The Brotherhood of Pirates

by William Gilkerson

  In that way, making daylong tacks across the Gulf of Maine, Merry nudged toward Boston. Along with my other responsibilities, I was charged with plotting the broad zigzag of her course, quickly learning more navigation than Grandfather had ever taught me. On this subject, I was commanded to read a book that was so long out of date, I protested.

  “It’s as good now as it was then,” the captain growled. “Read it.” And so I did, whenever I wasn’t doing something else, so that I had no such thing as spare time on Merry. The captain, however, had nothing but spare time, after instructing me on how to do everything that he didn’t want to, which seemed like everything. It left him little to do except play his pennywhistle, macramé his bottle, and watch all that I was doing so that he could criticise it.

  Recent events had led me to expect more pirate stories. When none developed, I asked for one, hoping for another of his yarns of the kind that drew me into them, but all I got was another antique book. This was the long-threatened copy of Johnson’s General History of the Most Notorious Pirates, which was as hard to read as Esquemeling—harder, by the light of the kerosene lamp over my bunk. It took three days to work my way through the introduction, between other assignments. The only thing that made the captain’s crudely printed old book easier to read, once I’d figured out the words, was that it sounded so much like him. It took a very lofty and critical look at the pirates, as well as the governments that had bred them, with the pirates often coming off better.

  One evening after doing supper cleanup, I took the book above to where the captain was having his usual lounge in the cockpit. I read an excerpt aloud:

  “Rome, the Mistress of the World, was no more at first than a refuge for thieves and outlaws; and if the progress of our Pyrates had been equal to their beginning, and had they all united and settled in some of those Islands, they might by this time have been honoured with the name of a commonwealth, and no power in those parts of the world . . .”

  “Could have been able to dispute it with them,” he finished the last sentence of the quote. “What’s your question?”

  “Could they actually have done that? Made their own republic?”

  “I do believe we could have done. We had the guns and the best fighters. With Nassau’s forts rebuilt, and some more eighteen-pounders in place, and a declared government, and a reign-in on piracy, and our own flag—not black—we could have had a tidy little republic. The first. England would have been annoyed, of course, but most of the Royal Navy had been cashiered by then, retired, and England had lots bigger things to think about. The cost of a fleet to deal with the place she’d abandoned would have been greater than the gain by miles.”

  “What stopped us?”

  “Mostly, just being sailors, too itchy a lot to get cosy in one place. And give up the life? Not bloody likely. Too addictive. Like tobacco,” he added, stooping to light his pipe. “So we had to be content with leaving our procedures to the Bahamians, in various ways, and our spawn in America. Do you have any notion as to how many of the founding patriots of the United States were direct blood descendants of the brotherhood? Some genealogist chap wrote notes about that. Quite amazing.”

  “The brotherhood never wrote down a Declaration of Independence?”

  “The brotherhood never wrote down anything at all, if we could bloody well help it, written things being such useful evidence. But we all came to it as individuals, like Captain Bellamy. He had a grasp for rhetoric that was a lot less wordy than the American chap who wrote the ‘When in the course of human events’ declaration that they’ve got enshrined somewhere. Hand me that book.”

  He leafed through Johnson, noting that Bellamy had dived on the Spanish treasure wrecks with the rest of the Nassau brethren, then sailed off with his sloop on the account, and captured an armed galley named Whydah, loaded with rich cargo and pieces of eight. “She was a first-rate catch, and he decided to keep her. Gave her some more guns and raided the Carolina coast. Took several prizes, including a sloop commanded by a chap named Beers. Bellamy did the usual thing, trying to get any recruits who wanted to join up. Here’s what he said when Beers turned down his invitation:

  “ . . . Damn ye, you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by Laws which rich men have made for their own security, for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by their knavery. But damn ye altogether. Damn them for a pack of crazy rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numskulls. They villify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of Law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make one of us, than sneak after the arses of those villians for Employment? Captain Beers told him that his conscience would not allow him to break through the Laws of God and man. ‘You are a devilish conscientious rascal, damn ye,’ replied Bellamy. ‘I am a free prince . . . and this my conscience tells me. But there is no arguing with such snivelling puppies, who allow superiors to kick them about deck at pleasure and pin their faith upon a pimp of a parson, a squab, who neither practises nor believes what he puts upon the chuckle-headed fools he preaches to.

