‘I have not,’ said she downrightly in response to the astonished captain’s initial inquiry as to whether she had dined. ‘And,’ she added, ‘I should be glad to sit down with you at once, if that meets your convenience, sir. It is, as you may very well have surmised, a very deep and pressing matter upon which I have ventured to come to you. That, I should imagine, would best be discussed while we sit at table, and so without delay.’
Again the captain demonstrated his admirable manners. He merely bowed and led the way to the door of his dining room.
Once seated opposite Captain McMillin, Camilla Macartney again went straight to her point. The captain quite definitely forgot to eat in the amazing and immediate interest of what she proceeded to say.
‘I am offering the reward of a thousand English sovereigns for the apprehension at sea and the bringing to St Thomas for their trials of the freetrader, Fawcett, and his mates. It may very well be no secret to you, sir, that a member of our family is one of these men. I think that any comment between us upon that subject will be a superfluity. You will take note, if you please, that it is I, a member of our family, who offer the reward I have named for his apprehension. You will understand – everything that is involved.
‘Earlier this day it was proposed to me that I should sail away upon a ship without very much notice. I have come here to you, sir, on one of my father’s vessels – Captain Stewart, her commander, a trusted man in our employ, has accompanied me all the way to your door. He is here now, waiting in the hired calèche which I secured in Frederiksted for the drive here to your house. Perhaps you will be good enough to have some food taken to him.
‘I have come, Captain McMillin, in all this haste, actually to request you to do the same thing that I mentioned – you made me see, when you were our guest, that I could wholly rely upon you, sir. I am here to ask you, as a military man, to command the expedition which I am sending out. I am asking you to sail back with Captain Stewart and me for St Thomas – tonight.’
Captain McMillin looked at Camilla Macartney across the length of his glistening mahogany dining table. He had been listening very carefully to her speech. He rang his table bell now that he was sure she was finished, and when his serving man answered this summons, ordered him to prepare a repast for the waiting ship’s captain, and to send in to him his groom. Then, with a bow to his guest, and pushing back his chair and rising, he said: ‘You will excuse me, Miss Macartney, I trust, for the little time I shall require to pack. It will not occupy me very long.’
4
The story of how the Hyperion, newest and swiftest of all the Macartney vessels, was outfitted and armed for the pursuit and capture of Captain Fawcett is a little epic in itself. It would include among many details extant the intensive search among the shipping resources of St Thomas, for the swivelgun which, two days after Captain McMillin’s arrival on the scene, was being securely bolted through the oak timbers of the Hyperion’s afterdeck.
A surprisingly complete record of this extraordinary piece of activity survives among the ancient colonial archives. Perhaps the recording clerk of the period, in his Government House office, was, like everyone else in St Thomas, fascinated by the ruthless swiftness with which that job, under the impact of Camilla Macartney’s eye, was pushed through to a successful conclusion in precisely forty-eight hours. Nothing like this rate of speed had ever been heard of, even in St Thomas. The many men engaged in this herculean task at Pelman’s Shipyard worked day and night continuously in three eight-hour shifts.
It is significant that these shipwrights and other skilled artisans were all Negroes. They had assembled in their scores and dozens from every quarter of the widespread town, irrespective of age or the exactions of their current employment, from the instant that the grapevine route spread through the black population of the town the summons to this task which Camilla Macartney had quietly uttered in the ear of her butler, Jens Sorensen.
The Hyperion, under the command of her own officers but with the understanding that Captain McMillin was in sole charge of the expedition, came up with the Swallow a little under four days from the hour of her sailing out of St Thomas harbor.
Captain McMillin caught Fawcett at a vast disadvantage. The Swallow, very lightly manned at the moment, hung in stays, her riding sails flapping with reports like pistol shots as her graceful head was held into the wind. She lay some ten ship-lengths away to the leeward of an American merchant vessel about which the Swallow’s boats – now nine in number – were grouped, a single member of the crew in each. Fawcett and his two lieutenants, and nine-tenths of his crew of cut-throats, were ransacking their prize, whose officers, crew and passengers had been disposed of under nailed hatches. They appeared, indeed, to be so thoroughly occupied in this nefarious work as to have ignored entirely any preparations for meeting the Hyperion’s attack – a circumstance sufficiently strange to have impressed Captain McMillin profoundly.
