Buccaneer

by Dudley Pope

  “And you’ll all starve,” Yorke said.

  “And we’ll all starve,” Saxby said, a hurt tone in his voice.

  “I was serious,” Yorke said, realizing the foreman had thought he was being sarcastic. “But we don’t have much choice. We’ve provisions on board for three months, and we’ve a cargo of sugar to sell, and I have a small amount of capital. And I have the responsibility of feeding fifty people, seven of them women. We can’t live on fish, and without a plantation we can’t live on our own produce. So, my dear Saxby, how do we survive?”

  “Ever thought o’ smuggling to the Main, sir?” he asked, with the same expression Ned had just seen on Aurelia’s face.

  Chapter Eight

  There were only four charts on board the Griffin, carefully drawn and coloured by hand, and all four produced by “William Wagstaffe, chartmaker”, who had his business at the Sign of the Compasses in Mark Lane, in the City of London.

  The first chart covered the English Channel, the second from the Chops of the Channel to the Canary Islands, the next took a voyager across the Atlantic to the islands stretching from St Martin in the north to Trinidad in the south, and the fourth covered the Caribbean sea from the eastern islands to the western tip of Cuba, the Isthmus, and the Spanish Main – the mainland westward from Trinidad.

  As Yorke looked at the chart of the Caribbean, he noticed the dedication written in the ornate scroll at the top righthand corner. Unless he had been able to render Parliament some particular service, Mr Wagstaffe was probably no longer in business because he had, as was the custom, always dedicated a chart to an important person, choosing in each case a member of the Royal Family. For the Caribbean the dedication was to “His Royal Highness the Prince Charles”–the man now in exile in France and who would, if the monarchy was ever restored, succeed his dead father as Charles II.

  The trouble with Wagstaffe’s charts (a fault shared by all the others on sale) was that it made up in curlicues, plunging dolphins and splashing cherubs for what it lacked in physical detail.

  Mr Wagstaffe had obviously never sailed among the islands himself; he relied on information from ship-masters. Perhaps one day a master would point out an error which Yorke had spotted long ago – that the island of Grenade was drawn upside-down, but was given the English name of Grenada. Obviously Antigua was wrong because Falmouth Harbour, which was in fact a great bay, was shown on the west side of the island, not the south, and both Montserrat and Redonda, which could be seen from the entrance, were charted in the wrong positions.

  If he had spotted these errors despite very little sailing in the Caribbean, Yorke wondered how many more there were?

  Smuggling to the Dons…it was a good idea and he was angry with himself for not having thought of it. Still, it was difficult to forget all the standards drummed into him as a boy, when he had been taught that smuggling was unlawful. Then, he reminded himself grimly, England had made him an outcast and rated him a rebel, and England was at war with Spain. At least, he assumed she was, though, come to think of it, he did not recall a declaration. Anyway, declarations by either side were of no consequence out here in the West Indies because Spain was perpetually at war with any man or ship, let alone nation, that had the impudence to cross the Line. “No peace beyond the Line” – that was the slogan which was as frequently spoken in French and Dutch as English.

  Smuggling goods into towns and villages along the Spanish Main was a crime only in the eyes of Spain. Everyone else, particularly the Dutch, regarded it as a normal way of business. Secrecy was necessary and, one assumed, certain safeguards against the Spanish preference for duplicity. But from what he had heard they paid up readily in dollars or pieces of eight, unless the smuggler wanted to barter, in which case they could offer hides, cochineal and tobacco.

  He smoothed out the chart and looked up with pleasure as Aurelia came into the cabin. It was the only cabin in the ship and intended for the master or, if he was on board, the owner. In the case of the Griffin, where the owner brought a woman with him, it was now Aurelia’s cabin, with himself and Saxby occupying hammacos in the space just forward of it. But it was the only place in the ship that had a smooth table suitable for a chart, and the charts themselves were stowed in a long drawer.

  Aurelia looked over his shoulder at the chart.

  “Where is Barbados?” she asked.

