The Buccaneers

by Iain Lawrence

  He pulled Mary away. We wore ship and headed west, punching through the waves. He put Dasher and Mudge to work, and the cable was uncoiled from his boat. It was led forward, outboard of the shrouds, and bent to the capstan. Then the anchor was hauled from the boat to the rail, and Mawgan came back to the wheel.

  “Steer for the Tombstones,” he said.

  I could scarcely believe I'd heard him right. “The Tombstones?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Can you see them?” he said. “ ‘Course you can. A blind man would know they were there.”

  It was true enough. The surf on the Tombstones was a heavy, muffled thunder, the sound of a thousand guns in a broadside that never ended. I turned the ship toward it.

  The seas grew bigger and steeper. They pitched us forward and went rumbling on to break their backs on the spikes of rock.

  “Closer,” Mawgan said. “Closer still. You want to nearly touch them, John.”

  All of Pendennis watched us from the cliffs beyond the Tombstones. It was the hardest thing I'd ever done to point the Dragon at that wild white water. I lived all over again the horrors of the Isle of Skye as the thunder of the Tombstones grew loud enough to shake the air. I watched the bowsprit rise and fall, the spouts shoot up and whirlpools open. I saw Dasher, in the waist, tighten the cords on his wineskins, and Mudge look up with fear in his eyes. Even Mary seemed frightened; she had seen many wrecks in her life.

  But Mawgan might have been sailing down the Thames for all the concern he showed. He held on to the binnacle with one hand, staring around at the sea and the shore. I was nearly maddened by his nonchalance, until I saw his fingers. They were white, and locked like talons on the wood.

  Then the breakers were all around us. The Dragon heaved herself toward the rocks, and heaved herself away. The spray and the spume made a fog that was thick as wool. We went tearing through it, into a blinding whiteness, and that roaring filled my ears. A rock rose up, seething with foam; it stood square before the bowsprit.

  “Left!” shouted Mawgan. He pushed on the spokes. The Dragon wove between the breakers. She tilted nearly onto her side; the topsail yard touched the sea, and a shroud parted with a crack.

  “Now right!” cried Mawgan. Again we turned the wheel.

  The broken shroud tumbled down, snaking in the wind. It tangled in the trysail sheets and drummed against the guns. The mast bent like a feather, then straightened as the starboard shrouds went taut. The waves battered at us, and Mawgan cried, “Let the anchor go!”

  Mudge heaved it over the rail. Fifty pounds of iron tumbled over the side, and the cable bounded after it. I felt a tug as it touched the bottom, another when it bounced. Hold, I thought. But we dragged the anchor on, out from the fog of spindrift, toward the cliffs and the beach below them.

  Then the anchor caught. The wheel was snatched from my hands, and the Dragon rounded up with a dizzying speed. Every timber creaking, the cable so taut that it crackled, the Dragon settled head to wind in a circle of calm in the lee of the Tombstones. And there she stopped, amid blankets of writhing kelp, barely twice her length from the beach.

  The waves rolled in, broke along their tops, shattered into spray and froth. But they reached us tamed to a gentle swell that was flattened by the kelp. And among the dark shapes of the Tombstones hung a score of rainbows that shimmered in the spindrift.

  Mawgan clapped me on the back. “Well done,” he said. Then Mary came up to the wheel, Mudge and Dasher too, and we stood together watching the rainbows form and disappear. It seemed impossible that we'd sailed through there.

  “I didn't think the anchor would stick in the sand,” I said.

  “It didn't,” said Mawgan. “We hooked onto the wreck.”

  “What wreck?”

  “The Isle of Skye.”

  I felt a shiver, a prickly twinge in my spine. The wreck that had once nearly taken my life had now saved it, as though a great and mysterious circle had been completed. When I was washed from that beautiful brig, I'd been a landsman, and now I clung to her bones as a sailor, as the captain of another ship. What a long way I had gone to get back to where I had started!

