The Sugar Islands

by Alec Waugh

  Unmoved the captain listened.

  ‘My men want food,’ he said. ‘The ship needs to be careened. I can’t run the risk of waiting.’

  Though these deliberations were staged in the secrecy of the captain’s cabin, rumours of them reached the crew. By every man below decks it was known that the officers and the captain were divided.

  §

  The entrance to the main bay of the Straits of Magellan is less than a mile across. It is set about with mountains so high that the sun rarely shines on them. It is beyond speech cold; snow falls; the nights are long. There are harbours, however, with good water and trees of an aromatic essence, whose bark smells like pepper shoots and whose green wood burns in the fire as though it were dry; there are rivers and pleasant streams. In the centre of the Straits the tides of the Atlantic and Pacific meet with a prodigious shock and noise. The floods rise to a great height from which they will subside so suddenly that there is a danger of the ship’s being stranded on dry ground. The rise and fall of the tides is a matter of four-fathom depth. There is no piece of water in the world that demands more delicate navigation. As the ship passed through the high lane of rock, the sailors, for all that they were cold and hungry, sang as they laboured at the ropes. Soon they would have food and fruit; their course would be set northwards to the blue seas, blue skies, and heavy sunlight.

  They were still singing when a sudden shock passed through the entire ship, when there was a scraping, rending noise, and the ship, for all that there was wind behind it, came to a sudden halt. There was a silence. Then a pandemonium of voices through which rang loud and menacing the captain’s voice. ‘Quiet there. There is nothing to be frightened over.’

  Nor was there, for the moment. The ship had become wedged between two rocks that held it firmly.

  ‘Down into the hold,’ the captain shouted. ‘See if there’s a leak.’

  There was no leak. The fabric had stood the strain. The ship was imprisoned but it was safe. The captain gathered the crew together.

  ‘There is no danger,’ he said. ‘In a little while when the tide subsides we shall be on dry ground. We shall then careen the ship, loosen it, and when the tide rises, float it. In the meantime I shall send the pinnace in search of a harbour where Indians may be met and gifts exchanged with them.’

  Roger was one of the sailors chosen. They took with them bangles, glass jewellery, and other such gimcrack objects as would be likely to appeal to the simple Indian. They rowed upwards of ten miles to a bay on the north side of the second narrow, where a ship could ride in clear, sandy ground.

  The Indians had gathered on the shore to meet them. They were of middle stature, well-limbed with round faces, low foreheads, little noses, small black eyes and ears, black hair of an indifferent length. Their teeth were white; their faces were of an olive colour, daubed with spots of white clay and soot; their bodies were painted with red earth and grease. After the fashion of a Highland plaid they wrapped round them the skin of seals; they made caps for themselves with the skin of chickens to which the feathers remained attached; their feet they protected with skin sandals. The women wore no caps but instead surrounded their arms with shell bracelets. They were active and nimble and, in spite of the cold, went naked. Their language was guttural and slow. They displayed the highest satisfaction over the trinkets that the sailors showed them. In exchange they gave such fish and fruit as they possessed, promising to bring more on the next and following day. That night, for the first time for many days, there was revelry and song aboard the Bordelais.

  At the same time there was a feeling of discontent. There might be fresh fish and fruit upon the table, but the ship was wedged between two rocks. The captain in whom they had trusted had wedged it there.

  ‘The officers were right,’ the seamen said. ‘He should have taken us round by the Cape. It’s mere chance that there’s one of us alive.’

  For the first time doubt of their captain’s seamanship had come to them. Roger, lying back in his hammock, his hands crossed behind his head, listened with a sardonic smile upon his lips.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘and you talk like that, and you say that he’s a swine, that he’s not even a good sailor, yet you’ll show up quietly while the ship’s refloated and set off through the Straits. You’ll trust your lives to a man you hate, whom you’ve no faith in. You don’t know where you’re going. You’ll be starved; you’ll be cold; you’ll go short of wine; and all so that some rich man in Marseilles shall grow more rich. You’ll grumble, but you’ll submit.’

  In years of experience of the sea Roger was the junior man aboard. And though he was broad-shouldered and well-built, there were half a dozen men whose fists could have settled a quick account with him. But his voice had a note of authority that no other man’s had got. His fellows listened to him uneasily.

  ‘What else is there for us but to submit?’ they said.

  Roger made no direct reply. His eyes were fixed on the blackened roof.

  ‘There’s plenty of time. There’s no hurry yet,’ he said.

  He did not let the matter drop. He had learnt much in the taverns of Marseilles of the sea’s life and of the ships that sailed it. ‘We’re told that we’ve come to trade in the South Seas,’ he said. ‘We haven’t. We’re privateers. We’re looking for a ship to plunder, a town to sack or ransom. We’re at war with the world, English, Spaniards, Dutch; they are free, any one of them, to attack us. We’re no better off than the filibusters of Tortuga.’

