A perfect summer weekend day for motorboats had brought out every size and kind, all making their wakes in passing. As their waves reached us, Merry jumped and rolled constantly. I could see an endless crisscross of wakes constantly approaching in patterns that were as restless as my mind. I thought about my mother, having just been farther from her than any time before in my life, and for longer. I was not particularly accustomed to giving much thought to her, except for how to get around her, but at that moment I saw her as perhaps an even lonelier person than I was, a novel thought. Suitors she had had, but nobody measured up to my dead father. I remembered Mother dancing with Robin after the concert, laughing with him. Then I thought about poor Aunt Karen, and then about Meg. How long would Meg stay at the inn, mopping floors and serving beer?
I was watching a big tour boat sliding past on its way toward Gloucester, when something familiar caught my attention: unmistakably the two-tone green sport-fishing boat with its flying bridge, and new little Decca radar. As I watched, the boat changed course and headed directly toward us, throttling down as it approached. I waved. “Hi! You’re Mathew’s friends?” I called, as they came within voice range. They were. Mathew had told them he was worried because we had no motor and no wind, and they had been looking for Merry to give us a tow, getting us clear of land. Being neighbourly, as he put it. “Yes!” I said.
“No!” said the captain, erupting from below. I quickly explained that these were Mathew’s friends.
“Mathew’s?” he stepped on deck, peering at them. Their boat nudged closer. There appeared to be three men, one standing on the stern, making a towline ready, a burly fellow in a T-shirt.
“Get your anchor up, and we’ll take you out to where there’s wind,” yelled the helmsman on the bridge. To my surprise, the captain declined what seemed like a heaven-sent opportunity to get out of where we were, and maybe indeed into an offshore wind.
“Mathew says your motor’s kaput!” said the helmsman, edging closer. “We’re here to help.”
“Don’t need help,” said the captain.
“But you’re out here without power? Or any radio?”
The captain thanked them for their concern, but said we’d made our repairs, and could contact the shore if we needed to, and wished them well with their fishing. He gave them a wave good-bye, and they went away. I hated to see them go. “Tell me more about this Mathew,” he demanded, and I did. “You told him we’re carrying a quantity of cash?” he interrupted, when I came to the part about Mathew’s telephone message.
“He is my friend,” I defended, adding that Mathew was the only way to get the message to Mother. He chewed his lip. I had a question of my own. “Why didn’t you take the tow? And why did you tell them the engine was fixed, and that we had a radio?” He did not immediately answer, watching the green boat roaring away from us. Lamprey was the name on its stern.
“There aren’t any whys,” he finally said, adding, “but there’s nose.” He put down the glasses. “What if Mathew’s friends are pirates?” I started to protest, but the captain quickly made the case that I knew hardly anything about Mathew, and nothing at all about his friends, whereas he knew we had a lot of money, a broken-down motor, no radio, and that we were only an old man and a boy.
“But . . .”
“But nothing. I want you to suppose, just for a moment, that Mathew is not the friend you think he is; that in fact he’s a disgrace to his noble ship, and that Mathew’s friends on that green boat now know everything you’ve told him about us, which they seem to. Now suppose you’re them, and you want our money. You’ve been surprised by our abrupt departure, but know we can’t get far without wind. It’s a clear day; you’ve got a big powerboat with a Decca, so you come out and shop around ’til you find us. You’ve got shotguns and pistols. What do you do next?” I pondered his question, but had a hard time accepting his whole premise.
“What do you do?” he insisted.
“Just come out and take us,” I supposed. The whole thing seemed like another of his uncomfortable little tests. My half-hearted response inspired him to go forward and have a pee over the side. While doing so, he continued the exercise.
“How? Just pull alongside, guns blazing, in plain view of God, the Coast Guard, and all this holiday traffic? More likely, you’d sniff up to us, very friendly, and offer us a tow offshore, where you could board us after dark with no other vessels around.” Finishing his business, he gazed after the green boat. It was far away in the direction of Cape Ann, and getting farther by the moment. On top of the irritations of our bouncy anchorage, and going nowhere, and my restless thoughts, his sinister suggestions did not sit well with me. I mumbled something about pirates, real pirates, having been quashed long ago.
