley has the official report on Swiftsure.’

  “And you have an unofficial one.”

  “No, sir. None.”

  They talked again, then Portocarrero motioned to the guards. “Aside for further consideration.”

  Chapter Eight

  The cell was twenty-four feet long by half as broad with two high-barred windows through which a man could only see by standing on another’s shoulders. The floor was of beaten earth, the walls of a sort of moor-stone which was as hard as granite.

  Ten of us shared it. Besides myself there was Major George—reunited with me in spite of his farewells—Victor, Lieutenant Fraser, a Lieutenant Harris and five others. We were not ill-used, indeed often received small concessions from our jailors; nor at first was food lacking: dried codfish, maize bread, meal and rice. All that was amiss was that we were all in greater or lesser degree in need of medical care, and living in mephitic conditions and great heat. And we were the gentlemen; I never knew how many of the crew or the wounded soldiers survived.

  Sometimes it occurred to me to wonder if all this had come on me, this capture and all the suffering that followed, as a judgment for the desecration I had wrought to the altar in Cadiz. In spite of the influences under which I have lived my life I have never quite been able to escape from a sense that in the end Divine justice is meted out in this world. The sensation comes and goes with circumstance and event, but the old feeling, like a childhood scar, remains.

  The first man in our cell died after two weeks. He had been wounded a second time by the explosion and his wound turned gangrenous. The stench in the cell in that hot weather made life for the rest of us unbearable. Victor’s recovery was checked but he kept cheerful and, thanks to his lute which he was permitted to retain, we passed many an insupportable hour. My old wound remained open and festering and I had a return of the fever at nights. Major George, like the iron man he was, tidied up the ends of his two lost fingers and the stumps healed. Then he began at night to work on one of the bars of the window. It was exhausting work holding him up, but there was something in the spirit of the man that compelled the rest to help him.

  To my surprise I had been able to cheat the searchers of the jewels I carried by passing them to Victor and then recovering them back again before they turned to him. Both the Portuguese soldiers who searched us were suffering from the prevalent fever and had little interest in their task.

  News from the outer world scarcely reached us until I became friendly with one of the guards, a cheerful soul called Cabeças, and when he found I spoke halting Spanish he talked freely.

  He was a Portuguese, and we were in fact in southern Portugal, a country which had lost its independence to Spain a decade ago. Though in name an ally and a part of the Spanish Empire, the country still had about it an air of occupation: the military governor and his officers were Spanish, the soldiers Portuguese.

  Cabeças told me that soon after our capture an attempt had been made by the Spanish to exchange us for prisoners taken at Cadiz; but Lord Admiral Howard did not trust Portocarrero and rejected the overture. Cadiz had at last been evacuated and instead a force landed south of Faro to attack that city. The Spaniards concentrated their main defence at Lagos, forty miles to the west, where we languished in prison. Our forces had marched overland and captured and burned Faro almost without resistance; had they then come on those last few miles we should have been set free; but they did not follow up their success and re-embarked and sailed away. No one had seen them since, but it was thought they were returning to England.

  One day I asked permission to write a letter home suggesting that ransom be paid to set me free; and I was given paper and pen and ink. I had no hopes of any sum whatever being forthcoming, but if the letter reached its destination it would at least tell them I was alive, then Sue might hear and would know I could yet return.

  While the opportunity existed I also wrote to Mariana de Prada, telling her I was again a prisoner. With Victor so frail any device was worth trying.

  So for a time life went on. Nine men living in a small cell at the height of a Spanish summer. Few complained. Individual suffering had to be borne in silence for the common good. All things must come to an end in time. We were hoping for ransom or exchange. At the worst, the weather would soon cool. Victor tried to teach the lute to a young man called Crocker, and often one heard the tune

  “Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee;

  When thou art old there’s grief enough for thee.”

  I instructed a Lieutenant Mabe in the rudiments of Latin. One man re-knitted his jersey with two old sticks of wood. Major George worked on his window.

