Buccaneer

by Dudley Pope

  Thomas ran his hand through his beard and grinned slyly. “A safe place. Rich, I reckon. Somewhere no buccaneer to my knowledge has ever waved a cutlass or tossed a pot.”

  “Where, Thomas?” the Frenchman asked again.

  “Not so fast, mon ami. Choosing the right target is the most important part of buccaneering: choosing the right comrades is the second. But third is agreeing on the terms.”

  “Surely dividing by seven is the fair way.”

  “Has any of you more than thirty men?”

  When they shook their heads he said: “I have more than fifty, and so has Mr Yorke. Half for us, a half for you four: that’s only fair to our own men.”

  The four privateersmen murmured their agreement.

  “So half and half it is,” Thomas said.

  Ned said: “There’s just one thing we might do for our friend the general.”

  Thomas and the four men looked startled, and tried to guess what Ned had in mind.

  “There should be plenty of guns lying around, wherever we go. If we can carry any away with us, especially bronze pieces, I suggest we make a present of them to the general. Or give him any iron guns we have that we’d prefer to change for bronze.”

  Morgan was obviously far from happy at the idea. “Why should we provide the bloody Roundheads with guns? Once you give ’em guns it’ll be a constant ‘We want shot’ because English shot won’t fit Spanish guns.”

  “We won’t be giving them to the Roundheads,” Thomas said delightedly. “That’s why it is such a splendid idea. We provide the guns and shot, and the Roundheads provide the powder and gunners!”

  “To fire at us, I suppose,” Morgan said.

  “No, to defend our new base! The general told me that the reason he is not building forts or batteries to defend this harbour is that he hasn’t any guns to put in them. Now, Cromwell or not, that’s a pity. We can use this harbour for refitting and repairs, and before long, you’ll see, there’ll be plenty of shops and taverns. Providing there are some guns protecting that entrance from any stray Spanish privateers.”

  The Frenchman held up his hand. “I agree, Thomas. Your motives are so devious I think you must have French blood in your veins!”

  The other three quickly agreed and the Frenchman said: “For the third time, Thomas – where?”

  “Santiago!”

  “Sacré bleu!” the Frenchman exclaimed, and Morgan muttered some oath that was drowned by the exclamations of the other two.

  “We’ll never sail in,” the Dutchman said. “The entrance is too narrow. And we’ll never tow in with boats without being shot to pieces by the fort. I was taken there once as a prisoner.”

  “But you escaped,” Thomas said. “Shall I tell you how? You broke out of the prison somehow – the details don’t matter – and you made for the hills to the eastward. You climbed over the ridge and came down the other side, to where there’s a long bay with fine beaches. You stole a fishing boat, and sailed to the north side of Jamaica. You crossed the mountains to here, cleaned yourself up, and managed to get on board a Dutch ship smuggling in slaves or goods.”

  “How do you know? I never told you!”

  “Alternatives,” Thomas said crisply. “You had no others. The only safe way of escaping from Santiago is eastward over the hills; the only place you could find boats is that bay; the only place you could reach is Jamaica, with the wind just abaft the beam…”

  “What has this to do with us now?” Morgan asked.

  “Old Gottlieb here found the best way out of Santiago. It is also the best way in. That bay is well out of sight of Santiago. Let’s get to sea before too many people guess what we’re up to. We’ll sail in company, but if any of us are separated, we’ll rendezvous at Caimanera. That’s on the east side of the Bahia de Guantanamo. Anyone not there a week from today will be left out: we daren’t risk raising an alarm along that Cuban coast; those ports and towns are plump pullets that have been fattening for us.”

  Eight days later the sun was within two hours of setting when the squadron, led by the Peleus and followed by the Griffin, the four privateers and the Phoenix, sailed close along the Cuba coastline, occasionally having to curve round isolated cays or the ominous brown patches in the clear water that warned of coral reefs.

  The ships were making about five knots; the sky was clear but there was a good deal of haze blurring the coastline. Thomas Whetstone had come on board the Griffin with the Dutchman, Gottlieb, who had offered to leave his own ship in the hands of his mate for this part of the voyage.

