“If you mean the cannon . . .” He cut me off, putting a finger to his lips, glancing toward the kitchen, where Mother was fussing.
“Your mum’s better off not knowing, nor anybody at all. Nobody. Drake’s second rule was secrecy: Never let the enemy know where or when you’re going to pounce. The only way to be sure about that is not to tell anybody. Also, in the case of your family, you’ll do them all a favour by not involving them. If things go wrong and there’s a flap, they’re innocent.” I told him that something going wrong was my exact worry.
He nodded. “There’s always risk. Your Drake chap, however, is quite skilful at minimising that risk, and has a number of important advantages that can be maximised. First, he has the handiest little ships in the world, manned by the best sailors—islanders descended from Norse mariners. The target area is huge and indefensible, with a number of key ports where the Spaniards have to accumulate their treasure, warehousing it until the next flota can take it to Spain. These are the points where you plan to strike. In order to do that, however, you need intelligence. Drake’s third rule: You want to know as much about the enemy as you can, being careful not to let him know you’re around.”
“How?”
“You and the Spaniards aren’t the only people in the neighbourhood. There are a lot of slaves called Cimarrones, who’ve escaped their Spanish masters, and have fled to the forests; also there are quite a number of indigenous chaps, native Indians, although not nearly so many as there once were, before they were decimated by the smallpox and other diseases the Europeans brought. Most of those who have survived are no more fond of the Spaniards than the slaves are. Both know the territory, and are glad to help you by telling you everything you want to know about where the enemy’s soldiers and ships are deployed, where he’s gathering his wealth, how much, and suchlike. Besides being your spies, your local friends supply you with fresh water, victuals, and local pilots who know all about these coasts and their special hazards. You treat these people with great respect.
“Your Drake chap was very good about not being arrogant with native chaps. He was very respectful of them and their ways, trading fairly with them, never threatening them with his powerful weapons, or bullying. Thereby he made friends. His second voyage to the Spanish Main was spent doing that along the Isthmus of Panama, where pack trains of treasure were brought from the Pacific. Look here . . .” My heart sank as he produced from among his papers another map. He had been holding my interest so far with Drake, but I feared another lapse into lecture, and I told him so. I begged him to go back to the way of his Vikings story.
“No time for that right now. Pay attention. Drake shows up on his third voyage and strikes here, working the shallows and taking ships; on his next voyage, he captures Nombre de Dios, a treasure town, with thirty-two men, and raids the trail to Panama, where it’s only sixty miles from ocean to ocean.”
For the next half hour, I was led through a detailed analysis of Drake’s strategies, tactics, and further rules. These included the rule of surprise and flexibility (whatever your plan, don’t get married to it); the rule of extracting yourself quickly after the fact, and finally the rule of justification (that is, how much money you brought home).
“How much did he bring home?”
“Enough, and he was only getting started. And now you know enough about him to tell me how he would go about getting your cannon if he wanted to take it.”
I had been thinking of little else. Quite unexpectedly I was Drake, and my blood was up, too. I said it would have to be done by water, because the base of the peninsula was inhabited by hostile forces—not just Klaus and Grendel, but other Moehners and more dogs, all hunters. The nearest of their houses was only a five-minute walk from the park, where the cannon was in plain view over open ground. It would have to be done at night without arousing anybody, especially the dogs. We could use my own fifteen-foot boat, Annabelle, a legacy from my grandfather, now floating at our dock until Tom found time to haul her out for the winter. She was an open boat with a full build, and would carry the cannon barrel. The thing I didn’t know was how just the two of us could hope to get the cannon over its parapet and down into the boat, considering that we couldn’t even lift it.
“I noticed there’s a flagpole right behind it, just a few feet away. How many feet?” We worked out this calculation to his satisfaction, and he reckoned a simple cargo boom could be rigged to it with blocks and tackles. The cellar was piled with old tackle blocks, spars, coils of line—everything needed. He had other questions as we both pored over his chart showing the Moehners’ peninsula and, before I knew it, we had a complete plan.
Here I became nervous again. “When do you want to do it?” I half hoped the season was too late for the adventure.
“Not me, you; when do you want to do it? I’m just assisting here, and you keep forgetting that. If we get caught, I’m going to tell everybody that you asked me to help you retrieve your cannon, and that I was doing it as a favour. So go ahead and ask me.”
I hesitated, and he read my mind.
“You’re worried that if something goes wrong, there’ll be a big fuss, with your getting into all kinds of trouble, embarrassing your family, getting me nicked too, maybe deported, leaving my poor Merry high and dry.” He sighed. “Those are reasonable fears, especially with a police chief who’ll wring us any way he can, and a magistrate who’ll back him up, and no way your Corporal MacMaster chap can help. You’ve come up with a pretty good plan here, but plans do go wrong. In fact, they almost always do. So maybe you’d like to have a little think about that while I go to the loo, and you fetch me another rum.”
This I did, again having a nip of it on my own. It seemed a manly thing to do.
“Will you help get our cannon back?”
