Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural)

by Henry S. Whitehead

  Supported by his two mates, one of whom was a small, neat, carefully dressed fellow, and the other an enormous German who sported a cavalry-man’s moustache and walked truculently, Captain Fawcett proceeded directly aft, where he turned and faced forward, a mate on either side of him, and leaned against the superstructure of Captain Macartney’s cabin.

  Macartney’s mates, taking pattern from this procedure, walked over from the rail and flanked him where he stood just aft of the Hope’s foremast. The rest of the freebooters, having apparently been left free by their officers to do as they pleased for the time being, strolled about the deck looking over the vessel’s superficial equipment, and then gathered in little knots and groups about the eleven Negro members of the Hope’s crew.

  Through this intermingling the comparative silence which had followed their coming aboard began to be dissipated with raillery, various low-voiced sallies of crude wit at the Negroes’ expense, and an occasional burst of nervous or raucous laughter. All this, however, was carried on, as Captain Macartney took it in, in what was to him an unexpectedly restrained and quiet manner, utterly at variance with the reputed conduct of such a group of abandoned villains at sea, and to him, at least, convincing evidence that something sinister was in the wind.

  This expectation had its fulfilment at a harsh blast from the whistle which, at Fawcett’s nod, the huge German mate had taken from his pocket and blown.

  Instantly the pirates closed in and seized those members of the Hope’s Negro crew who stood nearest them; several, sometimes five or six, men crowding in to overpower each individual. Five or six of the pirates who had been as though without purpose near the forward hatchway which led below decks began forthwith to knock out the wedges. The Hope’s Negroes, with a unanimity which bespoke the excellent discipline and strategy which Fawcett was generally understood to maintain, were hustled forward and thrust into the forecastle; the hatch of which, as soon as they were all inside, was forthwith closed tight and at once nailed fast by the undersized little Englishman who was Fawcett’s ship’s carpenter.

  None of the Hope’s crew had been armed. None seemed to Captain Macartney to have been even slightly injured in the course of this rough and effective handling. Captain Macartney surmised, and rightly, that the pirates’ intention was to preserve them alive either for ultimate sale into slavery, which was of course then extant throughout the West India Islands, or, perhaps, to convey them as shore servants to Fawcett’s settlement which, it was generally believed, was well in the interior of the island of Andros in the Bahama group, where a network of interlacing creeks, rendering anything like pursuit and capture well-nigh out of the question, had made this private fastness a stronghold.

  But Captain Macartney had little time to waste thinking over the fate of his crew. With perhaps a shade less of the roughness with which the Negroes had been seized he and his mates were almost simultaneously surrounded and marched aft to face their captors. It seemed plain that the usual choice was to be given only to the three of them.

  Fawcett did not hesitate this time. He looked at the three men standing before him, lowered his head, relaxed his burly figure and barked out –

  ‘Ye’ll join me or go over the side.’

  He pointed a dirty finger almost directly into the face of the older mate, who stood at his captain’s right hand.

  ‘You first,’ he barked again. ‘Name yer ch’ice, and name it now.’

  The hard-bitten New Hampshire Yankee stood true to the traditions of an honest sailorman.

  ‘To hell with ye, ye damned scalawag,’ he drawled, and spat on the deck between Captain Fawcett’s feet.

  There could be but one reply on the part of a man of Fawcett’s heady character to such an insult as this. With a speed that baffled the eye the great pistol which hung from the right side of his belt beneath the flap of his fine broad-cloth coat was snatched free, and to the accompaniment of its tearing roar, its huge ounce ball smote through the luckless Yankee’s forehead. As the acrid cloud of smoke from this detonation blew away Captain Macartney observed the huge German mate lifting the limp body which, as though it had been that of a child, he carried in great strides to the nearer rail and heaved overboard.

  Fawcett pointed with his smoking weapon at Macartney’s other mate, a small-built fellow, originally a British subject from the Island of Antigua. The mate merely nodded comprehendingly. Then – ‘The same as Elias Perkins told ye, ye blasted swab, and may ye rot deep in hell.’