  We would wait there, swinging over the drowned ribs of the Isle of Skye, for a fair wind to blow us home to London. My uncle Stanley would recover from the fever, as would Freeman and Betts. Dasher would slip away to his home in Kent, and one day—I was sure—-would sail back to the West Indies to find his barrel of silver. I would think often of Horn and his chest of doomed vessels, for his bottles would travel with me over the years, from ship to ship.

  I stood beside Mary and wondered if she might join me, if we might not voyage together to all the oceans of the world. It was on my lips to ask her that. But she spoke before me.

  “John,” she said. “Will you come home to Galilee?”

  I thought of her house beyond the cliffs, her garden of flowers that remembered old wrecks and people that she'd known. I thought of the stable, of the pony she rode wildly on the moor. And I saw that while I had changed, she had not. Mary was a match for any oarsman, but she was as rooted in the Cornish soil as the flowers she tended. And she could no more leave the land than I could settle on it.

  She sighed and leaned her head against me. “You have to stay with the ship,” she said. “Edn't that the way it is?”

  “Yes,” I said. We had to furl the sails and fit new shrouds; we had a hundred things to do. That would always be the way it was.

  Mary smiled. “You can't stay, can you, John Spencer?”

  “No,” I said. “But one day I'll be back.”

  And I meant it then. I meant it with all my heart.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  This story takes place in the early months of 1803, long after the last of the great buccaneers had been swept from the seas. When the Dragon set sail for the Indies, Henry Morgan had been dead for 115 years, Blackbeard for 85. Captain Kidd had gone to the gallows in 1701, swearing to the end that he had done nothing wrong. “I am the innocentest person of them all,” he told the judge who sentenced him to death.

  Kidd might have been a butcher of English grammar, but he was scarcely the terror of the seven seas that legend has portrayed him to be. Born in Scotland, made rich in New York through marriage and business, Kidd returned to Britain in the late 1600s, seeking command of a king's privateer. Instead, he fell among a group of politicians, all earls and lords and dukes. They agreed to fit him out with his own ship for a voyage to the Indian Ocean, where he might privateer against the French and plunder the pirate ships that were themselves plundering English merchantmen. King William III gave his personal blessing to the plan.

  Kidd sailed first to New York, then east around the Cape of Storms. His crew was picked away by press-gangs and disease and replaced by desperate men who were promised a share of each prize. But when the riches weren't quick in coming, the crew rose against the captain. Despite his problems, Kidd tried to stay within the shady laws that protected him. He flew a French flag to board the merchantman Quedagh Merchant, tricking her captain into producing the French pass that was all Kidd needed to claim her as a rightful prize. Kidd abandoned his own ship—by then leaking and rotten—and sailed off in the Quedagh Merchant.

  In 1699, less than three years after leaving England, Kidd arrived in the West Indies, where he learned that the English government had branded him a pirate. In desperation, he sailed north to Hispaniola and anchored in a lonely cove. A pirate trader came to buy the scraps of cargo that remained on the Quedagh Merchant and bought the ship as well. Kidd purchased a sloop, loaded aboard a few chests of gold, and headed home to New York, hoping to clear his name or buy his freedom. Instead, he was arrested for piracy and shipped to England for trial.

  The French pass from the Quedagh Merchant might have saved him, but it mysteriously went missing. Kidd hinted at his agreement with the politicians and the king, but he remained loyal to his employers and was hanged for his silence. The rope broke; he was hanged again, and then his body was tarr
ed and suspended in chains.

  The gold Kidd took with him to New York was recovered from the various places where he had hidden it. Together it amounted to £14,000, a tiny fraction of the then staggering fortune of £400,000 that rumor said he'd collected during his voyage. There was so much treasure unaccounted for that careers were made in searching for it through the centuries that followed. Even President Franklin Roosevelt took a stab at treasure hunting. But nothing more was ever found.

  It became a legend that Kidd had buried his treasure on the eastern shore of North America. Somewhere between the Indies and Canada, it seemed, he had anchored his sloop, landed with all his chests and his riches, and buried them deep in the earth.

  But what if he hid the treasure before he left for New York, before he even reached Hispaniola? What if he found an island with an empty harbor on his way through the Caribbean? What if he stopped at Culebra?