  Yorke pointed to the island. “Kingsnorth is here – and that’s Bridgetown.”

  “And Antigua?”

  “Here – and this is the bay we are in, except that the men who drew the chart put it on the wrong side.”

  “What are these little numbers?”

  “The depths of water.”

  “Where are we going?”

  Yorke shrugged his shoulders. “Shut your eyes and put down a finger and we’ll go there.”

  “It is probably as good a way as any,” she said, laughing. With that she closed her eyes and touched the chart with her index finger. She opened her eyes and exclaimed: “I missed the islands!”

  “Yes, you’ve just invaded the Spanish Main.” He leaned over. “At Coro. It doesn’t sound a very interesting place.”

  “One does not smuggle to interesting places,” she said, a practical note in her voice. She examined the chart. “No other towns for miles and miles. What direction is it from here?”

  Yorke pointed to the south-west.

  “I’m sure the Spanish in Coro want sugar. Now let me think – what else? Cooking pots. No woman and no kitchen ever has enough cooking pots. Knives and forks and spoons – stupid servants are always throwing them away in the water they wash them in. Cloth for clothes – for men and women. Lace for women. Clay pipes for men. Boots and shoes. Saddles for horses. No, they will make their own, because you were saying they have hides. Perhaps they make their own shoes and boots, too. So no boots and saddles. What else? Think, Edouard. What do men need?”

  “Women.”

  She blushed but gave an ironic curtsey. “Apart from them.”

  “Hope.”

  “There is plenty of that,” she said quietly, “but patience is needed as well.”

  Ned picked up a slate and noted down the items she had mentioned. “We had reached clay pipes. Ah yes, flints for muskets and pistols.”

  “So the Spanish can shoot us?”

  Now it was Ned’s turn to go red. “Are you sure you haven’t done any smuggling before?” he asked with mock suspicion.

  “It’s easy: just think of the things we have to buy from the Dutch. Beaver hats will be no good because a Spaniard walking across the plaza in an English-style hat would give himself away. What about kitchen knives, hoes, axes and rakes?”

  “Madame, pause for a moment. We can only smuggle to the poor Spaniards – to the rich Spaniards, rather – what we have. At the moment we only have sugar.”

  “Do not underestimate that sugar, chéri.”

  “I am not underestimating it! Why in England sugar is beginning to take the place of honey – at least, among the wealthier – and although the price of rumbullion is not as low as gin, very soon sugar will replace the juniper berry.”

  “But we are not selling our sugar in England,” she pointed out.

  “No, we’ll be selling to the Spaniards. The Barbados price when selling to the Dutch is a penny a pound.”

  “That hardly gives us a price to charge the Spaniards!”

  “No, but the Barbados price gives us a yardstick. Let’s see what we can remember. An anker of brandywine, for example, was 300 pounds of sugar.”

  “And men’s hats with brims were about 150 pounds. Thread – brown thread was about thirty-eight pounds of sugar a pound the last time I bought any. Thread stockings which sold for thirty-six pence in London were forty pounds of sugar a pair.”

  “The last pair of shoes I bought wer
e sixteen pounds,” Ned recalled, “although they offered me the so-called ‘new fashion’ at twenty-five to thirty.”

  “Good white linen was seven pounds a yard,” Aurelia said.

  “And horses – a poor one fetched 2,400 pounds of sugar and a good one 3,000. But the Spaniards are probably well off for horses, and they’re difficult to ship: they fall and break legs.”

  “Walter said that a Dutchman with 100 guilders of commodities made 2,000 pounds of sugar,” Aurelia said diffidently.

  “Ah – that’s what I heard. So we should be able to buy 100 guilders of commodities from them for 2,000 pounds of sugar, and smuggle it into somewhere like Coro and sell it for twice that.”

  “Why don’t the Dutch do that, then?” Aurelia asked.

  “Some of them do, but obviously they risk their lives and their ships. The choice for them is simple – a certain profit by safely trading among the British and French islands, or make double the profit at a very high risk trading on the Main. They have the choice, and we do not.”

