Captain Crossbones

by Donald Barr Chidsey

  He was frank about it.

  “Damn you, Rounsivel, she would have taken me, if only out of boredom, if you hadn’t come along.”

  George did not smile. He had no more love for Robinson than Robinson had for him, but he realized that since his return to Nassau he and Delicia, despite themselves, had been behaving like moonstruck idiots. There was no privacy at Fort Nassau. There were no grottos in which they could crouch, whispering, not any nooks to which they could retreat; there were no walks they could take down leafy lanes. In consequence, breathlessly excited to find themselves in love, they let off sly smiles seen by everybody, and sighs heard everywhere, or they brushed their hands together in passing, a gesture that never failed to bring a snigger from onlookers.

  “No doubt what you say is true,” George replied tonelessly.

  This was the fourth afternoon of the bombardment. They stood in the bailey or yard on the beach side, where they’d been examining holes in the pavement made by a few balls that sailed clear over the top of the wall. There was nobody else near at hand. Soldiers and civilians alike avoided this part of the yard, where there was always a chance of getting struck by flying chunks of stone when a ball walloped the wall near the top, spraying the air with shards.

  “No doubt it is, unless sir, you’re disposed to call me a liar?”

  “Oh, no,” George replied. “Don’t you think we’d better have these filled now, without waiting for night? When the attack comes it’ll be on this side and we’ll need every inch of level space we can get.”

  Robinson did not even look at the craters.

  “I am not a vindictive man,” he went on, “and under any other conditions I think I might have permitted you to live.”

  “Eh?”

  “I mean, I would ignore your challenge.”

  “I am not aware that I have challenged you, sir.”

  “Ain’t you, now? Yet I can remember three separate occasions when you backed away from a fight promising to give me satisfaction later.”

  “I do not take that to be a challenge.”

  “I do.”

  George shrugged, starting to turn away.

  “Please yourself. All I can say is that we are in the midst of a battle, which is no time for personal quarrels.”

  “That,” drawled Robinson, “is just the sort of answer I might have expected from you, you illegitimate son of an illegitimate mother.”

  George whirled, drawing.

  “Now, by God, you can’t—”

  Robinson too had drawn, swift as fight, and though he did back before that rush he was smiling again, for the first time in days, his teeth showing white behind his bright red lips. Crouching, his guard high, he slipped his steel over George’s hilt. It was as quick as the lick of a snake’s tongue. Robinson could have killed, in that split-second. He must have been afraid to go all the way in. Instead his point ripped a slit in George’s sleeve.

  George drove ahead, Robinson, smiling, sure of himself now, stood his ground.

  “Stop!”

  The voice should have been one of thunder. It wasn’t. It was a plaintive high baa-lamb sound, and coming from anybody else it would have been ridiculous. But it was the only voice these two would have obeyed.

  As though moved by one piece of mechanism, they stepped back, each lowering his point.

  Woodes Rogers hobbled into the space between them.

  “That will do, gentlemen! Put up!”

  Like scolded schoolboys they sheathed.

  “You will promise me, on your honor, that you will not fight one another within these walls again, no matter what the provocation.”

  Mumbling, shamefaced—after all, he could have clapped either or both of them into irons—they promised.

  “Very well, now come with me. I’ll give you something to take that belligerency out on.”

  He limped for the gate tower, and meekly they followed him. It wasn’t until they had reached the foot of the steps that George Rounsivel felt something tickle the palm of his right hand, and raised that hand to see blood.

  He looked at it a moment, blinking. A ball thumped the wall near its top, and chunks of stone flew, sprinkling the bailey, whilst languid dust rose. George gulped, amazed. Until this time he had not known that he was wounded. He wiped his hand on the seat of his breeches, and went upstairs.

  “Look!”

  A bony forefinger indicated the sloop, from which even at that moment a shot was fired, so that smoke all but blotted it from sight. It must have been a full hit, the ball burying itself in the wall, for even as this distance the men in the tower room could feel the floor shiver under their feet.

  They did not need to wait for the smoke to be blown away to see what the captain-general meant. The forepeak still was in sight, though it flew a different flag now. The red roger, which flapped there throughout the four days of the bombardment, had been run down, and the other, the black flag of death, had been raised.

  “Think of that, my merries, the next time you feel inclined to act like drunken rufflers in a tavern.”

  So many things had happened inside or barely outside of this window! Now the captain-general stood spread-legged before it, and he hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his waistcoat, and, flamingo-like, jerked his head out toward the bay. He belched thoughtfully.

  “They’ll come rowing in at night, either with the last can-nonshot or else just before the crack of dawn. And they’ll scramble over what little’s left, and then start to slash about. How long would you say, Robinson?”

  “The day after tomorrow, sir. Possibly one day longer.”

  “Um-m. It’s what I had figured. You, Rounsivel?”

  “I should say the same, sir.”

  “And—they have how many men?”

  Robinson said quickly: “You’d better ask this pirate, your excellency. He came from there.”

  “Very well,” not looking around. “Rounsivel?”

  “There should be twenty-four of the sloop’s crew, sir. All men, no boys. All armed.”

  “The brig?”