The Hyperion’s officers, unable to account for this singular quiescence on the part of the pirates, attributed it to their probably failing to suspect that the Hyperion was anything but another trading vessel which had happened to blunder along on her course into this proximity. With a strange, quick gripping at the heart, quite new in his experience, Captain McMillin permitted himself to suspect, though for a brief instant only, that something of the strange power which he had glimpsed in his contacts with Camilla Macartney, might in some extraordinary fashion be somehow responsible for this phenomenon.
But this thought, as too utterly ridiculous for harborage in a normal man’s mind, he put away from him instanter.
The strategy of the situation appeared to be simple. And Captain McMillin formulated his plan of attack accordingly, after a brief consultation with his officers.
Realizing that there could be no effective gunnery from the handful of men in charge of the Swallow, Captain McMillin ordered a dozen men in charge of the Hyperion’s second mate over the side in the largest of the boats. The maneuver of dropping an already manned boat from the davits – a risky undertaking in any event – was handled successfully, an exceptionally quiet sea contributing to the management of this piece of seamanship.
This boat’s crew, all Negroes and all armed with the pistols and cutlasses which had been hastily served out to them, had no difficulty whatever in getting over the Swallow’s side and making themselves masters of the pirate vessel. The dozen Negroes had butchered the seven members of the pirate crew left on board the Swallow within forty seconds of their landing upon her deck, and Mr Matthews, the officer in charge of them, hauled down with his own hand the Jolly Roger which, true to the freetrading traditions of the Main, flaunted at the Swallow’s main peak.
The magnificent cooperation of the fifteen Negroes constituting the Hyperion’s deck crew made possible the next daring piece of seamanship which the Hyperion’s captain had agreed to attempt. This was Captain McMillin’s plan.
The Hyperion should lay alongside the American vessel, grapple to her and board – with all hands – from deck to deck. This idea, almost unheard of in modern sea warfare, had suggested itself as practicable in this instance to Captain McMillin, from his reading. Such had been the tactics of the antique Mediterranean galleys.
For the purpose of retaining the outward appearance of a simple trader, Captain McMillin had concealed the thirty-three additional members of his heavily armed crew, and these had not been brought on deck until he was almost ready to have the grapples thrown. These reserves now swarmed upon the Hyperion’s deck in the midst of a bedlam of shouts, yells and curses, punctuated by pistol shots, from the pirate crew on board their prize.
These were taken at a vast disadvantage. Their prize vessel was immobile. They had, for what appeared to Captain McMillin some inexplicable reason, apparently failed until the very last moment to realize the Hyperion’s intentions. Most of them were busily engaged in looting their prize. Under this process five of the Swallow’s nine boats had already been laden gunwale d
eep with the miscellaneous plunder already taken out of the American ship. Two of these laden small boats and two others of the Swallow’s nine were crushed like eggshells as the Hyperion closed in and threw her grappling hooks.
Then, in a silence new and strange in Captain McMillin’s previous experience in hand-to-hand fighting, his forty-eight black fighting men followed him over the rails and fell upon the pirates.
Within three minutes the American vessel’s deck was a shambles. Camilla Macartney’s black myrmidons, like militant fiends from some strange hell of their own, their eyeballs rolling, their white teeth flashing as they bared their lips in the ecstasy of this mission of wholesale slaughter, spread irresistibly with grunts and low mutterings and strange cries about that deck.
Not a member of the pirate crew escaped their ruthless onslaught. Hard skulls were split asunder and lopped arms strewed the deck, and tough bodies were transfixed, and the gasping wounded were trampled lifeless in the terrible energy of these black fighting men.
