by Mark Keating
A voice straight off the docks at Wapping barked from the parade ground behind him. 'Mister Coxon, sir!'
He turned to see a mockery of a soldier in a sun-bleached, almost pink, tunic, grey breeches and sandals looking up at him.
'You will address me as Captain, boy!' Coxon was well lit in the sun, his brass buttons shining in the soldier's eyes. He was already moving to the steps.
'Yes, sir. Captain, sir.' He stood a little straighter, but not much. Coxon was almost upon him now.
'Don't shout at an officer, man. Approach me and wait for my attention!'
'Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.'
Coxon was right at his poxed nose. 'I'm a posted captain, boy, not a sir! I work for my bread! I'll use you for a hawser if you call me that again!'
'Sorry, sir. I mean, Captain, sir.' The soldier tried to look into the sun rather than at Coxon.
'Better, boy.' He took a step back to avoid the man's fetid breath. 'Be aware that you stink, man, and find yourself a pair of shoes. The king wears that uniform every day and you disgrace it. Now what do you have for me, boy?'
The man's head went empty. His mouth motioned something as he avoided the captain's eyes. Then he remembered the smell of bacon and kidneys.
'General Phipps would like you to join him for breakfast,.. Captain.'
'Noted.' Good. That meant news. Change. Action. Coxon relaxed. Calmed himself, clasping his hands behind his back. 'Dismiss.'
The soldier saluted badly, and turned and walked as quickly us he could towards his barracks.
Phipps had never invited him for breakfast before, though Coxon had often seen the dried remnants of the two-hour feast that ended in a nap, before an afternoon of fervent letter-writing back to England. Phipps never seemed to cease complaining back to Whitehall; mostly about the quality of the men he received, or the clerks sent to aid his governorship, and always again and again about his pitiful funding, for somewhere in his past Phipps had clearly paid attention when some wise soul had winked to him that the squeaky wheel gets the oil.
As for being invited to breakfast with Phipps, Coxon had learned one thing after numerous dinners: watch your plate.
Coxon, tricorne in hand, let himself into the private chambers that led straight from the chapel. General Phipps sat at the opposing broadside of a long, slightly warped table, ignorant of the man who had entered as he gorged on mashed potatoes mixed with egg, bacon and cabbage. He had fresh grapefruit juice and coffee in front of him, along with plates of bacon, the smell of which made Coxon's mouth draw tight with anticipation. He strode up to the table.
'Very kind of you to ask me to breakfast, General.' Coxon dragged a chair out without consent and placed his hat down. All around the table, Phipps's four brown children played, dressed like English princes but wearing bones and shells around their limbs. His concubine, for they were not officially married, floated up to Coxon with a porcelain cup of coffee. She placed the saucer down silently and smiled with antelope's eyes as she rustled backwards in her silks. Coxon permitted himself a moment to take in her jasmine scent as she backed away; then mentally he chided himself.
'Not at all, sir, not at all,' Phipps answered. 'I have need to speak with you.' A spray of potato as he spoke. Phipps was dressed in a simple white Arabian cotton shirt with the cuffs folded under themselves to prevent them straying into the myriad plates. His shirt was open to his ample, flaccid chest and Coxon spied the leather necklace of charms and bones, one of which also decorated his right wrist. Coxon noticed that, despite the informal attire, Phipps was wearing his powdered wig. He assumed this was a concession to his presence, rather than to hide any baldness.
'I must apologise to you that I have been rather slow in some of my administrative duties, although my clerks are idle sods in bringing these matters to my attention, sir.'
Coxon did not follow, and helped himself to some cold toast with his coffee. 'I'm sure you have nothing to apologise for, General.'
'Nevertheless, sir, I hope you will understand that there was no intention to delay your receipt of any information.'
'Information, General?' Coxon's heart beat faster.
'About your ship, man.'
Coxon pushed a plate of vinegar-soaked bacon away from him. 'Go on, General.'
'Letter for you, sir.' With one hand Phipps drained a crystal glass of grapefruit juice, and with the other tossed a packet of paper at the captain's place.