  Thomas tugged his beard from time to time as he walked impatiently between the mast and taffrail, looking forward over the starboard bow and occasionally examining it with his battered telescope, whose brass tubes looked as though they had been used frequently to drive a nail flush or knock the top off a bottle whose cork had stuck.

  “Several red cliffs, you said?” he asked Gottlieb.

  “Yes. There’s a sugar loaf hill, then about four miles beyond it a hill three times as high. Then there’s a beach with a river running into it, the Rio del Bacanao.”

  Thomas closed the telescope. “Well, that seems to fit, so we should now be off the mouth of the Rio del Bacanao, but I’m damned if I can see any red cliffs beyond, nor Punta Berracos.”

  “It’s the haze,” Gottlieb said. “You’ll see them soon, and Punta Berracos. You can’t miss that; it has a curious round hill on it.”

  Ned said: “There’s one thing about this haze – if we’re having trouble identifying the coast, any sentries in there probably won’t notice the ships.”

  “Better rely on them having too much wine with their meal than the haze.” Thomas pulled the telescope open once again. “Hey – there’s an odd-shaped hill! Yes, it’s a headland with a round hill on it. And…damn this haze…yes, the cliffs are – well, not red, but…well, perhaps they are.”

  Gottlieb nodded confidently. “Beyond that is Bahia Daiquiri, and from there a series of sharp hills run about four miles to Siboney, where we anchor. The nearest hill has a flat summit, and each gets higher as you approach Siboney.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Whetstone said.

  “We pass Siboney and find a small village just beyond, Aguadores. We anchor there. Then we land and walk over the hills to Santiago. Not such a climb, really; once we’re up on a ridge of hills it’s level until we reach the castle.”

  “Let me go over it again,” Ned said. “Santiago is like a big slot in the cliffs, the entrance is only sixty yards or so wide. A castle, the Castillo del Morro, is high on the east side, and the Catalina battery low on the west side.”

  “That is correct,” Gottlieb said in his precise English. “And we shall arrive off Aguadores just after it is dark. There is no chance that we shall cause an alarm because, as I was telling Thomas, any ship arriving when there’s not enough light or the wind is too fluky to try to enter Santiago, always anchors in the bay at Aguadores to wait.”

  “Don’t make it sound too easy,” Thomas grunted. “There’s always something that goes wrong. Something unexpected.”

  The Dutchman gave a harsh laugh. “I lead the march to Santiago – with you, of course, Thomas – as the guide.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Whetstone estimated from the position of Orion’s Belt that it must be about midnight. With the ships anchored off Aguadores and most of their men landed by boat clear of the village, they found the beginning of the climb not too arduous because the hills became steeper after the first couple of miles. The worst problem was the cloud of mosquitoes; next worst was the narrowness of the path leading up through first forest and then thorny scrub. Finally they were high enough to look down at the ships floating like toys on a village pond.

  Ned was thankful both he and Thomas had been able to persuade the women that for once (if
they had said “for once” a single time, they must have said it a hundred) they could be much more use helping sail the ships round than scrambling over hills and perhaps spraining their ankles.

  With three hundred men slithering and sliding, tripping and cursing as they followed the rough path, Thomas said to Ned: “I think we’ll light the torches: we’re going to have broken legs otherwise, and we’re out of sight of Santiago.”

  The column halted and flints struck against steels as the men blew gently into the tinderboxes until they glowed enough to light the rough torches they had made. The weak lights showed up a fearsome crowd with unshaven faces scratched and bleeding from branches springing back as one man followed another, and swollen grotesquely by mosquito bites.

