by Tim Severin
He lay still, not daring to move. For a moment he considered jumping to his feet and running back towards the woods, but dismissed the idea as suicidal. He was certain to be cut down by the Spanish marksmen.
Another cheer, and this time much closer. There was a tearing and crashing, and the thump of running feet. Cautiously he looked up and to his right. Some forty yards away was Sawkins, instantly identifiable in his bright yellow sash. He was bounding forward through the long grass, whooping and shouting and charging straight at the stockade, musket in one hand and cutlass in the other. Close behind him a score of heavily armed buccaneers was running full pelt towards the Spanish defences. As Hector watched, one of the buccaneers dropped to one knee, took aim with his musket and fired at the palisade. A second later he was back on his feet and careering onward, ready to use his musket as a club.
Within a few moments the first of the forlorn had reached the stockade. Someone must have found a chink between the wooden posts because two or three of the attackers were levering away with some sort of crowbar. A second later a small section of the palisade collapsed, leaving a small gap.
Now the buccaneers were tearing at the opening, making it wider. Later arrivals were thrusting their musket barrels through the loopholes and shooting in at the defenders. In the general mayhem there seemed to be little or no resistance from the Spanish garrison.
Shakily Hector started to get up. 'What the devil are you doing here?' said someone with a French accent. It was Jacques, musket in hand. He was clearly shocked at the sight of Hector rising from the ground.
'I was on my way to parley, carrying a white flag, when you attacked,' blurted Hector. He was still appalled by his narrow escape.
'We didn't see you,' said Jacques. 'You could have got yourself gunned down and that for nothing.'
'But I was on my way to offer the garrison safe conduct if they surrendered the town gold.'
'Christ! What imbecile came up with that idea?'
'Captain Coxon sent me.'
'Coxon? But he must have known that Captain Sawkins' idea of a battle is to charge straight at the enemy. That's why Sawkins was given the forlorn.'
'But Coxon had ordered Sawkins to await his signal before launching an attack.'
'Did he?' Jacques looked incredulous. 'That's the first I've heard of it. Sawkins didn't mention it to myself nor Jezreel or any of the others. He brought us up through cane brakes, and as soon as we had a clear sight of the Spanish position, gave the order to fire and charge.'
'Coxon claimed that the parley would also give the forlorn more time to get into position and prevent the Spaniards from learning our strength.'
Jacques grimaced with disgust. 'Now you may have the truth of it. A white flag can be a ruse. But it was crazy of you to volunteer to carry it.'
'I didn't volunteer,' confessed Hector. 'Coxon ordered me to do it, and I thought it was a genuine parley.'
Jacques gave him a searching look. 'Hector, I would say that Captain Coxon very nearly arranged your death.'
By now the fight at the palisade was over, and the Spanish garrison had surrendered. The battle had lasted barely twenty minutes, and the buccaneers had complete mastery of the stockade and the town itself. Hector went forward with Jacques to where the Spanish prisoners were being herded together. They were a sorry-looking lot, men of all ages from teenage lads to greybeards. Some of their weapons were arquebuses so obsolete that they required props on which to support the clumsy barrels.
'No wonder their rate of fire was so dismal,' commented Jacques. 'It must have taken ages to reload. How could anyone ever think that they were capable of defending this place?'
'Perhaps it was not worth defending,' said Hector. He had seen the disappointed expressions on the faces of buccaneers returning from investigating the settlement. They had with them a frightened Spaniard dressed in the clothes of a clerk.
'What a dump!' exclaimed one of the buccaneers. 'Nothing of value. Just miserable houses and wretched people.
'Didn't you find any gold?' asked Jacques hopefully.
The man laughed bitterly. 'There's a town treasury all right. We kicked in the door. But it was empty. This fellow was hiding nearby. He's some sort of a bookkeeper.'
'Perhaps you'll let me question him,' Hector suggested.
'Go ahead. He's in a complete funk. Thinks we'll hand him over to the Kuna.'