Then abruptly, save for a harsh sobbing sound from laboring panting lungs after their terrific exertion, a strange silence fell, and toward Captain McMillin, who stood well-nigh aghast over the utter strangeness of this unprecedented carnage which had just taken place under his eye and under his command, there came a huge, black, diffidently smiling Negro, his feet scarlet as he slouched along that moist and slippery deck, a crimson cutlass dangling loosely now from the red hand at the end of a red arm. This one, addressing the captain in a low, humble and deprecating voice, said – ‘Come, now, please, me Marster – come, please sar, see de t’ree gentlemahn you is tell us to sabe alive!’
And Captain McMillin, bemused, followed this guide along that deck slushed and scarlet with the life blood of those pulped heaps which had been Captain Fawcett’s pirate crew, stepped aft to where, behind the main deckhouse, three trussed and helpless white men lay upon a cleaner section of that vessel’s deck, under the baleful eye of another strapping black man with red feet and a naked red cutlass brandished in a red hand.
The Swallow, her own somewhat blood-soiled deck now shining spotless under the mighty holystonings it had received at the hands of its prize crew of twelve under command of the Hyperion’s second mate, the Danish flag now flying gaily from her masthead, followed the Hyperion into St Thomas harbor on the second day of September, 1825. The two vessels came up to their designated anchorages smartly, and shortly thereafter, and for the last time, Saul Macartney, accompanied by his crony, Captain Fawcett, and his colleague, the other pirate mate, was rowed ashore in the familiar longboat.
But during this short and rapid trip these three gentlemen did not, for once, occupy the sternsheets. They sat forward, their hands and feet in irons, the six oarsmen between them and Mr Matthews, the Hyperion’s mate, who held the tiller rope, and Captain the Honorable William McMillin, who sat erect beside him.
5
I have already recorded my first horrified reaction to the appearance of the handsome black-haired piratical mate whose painted arm my innocent thumbtack had penetrated. My next reaction, rather curiously, was the pressing, insistent, sudden impulse to withdraw that tack. I did so forthwith – with trembling fingers, I here openly confess.
My third and final reaction which came to me not long afterward and when I had somewhat succeeded in pulling myself together, was once more to get out my magnifying glass and take another good look through it. After all, I told myself, I was here confronted with nothing more in the way of material facts than a large-sized, somewhat crudely done and very old oil painting.
I got the glass and reassured myself. The ‘blood’ was, of course – as now critically examined, magnified by sixteen diameters – merely a few spattered drops of the very same vermilion pigment which my somewhat clever amateur artist had used for the red roofs of the houses, the foulards of the Negresses and those many gloriously flaming flower blossoms.
Quite obviously these particular spatters of red paint had not been in the liquid state for more than a century. Having ascertained these facts beyond the shadow of any lingering doubt in the field of every-day material fact, my one remaining bit of surviving wonderment settled itself about the minor puzzle of just why I had failed to observe these spots of ancient, dry, and brittle paint during the long and careful scrutiny to which I had subjected the picture the evening before. A curious coincidence, this – that the tiny red spots should happen to be precisely in the place where blood would be showing if it had flowed from my tack wound in that dangled painted arm.
I looked next, curiously, through my glass at the fellow’s face. I could perceive now none of that acutely agonized expression which had accentuated my first startled horror at the sight of the blood.
And so, pretty well reassured, I went back to my bedroom and finished dressing. And thereafter, as the course of affairs proceeded, I could not get the thing out of my mind. I will pass over any attempt at describing the psychological processes involved and say here merely that by the end of a couple of weeks or so I was in that state of obsession which made it impossible for me to do my regular work, or, indeed, to think of anything else. And then, chiefly to relieve my mind of this vastly annoying preoccupation, I began upon that course of investigatory research to which I have already alluded.
When I had finished this, had gone down to the end of the last bypath which it involved, it was well on in the year 1930. It had taken three years, and – it was worth it.
