Kingston by Starlight

by Christopher John Farley

  The crew members on the two-masted vessel seemed to be finishing up the work of throwing everything on board their craft overboard. I could see Calico’s jaw grow tight. We needed those goods. It also seem’d to me now that the opposing vessel was sinking. It was still sailing at a good clip, however; we would never board it before it slipped beneath the waves.

  “What say you to our offer?” said Calico. “Your goods for your lives!”

  A man came to the railing of the opposing ship. He, too, put a speaking trumpet to his lips.

  “I am the quartermaster of this vessel, now captain, since our former commander was laid low in your last barrage.”

  “My name is Calico Jack Rackam, and I am known for keeping my word.”

  The man on the sinking ship laughed. It was a sad, small laugh, but because both ships had grown silent in the tenseness of the moment, his laugh carried.

  “Governor Woodes Rogers has sworn to hang you on the Palisadoes,” said the man. “He, too, is a man of his word.”

  “And yet, here I am,” replied Calico.

  “Rogers hung twenty and five of your brethren at the wharf in Nassau after you sailed out. His word is proven, yours is not. And Rogers has promised death to all those who submit to pyrates. He has been granted full cooperation in his campaign from His Excellency Nicholas Lawes. The two governors mean to make the Caribbean, in its entirety, a haven for settlers and their families. Rogers has said this: he does what he does for the children.”

  Now the man’s ship was starting a quick slide into the sea. The deck had tilted noticeably, and the waters were beginning to lick the deck on the fore.

  “I say this to you pyrates— I die, but I descend to that other world knowing that you will soon join me, and meet your punishments there. What a sad lot of barking mongrel dogs you are, with no port, no race, and no nation to call your own! This is a ship of slaves and whether you are white or Moorish, you shall be treated like poor servants, one and all, when you are caught! The governors are on to your scent. Woodes has already posted along Bay Street notices announcing the planned method of your execution.”

  The ship was at a sharp angle now, and the water swallowed up half of it. Still the man continued.

  “Weights will be piled upon your chest until your lungs cease their movement and your heart expires. Next, to be certain that you are dead, a cord will be twisted ’round your neck until your eyes bulge. Then your bodies will be hung in cages put in public display, for the purpose of moral education and crime prevention.”

  The man’s crew had deserted the ship. They splashed and scattered about; the weakest swimmers were already slipping beneath the water. The quartermaster was the last soul on board his ship, and he stood on its very tip, the last portion visible. The men of the William did not jump in the drink to save the stores. Drowning men are dangerous adversaries; wild with the fear of death, they will pull down anyone who swims near.

  I looked at Calico, and, so, too, did the eyes of all the crew of the William turn to the captain. We had just lost a prize that we dearly coveted. We were dangerously low on food and water. And now this news that we were all marked men.

  Calico just smiled.

  “You’re nobody,” said Calico. “’Til somebody kills you.”

  At his words, so confident, so commanding, the gloom that had settled over our ship seem’d to lift a bit, and there appeared to be some small hope.

  The man on the sinking ship, who was so full of mockery before, now for the first time appeared full of fright. He drew a pistol from his side holster and, with surprising speed, got off a shot.

  His aim was well wide of Calico, but it caught Sugar-Apple full in the face. There was a dull thud as the shot struck skull.

  Calico drew his own weapon and returned fire. The quartermaster fell from the tip of his vessel and, along with his craft, slipped into the depths of the sea.

  Now all turned to Sugar-Apple. He lay on the deck, his arms spread out, his one good leg twitching and then still. A pool of blood grew around his prone form. That sweet face was now a mush of bloody pulp and white bone. Zayd set down his small bag of surgeon’s tools and kneeled down beside him. He attended him for a few moments and then laid down his works and bowed his head. Sugar-Apple was beyond medicine. He was gone.

  “Inna Lillahi wa inna ilahi rajtun,” said Zayd, in a voice that was no more than a breath.