The Spaniard was more than eager to answer any question that Hector put to him. The townsfolk of Santa Maria had known for days that the buccaneers were approaching, so the governor had arranged a fleet of boats to evacuate as many of the women and children as possible. The treasury had been emptied out, three hundred weight of gold put aboard a small sloop and sent by river to the capital in Panama. Finally the governor, his deputy, the local dignitaries and the priests had also left. All that remained in Santa Maria were townsfolk who were too poor or insignificant to get away.
'So that's it then,' exclaimed Jacques. 'We've come all this way, done all the marching and wading through rivers and lying on hard ground and eating vile food, only to find that the cupboard is bare.' He gave a snort of disgust.
At this point Captain Sawkins walked up to them. His yellow sash was speckled with flecks of gunpowder, and there was a sword cut in the shoulder of his buff coat. 'What have you managed to find out from this Spaniard?' he asked.
Hector told him about the Spanish withdrawal, and immediately Sawkins was eager to set off in pursuit. 'If we hurry we might catch up with that boat carrying the gold dust. There's a pirogue the Spaniards left behind which we can use.'
He crooked a finger at Hector. 'You come along, and bring that Spaniard with you. He'll be able to identify the boat for us.'
'I am assistant to Surgeon Smeeton. He's waiting for me at the camp,' Hector reminded him. 'I'll need to inform him where I'm going.'
'Then do so, and while you're about it, bring some more medicines with you. We may have some fighting to do.' Sawkins glanced at Jezreel and Jacques. 'You two are still members of the forlorn. You also come with me. Be ready to set off downriver in an hour.'
Hector ran back to where he had left his knapsack, stopping to pick up the abandoned spear and put on his shirt. When he got back to the camp, it was to find the bald quartermaster from Harris's ship seated on a log, his head bowed. Smeeton was standing over him and sewing a flap of skin back onto the quartermaster's scalp.
'Hector, there you are,' said the surgeon as casually as if he was in his consulting rooms in Port Royal. 'A minor head wound, and you see the advantages of hair loss. No need to shave the hair away before deploying needle and thread.'
His stitching finished, the surgeon wrapped a bandage around the wound, and the quartermaster got up and walked away.
'Captain Sawkins has asked me to accompany him downriver, in pursuit of the Spanish treasure,' said Hector.
'Then by all means go,' answered Smeeton. 'There's precious little medical work for you here. We lost just two dead in the entire action, and half a dozen wounded, so there's hardly enough work to go around. The other companies have brought along at least a couple of surgeons apiece. In fact we seem to have so many medical men on this expedition that I'm thinking of returning to the ships, accompanying the walking wounded. Now that we've crossed the isthmus I don't expect to add much to my pharmacopoeia.'
'Is it all right if I take some medicines with me?' Hector asked. 'Captain Sawkins requested I do so.'
Smeeton smiled indulgently. 'But of course. It'll be a chance to use those notes you made while sorting through the medicine chest.'
Hector opened the chest and looked inside. The salves and ointments used up during the march across the isthmus had been replaced by Smeeton's collection of items he thought might possess curative powers - dead snakes, odd-shaped roots, dried leaves, strips of bark, seeds, coloured earth, monkey dung, even the skull of a creature like a dwarf elephant that Dan and other Miskito strikers had found feeding beside the river. The animal's fle
sh had provided fresh meat for three dozen hungry buccaneers. The surgeon had kept the cranium.
Then his eye fell on the packet that the Kuna medicine man had given him. It was the ointment made for the children of the moon as a poultice for their skin sores. He took the packet from the chest, consulted his notes and found a jar labelled 'Cantharides'. Turning his back so Smeeton could not see what he was doing, the young man carefully untied the leaf wrapper of the Kuna medication. Inside was a blob of pale waxy ointment about the size of his fist. Spreading the leaf on the ground, Hector carefully tipped out several spoonfuls of yellowish-brown powder from Smeeton's medicine jar and, using a twig, stirred the powder into the Kuna salve. Then he wrapped up the packet once again, and returned both it and the jar to the chest.
He finished loading his knapsack with medicines, and said goodbye to Smeeton. As he turned to leave, he said casually, 'Have you had a chance to try out the Kuna skin ointment yet?'
'No,' replied the surgeon. 'It would be interesting to do so.'