  But Fawcett’s surly humor appeared to have evaporated, to have discharged itself in the pistoling of the other man whose scattered brains had left an ugly smear on the Hope’s clean deck. He merely laughed and, with a comprehensive motion of his left hand, addressed the larger of his mates, who had resumed his position at his left.

  ‘Take him, Franz,’ he ordered.

  The huge mate launched himself upon the Antiguan like a ravening beast. With lightning-like rapidity his enormous left arm coiled crushingly about the doomed man’s neck. Simultaneously, his open right hand against his victim’s forehead, he pushed mightily. The little Antiguan’s spine yielded with an audible crack and his limp body slithered loosely to the deck. Then with a sweeping, contemptuous motion the huge mate grasped the limp form in one hand, lifting it by the front of the waistcoat and, whirling about, hurled it with a mighty pitch far outboard.

  The German mate had not yet resumed his place beside Fawcett when Captain Saul Macartney addressed the pirate leader.

  ‘I’m joining you, Captain,’ he said quietly.

  And while the surprised Fawcett stared at him the newly enlisted freebooter, who had been Captain Saul Macartney of the schooner Hope, with a motion which did not suffer by comparison with Fawcett’s for its swiftness, had produced a long dirk, taken the two lightning strides necessary for an effective stroke, and had plunged his weapon with a mighty upward thrust from under the ribs through the German mate’s heart.

  Withdrawing it instantly, he stooped over the sprawled body and wiped the dirk’s blade in a nonchalant and leisurely manner on the dead ruffian’s fine cambric shirt frill. As he proceeded to this task he turned his head upward and slightly to the left and looked squarely in the eye the stultified pirate captain who stood motionless and staring in his surprise at this totally unexpected feat of his newest recruit. From his crouching position Saul Macartney spoke, quietly and without emphasis –

  ‘Ye see, sir, I disliked this larrikin from the minute I clapped eyes on him and I’ll call your attention to the fact that I’m a sound navigator, and – ’ Saul Macartney smiled and showed his handsome teeth – ‘I’ll ask your notice preliminary to my acting with you aft that it might equally well have been yourself that I scragged, and perhaps that’ll serve to teach ye the manner of man that you’re now taking on as an active lieutenant!’

  Then Saul Macartney, his bantering smile gone now, his Macartney mouth set in a grim line, his cleansed dirk held ready in his sound right hand, stood menacingly before Captain Fawcett, their breasts almost touching, and in a quarter-deck voice inquired: ‘And will ye be taking it or leaving it, Captain Fawcett?’

  3

  It was more than two months later when the Hope, her hull now painted a shining black, her topmasts lengthened all round by six feet, her spread of canvas vastly increased, eight carronade ports newly cut along her sides, and renamed the Swallow, entered the harbor of St Thomas, dropped her anchor and sent over her side a narrow long-boat.

  Into this boat, immediately after its crew of six oarsmen had settled down upon their thwarts and laid their six long sweeps out upon the harbor water, interested onlookers observed two officers descend over the Swallow’s side, where they occupied the sternsheets together. As the boat, rowed man-o’-war style, rapidly approached the wharves it was observed by those on shore that the two men seated astern were rather more than handsomely dressed.

  The shorter and heavier man wore a fine sprigged long coat of English broadcloth with lapels, a
nd a laced tricorn hat. His companion, whose appearance had about it something vaguely familiar, was arrayed in an equally rich and very well tailored, though somewhat plainer, coat of a medium blue which set off his handsome figure admirably. This person wore no hat at all, nor any shade for his head against the glare of the eleven o’clock sun save a heavy crop of carefully arranged and naturally curly hair as black as a crow’s wing.

  So interesting, indeed, to the loungers along the wharves had been the entrance of this previously unknown vessel into the harbor and the subsequent coming ashore of these two fine gentlemen, that a considerable knot of sightseers was already assembled on the particular jetty toward which the longboat, smartly rowed, came steadily closer and closer. The hatless gentleman, who was by far the taller and handsomer of the two, appeared to be steering, the taut tiller ropes held firmly in his large and very shapely hands.