  “I have only the estimate of my men, who didn’t have a real chance to count. But . . . about forty.”

  “That is, we have almost twice their numbers of armed men. If they storm us, would they take us?”

  “Yes,” promptly.

  “You, Rounsivel?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  It was a rhetorical question, since there could be but one answer. A breach was a matter of hours; when the pirates came raging through, such was their reputation for ferocity, and such too was the terror inspired by that black jolly-roger, the fort would fall with a crash, almost without resistance, and slaughter would follow. Retreat, now or later, was out of the question. There was simply nowhere to go. Individual townsmen could scuttle back into the hills and hide away for a little while, but men with arms, uniformed men, would be ruthlessly pursued. This was a small island, and there was no forest, no jungle.

  To attack would be to invite disaster. Surprise, the very nut of such a tactic, was out of the question, for it would be impossible to collect the boats, most of them in or near the town, without being seen. Only small arms could be taken. All of the soldiers were poor boatmen, and most of them could not even swim.

  There was only one thing to be done; and Thomas Robinson glibly named it.

  “Cut out that gun.”

  George nodded agreement, and Woodes Rogers too nodded, though he still was staring at the black flag.

  “But how?” he said.

  Robinson shrugged.

  “Take a boat tonight, just a few men. Sneak aboard. Rush the gun and cut it free and roll it on its trucks to the side and over.”

  “There is one objection to that,” George interposed. “That cannon hasn’t got any trucks. It’s mounted on a solid platform, and it uses ordinary recoil pads, like a land gun. It is a land gun, practically. It isn’t laid to poke through a porthole.”

&n
bsp; “It’d unstep the foremast!”

  “It probably has. That’s a measure of their confidence. They’re willing to sacrifice a whole stick, which would cut speed in half, because they are so sure that they won’t run away and that they’ll have plenty of time later to repair the damage.”

  “There is another objection to Captain Robinson’s plan,” Woodes Rogers put in. “That’s shoal water over there, only a few fathoms. There are any number of men in town, spongers and pearlers, who could put a line around anything on that bottom. The water’s clear as glass. And with tackle, in a few hours they’d have the thing up again.”

  He turned to George.

  “You know the gun itself, you say?”

  “I should!”

  “Would it be easy to spike?”

  George was candid. He confessed that he wasn’t even sure what was meant by spiking a gun, but he offered to call Tom Walker.

  “Do that, please.”

  Robinson frowned, for here was another tacit admission of Rounsivel’s independent command, another passing-by of the garrison. Yet even Robison was obliged to concede that Tom Walker was superior as a gunner to the Fort Nassau man, a wizened nincompoop named Andrews. For these past four days Tom, out of sheer impatience and disgust, had taken over command of the fort’s pitiful battery.

  Now, having answered the summons, he stood before them, a moon-faced, immensely serious man.

  “Yes sir, it could be spiked. By two men, if they was spry.”

  “How?”

  “Well, you’d take three or four of those lead tompions we have that’re made for the muzzle of the ten-pounders, and put ’em in, one after the other. They’d fit, just about. Ram ’em home. Then take the fattiest marlinspike you can find and put it smacketty-dab into the touchhole, which is on top, and pound it in as hard as you can with a maul. Unless of course the thing was loaded. Then you wouldn’t put in the tompions first, because if you did and you got a spark from pounding the spike it would blow up everything, including you. But they’re not likely to leave it loaded.”

  “Wouldn’t that make a lot of noise?”

  “Aye.”

  “And two men could do it?”

  ‘One alone could, but that’d take longer.”

  “Of the two methods you described, if there was only time for one which would be better?”

  “The marlinspike. That gun’s old, and the touchhole always was too big. It must’ve got pitted around the edges. Anyway somebody’s worked an iron ring in there, to make the hole smaller, but that too was pretty badly pitted, last I saw it And it would be much worse now, after all that firing. A marlinspike properly banged in would make it twice as big, and that’d be so dangerous that you couldn’t get any gunner to come close to it with a linstock. I know I wouldn’t. Too much chance of getting a flare-back—burn your hair off, put your eyes out.”

  “Could it be repaired?”

  “Not with anything they’ve got on this island. Matter of fact, I doubt such a spiking could be repaired anywhere this side of Plymouth, sir.”

  “Thank you, Walker.” He turned to the others. “Now, the matter of a boat—”

  “The Moses-boat,” George said immediately. “It’s dark, it’s low, and it’s got short oars and the quietest thole pins you ever knew It’ll only hold three men, but that’s all that are needed ”

  “Good But it will be dangerous, this assignment. It’s one for volunteers. Do you have any such, Captain Robinson?”

  “Not a damned one. Most of my men, they couldn’t step on a cockroach without screaming. Even if you got ’em drunk they wouldn’t go out for a thing like this. But I’ll go, of course.”

  “Um-m . . . I’d be reluctant to lose so valuable a man.”

  “I shall make every effort to return, sir.”

  “Rounsivel, what about your group?”

  “Beg pardon, sir,” Tom Walker broke in, touching his hat as a sailor should, “but we’ve most of us signed articles of companionship together. Shooting back and forth—that’s one thing. But to climb right aboard of that sloop and maybe kill a couple of guards—that’s something different.”