“I’d be delighted,” he smiled. “Thought you’d never ask.” His tone became abrupt. “Now the work starts. There’s a number of rusty blocks I’ve got to get greased so they don’t squeak in the night, then rig ’em up with a boom. I’ll need simple tools and that key to the cellar. You’ll need to make Annabelle ready to sail, and not be conspicuous about it. Grease her rowlocks. We’ll need a dim torch, meaning a red bulb for it from the marine supplies place. You’ll do that?”
“Good night,” said Mother, emerging from her kitchen, looking pleased that I was so engaged in my history lesson.
“Good night,” I said, fearing for a moment she was going to come over and kiss me; I turned to stir the fire, and she did not. The fire crackled.
“Now that we’re on our plan,” the captain said when Mother had left, “we’ll see what the weather has in mind for us. We’ll hope for a calm night, preferably overcast with mist. That would be the best, but maybe we’ll get back-to-back storms, snow, who knows? Anyway, it’ll take us a day to prepare; after that, we should be ready. Are we together? Good. Then let’s shake hands on it, and vow our loyalty to one another, as shipmates on our own account. Together.” We did so, and my hand felt very small inside his.
“Welcome to the Brotherhood,” he said.
6
The Night Raid
IT WAS A calm night, overcast and misty from sea rime that blanketed the water with a haze. We were ready to go, and this space between winter gales was our moment. “The gods have smiled upon us,” said the captain softly as I tended the fire. It was Saturday supper, with enough customers to keep Meg and Mother from noticing my nervousness as I went about my duties. The captain had his meal, then submerged himself in the intricacy of his macramé work. Robin paid his usual visit, stopping by his table for a cordial word, and afterward Tom visited for the duration of a beer. I tended the fire constantly, in order to be near the captain’s table.
“Stop hovering,” he told me when nobody was looking our way. “Take a deep breath, let it out, and do it again. It’s just an ordinary night. We won’t speak anymore. I’ll meet you aboard Annabelle at midnight. Dress warmly.”
Around 10:00 P.M. there was ano
ther impromptu concert with Meg and her new fiddle, to which the captain played an accompaniment, again to warm applause. Cleanup was finished soon after the departure of the last customer, and all turned in, including the captain with a conspicuous yawn.
Half an hour later we met, two dark figures on a darkened dock, me with my teeth chattering, not entirely because of the cold. Few words were spoken as we cast off and set sail in a light breeze. We had rehearsed in detail everything we were going to do, all under the cover of history lessons, and now we were doing it, ever so silently. The loom of the darkened inn vanished as Annabelle ghosted into the night and mist. Our touchstone to the universe was our little compass, dimly illuminated by the shaded, red flashlight. Above all, our objective was to be seen by nobody. I held the tiller while the captain navigated, which was just as well. I had sailed around our point in and out of the bay innumerable times, but never when I could not see around me. This was different.
“Come starboard a point,” said the captain, “and set up to come about.” There were rocks to both sides, invisible, but close, which was a scarier way of navigating this familiar place than Grandfather had shown me. “Now, put your helm alee.”
I pushed the tiller to leeward, and Annabelle pivoted in her referenceless universe, a dancer through dangers known but unseen. “There’s no light at all—none,” I said.
“It’s perfect,” said he. “Now set up to come about again, and make us a rhumb line for the landing.” I plotted our compass course, with allowances for current. My mentor checked my calculations, approved them, took the tiller, and sent me forward to keep a lookout ahead. It was a lonely position. I would have been more comfortable next to him. I reckoned that in this breeze we would have no more than a half-hour’s sail to where we were going, creeping through the darkness; I peered into it and thought my thoughts, and it was a long half-hour.
“What’s our depth of water?” asked the captain, clicking on the flashlight to look at the chart. I unhitched the lead line, and heaved it as I had been taught, swinging its lead weight to fall in the path of the boat, letting the line uncoil through my fingers, feeling for the markers and the spot where it hit the bottom under us.
“Only two fathoms,” I said, hauling the dripping line back aboard.
“We’re there.” As he said it, the shore loomed in front of us, a close presence, enemy territory. But which way from where we wanted to be? On which side of our target had we landed?
“I would say either to the right or to the left. What do you think?” I could not guess. “What’s your nose for it?”
“Uh . . .”
“Never mind thinking; what was your first impulse?”
“Right. Starboard.”
He put the helm up. “Starboard it is. Out oars.” And so we rowed, skirting a shore we could better hear than see, by the lapping of the surf. Just as I was becoming sure we were going the wrong way, a short promontory loomed in front of us, and we were there. I jumped ashore with a line, took another from the stern, and together we positioned our craft under the cannon’s parapet.
The next business was to unlash the twenty-foot spar that the captain had picked up from the cellar and fashioned into a boom. It was five feet longer than Annabelle, sticking out in front like a bowsprit, and was heavy enough to make a clatter as we hoisted it off the boat and over the parapet. A lone dog barked in the distance, barked a second time, and then all was silence again. Every movement we made seemed to be several times louder than necessary.