  “We can buy a lot of things here in Antigua, or at the other islands,” Aurelia said. “Particularly if we pay in cash and keep some of the sugar for the Spanish.”

  Ned started laughing. “I wish your father could see you now. Dressed in breeches – beautifully made by Mrs Judd and showing off your figure to advantage, of course – and one of my silk jerkins, and drawing up a list of goods as though you are the chief of the smugglers!”

  She tapped the position of Coro on the chart. “Perhaps I am. I must say I feel like it, having chosen the destination and the goods we take. After all, mon chéri, remember that until now I did not even choose the day’s menu…”

  It was only through these occasional remarks that he was able to piece together a picture of what her life with Wilson had been like. One thing had become all too clear – that to compensate for his impotence he had done his best to humiliate her at every turn. His one mistake had been the Bullocks, who had been outstandingly loyal to Aurelia but had warned her that to help her they would have to appear to side with Wilson. So when Wilson sneered at Aurelia, apparently humiliating her in front of the Bullocks, she knew they secretly supported her. When he would force Mrs Bullock to agree that her mistress was a French slut, both women acted their individual roles but because Aurelia knew of Mrs Bullock’s contempt for Wilson, his words had no effect.

  “Where were you?” she asked shrewdly, noting his silence.

  “I think you can guess.”

  “That is all over now,” she ran her hands through his hair. “It happened to someone else, and she told me about it. And soon I shall forget even what she said.”

  Ned gestured round the cabin. “But this is no life for you. I want to dress you in fine clothes, have your hair brushed and combed and pinned by your…”

  She gripped his hands. “You understand nothing, my love. I wait for the day when you can undress me; when you pull out the pins holding up my hair!” With her face crimson she ran from the cabin and Ned, who at least understood that, looked back at the chart. Coro was about six hundred miles to the south. Apart from avoiding some small islands and cays, it seemed easy enough to find.

  Chapter Nine

  Yorke was standing in the shade of a big kapok tree watching four men playing cards. The Trade wind was brisk, gusting round both sides of the enormous smooth trunk and blowing up the dust caught in the upper roots, which grew out from the cylindrical part of the trunk like the sinews at the back of a horse’s hind leg.

  The men cursed the gusts, which lifted the cards, even though they were heavy and clumsy, simply squares of thick leaf cut from the signature tree which, as its name indicated, acted as crude parchment, taking the impression of a sharp instrument and drying like stiff leather.

  The four men had been carpenters before the Civil War and transportation carried them to exile across the Atlantic Ocean and put them to work at Kingsnorth, where Yorke was only too thankful to have skilled men available.

  The four of them, with a couple of masons and half a dozen helpers, had built many of the outbuildings at Kingsnorth. In a peaceful England a good mason could earn half a crown a day, compared with anything between sixpence and a shilling for skilled labourers. In Barbados, transported men counted themselves fortunate to get half of that, although they were fed and housed.

  Now, however, the four carpenters, two masons and half a dozen helpers were busy at a completely different task: they were building three boats – canoes, Saxby called them – to be used among the creeks and inlets of the Main. They were longer and beamier than the Griffin’s single boat, but they were much more lightly constructed so that they drew less water. Instead of oars they would be propelled by paddles – both Yorke and Saxby knew how cumbersome oars could be in a narrow inlet lined by the stiff tentacles of mangrove roots which grew like tortured rheumatic limbs up and down in the water, one slim branch growing off another at a sharp angle, and the second sprouting a third.

  The canoes had to be fast, silent (an advantage paddles had over oars: a man crouched at the side of a boat wielding a paddle did not make the revealing creak of an oar in rowlocks), and capable of carrying a reasonable amount of cargo.

  Antigua had mahogany trees, but none of the trunks had been sawn into planks, the planters preferring to buy planks brought in by the Dutch from the East Indies. Fortunately Saxby had stowed a two-handed saw, so he had gone off into the forests on the north side of the bay one day with his assistant Simpson, and found a good tree which had fallen in some storm two or three years ago – long enough for the wood to have seasoned but not long enough for the termites to have destroyed it.

