Buccaneer

by Tim Severin

  To leave behind the bickering and the acrimony of the camp, Hector had got into the habit of going for a long walk each day. From the pleasant glen where the sailors had set up their shelters, a narrow goat track climbed steeply inland, leaving behind the groves of sandalwood and stands of pimento trees and passing up through dense thickets of brush. The path doubled back and forth, and after the long weeks spent on board ship he found that his legs were quickly tired by the demands of the steep ascent. Now his leg muscles were aching, and it would take him another hour of hard climbing to reach the crest of the narrow ridge where he liked to spend a few moments looking out over the ocean, quietly contemplating. This morning he needed to hurry because there was to be a general council of the expedition at noon, and he wanted to be back in time to attend. The men were to vote whether Bartholomew Sharpe was to continue as their general and – equally important – what was to happen when Trinity left the island.

  Hector took deep breaths as he scrambled upward. In places the bushes grew so close together that he had to force his way through, the branches snagging at his clothes. Occasionally he caught the distinctive acrid smell of goat hanging in the air, and once he startled a small herd, three billies and as many she-goats, which ran up the path ahead of him with their odd mincing stride, before plunging aside into the thickets and disappearing. As he ascended, the sounds of the seal colonies grew fainter and fainter from below, and whenever he stopped to turn and look down into the bay, Trinity looked increasingly small and insignificant until finally a turn in the path meant that he could no longer see the ship at all. From now on he might as well have been alone in the entire world. To his left rose a mist-shrouded mountain, a gloomy square mass with the shape of a gigantic anvil. On his right the island was a densely forested jumble of ravines and cliffs and spurs and ridges which were impenetrable to anyone except an expert hunter.

  Eventually he reached his destination, the narrow saddle of the ridge joining the anvil mountain to the wilderness, and sat down to rest. The crest of the ridge was no more than a yard or two in breadth and the view to either side was magnificent. Ahead of him the ground dropped away in sheer scree and he was looking out over a wave-flecked ocean which spread out to a horizon of cobalt blue. When he turned in the opposite direction, he was facing into the sun and the surface of the sea became an enormous glittering silver sheet across which drifted dark shadows cast by the clouds. Everything seemed far, far away, and the high ridge was exposed to a wind which rushed past, swirling over the crest of land.

  He sat in the lee of a great flat rock, clasped his arms around his knees, and gazed out to sea, trying to think of nothing, losing himself in the vastness of the great panorama before him.

  He must have been sitting silently for five or ten minutes when he became aware of an occasional small black speck which sped past him, flitting through the air. To begin with, he thought the specks were a trick of his vision, and he blinked, then rubbed his eyes. But the phenomenon continued, momentary glimpses of some tiny flying object which came up from the scree slope behind him, moving so fast that it was impossible to identify, then vanished ahead, dipping down the slope in front of him. He concentrated his gaze on a clump of bushes a few paces below where he sat. That’s where the flying specks seemed to disappear. Cautiously he eased himself off the ridge and, still seated, slid down towards the bush. There was a slight brushing sensation on his cheek as another of the little specks flew past, so close that he distinctly felt the wind of its passage. It vanished so quickly that he still could not identify what it was. He suspected it was some sort of flying insect, perhaps a grasshopper or a locust. He came to within an arm’s length of the bush, and waited motionless. Sure enough, there was a quick darting movement as another of the flying specks came up from behind him, slowed in mid-air for an instant, then plunged in among the branches. Now he knew what it was: a tiny bird, no bigger than his thumb.

  Another few moments passed, and then one of the diminutive creatures rose from within the bush. It ascended vertically and began to hover in the air, its wings moving in a blur. The bird was no more substantial than a large bumblebee and astonishingly beautiful. The feathers were green, white and brilliant blue. A moment later it was joined by a companion rising from the foliage. This time the plumage was a glossy dark maroon, the colour of drying blood, which glowed in the sunshine. A few heartbeats later and the two tiny creatures began to dance together in the air, circling and dipping, hovering to face one another for a few moments, then suddenly diving and turning and making short arcs and loops until they came together again and stayed hovering. Spellbound, Hector watched. He was sure that the two birds were male and female and they were performing a mating dance.