Here in the darkness was the cannon, and the flagpole near it, about where we had calculated. We lifted the boom parallel to the pole, and put on a lashing to hold it in place while I climbed onto the captain’s shoulders with the double tackle he had prepared to lift the boom. I attached it with rolling hitches, just as I had rehearsed. Then its foot had to be secured to the base. Without so much as a creak, we positioned it over the cannon, grasping its barrel with a sling. Its trunnion caps, securing it to the wood carriage, were detachable, freeing the barrel to be lifted with a second tackle. It all seemed to take forever.
“Handsomely now,” said the captain, starting to haul on the lift tackle as I tailed on. Anybody who is aware of the power of a two-part tackle will understand how an elderly man and a boy could lift a cannon weighing more than three hundred pounds. As we did so, however, the old spar we were using for a boom let out a sharp cracking noise as it took the strain. The wood held, but again the dog barked, this time not stopping.
“Steady,” said the captain, adjusting the position of the dangling gun over the boat. Another dog picked up the barking, and then another. “Now we’ll lower it,” he pronounced after what seemed an eternity. I did this rather too precipitously. The gun fell heavily onto Annabelle’s thwarts, with a noise that got even more dogs barking, until their din was alarming. Somewhere in the distance a door slammed.
“Steady, steady,” said the captain, making a last adjustment, then going down into the boat to lash the gun into place. The barking intensified. “Look smart,” he said, returning, “and hold the light while I get this boom gear unrigged and back aboard.” As we both worked by the dim ray of our hooded flashlight to unrig the boom, the barking of the dogs became louder.
“They’ve been loosed,” I said, “and they’re coming for us fast.”
“Quite. I’m afraid you’re right. Leave this. Get in the boat, and smartly.” I didn’t need any further encouragement. Casting off the bow line, I jumped on board Annabelle; the captain, freeing her stern, was right behind me. “This is what’s known as your fast extraction,” he said, taking up his pair of oars. The first dog on the scene looked like it was going to try to jump aboard, but the beast hesitated for just the moment we needed to push off and pull into the night.
“We’re free!” I exclaimed, my heart pounding.
“Not quite. We’ve left our gear, and we’re not yet out of range of a strong light if somebody comes out here to look around.” On the beach, an unknown number of dogs barked and barked. A light appeared, distant at first, coming closer. Noiselessly, we eased Annabelle farther into the mist. There were voices. No . . . one voice, somebody talking to the dogs, calling them home. The barking petered out, and the light receded without probing.
“What would Drake do now?” the captain enquired, resting on his oars.
“Wait until the enemy goes back to sleep, then sneak in and get the stuff we left?”
“Quite. I reckon we should give it a half-hour out here, laying off, staying warm as best we can, perhaps by thinking about California.”
“California?”
“Spanish California, and points south. Here resumeth the lesson. The Pacific is where your Drake chap wants to strike next.” He had done this to me earlier, this kind of sudden swerve into a story from where we were at the moment. Listening to the captain reminded me of the time Burt Amos had let me ride his mare. After a lesson or two, I was able to stay in the saddle, and even let her gallop, which was happening when she took a sudden—very sudden—turn toward her barn, although I had meant to keep going straight down the road. In fact, I did keep going in that direction, but only briefly before fetching up in some thorny bushes. Keeping my seat with the captain’s rides had that quality.
“Are you with me?” he asked, in the darkness.
“Where Drake strikes next.” I was.
“Good. What was bad was Spain’s defence of her American west coast, although that was where most of the treasure was coming from. The problem was getting there. The cold we’re in here would be a warm day off Cape Horn, which you had to go around if you wanted to sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific.”
Before I knew it I was bucking horrendous seas into the teeth of unrelenting westerly storms, with ships that were playthings of the wind and waves, proceeding with wrong charts through an area my mentor called the rocky cauldron of the angry gods.
“With three ships, you make it around into the Pacific, only to be blown back again by a stor
m, a great-grandfather of storms. In the words of Drake’s nephew . . .” He quoted:
“The winds were such as if the bowels of the earth had set all at liberty, or as if all the clouds under heaven had been called together to lay their force upon that one place. The seas, which by nature and of themselves are heavy, and of a weightie substance, were rowled up from the depths, even from the roots of the rockes . . . exceeding the tops of high and loftie mountains.”
He delivered this as though the archaic language was his native tongue, and instead of drifting on flat water, I found myself manning a pump aboard Golden Hind, as my ship lurched and plunged in a howling tempest.
“You sail through the Strait of Magellan with three ships. You watch one swallowed up by the storm, and another turn tail for home. Surviving, Golden Hind at last breaks through into the Pacific. Now you have a yachting holiday, sailing north with ever-warming, favourable breezes that are perfect for surprise visits to Spanish ports and shipping. No enemy has ever been seen on these shores, and you keep moving, never staying long enough to let word get ahead of your arrival. Your ship is faster than anything in the neighbourhood, because the Spanish vessels here are locally built, not for speed, but for carrying cargo. You are having a marvellous time. In one place, you see a whole pack train loaded with gold and silver, go ashore and get it, and move on. Farther along, you catch up with an undefended ship loaded with twenty-six tons of Peruvian silver ingots, among other things.
The Brotherhood of Pirates Page 8