Coxon recognised the cheap waxen paper of the Admiralty at once and slowly opened the folded outer, the seal of which had been brazenly broken by another's hands. The letter would have arrived in a sailcloth packet, now absent.
Acceptably dated three weeks ago, it would have taken about two weeks to reach the castle. He was expecting orders, and true enough it did contain such, but the main of it had to be re-read, the paper becoming stretched flat, his knuckles whitening with the tension in his hands.
The Noble had been lost. The frigate that was his command throughout the war had been set ablaze by Acting Captain Thorn. Somewhere northwest of Africa she had been attacked by pirates. The South Sea Company's navigator and an unnamed servant had been captured. Fifteen men were dead including 'Captain' Thorn. The rest of the crew had escaped in the boats and had been rescued by a Dutch corvette three days later. They were now all in Gibraltar awaiting orders.
The room, the stale air, suddenly seemed more temperate. Coxon stood, scraping his chair roughly, and walked to one of the green-shuttered windows. The narrow window was open but no breeze came through. Like most colonial buildings, its design paid no account to the climate in which it sat. A Queen Anne country house had merely descended onto the edge of the jungle, and it, and all its occupants, sweated in the closeted halls. Coxon could just see the ocean beyond the white rocks. She rolled forever towards him and he longed to be poured back into her.
His ship was gone. Twenty-four twelve-pounders, most of which he had christened himself, their nicknames burned into their trucks, lay somewhere out there, never to fire again. She was his first captaincy. Built in 1670, she had fought in the War of the Grand Alliance and the heat of the Spanish Succession. Only two years ago she had been given almost three acres of new American oak. He turned to face Phipps.
'I'm to leave on the first passage back to England, sir. When would that be?'
'Indeed, sir. Indeed.' Phipps wiped his brow as his concubine fanned him. 'But there are all manner of things to consider.'
Coxon moved back to the table and stood with his left hand touching the letter. 'Such as what, General?'
'Consider this, sir.' He put down his napkin. 'You will return to the Admiralty as a captain without a ship. A ship, commissioned to sail to the Americas as an escort to the South Sea Company. Such commissions are what keep the navy afloat, sir. You, sir, involuntarily or not, have lost the ship and the commission. The company will not be happy with that, sir.'
Coxon knew Phipps was right. Somehow the world had gone mad with greed whilst he had spent nights scraping blood off his coat.
The government and the king relied on the growing spread of companies that were opening up the world for them, plundering lands and enslaving people for a guinea. A coin named after the stolen gold and stolen coast from which it came, a coin that Coxon had never seen but had bundles of promissory notes for. Phipps sat before him swollen and mottled, fattening himself on two thousand pounds a year whilst Coxon, one of the men who had allowed him to sit there, stood before him and had not been paid for two years, his pay-cut deducted in arrears.
'What would you suggest, General?'
'It might have occurred to you, Captain, that I have been burdened with a poor quality of men out here. They are wanton and lazy, sir, and it would be worth two hundred pounds a year to me to have a captain of the guard who could control them.' Coxon sat, picked up his papers, and listened.
'An enquiry may already have been conducted in your absence. Your galley sailed without your escort because you had ordered it home. I
myself had to appoint a sloop for her, beyond my duty. Who knows what your situation is back home? But consider that here you could have command, pay, good food and pleasant company.' He smiled at his mistress, standing at his shoulder. 'I could write a commission for you to stay here at my request to fulfil my needs - and believe me, sir, my needs are never questioned in England. Never. What say you, man?'
Phipps did not smile or patronise. He stated facts, undeniable truths. Coxon could stay here. Why not, indeed? Removed and remote, checking over the guns and textiles coming in from England and shackling the slaves that went out in exchange. But there was something that perhaps Phipps could never understand. On a ship the world shrunk to a fingernail of existence. Every part of your day was ordered to a bell. You ate to it, you worked to it, you slept to it, the decision of what to do and when removed. You wore the clothes of your position. You mingled with the same people all year round, and the world ended at the rails. In that life all the exterior, superfluous nature of society was gone. A man was stripped down to what he was, not what society made of him.