  With a sudden pang of memory he recalled the last time he had seen a hummingbird. It had been just over a year ago with Susanna when they were travelling towards Port Royal and she had said he possessed the soul of an artist because he had compared the whirring sound made by the wings to the noise of a miniature spinning wheel. Now he listened carefully to the two birds dancing in the air before him. But he could hear nothing above the sound of the wind sighing over the ridge. An image of Susanna came to mind with painful clarity. He saw her dressed in a long, resplendent gown and attending a grand occasion in London where she had been taken by her father. She was dancing with her partner before a crowd of onlookers, all of them wealthy and sophisticated and of her own social standing. With an effort Hector tried to push the apparition out of his mind. He told himself that he was seated on a mountainside on the far side of the world, and this image of Susanna was entirely make-believe. He scarcely knew her. It did not matter what happened in the next months or years, whether he stayed with Trinity and her crew, whether he returned with riches or in poverty. Susanna was always going to be unattainable. His encounter with her would never be more than a chance meeting, however much it had affected him. He should learn from his moment of confusion when he had stood before the portrait of a young lady in La Serena and found himself uncertain of what exactly reminded him of Susanna. As more time passed, he would remember less and less of the true Susanna and what had happened during those few hours he had spent in her company. Instead he would substitute fantasy until everything about Susanna was make-believe. It was an irreversible process and his best course was to free himself of false hope. It was time he acknowledged that he was keeping alive an illusion that had no place in the true circumstances of his own life.

  He shivered. A cloud had passed across the sun and the wind brought a momentary chill in the shadow. Robbed of sunlight, the plumage of the two dancing hummingbirds abruptly lost its irridescence and, as if sensing the change in his mood, they darted back into the foliage. Hector got to his feet and began to descend the path back to camp.

  HE ARRIVED to find the general council already in session. The entire crew of Trinity was gathered in the glade where they had set up their tents. Watling was standing on a makeshift platform of water barrels and planks and haranguing them in his gruff soldierly voice.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Hector asked quietly as he joined Jezreel and Jacques at the back of the crowd.

  ‘Watling has just been elected our new general by a majority of twenty votes. They’ve turned Sharpe out and chosen Watling to replace him,’ answered the big man. Hector peered over the shoulders of the men. Bartholomew Sharpe was in the front rank of the assembly, over to one side. He appeared relaxed and unconcerned, his head tilted back as he listened to Watling’s announcements, his soft round face inscrutable. Hector remembered how he had thought when he had first laid eyes on Sharpe that his fleshy lips reminded him of a fish, a carp, and there was still that same faint air of guile. Seemingly, Sharpe was unaffected by his abrupt dismissal from overall command but Hector wondered what was going on behind that bland exterior.

  ‘We return to the ways of our gallant Captain Sawkins before his death,’ Watling was saying loudly. ‘Courage and comradeship will be our watchwords!’
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br />   There was a murmur of approval from one section of his audience. Among them Hector recognised several of the more brutish members of the crew.

  ‘There will be no more blasphemy!’ grated Watling. ‘From now on we observe the Sabbath, and unnatural vice will be punished!’ His tone had turned harsh and he was staring directly at someone in the crowd. Hector craned his neck to see who it was. Watling had singled out Edmund Cook, the fastidiously dressed leader of one of the companies that set out from Golden Island. Hector had heard a rumour that Cook had been found in bed one day with another man, but had dismissed the tale as mere gossip.

  Watling was speaking again, barking out his words.

  ‘Gambling is forbidden. Anyone who plays at cards or dice will have his share of plunder reduced . . .’ Watling stopped abruptly, and suddenly his arm shot out as he pointed at Sharpe. ‘Hand your dice to the quartermaster,’ he ordered.

  Hector watched Bartholomew Sharpe reach into his pocket and produce his dice. They were taken from him by Duill, one of the men who had tossed the shot priest overboard while he was still alive.