  “Your ethics mystify me,” Woodes Rogers said.

  “I can’t answer for the others, but I know how I feel, Governor, and I’m pretty sure they would too.”

  “But I haven’t signed those articles,” George cried.

  “That’s right, you never did, did you?”

  The governor looked at Robinson and he looked at George, and shook his head, but he said nothing.

  “Another one never signed,” Tom Walker went on, “and that’s Peter Knight. He’s only a boy and might not be much use in a tussle, but he could hold the boat there, which is all you’d really need him for anyway.”

  “Would he go, Tom?”

  “Cap’n sir, he’d go clear through Hell on his bare feet if you was to lead the way.”

  Thus it was that soon after sundown two men and a knobby red-haired boy came out through a smashed portion of the palisade on the beach side of Fort Nassau carrying the Moses-boat, which they launched.

  George was in high spirits Though he had suffered in this craft yet somehow he believed that it meant good luck to him, for hadn’t he, despite the suffering, won through? Hadn’t he got Delicia? He laughed. He nodded back toward the fort.

  “Do you realize that this is the first time I’ve ever left that building unshot at?”

  “Shut up,” said Thomas Robinson.

  The night was dark, the water smooth. The sky was all un-studded by stars, suggesting that there might be a late moon, and the air didn’t smell of rain.

  Peter rowed without a sound, leaning over the oars with the absorption of a watchmaker. There was no hiss at the bows, no gurgle in the wake.

  For the most part George strained his eyes ahead, eager to catch the first sight of John and Elizabeth, but when he did turn to glance at his companion in the sternsheets he caught in Robinsons face, even in that dim light, a glint of savagery that perturbed him. Was Robinson planning treachery? Did he take this to be a good time for murder?

  The opportunity was made of gold. After such a lion’s-mouth operation as this would be, if either returned without the other that occasion could hardly excite anything worse than comment. The governor had not been pleased to see them go off together, and had troubled to remind them of their promise not to fight; but George remembered, as he looked back at the queer-staring Robinson, that the promise, given only a few hours ago, had contained the qualifying phrase “within these walls.” They were not presently within any walls at all.

  The Moses-boat moved like a ghost. Revenge was bright with fights, and resounded to the song and shouts of the pirates, who were having a party there; but it was some time before George could even distinguish the outlines of John and Elizabeth, which rode utterly without a gleam. A small vessel, slim, low, she nonetheless loomed large from where he sat.

  He checked his equipment, which was scanty enough.

  None of them was armed in any conventional sense. Each wore only dark breeches and a dark tight-fitting waistcoat—no hat, shoes, stockings, not even a shirt lest the white of the sleeves show. Peter carried no weapon of any sort, George and Robinson only a sheath knife each. A rapier would have been too long, a pistol too noisy, a cutlass too heavy. George had in his lap a knotted rope and a grappling hook he hoped he wouldn’t need, and in his pockets three heavy leaden tompions. Robinson had two marlinspikes—in case he lost one—and across his knees was an enormous maul. The maul, iron-headed, was so heavy that it would have taken a strong man even to lift it, much less swing it; but Robinson was very strong.

  At George’s wave they approached the larboard side, where the Jacob’s ladder hung. This was contrary to the original plan, which would have taken them to the opposite side on the theory that smallboats from Revenge might approach or leave the Jacob’s ladder. However, when George saw that no boat was paintered there he signaled for larboard. Even if his th
row was perfect, the clunk of the grappling hook might awaken a guard.

  He gestured to Peter that after the two had climbed aboard he, Peter, should take the Moses around to the other side of the sloop. Then if a smallboat did come they would not be trapped.

  It was reasonable to suppose that most of the pirates were spending most of their time aboard of Revenge rather than John and Elizabeth. The brig was out of range. It was not subject—regularly in daytime, occasionally at night—to the shock of the twelve-pounder and the constant threat that the foremast would give ‘way. Moreover it was a much larger and no doubt more comfortable vessel.

  A couple of gunners were all who should be expected to be on the deck of the sloop at this hour. But they might at any time be relieved or checked. This was why George waved the Moses to the other side of the sloop.

  Peter was not intelligent, but he could understand that. He nodded.

  George fetched a full breath, and climbed to the waist.

  It was as dark as a dungeon there, and George congratulated himself that he knew it so well. A misstep might have meant death.

  Ordinarily after sunset this waist would be scattered with sleepers, but tonight there were none. George did not trust to his eyes—and indeed there was little enough to be seen—but stood silent for a moment, alert for the sound of a snore, a twitch, any mumble or mutter. All he heard was the blurred faraway drunken cacophony from the brig.

  Satisfied, he went to the other side, the starboard side, and fastened the grappling hook to the top of the gunwale, afterward lowering the knotted rope into the water. This would give Peter something to hold, to keep the Moses along-side. It would also provide a quiet way down to the boat if silence, in an escape, should prove more imperative than speed; for though there was not much freeboard at the waist, and any active man could have jumped to the Moses-boat, in such darkness a jumper might land on the thwarts, either himself falling into the sea, or capsizing the boat, or both, with much noise.