Some could not face the introspection of the life, and Coxon himself had come across midshipmen who on land were the lord of the dance and kings of the set yet after a year at sea they could no longer look at themselves in the mirror.
Some, a rare few, he had even found lifeless in their cots, with the blood spilling from their arms.
Phipps could never know what it was like to live inside a bell jar and appreciate it. He attempted another approach.
'Do you know turtles, General?'
Phipps stared back vacantly. Coxon continued, 'A turtle always returns to the place of its birth to mate and to lay its eggs. In the Caymans we deliberately wait on shore before dawn for the harvest. Turtles, as you know, General, are a delicious if slightly repulsive-looking green meat, but are a luxury to a sailor. It takes two men to turn them and we leave them writhing on their backs. After a few hours the sand is almost gone from view, so covered is the beach by these beasts.' Coxon slyly noticed that Phipps's mistress had stopped fanning, beguiled, and the children had lifted their silent heads to stare at him.
'The strange thing is that they don't stop coming. They can see and hear the distress of the others, but still they struggle onto the beach, oblivious to our presence. Do you know why, General?'
'I rejoice to say that I do not, Captain,' Phipps mumbled.
'It's because when he is born and digs his way out of the sand and down to the sea, the turtle carries in his mouth a grain of sand from that beach. He carries it with him for the rest of his days, and returns to that very same spot year in, year out. He has to. Regardless. Regardless of any danger or will to do otherwise.' Coxon stood and bowed his head to the elegant concubine, and then to the general.
Phipps bowed his head, and smiled. 'A dog also returns to its vomit, sir. Against others' better judgement.'
'I should like to return with your outgoing post, General. Please inform me when a ship is available. Good morning, sir.' He bowed again, took up his hat and left.
Fourteen hundred miles and eight degrees of latitude away, Patrick Devlin sat on the floor of Captain Seth Toombs's cabin. He had breakfasted on rice, pork and peas, all fried on a skillet by a man with one hand. On His Majesty's ships the man with one hand would have been cast off and left to fend for himself back home. Here, he would be compensated for his joint: two hundred pieces of eight, and given a less trying position. In Dog-Leg Harry's case, ship's cook.
Devlin had risen with the sun and slung his hammock. Generously he had been given the canvas bag that held Alastair Lewis's few remaining possessions. The only one he cared for this morning was a square shaving mirror. In the twilight he had seen his face clearly for the first time in years. The tanned reflection and dark eyes were still young, but now cynical and hard. His hair seemed lighter than the black he remembered, but the years at sea had probably seen to that. Four years as factotum to John Coxon, sleeping on the floors of cabins and rooms in Portsmouth or London. Two years among the citizens of 'la Cité corsaire', St Malo, where he lived and laughed with the fishermen and brushed shoulders with the privateers who ruled there. The young Irish butcher boy and poacher had gone, and he wondered if he now looked like his father; his memory of the man who had passed him on to the butcher when he was barely eight had long since dimmed. He could remember his father's arms swinging him along, and the huge, rough, square hands, but the voice and the face were in darkness.
He took the mirror and, with his shaver tucked in his belt, walked to the fo'c'sle, over the bodies of his sleeping comrades. Picking up a swab bucket, he sat on the deck in the violet dawn and shaved away the last two months.
Now he leaned against the cabin wall, warming a pipe and waiting for Toombs to awake. He had not dared look at the folded parchment hidden in his right boot, and in his mind's eye he began to see it fading away, an intangible promise.
They were still anchored and there was no watch on deck. The lack of a watch had seemed strange to Devlin, so familiar had the morose chimes of the bell become, but it was just the assertion of another freedom that normal seamen did not have.
Rather than the four-hour shifts between a starboard and a larboard watch, as the men-of-war dictated, Toombs's pirates generally favoured an 'all hands' approach ordered by Peter Sam for the work that wanted, although there was always a soul aloft on the mainmast looking for sails - a favoured task, for if he spied a prize he would have first choice of pistols from her spoils.
Devlin himself had been spared the labour of the watch on Coxon's ship, being a servant, but if he were to be Toombs's artist he would need its discipline.