  “There’s a declaration of independence if ever I heard one, complete with a full-front assault on all the god-bothering priests. Well, in all wisdom, it is said that the gates of heaven are taken by storm, and I’ll drink to that.” He did so. Merry’s mast creaked with content. “Did you ever hear that old saw about the pirates’ assault on heaven? Here’s Saint Peter, guarding his golden gates, and what should he see but a whole crew of buccaneers comin’ for him, all with cutlasses. He has to think fast. ‘A chase! A chase!’ he yells, givin’ the cry of a lookout who’s spotted a prize. ‘Where away?’ they call; ‘over there, Saint Peter points. Off they go, chasing, and heaven is saved.”

  “Did Captain Beers get his lips cut off?” I wanted to know.

  “Nah. Bellamy wasn’t Low. Damned few of us were. Beers got set ashore on Block Island, a little lighter in the purse, but safe as a lamb in the arms of Jesus. Bellamy even wanted to give his sloop back to him, but the crew didn’t, and they outvoted him.”

  “What happened to Bellamy?”

  “Sailed north on the pirates’ round. You worked the Caribbean in the winter, then before the hurricane season can start, around July, you made for New England, Nova Scotia, or Newfoundland, where you could pick a hidey-hole and careen, clean ship, and cruise ’til it was time to go south for the winter. That’s what Bellamy was up to. He careened in the Machias River in Maine, where he got an interesting proposal from one of his crew.

  “I forget the chap’s name, but he was a writer and an actor, and a retired highwayman turned buccaneer. This chap thought Bellamy (and Williams, another pirate sailing in his company) could found their own republic there, and make a go of it, and maybe they could have done, but Bellamy was more amused by this whimsical fellow’s talents as a classical playwright. He wrote a full-length drama called The Royal Pirate, and then directed a performance on Whydah’s quarterdeck, with costumes and music. Big audience.”

  “A success?” I asked, trying to imagine a company of buccaneers performing their own classical drama.

  “Yes and no. It did have an indisputable power. In the play a pirate was brought up for trial, and sentenced to hang, and it was realistic enough to confuse the gunner, who thought it was really happening. The gunner, having taken strong drink, went and got a grenade, which he lit the fuse on, and threw in among the actors, who took a bit of damage when it exploded. One actor lost an arm; another got a broken leg. Anyway, it cancelled the performance.”

  “What happened to the gunner?”

  “He was cancelled also. And good riddance, I say. Nobody much quibbled with his critique of the play, but it seemed a bit extreme.” The Bellamy yarn was interrupted by sunset, meaning I had to light Merry’s port and starboard lamps, and the stern light, and the binnacle lamp; down below ther
e was the cabin lamp, trimming all their wicks, and adjusting them so that they burned just perfectly to the captain’s eye, which took some doing. When I’d finished, he’d been below, glanced at my navigation, and brought up another coin, which he handed me.

  “There’s a bit of Bellamy’s treasure for you to have a look at. Grab the torch if you want to see it better.” In the flashlight’s beam, I saw the Spanish cross on an irregular silver piece that was much worn. “It’s the sand. It got worn away over the years, laying off Cape Cod. As to how it got there, Whydah, with twenty-eight guns, raiding off Newfoundland, attacked a thirty-six-gun French ship, full of soldiers bound for Quebec—an error of judgement that nearly cost all of them their lives. Badly shot up. Three dozen of her crew dead. Whydah barely escaped. In this action, the playwright was killed. Bellamy’s fortunes had turned, y’see. Soon after, while he was raiding the waters off Cape Cod, he forced a pilot. But the chap . . .”

  “Forced a pilot?”