  “What are those words?” I said, my voice rising to a shout. “What devil words do you speak?”

  Zayd turned to me.

  “We are from Allah,” he said. “And it is to him we are returning.”

  I could hear Poop sobbing somewhere. I could feel hot tears in my eyes. I didn’t even see Sugar-Apple come up to the quarterdeck. It was beyond belief that he could be taken so quickly, in a single burst of smoke and sparks.

  Calico betrayed no disconsolation. He walked back to his captain’s cabin.

  Before closing the door, he issued a command over his shoulder at First-Rate.

  “Set a course for Jamaica,” he said.

  chapter 16.

  Ahhhh— now where was I in my tale, my darling one, my love? For a woman of age am I now, respected in the town and throughout the parish, and yet the wisdom and store of knowledge I have built up over all these long years has faded and grown wispy, like the gray hair upon my head. I remember so little of what made me so wise and well regarded! It is a trick of time which the Almighty plays on us all, that the more we are known, the less we know. Even as we accumulate memories, like piles of leaves in autumn, they blow away as we gather them in. So where was I in my tale?

  Perhaps something to awaken my senses, which, in my advanced state, are as behind a veil or a darkened glass— I see shadows and suggestions of life but not always the thing itself. Yes, perhaps something to awaken my senses and bring the young life back, if only for a moment, if only for the length of my story to you. Ahh yes, my tea has grown cold and I have barely touched it. Sweet of you to offer to refresh my cup, my sweet bird, my kind one. But indulge me this— while in the pantry, in the top cupboard to the left of the window. Ahhh— you’ve found it. That’s coffee, my dear, straight from the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. Finest brew in the world. Oh— what’s the trouble, my dear one? No matter, my pearl, that you are too small to reach what I requested, I’ll fetch it myself. Ahhh— now my vision returns. In my mind’s eye only, my darling, in my mind’s eye. Like two tall trees the masts of the Will now sprout up before me.

  The sublime exultation of one’s first leagues out from land soon gives way to the grim reality of life at sea. The far-flung waters can be a lonely place; there is no canyon, no desert, no snow-swept plain, no dense forest echoing with the howls of beasts and creatures unknown that is as lonely as the open sea. So, night after night, I was at my post on the masthead, closer to heaven than to the ship below, and yet my proximity to God and his heavenly host offer’d me little respite and, like others on the crew, I felt a crushing lack of hope. The very air appear’d alive with the absence of angels. We felt forsaken by God and abandon’d by the devil. It seem’d Governor Rogers had us tripped up and outwitted at every turn and move, like a canny player pressing hard his position in a game of chess. The small inlets and islets we sail’d by and at which we may have taken refuge and restock’d our provisions at an earlier time were now, thanks to the good and intrepid Lawes, guarded well by man-o’-wars flying the colors of England and the standard of the Governor.

  “De Graff, that blue-eyed sea god, would never have been pressed so,” Xbalanque hissed in my ear (I had become expert at telling one twin from the other). “There was a man worth a score of Rackams.”

  “Close your damned porthole,” I replied. “Or else I’ll tie a turk’s head knot round your throat, you scoundrel!”

  So we sail’d on. Rackam drew deep into his stock of expertise, built up over long devotion to the sea, and he studied hard his charts, many obtained at bloody cost, and yet there was no place for
the Will to careen and water herself. So we sail’d on. We had gone too far to turn back and yet we knew not what awaited us in the outstretch’d waters before our helm. And so we sail’d on.

