1637: No Peace Beyond the Line

by Eric Flint

  Van Walbeeck closed his eyes. “I have seen how quickly these conflagrations rage out of all control, during my time in the Pacific. Once the fighting becomes personal, the resentment and hatred of the slaves combust wildly with the bigotry and fear of their owners. And after the fires have finally guttered out, it is impossible to sort out who injured who first and with what measure of justice.

  “This is because although the commercial class might have no affinity for slavery, the slaveholders are often tied to them by marriage, by faith, by language. So do the merchants and artisans stand by to see all the slaveholders consumed by a two-day fire storm of retribution? No. And so, because of those personal ties, townspeople invariably enter the fight on the wrong side. But once the first of them is killed, it becomes their fight, too.”

  Van Walbeeck shook his head. “No, there is a better path. And we have already taken the first and crucial step in that direction. About which: you are aware of the dozens of slaves whose labor this government has ‘leased’ from their owners? The ones who we are secretly shipping to Antigua to help build our new facilities there?”

  All three of the politicians nodded. Corselles murmured, “Of course.”

  “Well, during their absence, two things will occur. Firstly, the owners of those slaves will make a considerable amount of money. Not immense mind you, but money without risk. Also, their investment in the slaves themselves is not at risk. The labor leases stipulate that this government must repay the owners the purchase price for any slaves who might die in accidents or escape.”

  Carpentiere’s face was unchanged, but his eyes seemed to ignite. “So, you mean to free them, then? To pay the insurance as the price of their freedom? That is as bold as it is just.”

  “And is also financially insupportable,” Serooskereken grunted with a hint of regret.

  “It would also be unwise,” Tromp added. “As Jan said, we must avoid abrupt action, lest that become the catalyst for an equally abrupt reaction. And if a large number of the leased slaves were to strangely ‘escape’ while on Antigua, their owners would know that was not the result of error, but intent.”

  Servatius folded his hands. “So if you do not mean to pay for their ‘escape’ to freedom, then how do you propose to achieve that less ‘abruptly’?”

  Van Walbeeck grinned. “The up-timers have an interesting axiom about that. It involves cooking frogs.”

  Serooskereken’s face contracted into an asterisk of wrinkles centered on his nose. “You mean, as the French do?”

  Jan laughed. “I am not speaking of a recipe, my dear Phipps, but an axiom. And here is the gist of it:

  “You put a frog in a pot of water, so high-sided that he may not escape easily. Now, if you put that pot over a roaring fire, the frog will feel that rapid increase in heat and hop out, struggling as may be needed. But if you raise the temperature slowly, ever so slowly, the frog never feels it. Rather, he keeps adapting to it . . . until he is cooked.”

  Corselles shrugged. “Yes, yes, and so how do you propose to—er, slowly increase the heat on the landowners?”

  “Well, it’s already started, of course. By making money from the leases, they do not have to watch over their slaves nor worry about whether the weather will produce a good crop. So we’re already introducing the landowners to a new way of life; less money than they’d envisioned, but also not as risky, expensive, or exhausting to make.

  “The second phase will start when, in a few days, we shall announce the incentive I mentioned earlier: a five-year exemption upon both export and import. Their profit margins shall thus be drastically increased.”

  Phipps nodded. “I believe I see where you are going with this.”

  Tromp smiled. “I suspect you do. Not long after that, we take a third step. We announce that our partner nations have imposed one requirement upon those who wish to take advantage of the exemptions: the recipient may not be a slaveholder. Or, in the case of speculators, the goods exempted may not have been produced by slaves.”

  Carpentiere was solemn. “At which point, the actual intent of the exemptions will be writ clear: to get the owners to free their slaves. Why not simply announce the exemptions and the stipulations all at once?”

  “Because,” Jan twinkled, “that’s the time over which we are boiling the frog, their initial resistance to the idea. By putting some time between those two announcements, the landowners will have had time to consider which future seems more prudent and more pleasant. They can either keep their slaves without the enjoyment of the exemptions and yet with the surety that they will have to free them within five years, or—”

  “Or,” Phipps finished with a slow smile, “they can convert their slaves to bondsmen immediately. Yes, the rate of production will go down and expenses of labor will go up, but the exemptions will make up for most of that.”