“Quashed? I’d say flourishing. Try the South China Sea, or Indonesia, or the Red Sea, for that matter. Not to mention long stretches of coast around Central and South America. I still allow a ten-mile offing on the north coast of Jamaica, and lots of other places, too. Yachts are such tempting little morsels, so easily taken by surprise. You kill the crew. Sink the boat. No evidence. Just another little sailboat gone missing. Happens all the time, bloodier than ever.” He brooded. “It’s not like the old days. No more Tom Whites. No mercy anymore, because you can’t afford to leave witnesses or evidence.”
“And do you really think Mathew’s friends are pirates?”
He shrugged. “Not everybody shares your own gentle scruples.” This was a direct reference to Roseway Bay, where I had cast my vote not to rob Cock Tails. In fact, he had cast my vote for me, as I was chewing my fingernails, trying to make up my mind. (“If you have to think about it so much, the answer’s no.”) Instead, we had launched the dinghy, and used a quart of red paint writing I AM VERY CARELESS, in two-foot letters all along the yacht’s starboard bow, and WATCH OUT FOR ME on the opposite side. Satisfying as that prank had been, it had left me feeling puny, thinking of what else we might have done. The whole thing had left me not wanting to talk about it. Nor did I want to discuss Mathew anymore, so I changed the subject, asking him about the moves he had used to dispose of the men in the alley.
“Thrust and cut. Then there’s the parry,” he said, “which I didn’t need last night.” This led to a demonstration on deck, both of us with batten-sticks of cutlass length. “Nine out of ten opponents can be taken out with the first move, because you wait until they start to swing, and they’re exposed; if you strike them with a straight thrust, they’re goners before anything can start. So much for Mr. Quarter, who can be grateful it was only a walking stick. As to Mr. Dollar, that villain was open to a backhand cut. Think in terms of balance and breath.” Demonstrations and practice went on until noon, after which I was allowed to handle his real cutlass, getting used to its live weight. I was surprised to learn there was very little clanging and whanging of swords, as in the movies.
“Can’t think—goes too fast. Now, do it again.” And so I did, until I worked up a sweat in the still heat of the afternoon. I wanted to take a dip overside after he dismissed the lesson, inviting him to come along.
“There’s big fishes down there,” he said, adjusting his spectacles on his nose, and taking up his macramé. I returned to find him absorbed in his work. “With another week or two, I’ll finish this,” he said, tying off one more tiny knot in the mosaic of twines with which he was sheathing the rounded rum bottle. He had been at it forever, and had come to its bottom; scores of strings hung from it like a beard, waiting to be braided into the whole.
“This is the trickiest part,” he commented. “Losing the ends, y’see. You’ve got all these hundreds of little twines, and then you must lose their ends, so there’s no hint of one in sight when you’re all done.” He sighed. “When I can do that perfectly, maybe then I can rest.”
“Rest?”
“Retire. Swallow the anchor. No more pottering about on this old world’s oceans, doin’ whatever a chap has to do to make ends meet to keep his independence, like, so�
��s he can bury his ends. My little strings. Pour me a rum.”
“How many years have you been sailing?” I asked, handing it up to him.
“How long can you count?”
“How long do I have to be able to?” This got a flicker of amusement from him.
“Good lad. Well done. Honest answer? I’m like the Flying Dutchman.”
“You are saying you are the Flying Dutchman?”
He chuckled. “Call us shipmates. I last hoisted a jar of punch with old Van der Decken off Sumatra, in ’95 I think. Not a bad chap. A bit gloomy at times. Can’t blame him, really, because when they tell you that you’ve got to keep sailing forever, well, that’s a bloody long time, mate.” He took a swallow of rum. “And when they give you the sentence, they don’t hand you some magical way to support yourself, either, so there you are, back on your own.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“My own thoughts, I think, but what’s to be trusted?” He laughed, turning back to weaving his tiny knots. “Don’t worry,” he added with a wink, “nothing’s as it seems.”