I was in St Thomas that season and St Thomas was still operating under the régime which had prevailed since the spring of 1917, at which time the United States had purchased the old Danish West Indies from Denmark as a war measure, during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson.
In 1930 our naval forces had not yet withdrawn from our Virgin Island Colony. The administration was still actively under the direction of his Excellency Captain Waldo Evans, U.S.N. Retired, and the heads of the major departments were still the efficient and personable gentlemen assigned to those duties by the Secretary of the Navy.
My intimate friend, Dr Pelletier, the pride of the U.S.N. Medical Corps, was still in active charge of the Naval Hospital, and I could rely upon Dr Pelletier, whose interest in and knowledge of the strange and outré beliefs, customs and practises of numerous strange corners of this partly civilized world of ours were both deep and, as it seemed to me, virtually exhaustive.
To this good friend of mine, this walking encyclopedia of strange knowledge, I took, naturally, my findings in this very strange and utterly fascinating story of old St Thomas. We spent several long evenings together over it, and when I had imparted all the facts while my surgeon friend listened, as is his custom, for hours on end without a single interruption, we proceeded to spend many more evenings discussing it, sometimes at the hospitable doctor’s bachelor dinner table and afterward far into those tropic nights of spice and balm, and sometimes at my house which is quite near the old T. L. Macartney mansion on Denmark Hill.
In the course of these many evenings I added to the account of the affair which had emerged out of my long investigation two additional phases of this matter which I have not included in my account as written out here because, in the form which these took in my mind, they were almost wholly conjectural.
Of these, the first took its point of departure from the depiction of the rope, as shown in the painting, with which Saul Macartney had been hanged. I have mentioned the painstaking particularity with which the artist had put in the minor details of the composition. I have illustrated this by stating that the seven traditional turns of the hangman’s knot were to be seen showing plainly under Captain Fawcett’s left ear. The same type of knot, I may add here, was also painted in laboriously upon the noose which had done to death Fawcett’s other mate.
But Saul Macartney’s rope did not show such a knot. In fact, it showed virtually no knot at all. Even under the magnifying glass a knot expert would have been unable to name in any category of knots the inconspicuous slight enlargement
at the place where Saul Macartney’s noose was joined. Another point about this rope which might or might not have any significance, was the fact that it was of a color slightly but yet distinctly different from the hemp color of the other two. Saul Macartney’s rope was of a faint greenish-blue color.
Upon this rather slight basis for conjecture I hazarded the following enlargement.
That Camilla Macartney, just after the verdict of the Danish Colonial High Court had become known to her – and I ventured to express the belief that she had known it before any other white person – had said in her quiet voice to her black butler, Jens Sorensen: ‘I am going to Ma Folie. Tonight, at nine o’clock precisely, Ajax Mendoza is to come to me there.’
And – this is merely my imaginative supplement, it will be remembered, based on my own knowledge of the dark ways of Vodoo – burly black Ajax Mendoza, capital executioner in the honorable employ of the Danish Colonial Administration, whose father, Jupiter Mendoza, had held that office before him, and whose grandfather, Achilles Mendoza (whose most notable performance had been the racking of the insurrectionist leader, Black Tancrède, who had been brought back to the capital in chains after the perpetration of his many atrocities in the St Jan Uprising of the slaves in 1733), had been the first of the line; that Ajax Mendoza, not fierce and truculent as he looked standing there beside the policemaster on Captain Fawcett’s gallow platform, but trembling, and cringing, had kept that appointment to which he had been summoned.
Having received his orders, he had then hastened to bring to Camilla Macartney the particular length of thin manila rope which was later to be strung from the arm of Saul Macartney’s gallows and had left it with her until she returned it to him before the hour of the execution; and that he had received it back and reeved it though its pulley with even more fear and trembling and cringings at being obliged to handle this transmuted thing whose very color was a terror and a distress to him, now that it had passed through that fearsome laboratory of ‘white missy who knew the Snake . . . ’
Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) Page 70