  Soon the column was on the move again. As he climbed, his shin and thigh muscles aching, his clothes sodden with perspiration and his ears ringing with the incessant buzz and hum of insects, Ned found he was beginning to have doubts about the Santiago raid. Not Santiago as such, but because this was his first buccaneering raid. The descent on Riohacha could be explained away because Jamaica needed the corn. At least, he thought so. Three thousand men were starving. Yet if he was as honest with himself as Thomas was, those three thousand men were the enemy: they were Roundheads who had stolen his family estates, forced his family into exile, confiscated his own plantation and forced him to flee Barbados. Now they wanted to arrest him just because he was who he was. Why was he helping them, then? Because the general had promised a good price for the grain and said he would pay in gold! In the end it had taken threats to make the fool pay up, but that was understandable now that they knew he had used the last of the money in his treasury. The troops were lucky they had nothing to spend their money on; it made less of a problem for the general not to pay them.

  So, he mused, why had he this doubt over Santiago? A successful raid by the buccaneers would certainly alarm the Spanish. It would either frighten them off any thought of attacking Jamaica – and thus do Cromwell’s work for him – or make them realize Jamaica had to be recaptured if the Spanish possessions were to be safe, which meant the buccaneers would be doing the Spaniards’ work for them. Or doing their thinking, rather; drawing their attention to a dangerous threat. Yet without the buccaneers and their ships, the threat to the Spanish did not exist.

  Either way, he realized, the buccaneers were helping Cromwell or the Spanish. This conclusion so startled him that he stopped and Saxby, next behind, bumped into him with a muttered apology but a warning that three hundred men were following in the darkness.

  Thomas Whetstone dropped back, telling Gottlieb to go on ahead, and fell into step with Ned. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “Yes, I was just thinking.”

  “Ah, indeed. No good comes of it,” Thomas said seriously. “Good men can go mad doing that.” He stumbled over the root of a shrub and cursed. “What I am, an honest man, doing here behaving like a footpad…? Shall I have the strength to steal a doubloon when I see one…? That’s it, eh Ned?”

  “Something like that!”

  “Well, console yourself that if they catch you they’ll stretch you six inches longer on the rack, then crack your spine at the neck with the garotte, and generally be hateful. So grab those doubloons and admire the perfect cross-crosslet embossed on one side. Or is it the cross-potent? I always get ’em mixed up: heraldry is a black art. Give thanks to Philip IV and remember that he mined the gold free in Mexico, and he’d only waste the money paying his army in the Spanish Netherlands or building ships to drive us out of the Caribbees.”

  “All right, as long as His Most Catholic Majesty does realize we are only saving him trouble,” Ned said, his voice now considerably more cheerful. “His armies in the Netherlands will be better off back behind the Pyrenees, and if he sends a fleet out here, it’ll only sink on reefs!”

  “Remember Ned,” Thomas said soberly, “here it’s been ‘No peace beyond the Line’ for more than a hundred years, and it is the Spanish who say it.”

  “Yes, don’t worry about me. I was just sad that what with your uncle and the King of Spain, there’s not much chance that Aurelia and I can ever settle down on a plantation and live peacefully…”

  “You’re looking at Diana and me, I suppose.”

  “Obviously. I know you are happy together, but…”

  “You’d be wrong if you went on after the word ‘together’.”

  “How do you know what I was going to say?”

  “‘…but if only you could settle down on your estate in peace and start a family,’ and so on…”

  “Yes. What’s wrong with that?”

  Thomas cursed as a branch brushed aside by Gottlieb swung back and hit him in the face. “Everything’s wrong with it, Ned. The last thing that Diana and I want is to settle down. Oh yes, we did once, at the beginning. Sailing round in the Peleus, we felt like tinkers, or gipsies, every day a different anchorage, at least once a week a different country, French, Spanish, Dutch, English – we never knew which language we’d be trying to use. We got to hate the Peleus; she was like a prison. Then slowly we realized it wasn’t the Peleus, it was us. Diana and me. We woke up to the fact that the Peleus was both our home and our escape.

  “You see, Ned, it doesn’t matter a damn where the Peleus is, at anchor or at sea. If she’s anchored in Curaçao, very well, then our home for a while is in Curaçao. But it could be Barbados, some bay along the Main or, as it is now, Aguadores. Tomorrow – later today, rather – it should be Santiago de Cuba. Freedom, Ned, that’s what Diana and I have. Who cares what my damnable uncle does next? He won’t live for ever, and his son is a ninny, so as soon as they bury Uncle Oliver the Council of State will be quarrelling – but I don’t care. Just so long as they don’t make peace with Spain!”