  In my perch, as shy dawn spread her gauzy red veil across the sky, all the world seem’d water, and I felt alone, more than I have ever felt with solid earth beneath me. Below, I heard the groans of the men who were hungry and without water. In the distant past, one and all had cursed the foul concoctions that Sugar-Apple had, with temerity, called victuals; with his passing, and with every man left to himself to find and prepare his own grub, Sugar-Apple’s preparations seem’d akin to the finest feasts cooked up by the greatest chefs of the capitals of Europe. The food that remained was tasteless and rotting: scraps of bread and dried strips of rat flesh. Lemon rinds were prized delicacies and fistfights broke out with regularity for the right to suck milk straight from the teat of the one scrawny, coughing goat that remained tied up in the hold. Bellies grumbled and rumbled and almost howled with complaint over the unfairness and hardness and inhumanity of it all; the ship’s hull, leaking and barnacle covered and in sore need of repair, creaked back as if in answer, as if all the men, the tragic passengers of this doomed voyage, travel’d the blue expanse in the empty gut of a starving giant.

  One afternoon, ’round or about this time, a man who had been station’d on the forenoon watch fell hard from his perch on the mizzentop and broke his skull. I was beneath deck in my hammock, but the reverberations of the impact tore me from sleep for it sounded like a melon, fired from a cannon, striking its target. I went quickly up top and Zayd was already attending the poor fellow, who, with his last energy, made the sign of the cross and then gave up the ghost. If ever God had his gaze on our ship, he, with the utmost certainty, seem’d to have averted his vision now. The men, who had gathered in a circle ’round the accident, looked on with hard secular eyes. Neither fortune nor heaven was smiling on this journey. Xbalanque pushed by me, all sneers and sibilance, and climbed the mizzenmast to begin his watch early. Hunahpu followed after, looking upon me with more felicitous eyes.

  The singing, the reveries and revelries, they were all in our wake. There was hard work to be done. The men put their faith in their hands, hoping that physical labor could distract the mind from lamentation and redirect the body from dissolution. The ship itself was in no happy state. A shot from the last ship we had opposed had scored true, breeching the hull, and we men, being unable to repair the damage given the current state of supplies, made do with coping with it as best we could. A team of hands worked day and night pumping water from below, where the breech had occurred, up and out of the ship, lest she fill with ocean and take all souls aboard to the briny bottom. At times, when I was not in my perch, I shared the labor and it was hard. Already we suffer’d chores without adequate and fitting amounts of water to drink; the pump crew’s thirst increased as the salty spray from the breech found its way into the eyes, nose, and mouth; and all the while the work put an ache in the shoulders, a burn in the belly, and a stiffness in the neck.

  And so my watch became even more important. Even after my stints at the pump, even as my eyelids grew heavy and sleep courted me hard, I dared not let sweet slumber’s arms wrap themselves around me. Much was riding on the watch— our chief hope, forsooth our only hope, rested in the taking of another ship, one well-stocked with provisions and the like. By bringing misery to others, we would be freed from it ourselves. We had started this journey with dreams of gold and jewels; we continued it now with our thoughts focused on more mundane stuff: meat and water and bread.

  I stared out at the blue, searching the horizon for a sail. The sea was stagnant, the sky was stale, and nothing was in my sight save the boat below and the endless blue-green of the sea. A spray of porpoises surfaced off starboard; the happy creatures seemed to mock the crew with their white bellies and crooked smiles. They leap’d up from the water a great height, and when they slid back in, they made nary a splash. We had no tools to catch ’em with or else we would have eaten every one, white bellies, crooked smiles, and all.

  The days passed to night and the nights passed to day and no calendar was kept and time slipped away. Still I looked for that elusive sail. I was dreaming in daylight now, perhaps a quarter mad from thirst and hunger, perhaps a quarter more mad with boredom. Phantasms came to me, like waking, walking dreams. Floating in the cloudless sky I saw the image of a young boy. He looked of my own blood— he had my self-same olive skin, the same crimson curls of hair and high cheeks and full lips. I saw the light of mischief in his eyes, burning like tallow candles.