  Planking presented no problem: a dozen men with spades soon dug a pit lengthways under the trunk deep enough for the bottom sawyer to work, pushing on his end of the saw towards the top sawyer who was standing astride the tree.

  The bottom sawyer had the worst task: the sawdust scattered down into his eyes and the wind did not cool him. Yorke realized he was fortunate to have four carpenters who happily went to work, two working briskly for half an hour and then changing places with the other two.

  Saxby then produced a couple of adzes which he had kept stowed away in the Griffin for years, thickly coated in tallow to protect them from rusting. Three of the four carpenters had bellowed for joy when they saw the hoe-shaped axes and spent the next hour seeing which of them, standing on a fallen neem tree trunk, could chop the smoothest surface, using the adze as a gardener would hoe but slicing away thin slivers of wood.

  With planks cut from the trunk, and some of the crooked boughs (with more cut from other fallen trees) used as frames, each canoe was built, looking in the early stage like a fish skeleton, the backbone formed by the keel and the frames rising like thick ribs at the bow and stern, the frames in between being lighter.

  Saxby was in his element. Not a vain man, he found it satisfying nevertheless that he, a seaman turned plantation foreman, could also show carpenters how to build a canoe. The carpenters wanted to name the first one they launched after Aurelia, but she thanked them in a graceful little speech of refusal. She explained later to Yorke that the men had taken her by surprise and she felt superstitiously that if the canoe ever sank, she would die.

  When they remembered that all four of them had been lodged in the Bridewell for three months before being taken to the London Dock and put on board a ship for transportation, they had asked Aurelia if she would launch their new vessel for them and name it Bridewell. She agreed, although it was customary, in England at least, for a man to launch a ship, using a bottle of port. When Ned warned her that the canoe was being called after the most notorious prison in London, she laughed and delivered an amusing little speech (cheered all the more because of her French accent, which delighted the men) in which she said they all owed a debt to the Bridewell because, she had been told, the accommodation
was so good that only the most discerning guests stayed there while waiting to board ships for foreign destinations.

  The second canoe was still being planked up when Bullock arrived back on board the Griffin from Falmouth village, obviously bubbling over with important news. He refused to stop to tell his wife and dodged round Mrs Judd’s ample and inquisitive body as he looked for Yorke, who was up on the fo’c’sle.

  “Sir, they’ve sailed, more than a week ago!”

  Yorke smiled at Bullock’s excitement and although he guessed the answer asked, to avoid misunderstandings: “Who have sailed where?”

  “The fleet under Admiral Penn, sir, sailed from Barbados!”

  “Bound for where?”

  “Santo Domingo, sir. They’re going to capture the city.”

  “And when did they sail?”

  “Eight days ago from Bridgetown, sir. Their storeships haven’t arrived from England but General Venables refused to wait and they are to join him at Hispaniola.”

  So Venables and Penn had been delayed by their storeships for – three months. From Barbados to Santo Domingo was some 900 miles. It would take the fleet about nine days, which meant that it was likely they would be attacking Santo Domingo tomorrow.

  “Where has this news come from?”

  “Oh, it’s common knowledge, sir. General Venables sent a local sloop to deliver messages to Antigua, Montserrat and St Christopher saying that more men are still needed and they should be sent on to Santo Domingo. The governor here sent out a crier with the news but the only volunteer is a man lodged in the jail a couple of days ago because he killed his wife with a machete.”

  “He could be making a mistake,” Yorke said soberly. “The gallows might be preferable to what Santo Domingo has to offer that expedition.”

  Saxby had arrived to hear the last of Bullock’s report and Yorke’s comment, and he agreed. “No storeships, which means no artillery or horses and no provisions and water beyond what the fleet carries, which won’t last long. Not enough men and only half those armed until the storeships arrive. And once on shore, cholera and yellow fever will kill ’em off faster than the Dons because they’re not used to the heat.”