  In the cafés of Marseilles he had heard often of that strange group of derelicts from St. Christopher, who had banded themselves against the hazards of Spanish tyranny on the small turtle-shaped island to the north of San Domingo. From all countries they had come. There were Protestants from La Rochelle and Dieppe; soldiers unemployed after the religious war and by the disappearance of the Prince’s party; Scottish Puritans and English Catholics; cadets of Gascony, Normandy, and Flanders; sailors who had mutinied or deserted; engages who had broken from their servitude to the white planters in San Domingo. Inoffensive settlers to begin with, but driven by oppression to realize that they must fight or die, they had levied war in their long boats against the world. ‘No prey, no pay’ had become their motto. There was no West Indian captain whose spy-glass did not nervously sweep the horizon for signs of the Brethren of the Coast.

  ‘If we were one of them, we should be in no worse danger than we are now,’ said Roger. ‘And we should be free, we should be working for ourselves.’

  The crew listened, suspicious but impressed.

  In the shadowed room, lit by the wavering lantern light, he looked strong and purposeful, with his broad shoulders, his proud, high-held head, his long beaked nose, and the scar that ran along his cheek-bone.

  ‘We are slaves,’ he repeated, ‘and we needn’t be. Not so many miles away there is an island where we could live freely, as we chose, fighting whom we chose, when we chose, sharing our spoil among us.’

  He paused, and when he spoke again his voice had a ringing, imperious quality, a quality that made each sailor recognize the power of leadership.

  ‘We are many, he is one.’

  §

  Two mornings later the Bordelais was driving fast and straight through the second narrows. That night the second mate was roused in his sleep by a foully smelling hand pressed on his mouth and the point of a dagger rested against his throat. Through the dusk of the cabin he could not recognize the faces that peered down into his; nor was the voice that whispered into his ear familiar.

  ‘You will make no sound or you will be killed,’ the voice was whispering. ‘You will get up, and you will walk to the captain’s cabin. You will knock on the door and ask him to let you in. What follows is not your affair.’

  Drowsy with sleep and wine, the first mate stumbled from his hammock. With the point of the knife pressed close against his side he felt his way down the passage to the captain’s cabin.

  He beat with his fist on the stud
ded door. There was silence, then a voice, angry, rough, resentful:

  ‘Who’s that? What is it? I’m asleep.’

  ‘It’s I, Dargot.’

  ‘I can hear it is. What in hell’s name do you want?’

  ‘To see you.’

  ‘What about?’

  He hesitated. The point of the knife was pressed tighter into his side.

  ‘About something very important,’ he called back.

  ‘Ah, very well, then.’

  There was the sound of a shot bolt, the creaking of a hinge. The door swung open. As it did so the first mate received a push in the back that flung him face downwards on the cabin floor. Lying there in the corner he saw what happened; saw stride into the room a young sailor, tall, lithe, broad-shouldered, with long beaked nose and a scar below the eye, with after him a half-dozen or so of sailors, three of whom pinioned the captain’s arms behind the head. That he saw with his head singing, with a hand gripped upon his throat, with the cold blade of a cutlass laid against his neck; saw it, and seeing, heard the astounded, indignant boom of the captain’s voice: ‘Now what in hell’s name does this mean?’; heard that and heard ringing on it the reply of the young sailor: ‘What does it mean? Not more than this. That the ship’s head is going to be set south; then, when the Horn is rounded, to the north.’

  The captain glared with wild, rage-filled eyes.

  ‘And after that?’ he asked.

  ‘After that we will decide with the filibusters of Tortuga what use is to be made of her.’

  Roger flicked with the tip of his finger at the long blade of his knife.

  ‘I shall stand beside you,’ he said. ‘There is no one else on this ship qualified. I shall see that you steer her right.’

  The captain made no reply, but the first mate, sprawled there on the floor, knew from the way the lips set over the ragged and blackened teeth that the last word had not yet been spoken.

  That night Roger moved into the captain’s cabin. The crew, trained in subservience, accepted his leadership with the same meekness that they had their captain’s. They knew that they were powerless of themselves. They yielded to those who could control them. There were no prayers next morning. Roger spoke to them instead.

  ‘We are bound,’ he said, ‘for an island where men are free; where they share equally the profits of their work. In a few weeks’ time we shall be there. We shall join the brethren on such terms as their brotherhood ordains. Till then, however, so that the ship’s running may be smooth, it is best that the former discipline of the ship be maintained.’

  As far as the actual seamen were concerned, the mutiny involved little change. If anything, there was rather more work for them to do. Three men were required to guard the captain; and the officers who had been transferred below decks were indifferent substitutes. Roger saw to it, however, that the ration of rum was increased to a tumbler and a half a day.

  And so the ship swung south into the Antarctic tempests. And for days, with the sails screaming and the ship plunging, the mutineers fought their way round the Horn, till at last their head turned northwards. And it was on their right that the sun rose, lilac and lavender out of a morning sky, and on their left that it drowned in a foam-churned, tawny-red horizon. And the wind became gentle gradually, and the seas less fierce. The days lengthened and grew warm. Over the pale water the white flying-fish would quiver. And at night the sailors would sit out under the stars singing the songs of their own country.