  In the middle of August the food grew suddenly almost uneatable: the fish was rancid, the bread full of weevil, the water foul. Three men fell ill with dysentery. I complained to Cabeças; he shrugged, and said he could do nothing about it. I asked him for an interview with Don Juan Portocarrero; he shrugged again and said Portocarrero had left Lagos and we were now in the charge of Manuel Buarcos, military governor of the town, who it seemed was the scarred man at our first interview. I asked to see him. Cabeças blew through his teeth and said better not, he was a hard one, better leave him alone or worse might befall.

  Two days later Lieutenant Fraser died. Since he lost his leg I think he had little taste for life, and it is hard to blame him. Major George and I now wrote a formal letter asking for an interview with Buarcos. It was refused. Lieutenant Harris, who had been sick with a scorbutic condition, became worse, his swollen gums having so grown about his teeth that he could chew nothing. We pestered Cabeças again, but he said it was as much as his life was worth to pass our message through. When we asked if Portocarrero was returning, he said the admiral was now with many others arraigned before a court martial for the loss of Cadiz.

  At the end of August Victor caught the dysentery and began to lose ground. By giving a small ruby to Cabeças I was able to have some food smuggled in. My own wound had become an open place that wept pus and lacked the most elementary cloths. Lieutenant Harris died. Major George, working away at his prison bar, said grimly that this gave more room and a better chance for the others, but there were only three of us now strong enough to support him at the window, and soon he turned to being the support himself and leaving us to pick and scratch at the mortar around the bar. Some progress had been made, and each morning before dawn the broken stone was filled in with dampened bread; but the bar went farther down into the wall than expected, and now we had come up against a piece of stone which would not yield. We could not be noisy, for the cell windows looked out on an alley much frequented by the guards when off duty.

  Victor now gave up playing his lute. He was often racked with colic, and afterwards seemed too weak to care. Sometimes I would see him lying with his hands clasped over his abdomen and his head rolling slowly from side to side. I did what I could for him, bathing his face with water, though we did not have enough of it and it rapidly grew warm and foul from use. I gave Cabeças another ruby to buy some extract of poppy seed and some starch, and this when it came helped Victor, The pain was eased and the fever lighter. Cabeças was sympathetic and brought an amulet stone from his mother which was good for all distemper of the bowel. He bound us to secrecy in all this: it would go hard for him if anything were known.

  So September came in with blazing skies and unrelenting heat. I wrote again to Manuel Buarcos, asking for the favour of an interview. After a week’s wait he granted it.

  We were taken across, Major George and I, the following evening to the officers’ quarters at the other si
de of the square. It was the same room upstairs where we had been first interviewed; but this time except for our escort Buarcos saw us alone.

  As the only one with Spanish I had to be spokesman. George spoke a halting word or two, but by now I was fluent.

  This was the moment when I needed all my fluency. Buarcos sprawled behind the table sweating and picking his nose. Tonight the scar looked like a shoe-lace drawn taut across the wet brown surface of his skin.

  I told him the conditions under which we were living, and said that if nothing were done to ease them the rest of us would soon die. We had all, I said, been put aside for ransom; even the poorest had been adjudged of some value. But one of the first to die now would be Victor Hardwicke who was a close kinsman of the great Sir Walter Ralegh. His would be a big ransom and it would all be lost. The Spanish Government and the Court would not look approvingly on his treatment of us if by it they became the losers.

  Buarcos waited until I had finished. Then absent-mindedly, one eye staring more than the other, he said that in his view war was not waged thus. In his view war was a matter of blood, not of gold. If he had had his way when we first came here he would have impaled us all together on one long pike and left us for the crows to pick. Portocarrero and his like were weaklings and were now paying the penalty. Had he made his feelings clear?

  Perhaps then I should have gone, but I was fighting for Victor’s life as well as my own. So I swallowed and began again. I said it was accepted and praised in Spain—even we in prison had heard the praise how the English in Cadiz had been considerate to the sick and the wounded. If war were a matter of blood it could yet be conducted with dignity. Could we not as prisoners ask for fair treatment? If a doctor were unavailable, could I not be given permission to beg herbs in the town? And perhaps one or two of our most serious sick might be granted some milk and eggs, which might just make the difference between life and death to them.