  I imagined at that moment that I had a doppelgänger of some sort, a twin or some sibling of opposite sex but similar countenance, hidden from me all these long years for purposes unknown for a design unreveal’d. I saw my father lead the doppelgänger by the hand through the streets of Cork, down shady Shandon Street, down puddle-lined Mallow Lane. I hear his voice— it’s a high voice, all treble strings— cursing all the women in his life, my ma and his ma and the God who made a world ruled by women and underpinned by money. He is gripping the hand of the little boy tightly, too tightly, but the boy does not cry or struggle or whine tho’ he looks all too uncomfortable in his clothes— a too tight red coat matted with dried mud, brown breeches cut off just below the knee, stockings that were once white but now brown with dirt and dust, and leather shoes with large square buckles and loose soles that had nearly flopped their way off.

  Then the vision faded like a ring of tobacco smoke. Through the haze of my thoughts I saw a square of white. A sail. A sail! A sail! My heart leapt up like a child called from some punishment back to the table to share in dessert. I called down to the poop deck.

  “A sail! A sail!”

  Rackam near sprinted to the bow of the deck as the men took their positions and set the sails for pursuit. We caught a strong gale of wind at southwest, and we made our way quickly toward our quarry. Now I could see ’er more clearly. She was a man-o’-war, Dutch in origin it seem’d, with a good dozen guns on deck; Rackam was intent to take her no matter what colors she flew or what arms she was arrayed with.

  “Haul taut!” Rackam ordered. “Let go and haul!”

  Angel was at his gun, peering intently over the rail. His eyes, like those of a cat, were bright slits, his countenance was grim. He looked back at Rackam, ready to fire at command and waiting for a signal.

  “A shot of warning then!” came the cry. “Fire!”

  So we fired a gun for ’er to bear down, but, instead, she continued to give us the chase. We ran at a right good rate, there being smooth water, and eventually, we outbore our consort and drew close, spotting ’er off our larboard bow. Now, at this distance, we could more easily see the condition of the ship and the state of its crew. The vessel’s sails were in tatters and hung from the mast like dead vines from a tree in winter. As for the crew, there was but one figure apparent: a man of medium build, youthful in age, and dressed in brown leather pants, a white shirt with sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and a brown vest. Around his forehead was tied a red scarf. He was now standing up straight, but slightly to the side. The language of his posture had a laughing arrogance to it.

  We pulled alongside the strange ship and, seizing her with grappling hooks, we prepared ’er for boarding. A roar went up from the crew. At long last, after many hard days and nights, we had captured a prize.

  I could see the face of the man now. He was blond, blue eyed, and clean shaven. A smile played about his lips, which were full but cracked and somewhat whitened. He held a long wooden pipe in one hand and on occasion, and in a leisurely fashion, he would put it to his lips, take a slow drag, and then blow smoke rings into the air.

  “Hoist the black flag, you sea-bitches!” cried Rackam.

  The flag was flown.

  Rackam, with long deliberate strides, went to the railing and hoisted a brass speaking trumpet to his lips.

  “Hoy there— we fly under the black flag!�
�� Rackam shouted.

  The man said nothing, but, perhaps in way of reply, blew another smoke ring.

  Rackam continued: “We would take your ship and all its goods. Do you yield, or must we broadside your vessel?”

  The man met Rackam’s gaze for a long moment. Then he extinguished his pipe, put it in his pocket, and drew a cutlass from a scabbard with his left hand and a pistol from a holster with his right hand. I thought he might have smiled a bit more, but the line of his mouth moved but a little.

  “Take my ship if you will,” said the man, whose voice was high but rough. “But honor me and humor me only in this— send your men ’gainst me one at a time so that, in single combat, I may send them one by one, one and all, to the boneyards of the depths, where, with their mothers in their company, they may discuss and make repayment for their sins in this world. Come!”

  A hoot rose up from our crew.

  “Come now,” said Rackam. “We have lost both the patience and the taste for such sport. We are on account and in need of supplies. You are vastly outnumbered— unless you have some hidden hands on your ghost ship that remain unseen. I say again— will you yield?”