Captain Crossbones

by Donald Barr Chidsey

  The sun was very strong, and the sand was light and bright, fiercely reflecting it. The clamor at the gate died, nobody having ventured out after him, for all their brazen fury. Still George did not turn, nor did he look directly at the men he approached.

  They must have seen him emerge from the fort, and they were silent, no doubt watching him, probably not sure, because of the glare, of his identity. Not until he was halfway to them did they recognize him, and then they set up a great shout and started to run at him.

  Here it comes, he told himself. But he kept his eyes open.

  He stopped, and drew, and put himself into guard position, moving with a deliberate, feline, almost scornful grace.

  It was not until then that he really looked at the men who were racing toward him.

  Their mouths were open, as he had expected, but not to yell in rage, only to cheer. If their arms were raised it was in welcome, not menace. They were overcome with joy at seeing him. They gibbered.

  He swallowed, and lowered his point. An instant later he was engulfed by men who slapped his shoulders, slapped his back, pumped his hand, and fairly wept with relief and happiness—not only Tom Walker, not only Si Simonson and Ezra Garde, but all of them.

  “Gawd bless ye, cap’n sir!”

  “We thought you was dead!”

  “Did they harm you here? We’ll rip the place to pieces!”

  They all talked, babbled rather, at the same time. George never did get a clear picture of what had happened the night he and Delicia left the sloop. Seemingly Rackham, while his doxy was engaged in repriming her pistol, had been smitten with an idea Calculating that he himself would be better off if George was gone, and fearing that George, if brought back, might defy him to his face, splitting the gang, he had not given an alarm. Later, however, he reported that he was sure George and Delicia had escaped in the Moses-boat. He had given no reason for this conviction, nor had Anne Bonney. They were all puzzled and suspicious, and among George’s followers the belief grew that Calico Jack had somehow contrived secretly to sell out George, turning him over to the authorities at Fort Nassau—or at least tricking him into going there under false pretenses, knowing that he’d be nabbed. Perhaps Miss Rogers had been a bribe? They couldn’t explain it, but neither could Rackham, who waxed evasive. There had been a council. There had almost been a fight, the gang being divided between pro-Rackham and pro-Rounsivel men. In one thing only were they agreed—that they should proceed at once to New Providence.

  The meeting with Vane’s Revenge had been pure chance, but it was no coincidence that Vane was planning to do the same thing they were planning to do, and it wasn’t difficult for them both to agree to work together in the assault, burying their differences at least until fort and town had been taken.

  It was at this point that George’s friends had stepped forward to declare that they weren’t willing to take part in any attack on the fort if Captain Rounsivel was in it. They proposed to land near there with a flag, and have a parley, insisting that they at least be permitted to see George, to learn that he was alive. Rackham, no doubt glad to get rid of the dissidents even at the price of a longboat, and secure in the belief that the balance of his force, combined with that of Charles Vane, could take Fort Nassau, had agreed to this.

  “He’d’ve had a tussle on his hands if he’d done anything less,” Walker said.

  George was sincerely touched. There were tears in his eyes as he thanked them, and he insisted on shaking hands all the way around once more, a sight that must have astonished them in the fort.

  “But I will tell you that I left of my own accord. I shouldn’t have done that. I should have taken you into my confidence and explained how I felt about Delicia—about my wife.”

  “How did Jack know this?”

  “Guessed it, I guess. He tried to stop us, but we got away anyway.”

  “He didn’t tell us that!”

  “It would have made him look foolish.”

  “But . . . are you all right, cap’n sir? How did they come to let you out like this? Ain’t they making to hang you?”

  “No,” George said thoughtfully. “No, they won’t hang me.”

  “They hanged Cunningham and Augur and—”

  “I know, but those men had taken amnesty and then foresworn it.”

  “Taken what?”

  “The King’s pardon. The Captain-General isn’t a blood-thirsty man. But he hates to be hoodwinked, as Augur and the others tried to do. But I didn’t. I’ll get a pardon. So will you, if you only ask for it properly. Why not? You must be sick of petty pickings. And the Carolina coast’s closed now. But they need men here. Seafaring men. Gunners like you, Tom. Navigators like Ezra.”