  All that Whetstone said made sense; in fact, as Thomas described how he and Diana had begun to feel like tinkers and then slowly the ship had become their home, Ned realized that Aurelia had already reached that stage; that she already regarded the Griffin as her home. In the last two or three weeks, when he had been apologetic about bad weather, rough seas, the monotony of the food, she had been more and more dismissive about whatever it was. He realized that she had not been trying to reassure him that she did not mind; she was trying to convince him that the life of a buccaneer was an interesting one, to persuade him that they should be like the snail, carrying their home around with them.

  Gottlieb had stopped, and by the time Ned and Thomas reached him they could see that they had just climbed over the edge of a great flat ridge: ahead of them the ground was level and in the starlight they could see a bulky building on a lower slope.

  Thomas turned to face the oncoming column and bellowed: “Stop. Ten minutes rest. Pass it back!”

  Ned had the feeling that he could see through the darkness; that like some bird he could hover over the far corner of the ridge and look down on Santiago sleeping in its valley at the end of the narrow channel leading from the sea. On the eastern side the great Castillo del Morro stood at the end of the precipitous cliffs that they had been skirting most of the way from Aguadores; on the west side the Catalina battery was built into a flat ledge more suited to ospreys. In the town the alcaldia would be locked up on one side of the plaza; the mayor would be sleeping peacefully. Would there be an alcaide, a governor of the Castillo? Presumably Santiago was big enough to have its own gobernador. In fact it must be the main town of a province, so somewhere down there the governor slept soundly too, unaware that three hundred buccaneers were approaching, a column of cutthroats escorted, so it seemed, by an aerial column of vicious mosquitoes, each with a sting sharp enough to fell an ox.

  “We’ll split up when we’re closer to the Castillo,” Thomas said. “Are you sure you want to tackle the castle? It looks enormous. The town will be easy. No troops down there, and the rule of thumb is simple – the rich a
nd the important live in the largest houses. Ransack the homes and ransom the owners!”

  “The castle suits me. I’m new to all this. It’s best that you have the most men. My fifty should be enough for the castle, as long as we can get to it without raising the alarm.”

  Thomas looked back along the column. “At least they had the wit to douse the torches without being told.”

  “They just burned out. They don’t last forever.”

  “True, true, Ned! Ah well, these sorry poltroons have had enough rest. If we wait too long, some rascal who managed to hide some hot waters will get drunk. Still, we searched ’em thoroughly.”

  “Do you remember that passage from Shakespeare, where Falstaff is leading a column of men he has just pressed into the King’s service…”

  “Yes, but we’ve better bargains! You’re not comparing me with Falstaff? I haven’t such a belly!”

  Chapter Twenty

  Ned and Thomas stood side by side as the column trudged past them. “Griffins this side,” Ned said, counting them off. As soon as fifty had passed he called softly; “Stop and wait.”

  Now Thomas was counting out eighty of his own men and grouping them to one side and then calling for Saxby, who stood beside him as another eighty were counted and then led them a hundred yards ahead and halted. “Burton?” Thomas called and as soon as the Griffin’s gunner stepped forward had the rest of the column follow him, counting as they went. The last man was given a slap on the back as Thomas said: “That’s nearly three hundred of us! Not a man fallen by the wayside.”

  The Castillo seemed black and menacing, heavily shadowed by the light of the stars in a clear sky. The entrance was on the north side and Ned could see a long path zigzagging up the hillside from the town below.

  Thomas came and stood beside him. “Santiago de Cuba…” he said quietly. “Down there they’re all sleeping – prelates and pimps, treasurers and trollops, rich and poor.” He looked up at the sky. “Our people will be weighing anchor at Aguadores about now. I’ll be glad to see the Peleus coming in through the channel. Look.” He pointed down at it; they could not see the entrance from this angle but the main anchorage was clear enough, reflecting the stars and showing how sheltered it was. “We can go alongside those jetties and load the purchase; aye, and hoist on board your dam’ guns.”