  They were happy. The supply of fruit was nearly finished. Scurvy would soon be once more on them. There was only a barrel of rum left. They knew that. But they were happy. They were bound for an island where men were free, where men could make riches quickly and return with them to their parents, their wives, their sweethearts; to the friends that awaited them. The songs that they sang by starlight were the songs of yearning: of a homesickness for the white houses and the grey-green terraces of the south; for the long bare cliffs of Brittany; the thatched cottages, and the fields, green-brown in the mild spring light.

  Roger, at the captain’s side, listened to their singing with a mind detached. He was not yet twenty. He had been less than a year at sea. Yet already the familiar faces and the familiar scenes of his boyhood had grown unreal. He imagined that he would see them again one day. But he did not dream, as these others did, of returning one day rich to the village that had despised him in his youth. He did not think about the village much. He did not look ahead. The present sufficed for him. He felt complete. And as the days passed he became aware, as primitive people are aware, of a kinship of loneliness between himself and the hard, weather-beaten sailor he had enslaved, who had not in any port in the world a human tie; who existed for himself, within himself, in his love for the sea and for his ship.

  They rarely spoke during the long weeks of their journey northwards. Taciturn as ever the captain buried himself over his charts; walking from time to time on the bridge to sweep the horizon with his spy-glass; the beaker of grog unceasingly replenished was at his side. He might have been captain still except that he never cast a look towards the crew. He made no reference to the mutiny. He gave instructions to Roger as though Roger had been his officer. He did not ask whether or not those orders had been carried out. He made no attempt to speak with his former officers or with any of the men. He accepted his position. Occasionally he would fix a slow searching glance on Roger. Once he asked him a question.

  ‘When and how did you join this ship?’ he asked.

  When Roger told him he nodded his head.

  ‘I seem to remember them telling me,’ he said. ‘I didn’t hear till we had left Marseilles. They should have told me. I don’t suppose if I had seen you I should have let you sail.’

  That was the only reference he ever made in Roger’s presence to the mutiny. With the quiet efficiency that had won him the respect of merchant owners he steered the ship along the Brazilian coast, rounded the outposts of Venezuela, passed between the narrow straits that separate Trinidad and Tobago, sailed into the calm waters of the Caribbean that had held for a century past, and was for two centuries yet to hold, the West in fee; was to be the symbol of romance; the Eldorado of beglamoured youth; the background against which the courage and skill of British seamen, Drake, Nelson, Rodney, Howe, were to flame through history; that had sent, first gold and silver from its mines; and later from its fertile soil was to pour sugar, rum, coffee, cocoa into Europe, till the phrase, ‘rich as Croesus’, should be displaced by ‘rich as a Creole’. Green and high and fecund they circled jewelwise this tropical Mediterranean, the islands for whose sake so much blood and money should be spilt; Trinidad, Jamaica, Cuba, San Domingo.

  As the Bordelais swung through Trinidad’s northern channel, Roger standing upon the bridge had a sense of entering a kingdom.

  ‘How many days away is Tortuga now?’ he asked.

  ‘Seven or eight maybe.’

  ‘Have you ever been there before?’

  ‘I’ve been there.’

  And the old man turned his eyes back to the shimmering white-blue horizon. In silence they sailed on across that unruffled lane. There is no land between Trinidad and San Domingo.

  High and green the mountains of San Domingo rose out of the sea. As the ship cruised along its southern coast, turning northwards round Dame Marie, then eastwards from the Mole St. Nicholas by the same route Columbus took, the crew laughed and sang about their work, happy in the knowledge that in a few hours’ time there would be fresh food for them and wine. They had asked no questions as to what would happen when they arrived. Had they done so Roger would have been uncertain how to answer. He had himself the haziest idea of what would happen. But he lacked the imagination that would have caused such haziness to worry him. His heart was restless with excitement.

  At his side the captain was more taciturn, more withdrawn than ever. His lips were set tight upon his ragged teeth. His eye shone brightly. He answered abruptly with his face fixed on the horizon such que
stions as Roger asked.

  ‘Harbours,’ he said. ‘There is only one harbour.’

  ‘Is the coast rocky?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘I suppose that’s why the buccaneers chose it. They thought it would make them safe against invasion.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  And indeed it would have been hard to picture anything more barren and bleak and inaccessible than the high-humped island that grew clearer hour by hour. Along its dark-green coast there was no sign of life; roots and trees grew on its rocky face, like ivy against a wall.

  Through the spy-glass Roger gazed closely at the approaching beach. ‘This is where my life starts,’ he thought.

  Though the sun was shining fiercely out of a blue sky there was a keen wind blowing. The water in the narrow channel was churned and choppy. The ship, as each wave hit against it, pitched to such an extent that Roger at first took for no more than the impact of a larger wave the sudden jolt that flung him off his feet and sent the ship heeling over to a twenty degree angle. It was not till the ship, as he struggled to his feet, did not right herself, that he realized that it was not water that had caused that jolt.

  ‘What’s that?’ he cried.

  The captain fixed on him a look of triumph and cunning. The old man’s eyes were bright. There was a glow of colour in his lined, rum-roughened cheeks. He spoke slowly and proudly, on a note of self-vindication.

  ‘You thought,’ he said, ‘that you could frighten me into steering my ship into an enemy harbour, and making a present of her to pirates at the bidding of mutineers.’