  “With our record—”

  “Good God, Woodes Rogers has fought with pirates as much as he’s ever fought against them. D’ye think he’s a man to be finicky about anybody’s record, out here? Look at Tom Cockran. Look at Ben Hornigold. Each one’s master of his own vessel now, and he was allowed to keep everything he had. You would be too—so long as you haven’t taken the King’s pardon and then broken your word. You didn’t, did you?”

  They had not. For one reason or other—absence from the island at the time, skepticism, fear that though they might go unhanged all their property would be taken—these men never had announced themselves to be on the side of law and order.

  “Then that’s all right,” cried George. “And you’ve got your money. What can you lose?”

  “Our lives. If Vane and Rackham take the fort.”

  “If you’ll fight with us they won’t take it.”

  “Cap’n sir, we trust you, sure. But how do we know we can trust this Governor Rogers?”

  “I’ll give you my life on it.”

  As they wavered, he went gleefully to work. He appealed to each individually: brought out with no trouble that they were indeed sick of a pirate’s life and that the high times were past, the big prizes gone for good. They might have quit piracy ere this, had they trusted anybody on the opposite side. They hadn’t even known, as a certainty, that any other existence was open to them. But George told them so. Attorney Rounsivel from Philadelphia told them so.

  “What’s more, you’ll be in the service of the colonial government, and no warship will ever dare to press you.”

  “But look here: You’re so sure you could get us pardons. How? That proclamation said the King’s pardon would run out January 5, and here it is almost March.”

  “Nonsense! Haven’t you ever heard of a gubernatorial writ of nunc pro tunc?”

  “No.”

  “Neither had I, until just now. I made it up. But the Governor-General doesn’t know that, and he’s the law in this part of the world. They won’t know it in London either, but they’ll never admit that. And it will hold.”

  “Oh?”

  “Such a writ would be retroactive, of course.”

  “It would?”

  “Surely. In the very nature of it.”

  “But . . . what is it, this nunky-tunk thing?”

  “Authority for the governor in his capacity of military commander to extend for not more than sixty days the provisions of the King’s pardoning proclamation, provided he has good reasons to do so and believes it to be in the best interests of the colony and the Crown, especially the Crown.”

  “And the governor don’t have any such right, the way things stand now?”

  “No. But he doesn’t know that. You have no notion how uncertain he is of his own powers. It’s his inclination in those circumstances to do what he thinks best and let the legalisms fall where they may. He’s no fool, Woodes Rogers! He’ll want to believe in this beautiful privilege of nunc pro tunc that I have invented. And when a man wants to believe in anything hard enough you can always make him believe it, if only your Latin holds out. Come along. We’ll put it up to him. You’ve got a flag anyway. You have nothing to fear.”

  Ezra Garde said: “Here comes Vane now. And Rackham’ll be right b
ehind him. They’re going to start a bombardment.”

  Across low flat Hog Island they could make out the top hamper of the Revenge brig, getting closer. It had been seen elsewhere. Back of the town the hills were straked with refugees who would wait for the blow.

  “Come on,” said George. “You want to be under cover when the shooting starts, don’t you?”

  They started for the fort. There was a cough, smoke, and not thirty feet before them a spear of sand rose, scattered, and fell fluttering.

  “I thought you said they would welcome us? Is that how?”

  George was furious. In his excitement he had not sheathed but had been slapping the flat of the rapier against his thigh as he walked. Now he shook the thing at the fort. He ran there.

  “Damn you, Robinson! These men are carrying a flag! You can’t shoot at a parley flag!”

  The captain of the guard, wherever he was, was given no chance to answer. The governor had appeared at the tower room window, his niece behind him. In that curiously high, effeminate voice the governor called down.

  “Who are these men, Rounsivel, and what do they want?”

  “They’re my friends, and they want to fight for the fort!”