I watched him at his work, trying again to collect my thoughts regarding him, with no more success than any of the previous times I’d tried. Every time he started to make me believe something about himself, he would dispel it with a wink; on the instant I came to some judgement about him, he did something to shatter it. There was no question that he had blown me out of my personal doldrums, and the inn, too, and had become well regarded in Grey Rocks, and there was all of that. But I knew other sides of him. Aside from being a thief, at least a petty one, he was an actor beyond Meg’s most fearsome suspicions—seldom a liar, but a master manipulator of the truth, and of people.
“We gave all those dealers good value, y’know,” he said, as though reading my mind. “They’ll be a bit put out when they learn how much pewter is suddenly about, but they’ll make their dollar on what they got from us, you can trust me on that. Watch out, here comes a big wake.” A moment later, the waves from a tour boat slammed into us, making Merry bounce and roll.
As to trusting him, I realised that I trusted him because I wanted to trust him, with no more idea than ever as to whom I was trusting. I had come to the notion that he was probably the most dangerous man I had ever known, and for sure the scariest. The risks that attended him didn’t begin to touch a dark depth of him that I think I sensed all the time, twice glimpsing it through the fathomless holes where his eyes should have been. I had no idea what that meant, but it was very disturbing.
“What do you want from me?” I heard myself ask him out loud. It was a pure blurt, taking me more by surprise than him. He glanced up with a puzzled smile.
“Why, the pleasure of your company, Jim, what else? We’re shipmates.” This was so innocent, I was immediately flustered by my own rudeness. He scratched the top of his head, dislodging the flapped bandanna he wore to keep sun off the small bald spot there. “I suppose it would oblige me if you’d read my book, and put to rest whatever questions you’ve got left about pirates. We never finished with that. I presume you do have a question or two?” I did, first to mind being how a society of freebooters could enforce its own laws. By what judicial system? He commanded me to fetch his copy of Johnson. I did as I was told, mentioning I hadn’t finished the chapter on Bartholomew Roberts. “Right,” he said, opening the yellowed pages. “Well, old Roberts, for all of his many virtues . . .”
“Virtues? Didn’t he take over four hundred ships?”
“Just so, a very considerable virtue in our circles. And he let lots of his captures go, which was kindly. He was a frightfully Christian chap, who wanted a proper, resident clergyman aboard. He finally took an English ship that had one, and tried everything to persuade the parson to sail with him. When he didn’t, Roberts honoured that, gave him money, and let him go on his way.
“In any case, for all of his virtues, Roberts was an absolute sod of a navigator, so he forced the first mate off one of his captures, good navigator named Harry Glasby, and kept him. Hard cheese for Glasby. Being a navigator didn’t get you the same option to decline that Roberts gave clergymen. Glasby was a reserved, sober sort, and he had a great disinclination to that life, so he bided his time, then jumped ship while they were at anchor off an island where he thought he might be able to make a good escape. He and two others ran, but they didn’t get far. The penalty for desertion was death. So here’s what happened when they brought ’em back aboard.” The captain found the page he was looking for, adjusted his spectacles, and read:
“This was a capital offence, and for which they were ordered to be brought to an immediate trial.
“Here was the form of justice kept up, which is as much as can be said of several other courts that have more lawful commissions for what they do. Here was no seeing of council, and bribing of witnesses was a custom not known among them; no packing of juries, no torturing and wresting the sense of the law, for by ends and purposes, no puzzling or perplexing the cause with unintelligible canting terms, and useless distinctions; nor was their sessions burdened with numberless officers, the ministers of rapine and extortion, with ill-boding aspects, enough to fright Astrea from the court.