  “Still, some will not like it,” Servatius cautioned darkly. “There are men among them who like holding slaves, and whose visions were not of merely a comfortable life, but of ever-increasing wealth. And dominion. And frankly, satiation of their lusts.”

  “Exactly,” Tromp agreed. “And they will likely leave.”

  “You think they will simply leave?”

  Jan nodded. “Actually, I do, mijn Heer Carpentiere. Most men simply wish to keep their families safe, their bellies full, their prospects bright, and their lives pleasant. Very few will set aside all those benefits in pursuit of unlimited wealth and unbridled power. Some will, and many of those did indeed come to the New World.

  “But they are not the majority, particularly now. In addition to the soldiers and sailors, most of our new arrivals have no such ambitions.

  “However, when we first arrived from Recife, who had the time to think of such things? Contending with the ever-imminent threats to survival was the daily reality and that uncertainty made the community fragile. And for those who had no overpowering greed to serve as a counterweight to the terrible risk, their humbler hopes could hardly be seen as worth the cost: living in constant fear of pirates, the Spanish, the Kalinago, and even the French.

  “And those are only the external threats. This time last year, nine out of every ten people beyond those storm shutters were living in tents. Sanitation was a daily struggle. Food was short, water almost as much. The great majority of them would gladly have climbed aboard ships and returned to the Lowlands from whence they came, preferring the grim and limited lot of that life to the constant terror and unsurety of this one.”

  Van Walbeeck cocked his head in the direction of the window. “Go out and ask them what they want now. Now that they have full bellies, peace with the Kalinago after repelling them last year, and three historical victories over the Spanish in the same space of time. Now, every day when they rise they walk out into real streets lined by real if humble houses. They see the mighty fleet now in our bay, the various wondrous machines of up-time manufacture or inspiration, the wares and wealth from all the islands with which we have now made common cause—not the least of which is the oil, which Don Michael McCarthy has rightly dubbed ‘black gold.’

  “So go into that street and ask almost anyone you meet if they still wish to return home. Because with the convoy still at anchor, they can leave if they wish. They are no longer marooned in this world, and even the land they came from is now at peace and with largely autonomous rule.”

  “Yes, yes, Jan,” Corselles muttered, waving his hand as if to push all those factors behind him. “The people are now as content and hopeful as they were desperate and fearful this time last year. But how does that concern slavery in these colonies? The people of whom you speak are not slaveholders.”

  Van Walbeeck’s cheeks flushed. “But my dear Pieter, do you not see what that means about the great majority of our colony, about those families that came here merely seeking a better life, not boundless wealth and dominion? It means they have decided that here, in this world, they are achieving all those things that do matter to them: the comfort an
d safety and homely pieties that make for happy families and a good life.”

  Phipps nodded, frowning. “And I suspect—as you and Maarten clearly do—that many of the present slaveholders will feel similarly, and will free their slaves. That will relieve them of much worry, and for many, nagging guilt.”

  Servatius nodded solemnly. “Many of the smaller landowners cannot reconcile owning other humans with the precepts of their faith. But the others?” He shrugged. “Their voracious appetites are not merely the evidence of sin. It suggests a deeper depravity.” He glanced at Tromp. “So what is to be done about them?”

  Maarten took a moment to respond. “I have given much thought to that. In general, I like to think myself a tolerant man, in that I judge not lest I be judged. Even if I find my neighbor’s actions or beliefs highly . . . idiosyncratic, we can only live in peace because their right to exist as they please in their house is the only guarantee of my enjoying the same freedom under my own roof.

  “But depravity is a different matter. I do not want such neighbors who derive gratification from treating others worse than they would an animal of the field. Because—and mark this—any who accepts that one human can be property will come to accept that any human can be property.”