  The island was right in his path. Its pattern of hills, its twisting shoreline with one good harbor, come surprisingly close to the Treasure Island described by Robert Louis Stevenson. If there is a buried treasure yet to be found, could it possibly lie in Culebra?

  Bartholomew Grace believed it did, but Grace is a fictional character. He was created from the necessity of having a buccaneer in a time when there were no buccaneers. The West Indies of 1803, as attested by John Spencer's father— and maintained by Roland Abbey—were haunted by cutthroats who attacked passing ships from their bases onshore in swarms of little boats. Grace had to be more than that, and worse than that. His career is based on the sad tale of John Rodney, the son of the great British admiral George Rodney. John went to sea as a midshipman at the age of fifteen, and it took him less than a week to be made a lieutenant and less than two months to become a captain. Yet John Rodney never turned to piracy; he just lingered as an ineffectual captain for another sixty years.

  The Black Book used by Bartholomew Grace really did exist. It contained the old Laws of Oleron as introduced to England in the twelfth century by King Richard I. A museum piece when it was last seen around 1800, the Black Book disappeared from the High Court of the Admiralty just in time to appear aboard Grace's little Prudence.

  There are many many books about pirates and buccaneers. One of the first ever written, dating to 1724 and often credited to Daniel Defoe, can still be bought in new editions with the title A General History of the Pyrates. Two of my more modern favorites are Pirates, by David Mitchell, and especially the wonderful Under the Black Flag, by David Cordingly who reveals the sometimes disappointing truth behind the legendary buccaneers.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This last adventure of John Spencer began in a newspaper office in a little city on the northwest coast of Canada. The office belonged to Bruce Wishart, the publisher and editor of Prince Rupert's weekly paper, and we talked for hours about pirates and schooners and cannons.

  A short haul up the hill was the Prince Rupert Library, where the story came into shape to fit the facts unearthed by research librarian Kathleen Larkin. The realities of tropical fever sent the Dragon to a place of swamps and mud. The real-life search for Captain Kidd's treasure took her to Culebra and brought Dasher in his brig. The picture that the word Caribbean might have raised in an Englishman's mind in 1802 gave John a fear of cannibals and gave Roland Abbey an eagerness to get a shot at his picaroons.

  My father took as much interest in this last adventure as he did in the first, tracking down books about pirates and ships. He read the first draft, as he did with The Wreckers and The Smugglers, finding my mistakes and inconsistencies and embarrassing gaffes with a thoroughness that he called nitpicking but I called invaluable.

  Jane Jordan Browne, my agent, suggested improvements that sent the story in new and exciting directions.

  Lauri Hornik was my editor at Random House when I began the story. She helped it through its early stages, but when she moved to a different publisher the project was passed on to Françoise Bui, who found failings in the book that no one else had seen. It's due to her that Horn appears in his lifeboat a thousand miles from land. She improved the story in many ways.

  Through it all, my wife, Kristin Miller, put up with a houseful of books, with martial music and “Heart of Oak,” and even with the sound of cannons as I staged my little battles on a computer screen.

  To all these people I owe my thanks and great appreciation. I am lucky to know them.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  IAIN LAWRENCE learned to sail at the age of nine on a tiny lake on the prairies and has been an avid sailor ever since. He has owned a variety of boats, from a navy whaler to a dinghy that he built out of paper just to see if it would float. He now sails a wooden cutter called Connection.

  With his longtime partner, Kristin Miller, and their little dog, the Skipper, Iain Lawrence makes lengthy voyages up and down the north-west coast, from Puget Sound to Alaska, exploring the far-flung islets and inlets of British Columbia. He has written two nonfiction books about his experiences.

  A former journalist, he writes full-time. His two critically acclaimed companions to The Buccaneers—The Wreckers (an Edgar Allan Poe Award nominee) and The Smugglers—were both published by Delacorte Press.

  Iain Lawrence makes his home in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia.

  Published by

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  Copyright © 2001 by Iain Lawrence

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  eISBN: 978-0-307-51518-6

  February 2003

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