“The place appointed for their trials was the steerage of the ship; in order to which, a large bowl of rum punch was made, and placed upon the table, the pipes and tobacco being ready, the judicial proceedings began; the prisoners were brought forth, and articles of indictment against them read; they were arraigned upon a statute of their own making, and the letter of the law being strong against them, and the fact plainly proved, they were about to pronounce sentence, when one of the judges moved that they should first smoke the other pipe; which was accordingly done.
“All the prisoners pleaded for arrest of judgement very movingly, but the court had such an abhorrence of their crime that they could not be prevailed upon to show mercy, till one of the judges, whose name was Valentine Ashplant, stood up, and taking his pipe out of his mouth, said he had something to offer to the court in behalf of one of the prisoners; and spoke to this effect, ‘By God, Glasby shall not die; damn me if he shall.’ After this learned speech he sat down in his place, and resumed his pipe. This motion was loudly opposed by all the rest of the judges, in equivalent terms, but Ashplant, who was resolute in his opinion, made another pathetical speech in the following manner. ‘God damn ye, gentlemen, I am as good a man as the best of you; damn my soul if ever I turned my back to any man in my life, or ever will by God; Glasby is an honest fellow, notwithstanding this misfortune, and I love him, double-damn me if I don’t: I hope he’ll live and repent of what he has done; but damn me if he must die, I will die along with him.’ And thereupon, he pulled out a pair of pistols, and presented them to some of the learned judges upon the bench who, perceiving his argument so well supported, thought it reasonable that Glasby should be acquitted; and so they all came over to his opinion, and allowed it to be law.”
The captain paused to wet his whistle. “A neat piece of work, eh? Glasby was a good bloke, right enough, and deserved saving; the procedure might have been a bit odd, but you could say fair, for all of that.” I asked what had happened to Glasby’s two friends. He finished his reading.
“But all the mitigation that could be obtained for the other prisoners, was that they should have the liberty of choosing any four of the whole company to be their executioners. The poor wretches were tied immediately to the mast, and there shot dead . . .”
He snapped the book closed, and smiled at me. I said I felt sorry for the other two prisoners. He shrugged. “Well, the rules are the rules, wherever you go. Which court would you rather stand before, Glasby’s, or the high court of the land in London that tried Kidd, with judges in robes and powdered wigs? Remember, they’re the sods who kept him in irons for two years, then gave him a lawyer two hours before his trial, but didn’t hand him back the documents he needed to make his case, or let him have any witnesses. Then he got to enjoy being displayed like an animal for a
couple of more weeks, ’til they strung him up. At least Glasby’s mates got a fair hearing and a quick end.”
Shooting was the favoured form of execution among the brotherhood, according to my mentor, who considered it more merciful than any of the methods used by governments. “The officials hung you slow, or they could draw and quarter you if you had really niggled them, or break your bones on the wheel, or whip you to death, or do any number of other things that produced a lingering that one would rather avoid.”
“What happened to Roberts and Glasby?”
“Roberts sailed for the Guinea coast, and his luck held until he took on a Royal Navy ship. There was a hot action; in the middle of it, he took a grapeshot through his neck, which did him in, and old Glasby seizes the chance to lower the colours, and that was that. He surrendered ’em. There was a big trial; most of the company, including Ashplant, got turned off in 1722, but the court let Glasby go free. Here’s to Harry,” he toasted.
The brotherhood’s alternative to a death sentence was marooning, which I knew about, but not in the depth of detail that he presented to me as the windless afternoon wore on. According to his stories, there were various levels of the punishment, all having to do with just putting somebody ashore, usually not in an inhabited place. In the most severe circumstances, it would be somewhere without food, water, supplies, or escape, barring a miracle. At the gentlest, it would be a place with everything needed to sustain life, and the maroon would be allowed to take weapons, tools, even cooking gear.
“That was the case with Alexander Selkirk, most famous maroon in history; as to cooking gear, let’s you think about supper.” And so he wove macramé while I got the stove going. (He wanted bacon, eggs, beans, and bread, and he wanted the bread carefully toasted, lightly buttered, with a slab of cheese on the side, and a beer.) As I was finishing, he called down to me.
The Brotherhood of Pirates Page 26