'Captain Coxon was asking if you had anything to relieve the rash on his skin. The past few days in the jungle have made the itching much worse.'
'So I noticed,' said Smeeton. 'I shall suggest that he tries the ointment. It can do no harm.'
As he headed off to where Jezreel and Jacques would be waiting, Hector was smiling to himself. It was the quartermaster's bald head which had reminded him of Smeeton's store of cantharides powder. Smeeton had cited it as another example — like snake venom — of a poison that could have beneficial properties. Cantharides powder was made from the powdered wings of a beetle and very popular with the buccaneers as an aphrodisiac. More prosaically, Smeeton had said, the powder applied very sparingly to the skin would encourage hair to grow. However, if used in quantity, it brought on violent itching, caused a burning rash, and raised a mass of painful blisters.
NINE
A hundred miles away in the city of New Panama, the governor,
his Excellency Don Alonso Mercado de Villacorta, was shocked by the fall of Santa Maria. The news was brought to the city by stunned refugees who described how the Kuna, given the chance, had massacred the Spanish settlers once they had been disarmed by the buccaneers.
'This has all the potential to turn into a disaster,' he said in his characteristically despondent tone to the emergency meeting he had called in his office. 'A gang of pirates is now on the loose in the South Sea. It is exactly what I and others have been warning the authorities about for years. But no one took a scrap of notice. What are we to do?'
He looked round the conference table. His glance swept past the city councillors and church dignitaries, barely paused on the two colonels who commanded his cavalry and infantry, and came to rest on Don Jacinto de Barahona, the officer in charge of the Pacific naval squadron.
Barahona was thinking to himself that the governor was being unduly negative.
'We go on the offensive,' he said firmly. 'Stamp out the threat immediately. If we don't, other pirates will follow the route they have found over the isthmus. We risk being overwhelmed.'
'But we don't know where to find the pirates, nor their number,' objected the governor. He had a habit of tugging at his right ear lobe when he was worried. 'They could be anywhere. The coast is a maze of islands and inlets. Our forces could search for weeks and not discover them. Meanwhile the city would be left without protection.'
'Could we not ask the Indians to keep a look out on our behalf?' The suggestion came from the bishop. He was newly arrived from Old Spain, and had yet to learn that the Indians were not the devout and loyal Christians he had been led to expect.
'The Indians!' exclaimed the cavalry colonel, his mouth turned down in a grimace. 'It was the Indians who showed the pirates their trail over the mountains.'
'There's no need to go searching for the pirates. They will come to us,' said a quiet, firm voice. The speaker was Capitan del Navio, Francisco de Peralta. His swarthy tan and the maze of lines and wrinkles on his face were the legacy of a lifetime sailing the Pacific Ocean. For thirty years Don Francisco had worn a furrow in the sea between Panama and the southern ports of the viceroyalty of Peru. There was hardly a vessel which he had not commanded, navigated or escorted - galleons with cargoes of bullion, tubby ureas loaded with merchandise, fast pataches carrying official correspondence, even a pasaca-ballo, a flat-bottomed horse ferry, out of which he had once disembarked a troop of cavalry to fight the Aurocanos in Chile. Now, as Capitan del Navio, his ship was a barca longa, an armed brigantine, anchored off Panama City.
'The pirates have succeeded in crossing the mountains, but they find themselves in a quandary,' Peralta went on. 'They must have boats if they are to reach and attack Panama. To march overland along the coast is too slow and too hazardous. The only craft available to them will be small dugout canoes made by the Indians, and perhaps a piragua or two. This makes them vulnerable.'
Barahona had grasped the point Peralta was making. 'We must shut down the sea lanes. None of our vessels are to sail from any port. All those currently at sea will be ordered into harbour,' he said.
'But surely we should send out boats to warn our coastal settlements that the pirates are on the prowl,' protested the bishop. He was feeling piqued that his earlier suggestion had been dismissed out of hand.
'No. The pirates might capture our vessels and turn them against us.'
'What naval forces do we have to defend us if the pirates do get this far?' The governor put the question directly to Barahona though he already knew the answer. It was better that the civilians and the Churchmen were made aware just how acute the danger was.