'Maybe you should have wakened me, Patrick.' Toombs effortlessly got out of his hammock, awakened presumably by his bladder or an aching head.
His coat and hat were slung across the table and he instinctively put them on with his eyes still closed, Devlin noticing that without these accoutrements Toombs looked like any other seaman, if not thinner than most, but with the same hunched shoulders until the burgundy tricorne tipped his head up like a prince's.
'What time is it?' This was his own question, as Toombs had Lewis's timepiece set for London, and his own watch that he reset at noon each day.
'Almost half past ten. Show us your preparations, Pat.'
He swept towards the deck with a yell. 'Dog-Leg! Coffee!' He kicked the nearest man to him. 'Get up, you lazy dog! Prepare to shift that capstan, and fetch me Peter Sam!'
He pulled his pipe from his pocket and took a few steps forward, loading as he went. Glancing upwards at the crosstrees and the man above, seeing him still awake and silent, he knew they were alone for at least a dozen miles in any direction. Eighty feet in the air, the wind strafing his ears and smarting his eyes red until he was weeping, not even able to light a pipe in the wind, standing more over the sea than the deck, he was the loneliest man on earth.
'Any man who calls himself an officer move himself to the cabin! I want movement and breakfast, you dogs! Hands to braces!' He turned, lighting his pipe from his tinderbox, and walked back to the cabin with a wink to Devlin. 'Now you can officially meet the others.'
In the past, Devlin had been privy to many an officer's meeting in the capacity of servant, tray in hand, but this one had a different edge to it. The room stank of drink. In the mid-morning heat it sweated from the men's pores, although no one showed ill of it.
Devlin knew Peter and Seth; the others he knew of - had even worked with - without names being passed between them. Around the table he nodded greetings to the sailing master, William Vernon, or Black Bill as he was known to all, a dark, broad Scot with a great black beard that covered his neck and face. He stood next to 'Little John' Phillips, bosun, whom Devlin supposed was no more than twenty- five.
William Magnes he fairly knew, the tall, nervous-looking carpenter with the grey sideburns, the only one to offer his hand to Devlin that morning. John Watson was the cooper, and a great bawdy storyteller bel
ow deck, who fought constantly with Magnes over tools. Lastly, Gunner Captain Robert Hartley, formerly of His Majesty's ships. A half-deaf drunkard, obsessed with sponges and tallow, who spent all his time drinking, sifting powder and swearing at the damp. Devlin felt he was backstage at a French cirque, Toombs the ringmaster to the freaks.
Earlier it had been in his mind to share Philippe Ducos's last will and testament with his captain, for last night a drunken
Toombs joyfully declared that he knew Devlin to be one like him, just by the way he wore his sword all the time he was not at work, 'like a lord'.
In truth Devlin wore the sword and crossbelt with a misplaced sense of duty. It was one of Coxon's that he had liberated in defence of the Noble. It would be worth twenty guineas if he ever got it to a civilised shore. By wearing it he felt still a part of that orderly world, Coxon hanging at his side. This morning he held back the thought to share his newly found destiny. Meeting the swaying corps had given him confidence. He would stay his hand.
'Gentlemen, I want you to treat Patrick as kindly as you do each other!' An evil laugh pervaded as Dog-Leg poured coffee into pewter mugs.
'What's our plan, Captain?' Black Bill spoke for all.
'A fine, bold plan, Bill. Bold as brass!' Toombs began the rough detail of his scheme. The attack on the frigate had gone badly. Toombs had taken the chance against the sixth-rate ship, but the fire had ended all that. Then, running west, they had met the French sloop - and that had turned out empty.
A pirate captain's tenure was only as substantial as the goods in his hold. To that end, Toombs had dreamed up the audacious kidnapping of the Portuguese governor of one of the Verde Islands.
They would present themselves as English merchants and ingratiate themselves with the governor. Toombs would then Invite him aboard for dinner, whereupon they would place a pistol upon his breast and a ten-thousand-doubloon ransom on his head. The ring of the Spanish coin still the finest in all the world.