  “How do we know they won’t turn against us, once they inside?”

  “Damn it, didn’t I say they were my friends?”

  The governor nodded gravely.

  “Very well,” he called. “Robinson, throw that gate open.”

  CHAPTER XX

  THEIR BATTLEFIELD was the pellucid water of the bay. The pirates with their two vessels dominated but made no try to sack the town, knowing from experience that it wouldn’t be worth the trouble. Instead they came to a point opposite the fort, though a good distance away, and anchored there, John and Elizabeth, the nearer, being bow-to, while Revenge took up a berth behind her and safely out of reach. Thus they could bring to bear only a single gun, but that was the best they had, the long brass twelve-pounder, Tom Walker’s joy, to which George once had been tied. John and Elizabeth, being slight of beam, offered a tiny target, while none of the fort’s pieces could menace the brig beyond it or do much to delay communication between the vessels or between either of them and the shore. So it was that the air over the greater part of Nassau Bay at any given day-light hour was likely to be loud with the whine of cannon-balls, which, when they fell short, as many did, would raise geysers of water, or, worse, would ricochet, hissing, spewing spray.

  Any artillery man in his right mind, given a choice between land and the deck of a vessel from which to fire a gun repeatedly, with no hesitation would plump for the land. A vessel might rock. If she was free she might be drifting; if she was anchored she might drag her anchor, making it necessary to change calculations and aim. It was easier to build a solid emplacement on even the shiftiest land than on the largest and steadiest of ships. Fire was what the cannoneer most dreaded, and fire was closer than ever when your magazine was below your feet, encased in nothing but wood. On land the powder could be stored some distance away in a stone structure.

  At Nassau the situation was otherwise. The bay was a lake. The bottom was firm, and John and Elizabeth, with hooks down both fore and aft, was as steady as a rock. The platform Tom Walker had built was monumental, yet, like the rest of the forward part of John and Elizabeth, it offered almost nothing to hit, so that at least nine-tenths of the shooting they did from the fort was a waste of powder and iron. Merely hulling the sloop would not suffice. Several holes made within a short time, the last before the first could be plugged, might cause John and Elizabeth for a little while to dip at the bows; but they could be quickly repaired. The chances against such a series of hits, Tom glumly calculated, were about a thousand to one. The only thing that would surely knock that brass cannon out would be a direct hit upon its muzzle or its primer, and the chances against that were about a million to one—poor military odds.

  Powder arrangements were ingenious. The magazine a-board of the sloop was located far astern, where even a lucky shot from the fort could hardly get it, but it was apparent anyway that the pirates did not depend upon this. Instead they brought up powder as needed from the brig Revenge, anchored out of range. Their smallboats in making this transfer could pick the best times—immediately after a shot from the fort, during a rain squall, or of course at night.

  The pirates’ plan was clear and it was exceedingly simple—so simple indeed as to seem almost the work of a genius.

  “Is Vane as sharp as that?” George asked Si Simonson.

  “He’s marvelous sharp. Him and Rackham working together—if they will work together—they can think of all sorts of things.”

  Since it was clear that most of the shots from the fort were wasted, not even serving to intimidate those who worked the smallboats between the vessels, and since though powder was plentiful there was a limited supply of ball, firing from the fort was gradually reduced—a fact the pirates no doubt were quick to note. On the other hand, the brass twelve-pounder was fired with an infuriating regularity—once every four and a half minutes, Tom Walker estimated. This was lightning handling, which the big man could not help but admire. Tom wondered how they kept the barrel cool. Ezra Garde wondered how the foremast stayed upight under so many recoils.

  Virtually all of these shots took effect. Even the ones that fell short often skipped across the surface of the water to slam at least into the wooden palisade.