'There are five merchant ships currently at anchor. One of them, La Santissima Trinidad, is a large galleon, but currently she is fitted out as a merchant vessel so has no armament. Then there are the three small warships of the South Sea squadron.' Barahona was careful to describe the colonial navy as an armadilla, a squadron. Its official title might be far grander as an Armada or Fleet, but the merchants of Peru and Panama had been stingy about paying the situados, the special taxes which were meant to fund the colony's defences. So now the royal vessels were few in number, undersize and decrepit. The warships at his disposal were barca longas like Peralta's, a two-masted craft equipped with a dozen cannon.
'Surely that should be sufficient to deal with a handful of pirates in canoes,' sniffed the cavalry colonel.
'Our main problem is not in ships, but in men,' retorted Barahona crisply. As always the land soldiers overlooked the fact that sailors took far longer to train than infantrymen.
'We have enough competent seamen to man just one of the warships. They are mostly Biscayners, so they are prime seamen and excellent at their job. But the other two vessels will be relying on locally raised crews.' Barahona's eyes flicked towards Peralta and the officer seated next to him, Capitan Diego de Carabaxal. The latter was a competent seaman but Barahona was not sure that Carabaxal would have the necessary courage when it came to a fight. 'Both those vessels are short-handed. So I propose stripping the merchant ships of their sailors and redistributing their men to the warships.'
'Is that wise? Without crews they cannot save themselves,' objected one of the councillors. From the note of alarm in the man's voice Peralta suspected that he was part-owner of one of the merchant ships and dismayed at the threat to his investment.
'If any merchant ship is about to fall into the hands of the pirates, it will be scuttled or burned on my orders.' Barahona had the satisfaction of seeing the councillor go pale at the prospect.
'Then it's decided,' announced the governor. 'The armadilla will put itself in a state of readiness to intercept and destroy the pirates while they are still in small boats. The land forces are to concentrate in the city and look to the defences should the pirates succeed in coming ashore.'
The bishop closed the meeting with a prayer for salvation, beseeching the Almighty to thwart the evil designs of the heathen sea robbers, and Francisco de Peralta lef
t the governor's office. He had only a short walk to where his ship's cockboat was waiting. As he crossed the main square of New Panama, he remembered what it had been like the last time the pirates had attacked. Henry Morgan, the great pirate, had marched across die isthmus with 1,200 men. A garrison of four regiments of foot and two squadrons of horse had failed to stop a ragtag force so poorly supplied that the bandits had been obliged to eat their leather satchels during their advance. The entire city, seven thousand households, had panicked. People ran about, frantically hiding their valuables down wells and cisterns or in holes in walls. Then they fled into the countryside, trying to escape before the city was invested.
Peralta had received orders to warp his ship up to the quays. There he had taken on an astonishing variety of refugees and their baggage - nuns and priests, high-born ladies with their children and servants, senior government officials. They had brought the contents of the city treasury, boxes of official deeds and documents, sacks stuffed with church plate, paintings, sacred relics hastily wrapped in altar cloths, chests of privately owned jewellery, gold, pearls, all manner of portable wealth. The value of the cargo rushed aboard his vessel that day had exceeded all that was left behind in the city for the pirates to plunder. In vain he had warned that his vessel was not fit for sea. Its sole defence was seven cannon and a dozen muskets, and her sails had been condemned and taken ashore. No one listened. Everyone begged him to leave port at once and save them and their goods.
What followed had seemed like a miracle. His grossly overloaded vessel had cast off, and his crew had spread a set of topsails, the only canvas they still had on board. It was barely enough to push the vessel through the water. Half-sailing, half drifting on the current, his ship had limped away from the city, and Peralta had spent the next forty-eight hours waiting for the pirates to commandeer local boats, catch up and take their plunder. A score of pirates in a piragua would have been enough. But it never happened. The enemy failed to appear, and for years he had wondered why. Eventually he had learned that the pirates had got drunk. They had wasted so much time on shore, guzzling captured wine, that when they emerged from their stupor Peralta and his precious cargo had drifted away over the horizon.