  It was the Herr Rudolph Bernn, who had observed the crowd collecting on the jetty through the open windows of his airy shipping office close at hand, and who had clapped on his pith sun helmet and hastened to join the group, who was the first to recognize this taller officer.

  ‘Gude Gott! If id iss nod der Herr Captain Saul Macartney. Gude Gott, how dey will be rejoiced – Oldt Macartney andt de Miss Camilla!’

  Within five minutes the rapidly approaching longboat had been laid aside the pier head in navy style. Without any delay the two gentlemen, whose advent had so greatly interested the St Thomas harbor watchers, stepped ashore with an air and mounted the jetty steps side by side. At once Saul Macartney, whose fine clothes so well became him, forged ahead of his well dressed, shaved and curled companion. He wore the dazzling smile which revealed his magnificent teeth and which had served to disarm every woman upon whom it had been consciously turned since his eighth year or thereabouts.

  Like a conquering hero this handsome young man – who had taken clearance from the South American port of Barranquilla nearly three months before and subsequently disappeared into thin air along with his vessel and all hands off the face of the waters – now stepped jauntily across the jetty toward the welcoming group whose numbers were, now that the news of his homecoming was beginning to trickle through the town, constantly increasing. He was instantaneously surrounded by these welcoming acquaintances who sought each to outdo his neighbor in the enthusiastic fervency of his congratulatory greetings.

  During this demonstration the redoubtable and notorious Captain Fawcett stood quietly looking on through its milling course, a sardonic smile faintly relieving the crass repulsiveness of his maimed countenance. The pirate had been ‘shaved to the blood’ that morning; dressed for the occasion with the greatest care. His carefully arranged locks were redolent of the oil of Bergamot, filched a week before out of the accessories of a lady passenger taken from the luckless vessel on which she had been coming out to the West Indies to join her planter husband. This lady had, after certain passing attentions from Saul Macartney, gone over the Swallow’s side in plain sight of the volcanic cone of Nevis, the island of her destination.

  That Macartney had brought Captain Fawcett ashore with him here in St Thomas was a piece of judgement so lamentably bad as to need no comment of any kind. His doing so initiated that swift course of events which brought down upon his handsome head that ruinous doom which stands, probably, as unique among the annals of retribution; that devasting doom which, for its horror and its strangeness, transcends and surpasses, in all human probability, even the direst fate, which, in this old world’s long history, may have overtaken any other of the sons of men.

  But the sheer effrontery of that act was utterly characteristic of Saul Macartney.

  In the course of the long, painstaking, and probably exhaustive research which I, Gerald Canevin, set in motion in order to secure the whole range of facts forming the basis of this narrative – an investigation which has extended through more than three years and has taken me down some very curious by-paths of antique West Indian history as well as into contact with various strange characters and around a few very alluring corners of research – one aspect of the whole affair stands out in my mind most prominently. This is the fact that – as those many who nowadays increasingly rely for guidance upon the once discredited but now reviving science of astrology would phrase it – Saul Macartney was in all ways ‘a typical Sagittarian’!

  One of the more readily accessible facts which I looked up out of ancient, musty records in the course of this strange affair was the date of his birth. He had been born in the city of St Thomas on the twenty-eighth of November, in the year 1795. He was thus twenty-nine – in his thirtieth year and the full vigor of his manhood – at the time when Captain Fawcett had captured the Hope and, having lightened that vessel by emptying her hold of her cargo which he consigned to the sea, and having scuttled his own disabled vessel, had sailed for his home base among the Andros creeks.

  From there a month later the transformed Swallow had emerged to maraud upon the Spanish Main. He was not yet out of his twenties when he had chosen to tempt fate by coming ashore with Fawcett in St Thomas. He was still short of thirty when a certain fateful day dawned in the month of September, 1825.