  ‘What’s happened to Samuel Gifford? I thought he was our quartermaster,’ Hector asked Jezreel.

  ‘Watling insisted on having a second quartermaster appointed. John Duill is one of his cronies.’

  Duill had handed the dice on to Watling who held them up over his head for all to see and called out, ‘These are not fit to be aboard a ship.’ Then he drew back his arm and flung them far into the bushes. From several onlookers came catcalls and scornful whistles, clearly directed at Sharpe. The demoted captain still showed no emotion.

  ‘Where would you lead us?’ yelled someone from the crowd.

  Watling paused before answering. His eyes swept across his audience. He looked very sure of himself. When he did finally speak, his voice rang out as though he was a drill sergeant.

  ‘I propose we attack Arica.’

  There was a moment’s lull, then an excited noisy chatter broke out in the crowd. Hector heard one scarred buccaneer give a subdued snort of approval.

  ‘What’s so special about Arica?’ he whispered to Jezreel.

  ‘Arica is where the treasure from the Potosi silver mines is brought to be loaded on the galleons for shipment. It’s said that bars of bullion are left stacked on the quays.’

  ‘Surely a place like that would be powerfully defended,’ said Hector.

  Someone in the crowd must have thought the same, for he called out to Watling, ‘How can we take such a stronghold?’

  ‘If we attack boldly, we can overrun the town in less than an hour. We’ll use grenades in the assault.’

  Hector caught sight of Ringrose in the crowd. He was standing beside Dampier, and both men looked unconvinced by Watling’s confident assertion. Duill, the new second quartermaster, was already calling for a show of hands to vote on his commander’s proposal.

  The vote was two-thirds in favour of an assault on Arica, and Watling’s supporters cheered loudly, slapping one another on the back and promising their comrades that soon they would all be rich beyond their dreams. The council over, Samuel Gifford was calling for volunteers to help prepare the grenades to be used in the assault.

  ‘Why don’t we join the grenade makers,’ suggested Jacques. ‘I’m growing bored on this island, and it will give us something to do.’

  As the three of them walked over to where Gifford was assembling his work crew, Hector found himself agreeing with Jacques. Life on Juan Fernandez had grown wearisome and dull. Five weeks spent on the island was enough. He had no wish to go raiding the Spaniards but he was looking forward to getting to sea again. He wondered if the reason for his restlessness was wanderlust or had more to do with his decision to leave aside his dream about Susanna.

  ‘I need someone to cut up musket bullets in half,’ said Gifford. His glance fell on Jezreel. ‘That’s a job for you.’

  He sent Hector to search Trinity’s stores for lengths of condemned rope while Jacques was to bring back a large iron cooking pot and a quantity of the pitch normally used to treat the vessel’s hull.

  When the materials arrived, the quartermaster set Jacques to melting the pitch over a fire while the others unpicked the rope into long strands of cord.

  ‘Now follow closely what I do,’ Gifford said as he took a length of the unravelled cord and began to wind it around his fist. ‘Make a ball of the twine but do it carefully, from the outside in and leaving the coils loose so they run out freely.’

  When he had the ball of twine completed, he showed the loose end of the string which emerged from the centre like the stalk on a large apple.

  ‘Now for the coating,’ he announced. He took a sharp straight stick and carefully pushed it through the completed ball. Going across to Jacques’s iron pot he dipped the ball into the melted pitch and held it up in the air for the pitch to harden. Then he repeated the process. ‘Two or three coatings should be right. Enough to hold a shape.’

  He beckoned to Jezreel. ‘Hand me some of those half musket balls,’ and he began to stick the lead bullets into the soft tar.

  ‘Now comes the tricky part,’ Gifford said. Carefully he removed the stick, then felt for the free end of the string. Gently he began to tease the string out of the globe. It reminded Hector of the day that Surgeon Smeeton had showed him how to extract the Fiery Serpent from an invalid’s leg.

  When all the string had been pulled from the ball of pitch, leaving it hollow, the quartermaster turned it over in his hand.