  “So you are saying we are better without the ones who would leave?”

  “I am. And the sovereigns and presidents to whom we answer are unanimous in that feeling as well.” Tromp stood. “This is what shall be announced in the coming weeks. I wanted you to hear it from us well in advance.”

  Phipps rose with a sigh. “And so give us nightmares in advance? You are most considerate, Maarten.”

  “Well,” van Walbeeck mused, “you could always do what I do.”

  Servatius stared balefully at him. “Tell me that it does not involve rum.”

  Jan just smiled beatifically.

  Carpentiere sighed. “I knew it.”

  * * *

  When all three had walked out, silent and somber, van Walbeeck closed the door behind them. He stared at it for a moment, and muttered, “‘Dead men walking.’”

  “What? You think they shall be killed for bringing the news to the slave owners, when the time comes?”

  “No, no: it’s an up-time expression I’ve heard Eddie and Mike use. It means seeing men who are acting as if they’re walking to their own execution. Which is just how those three may feel, since we may be quite sure that de Bruyne, Haet, and Musen shall skin them alive when they hear the news.”

  Tromp found it very easy to envision the island’s three most prominent slaveholders relishing such an activity. “As long as that remains a figurative description of their exchange, I shall be pleased.”

  Van Walbeeck paused. “Still no word of Curaçao or Thijssen?”

  Tromp shook his head. “Nothing.” Van Walbeeck’s question had acquired the routine of a ritual, and the admiral understood why. He was to have sailed to Curaçao with Thijssen, but the disaster at Dunkirk undid those plans. Jan seemed to feel as if he should be there, sharing the greater danger of that far more vulnerable colony.

  “Not even word from our privateer with too long a name, Moses Cohen Henriques Eanes?”

  Tromp sighed. “Moses can no longer make port at Curaçao. As it is, too many of the ‘Brethren of the Coast’ have already become suspicious of him, of where his true allegiances lie.”

  “I thought they were always suspicious of him.”

  Tromp nodded. “They are more so, now. It was inevitable that they would learn that he and Calabar have not just been taking Spanish and Portuguese prizes, but pirate hulls, as well. And while it is true that there is no honor among thieves, and that they often strive against each other when there is great profit in it, they may have had whispers of his occasional rendezvous with Jol.”

  “So Curaçao remains quiet.”

  Tromp frowned. “Let us hope it is quiet . . . in every way.”

  Chapter 37

  Willemstad, Curaçao

  Captain Alonso de Contreras watched another pair of pirate sloops approach the two smaller raiders that had already lashed themselves to opposite sides of the Dutch jacht trying to clear the mouth of Curaçao’s harbor. If the Dutch spotted the two closing ships, they gave no sign. While they were still narrowly getting the better of the fight against the less numerous raiders who had come over their gunwales, they had their hands full just keeping their ship. However, when the two sloops finally lashed themselves to the smaller hulls already grappling their target, the contest would effectively be over. Fresh and eager for combat, and with muskets and pistols loaded and ready, the freebooters’ combined numbers would sweep the deck of the jacht.

  Contreras watched one of the tallest of the boarders from the first ship, a cimarrone who had probably been born a Spanish slave, slash at a wall of Dutch cutlasses with a falchion in either hand. After a few moments, however, a Dutch officer behind the skirmish line finished loading his musketoon, raised it calmly, and discharged the weapon into the pirate’s body from a range of three paces. The fellow kept swinging for a moment, then slowed, looked down at his much-ravaged abdomen and staggered sideways. He disappeared behind a flashing whirl of Dutch cutlasses. Contreras, watching the first of the sloops now making itself fast to the portside raider, reflected that within minutes it would be the Dutch suffering the same fate they had meted out to the cimarrone. Such were the fortunes of war.

  Beside him, Captain Ramon Berrio gestured repeatedly back toward the channel-like anchorage that led into Curaçao’s St. Ann’s Bay. “At last they’ve decided to crawl out of their den. They must have finished their gin. Which we’ll find out as soon as our devils open up their bellies!”