  True to this hypothetical horoscope of his and to every sidereal circumstance accompanying it, Saul Macartney was an entirely self-centered person. With him the ‘main chance’ had always been paramount. It was this addiction to the main chance which had caused him to join Fawcett. A similar motive had actuated him in the notable coup which had at once, because of its sheer directness and the courage involved in it, established him in the high esteem of the pirate captain. There had been no sentiment in his killing of the gigantic mate, Franz. He was not thinking of avenging his own faithful lieutenant whom that hulking beast had slain with his bare hands before his eyes a moment before he had knifed the murderer.

  His calculating sense of self-interest had been the sole motive behind that act. He could quite as easily have destroyed Fawcett himself, as he characteristically pointed out to that ruffian. He would have done so with equal ruthlessness save for his knowledge of the fact that he would have been overwhelmed immediately thereafter by Fawcett’s underlings.

  There is very little question but what he would have before very long succeeded to the command of the Swallow and the control of the considerable commerce in the slave trade and other similar illegitimate sources of revenue which went with the command of this piratical enterprise. He had already inaugurated the replacement of Captain Fawcett by himself in the esteem of that freebooter’s numerous following well before the refurbished Swallow had sailed proudly out upon her current voyage. His unquestionable courage and enormous gift of personality had already been for some time combining actively to impress the pirate crew. Among them he was already a dominating figure.

  Since well before he had attained manly maturity he had been irresistible to women. He was a natural fighter who loved conflict for its own sake. His skill with weapons was well-nigh phenomenal. In the prosecution of every affair which concerned his own benefit, he had always habituated himself to going straight to the mark. He was, in short, as it might be expressed, both with respect to women and the securing of his own advantage in general affairs, thoroughly spoiled by an unbroken course of getting precisely what he wanted.

  This steady impact of continuous success and the sustained parallel effect of unceasing feminine adulation had entrenched in his character the fatal conviction that he could do as he pleased in every imaginable set of conditions.

  The first reversal suffered in this unbroken course of selfish domination inaugurated itself not very long after he had stepped ashore with Captain Fawcett beside him. After ten minutes or so, Macartney gradually got himself free from the crowd of friends congratulating him there on the jetty.

  Stimulated as he always was by such adulation, highly animated, his Irish blue eyes flashing, his smile unabated, his selfish heart full to repletion of his accustomed self-confidence, he disentangled himself from the sti
ll increasing crowd and, with several bows and various wavings of his left hand as he backed away from them, he rejoined Fawcett, linked his right arm through the crook of the pirate captain’s left elbow and proceeded to conduct him into the town. Those fellows on the wharf were small fry! He would, as he smilingly mentioned in Fawcett’s ear, prefer to introduce the captain at once into a gathering place where he would meet a group of gentlemen of greater importance.

  They walked up into the town and turned to the left through the bustling traffic of its chief thoroughfare and, proceeding to the westward for a couple of hundred feet or so, turned in through a wide arched doorway above which, on its bracket, perched guardian-like a small gilded rooster. This was Le Coq d’Or, rendezvous of the more prosperous merchants of the flourishing city of St Thomas.

  A considerable number of these prosperous worthies were already assembled at the time of their arrival in Le Coq d’Or. Several Negroes under the direction of the steward of this club-like clearing house were already bringing in and placing on the huge polished mahogany table the planter’s punch, swizzles of brandy or rum, and sangaree such as always accompanied this late-morning assembly. It lacked only a minute or two of eleven, and the stroke of that hour was sacred at Le Coq d’Or and similar foregathering places as the swizzle hour. No less a personage than M. Daniell, some years before a refugee from the Haitian revolution and now a merchant prince here in the Danish colonial capital, was already twirling a carved swizzle stick in the fragrant iced interior of an enormous silver jug.

  But this hospitable activity, as well as the innumerable conversations current about that board, ceased abruptly when these city burghers had recognized the tall, handsome gentleman in blue broadcloth who had just stepped in among them. It was, indeed, practically a repetition of what had occurred on the jetty, save that here the corporate and individual greetings were, if anything, more intimate and more vociferous.