  ‘I want at least twenty of these,’ he said. ‘Later we fill them with gunpowder and fit a fuse. When we get to Arica . . .’ He hefted the empty grenade in his hand and pretended to lob it towards the enemy, ‘Pouf! It’ll clear our way to the bullion.’

  Watling’s promotion had brought a sense of energy to the expedition. In the two days it took for Hector and his companions to prepare the grenades, the buccaneers shifted all Trinity’s equipment back onto the vessel, set up her rigging, filled her water casks, replenished the firewood for the cook’s galley, struck camp and moved themselves back aboard. All that remained was to take on fresh food. Jacques went ashore on a mission to gather a supply of herbs and greens, and the ship’s launch was despatched in the opposite direction with half a dozen armed men. They were to wait at the foot of the cliffs while Dan and Will, the other remaining striker, went inland and drove a herd of wild goats towards them. After shooting as many goats as possible for Trinity’s larder, the launch’s crew was to collect Dan and Will and return to the ship.

  ‘We’ll have to fight our way into Arica so I might as well give you a few tips on hand-to-hand combat while we are waiting for Dan to get back,’ Jezreel said to Hector. He handed him a cutlass and stood back, raising his short sword. ‘Now strike at me!’

  The two of them sparred, Jezreel easily deflecting Hector’s blows before making his counterstrokes which usually slipped past his opponent’s defence. Occasionally Jezreel stopped and adjusted the position of Hector’s sword arm. ‘It’s all in the wrist action,’ Jezreel explained. ‘Keep your guard up high, flex the wrist as you parry, then strike back. It must all be one swift movement. Like this.’ He knocked aside Hector’s weapon and tapped him on the shoulder with the flat of his own blade.

  ‘I don’t have your height advantage,’ Hector complained.

  ‘Just stick to the basics and stay light on your feet,’ the ex-prizefighter advised. ‘In battle there’s no time for fancy sword play, and you can expect your opponent to fight dirty like so!’

  This time he distracted Hector by aiming a high blow at his head, and at the same time moved close enough to pretend to knee him in the groin. ‘And always remember that in a close scuffle, the hilt of your sword is more effective than the edge. More men have been clubbed down in a brawl than were ever run through or cut.’

  Hector lowered his cutlass to rest his arm. Just then there was the sound of a musket shot, closely followed by two more in quick succession. They came
from Trinity’s launch which had gone to meet Dan and Will and shoot wild goats. The crew were rowing frantically back to the ship. Clearly something had gone wrong.

  ‘Loose the topsail to show we’ve heard their signal!’ Watling bellowed. Half a dozen men ran to obey his command, and Hector found himself with the rest of the crew, waiting anxiously at the rail for the launch to come within shouting distance.

  ‘I can see Dan in the boat, but not Will,’ muttered Jezreel.

  Just then Watling stepped up beside him, cupping his hands around his mouth and using his drill sergeant’s voice to call out. ‘What’s the trouble?’

  ‘Spaniards! Three ships hull-down to the east,’ came back a shout. ‘They’re heading this way.’

  ‘Shit!’ Watling swore and turned on his heel, looking out to sea. ‘We can’t see anything from here. The headland blocks our view.’

  He hurried back to the rail and bellowed again at the approaching launch. ‘What sort of vessels?’

  ‘They have the look of men of war, but it’s difficult to be sure.’

  Watling glanced up at the sky, gauging the direction and strength of the wind. ‘Quartermasters! Call all hands and prepare to raise anchor. We have to get out of this bay. It’s a trap if the Spaniards find us here.’ He caught a seaman by the shoulder and barked, ‘You! Get two of your fellows and bring up all the weapons we have. I want them loaded and ready on deck in case we have to fight our way clear.’

  There was a rush of activity as men began to bring the galleon back to life after weeks of idleness. They cleared away the deck clutter, braced round the yards ready to catch the wind, and hoisted a foresail and the mizzen so that Trinity hung on her anchor, ready to break free and sail out of the bay at a moment’s notice. Quartermaster Gifford himself took the helm and stood waiting.