  Contreras glanced toward the harbor, where the only true warship of the four Dutch hulls was fatefully venturing out. Square-rigged, she had the advantage of a wind out of the northeast, but that did her little good against the nimble fleet of almost thirty craft arrayed against her. Several angled in from windward, leaning over as the breeze came into their sails on a broad reach, musketeers waiting on their decks, gunners holding their petereroes level. By the time they had cleared half the distance to what was almost certainly Thijssen’s own flagship, another three of the smaller pirate ships had heeled over to follow the first wave. And so it would go, the fore-and-aft-rigged picadors coming in to throw their darts and dashing out again, hopefully before the square-rigged Dutch bull could turn its heavy half-cannon horns in their direction.

  “Ah, this will be good sport,” Berrio muttered to the two masters of the galleoncete that was not so much directing the pirate attack as it was watching its execution. Contreras reflected that feral smiles and breathless anticipation such as Berrio’s had probably been common sights at Nero’s coliseum, as well. And, although his armor and body were adorned with crosses and other signs of his so-called devotion to Christianity, the criollo would probably have been rooting for the lions. Because, after all, whatever he professed and whatever prayers he said, it was clear enough that his holy trinity was War, Blood, and Rape. Usually, but not necessarily, in that order.

  The masters of the twenty-six-gun galleoncete with the horribly ironic name Santa Maria de Gracia were little better. Juan Garcia and Pedro de la Plesa were a pair of opportunistic cutthroats who’d made their living as Dunkirkers until they began to snatch the occasional Spanish fishing smack in lean times. Quitting the Old World for the New before any warrant could be made out against them, they now plied a similar, legitimated trade as “captains” of Tierra Firme’s Garda Costa. Operating mostly from pataches and barca-longas, they ostensibly eliminated various pirate threats and kept a finger on the pulse of such activity.

  It seemed to Contreras that, as de Murga had expected, this pair excelled at their job largely because they had surreptitiously become part of the scourge they had been set to eliminate. But their years in Dunkirk had taught them the dangers of incautious opportunism, so they applied a different strategy in their new roles.

&n
bsp; During the season when the Flota and the smaller ships that converged upon its ports of call made their westward progress along Tierra Firme, Garcia and de la Plesa were veritable lions of the coast. Their success at finding and exterminating pirates during those months was prodigious. However, once La Flota had passed—which was to say, once Mother Spain’s interests had been secured—their anti-piracy efficacy plummeted precipitously. And, among those who knew to look for it, a curious pattern evolved. Wherever the galleoncete of the white-locked Garcia “Blanca” patrolled, searching vigorously for “pirate scum,” there would be calm and tranquility until a week or so after he moved on to his next port of call. That calm was frequently shattered by the appearance of a small, well-armed pirate band with extraordinary luck at finding and looting the richest prizes in the town that Garcia Blanca had just visited. That the small and quiet Pedro “Pistola” Plesa (so called because he was almost comically useless with a sword) was not with the older Garcia on his patrols excited little comment. And if anyone had thought to look for him hidden aboard that extraordinarily lucky pirate ship which shadowed Garcia’s rounds, they would have found their investigatory visit lethally rebuffed.

  Garcia Blanca puffed out his white mustaches, nodded in the direction of the inrushing pirate sloops. “They’ll break to windward.”

  “What?” exclaimed Berrio. “Head into the wind and closer to the land to escape?”

  “Why not?” Contreras offered with a shrug. “They have shallow draft and can sail quite close-hauled. If Thijssen turns his ship to bring his guns to bear on them, he loses the following wind and is heading the wrong way: directly toward us and away from his only reasonable course of escape.”

  The newly lettered Brethren of the Coast had approached from the east of Curaçao, ensuring that they would have the weather gauge for this engagement. It also encouraged any Dutch who might escape their narrow anchorage to flee before the westward wind, and so right into the clutches of the six barquentines and large sloops that lay in wait behind the headland of Cape St. Marie.