  “Conscripted. When the Royal Navy did it, it was called ‘pressing’; when the brethren did it, it was called ‘forcing.’ Both of ’em took people, as they needed ’em. We always needed artists: navigators, coopers, sailmakers, pilots, what have you. So Bellamy forced a pilot out of a small prize. Then, at night in a freshening gale, gave him the job of steering them into shelter, under the hook of the Cape. He had the lead vessel, and it had a careless crew, because while they were all having a jar of punch in the pleasant anticipation of a snug anchorage, their forced pilot runs both their ships aground. The pilot gets himself safe ashore, while Bellamy’s vessels take a mortal pounding in the surf, and break up. And that was the end of Whydah and her prize.”

  “And Bellamy?”

  “Drowned, 147 of them. All drowned except for seven who managed to swim through the surf. Got arrested by the locals, and sent to Boston for trial. That was in the fall of 1717. Now I’ll have my coin back.” He stretched out his hand. I put the silver piece in it, telling him I was disappointed that neither he nor it had taken me into any of the action he had described.

  “I’ll try to make up,” he promised. “Meanwhile, there’s chests and chests of silver and gold to be found in the sands off Wellfleet, waitin’ for somebody to come and take ’em.” He put the coin back in his pocket. “But that’s another project for another day.”

  On the morning of our tenth day out, we sighted Cape Ann, which was my first glimpse of the world beyond Nova Scotia. I couldn’t wait to get where we were going, now so near. But there was more tacking to do, and trickier navigation as we approached the islands and shoals of inner Massachusetts Bay. The skyline of Boston began to define itself with a wink of sunlight on a golden dome among a prickle of church steeples on a hill. Beyond, to either side, there were chimneys producing a pink and purple haze over everything.

  The captain had the binoculars. When he lowered them, a tear rolled down his cheek. He glanced at me. “It’s the smog. My eyes aren’t used to it. Same in all the old ports, really. And here you have the Paris of New England, Cradle of Revolution.” A cluster of racing yachts flashed past. All had yacht club burgees, crews in white, and American ensigns flying, prompting the captain’s remarks on America and Americans. In his view, the American phenomenon, as he called it, was entirely predictable from the outset. “You’re England,” he challenged me, “and you’ve got this huge chunk of the North American continent that you’ve pirated from the chaps who lived here; now, what do you do with it?”

  “Settle it.” I’d learned the history.

  “Quite. But with whom? It’s a bloody remote wilderness, nothing in it but savages—irritated at having been pirated—and bugs. Bugs that bite, and bugs that sting, and bugs worse than the savages. Read the old journals on the subject of bugs. So, who can you get to settle North America?”

  “Adventurers?” I offered.

  “Just so. Intelligent lad. Not just adventurers, but the most self-confident, obstreperous, independent, aggressive, impoverished, and dissatisfied people. Then you’ve got criminals you can deport, and religious outcasts, and you get the miscellany of foreigners and other refugees, and black slaves, plus hundreds and hundreds of pirates, buccaneers, the brotherhood, retired and otherwise. Well,” he reached for his tobacco, “there you have a genetic boil with enough steam to blow the lid off the pot for a while in history. I mean, how can you blame the Americans for being who they are, considering they’re our own creation?”

  As we approached Boston, the captain seemed to be having unaccustomed difficulty in reconciling the chart with his memory of the last time he had been there.

  “When was that? I asked.

  “I’d have to think back. But over to starboard there’s a thundering great aerodrome, where there used to be water, and Noddles Island. And Nix’s Mate is gone. That’s a little island, or used to be, where some of the brethren were hanged in chains. Just a marker there now. And Bird Island’s been renamed. That’s where they hung Archer, slathered in tar, in 1724. He lasted a long time out here, but he’s long gone now.”

  “Where are we headed?” I wanted to know. It was getting on toward twilight, and Merry was close in.

  “How can I say until I see it?” He had the helm, steering us past wharf after wharf, all teeming with commercial traffic.

  “Where’s a yacht harbour?” I asked, unable to locate one on the chart.