  Fort Nassau was roughly rectangular, and its corners were bastions constructed more or less after the Vauban style. On paper this was all very well; but more than paper would be needed to defend the fort. The wall was thick—much thicker at the bottom than at the top—but only about twelve feet high. Its lowness and gentle slope—a truly agile man, carrying no equipment, and given a good start, could almost have run up the outside of it—were the result of an absence of hard stone in the Bahamas. None having been obtainable from England, which preferred to ignore these small hot flat islands, the builders of Fort Nassau had perforce used the local stuff which though plentiful was soft, and dry. Whenever a ball plopped into it there rose from the point of impact a whiff of dust. The holes to some extent sealed themselves, the stuff was so crumby, but a large number of them soon weakened a section of wall, which had no core, no spine, to lend it strength.

  There was also a wooden palisade, six to seven feet high, made of poles set close together, bound with liana, and sharpened on the top. This was meant but to give pause to sallies. It was not cut for cannons or even muskets. It wasn’t towered, nor was there any fosse before it. Along the bay side, because of sand and tide, the palisade was especially vulnerable; it was there that it was being battered. Before the end of the first afternoon the palisade along the beach was little more than a fence of splinters, a line of jagged scarecrows. The balls from the twelve-pounder were ripping right through it, and over the place where the members of the Augur gang had been executed, to slam into the main wall, shuddering this. For a stretch of fully two hundred feet, wherever it wasn’t knocked out entirely, the mortar was being loosened. Sometimes a large round section of the outer shell of the wall, shaken loose by shock, would fall away without even having been directly hit.

  “It just gets tired,” Si Simonson remarked.

  Not all of the fighting went on between these two positions. There was some inside of the fort as well.

  The defenders at the time George brought the beach party in had numbered a little over two hundred. Somewhat more than half of these were civilians, who either had been employed strengthening the defenses or else had taken refuge in the fort at the first alarm. These ate more than their share of food, drank more than their share of water, and got in the way. They had only one possible use, and they failed in that, being cowardly. Formed into “patching parties,” they were supposed to climb outside of the wall on the shore side as soon as the sun had set and before the rise of the moon, and there replace dislodged stones, cram cement into opened seams, and otherwise, whether raised on t
emporary scaffolds or lowered in boatswains’ chairs, do what they could to repair the day’s damage. The pirates, however, had anticipated this defense, and the twelve-pounder was not silent all through the dark period but banged and flashed at irregular, unpredictable intervals, sometimes once an hour, sometimes once every ten minues. After the second night of this not even loaded pistols could force a civilian outside.

  The permanent defenders, ninety-odd, were almost as bad. Some were militiamen from the town, loafers who either had been empressed into the service or had enlisted because they could not make a living any other way. The rest, the majority, were the worst of all, being those wan sagging droopy super-annuated wretches-disguised-as-soldiers who had come over with Woodes Rogers last summer.

  In such surroundings the nineteen brethren of the coast George had brought in from the beach were sure to be marked. They wore no sort of uniform and didn’t pretend to discipline, but whatever they might not have been they were fighters They couldn’t keep the scorn from their eyes when they gazed upon the riffraff here collected under the leadership of Captain Robinson. They were an elite corps, and they knew it and acted it. They wouldn’t take orders from Robinson or even from the governor himself, but only from George. This amused Woodes Rogers, who knew that he could give his orders through George and be obeyed; but it infuriated Robinson, who passed many caustic comments about “Rounsivel’s private army.”

  The truth is, Thomas Robinson had turned sour. His clothes still were brave, his plume gleamed; but the bounce, the arrogance, were gone, leaving irascibility. Once he had smiled most of the time, though it was a supercilious smile Now he only scowled.

  In part this might have been the climate, to which, like most of the others, he was unaccustomed. In part no doubt it was discouragement in his task of training and leading such miserable somnambulists, over whom, to give him credit, he had worked hard. But the most part of Thomas Robinsons trouble was disappointment about Delicia.

  How he felt in his heart was of no immediate importance. Doubtless he liked and admired the governors niece—indeed it would have been difficult not to—but his first thought was for himself. His vanity had been pricked when the girl made it clear that she preferred George Rounsivel. Perhaps even more telling was the fact that by losing her he was losing his only chance to make a fortune, if a small one, out here.