  “That’d be our last resort.”

  And so we nosed into the Charles River, where the masts of a square-rigged ship came into view. According to the captain, it was the United States frigate Constitution. She had been launched in 1798, had chased French pirates called Picarroons in the Caribbean as her first assignment, and then gone on to greater things.

  “She’s the oldest old vessel afloat, very famous, and we should have a look at her,” he said, and so we did, with little apparent regard on his part for where we would tie up for the night. Not that I was tired. The sombre muzzles of old cannons peered out at us as we tacked under the ancient warship, its majesty of rigging limned by the dipping sun.

  “There’s our berth,” he said, pointing to a service float laying forward of Constitution along her wharf. He gave me a string of instructions as he luffed Merry alongside. And so we landed at the Boston Navy Yard in Charlestown, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

  “You can’t tie up here,” yelled a uniformed person, just as we had finished doing it.

  “Our engine’s down,” called the captain, back at him. “Got blown in here! Hailing from Canada!”

  “Oh,” he said, “I’ll have to get the duty officer.” And off he went. By the time that person came, we had snugged down Merry.

  “Can’t tie up here,” said the duty officer, in whites, with an armband that said SP.

  “Means Shore Patrol, Navy Police,” the captain whispered. “No choice,” he called back to the dock, in a perfectly cultivated English accent. “Frightfully sorry. Engine’s packed in. Come aboard.” The duty officer did so, by which time the captain had taken away the coverings to the long-defunct Ailsa Craig motor, and was struggling with it.

  “Enough to try the patience of a saint,” he said, tapping it with a tool. The long and short of it turned into a conversation regarding the lineage of the duty officer, who was Irish. By the end of their conversation, the captain was talking with an Irish accent, and when the duty officer went away, we were cleared to be where we were as an emergency procedure, pending word from higher authority.

  Half an hour or so later a jeep pulled up, and the officer of the day climbed down the ladder to the float, where he was greeted by more engine poundings and expletives by the captain, until being noticed. “Come aboard, dear sir,” he said. The officer of the day, a quartermaster, was bemused by us, an old man and a boy against the sea, and even though he could not accept the rum that was offered him, he authorised our being there, pending getting our motor fixed and further examination by other authorities.

  These came in two waves. First, there was Naval
Intelligence, which was duty-bound to look at any unusual visitation to a U.S. Navy facility, even in a low-security area. Two officers poked around for a minute or two, found nothing suspicious, and left.

  “Let’s you make some corned beef sandwiches,” he told me, and I did, just as a customs officer and an immigration officer showed up.

  “Join us?” the captain invited, but they were more interested in asking their routine questions, looking at my birth certificate, stamping his passport, and getting on with their interrupted lives. “Better that they come to us than us having to go to them, no?” Our last visitors were some off-duty sailors from Constitution’s crew, who did not decline the rum they were offered, and there was good will all around. I finally went to sleep in my forward berth to the background rumble of laughter, trucks, airplanes, passing ships, and distant sirens in the night.

  16

  Boston

  “HERE’S THE PLAN,” said the captain, all business. It was early the following morning, Tuesday, and we were up before the Navy Yard, having a wash on deck, then putting on our carefully rolled shore clothes. “First, make a big batch of coffee. Full pot. When the watch shifts, we’ll have some more visitors. They’ll tell you where to find a telephone so you can ring up y’r mum, and let her know we’re still among the living, though a bit behind schedule. When the visitors clear out, I’ll toddle over into the city and start business. I’ll be gone when you get back. You’ll be minding Merry.”

  My disappointment aside, that is how it worked out. Right after whistles went off in the yard, another jeep pulled up on the wharf with a new duty officer, who’d been told about us, and was just there to view us and say hi. He was soon followed by a lieutenant wearing crisp summer whites and a broad smile as he descended the ladder to the float. Constitution’s huge bowsprit projected directly over Merry’s little masts. The officer turned out to be her commander, Lieutenant Messier, who was glad to take his morning coffee in our cockpit.