Sea Robber

by Tim Severin

  Abruptly Captain Garza blurted out what was clearly a Basque profanity. His attention was fixed on the channel ahead.

  Looking in the same direction, Hector saw the masts of a ship beyond the island, and the flash of canvas as she spread her topsails. Soon afterwards the vessel herself came in view, sailing down the channel towards them. An instant later he recognized the Cygnet.

  Behind him Jezreel let loose a great whoop of pleasure. ‘Who’d have thought it? Our high-principled Captain Swan has turned pirate. Ha-ha! He’s working with the Delight.’

  The ambush became clearer by the minute. The aviso was now too close to the coast to double-back and flee, and if she continued on her course, she was sure to run into the Cygnet’s guns. Captains Swan and Cook, if they were still in command, had executed a neat pincer movement. Their prey was caught.

  Certainly the sloop’s Basque captain thought so. With a snarl of disgust, Garza cupped his hands around his mouth and called out to his crew to stand by to drop sail. Then he stepped across to the helm and, taking the tiller in his hand, brought the little ship’s head to wind. The aviso carried no cannon and had relied on her speed. She was at the mercy of her captors.

  The Cygnet maintained her confident approach. Smaller than her consort, her shallow draught allowed her to come within hailing distance of the sloop. Hector could see his former shipmates lining the rail as they examined their latest prize appraisingly.

  ‘There’s Jacques,’ called out Jezreel. The ex-prizefighter swung himself back on the rail and let out a great roar. ‘Hey, Jacques. Have you learned to make a decent pudding yet?’

  A ragged cheer went up from the Cygnet’s crew as, one by one, they recognized Jezreel by his size. They waved their hats, there was a confusion of catcalls and yells of greeting. Someone fired his musket in the air to celebrate. A boarding party scrambled into the longboat and was on its way to take possession of the sloop. Jacques stood in the bows, grinning broadly.

  ‘Mes amis! So they did not waste string to garrotte you,’ exclaimed the Frenchman as he scrambled up the aviso’s side and gave Jezreel a delighted thump on the back. Jacques beamed with delight as he turned to Hector. ‘None of us thought we would ever see you again.’

  Hector was more restrained. He couldn’t see Dan among the men aboard the Cygnet and was worried about his friend. ‘Where’s Dan? And how are his eyes?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t worry about him,’ said Jacques cheerfully. ‘He is on the Delight and his eyesight is as good as it ever was. In fact he’s the chosen lookout whenever we set up this little ambush. This is the third vessel we have snared these past few days.’

  The rest of the boarding party were busy searching the sloop for plunder, but found little. Their only loot consisted of a few coins and trinkets robbed from the sloop’s crew, and several kegs of quince marmalade marked for delivery to a merchant house in Lima. Under Jacques’ approving gaze, the barrels were hoisted up on deck and ferried across to the Cygnet. Then the boarders attacked the base of the aviso’s mast with axes and a saw. In a few moments they’d cut down the mast and sent it toppling over the side.

  ‘That will slow them down,’ said the Frenchman approvingly. ‘We don’t take any prisoners. We have no room to hold them.’ He hustled Jezreel and Hector into the waiting longboat. ‘You are doubly lucky. Our ambush is getting too well known, so this evening we head off to careen and recuperate.’

  ‘Where to?’ Hector asked.

  ‘We have a camp on the Encantadas. They are far enough away for the Spaniards to leave us alone.’

  ‘Does John Cook still command the Delight?’ enquired Hector. He was unsure of his welcome.

  ‘Cook, he died of ship fever last July. The men elected the quartermaster, Edward Davis, to succeed him. The vote was unanimous.’

  The longboat pushed off, and in a few moments they were alongside the Cygnet. More cheers and shouts of welcome greeted Jezreel as he climbed aboard. Several men came up to shake his hand and thank him for fighting a rearguard action on the beach at Niebla. ‘But for you, I’d have more than this scar from that day,’ said one battered-looking veteran, touching the mark on his cheek where a musket bullet had grazed his face.

  ‘The men are glad to have your big friend back aboard,’ said a familiar voice behind Hector. He turned and looked into a face that for a moment did not match the voice. Then he recognized Captain Swan. The man was vastly changed. Gone was the plump, fastidious merchant captain, easy-going and genial. Standing before him was a grim-faced individual dressed in a stained shirt and wearing a battered low-crowned hat, and he had a hard glint in his eyes. Swan now looked like a seasoned brigand.

  ‘WHAT MADE Swan turn pirate?’ Hector asked Jacques a fortnight later as the Cygnet followed the Bachelor’s Delight. The two vessels were threading their way through the cluster of islands where the raiders had set up their base.

  ‘After Valdivia he tried several more times to open a legitimate trade. But each port turned him away,’ answered the Frenchman. ‘His crew became more and more restless. Then we met again with the Delight cruising for prey, and half the men threatened to desert to the other ship. They said that plundering the Spanish was the only way of making any money.’

  ‘So he had no choice?’

  Jacques grinned sardonically. ‘Captain Swan has taken to piracy like a duck to water. A good joke, no?’

  Hector could only smile weakly. He thought back to the letter Swan had asked him to deliver to the Governor of Valdivia. In it Swan hadn’t hesitated for a moment to betray his fellow countrymen by warning that an English pirate ship was prowling off the Peruvian coast. He wondered if Swan now regretted rescuing the messenger who might know its treacherous contents. The thought left him very uneasy.

  A few feet away from him the Cygnet’s helmsman cursed softly. An awkward eddy was pushing the vessel off-course. The helmsman – as seasoned a mariner as one could expect to find – complained darkly that the currents among the islands reversed direction whenever the moon was full, and flowed against the wind, and that was against nature. They were the Devil’s work, he muttered. To Hector the islands did seem abnormal and strange; there was something otherworldly about the way they rose abruptly from the surface of the ocean so far from any land mass. The archipelago, 165 leagues from Peru, was so remote that the number of its islands was in doubt, and no one had yet charted them properly. The more credulous said the task was futile, for the islands floated from one location to another. That was why the Spaniards called them the Encanta-das, the ‘Enchanted Ones’.

  ‘I’m surprised you managed to find fresh water on such harsh-looking shores,’ Hector commented to Jacques. The slopes of the nearest island appeared to be nothing but cliff and collapsed scree of dark-brown crumbling rock.

  ‘We searched and found only one place where we could bring our casks.’ The Frenchman pointed up ahead. ‘There, on the island just coming into view and a little beyond where the Delight is about to drop anchor. It has a spring at the east end of the beach.’

  Hector saw that another ship was already at the same location. She was canted over to one side as if she had run aground.

  ‘That will be Captain Eaton with the twenty-six-gun Nicholas,’ Jacques explained. ‘He too is harassing les Espagnois.’

  Hector noted a thin haze of smoke rising from the stranded vessel. What he had at first taken to be a shipwreck was in fact a small brig being breamed. Men moved about her hull, knee deep in the sea, as they burned off the layers of weed and fouling that had accumulated on the vessel’s hull and would slow her down when chasing her prey. At high tide they would float her off again.

  ‘Eaton is energetic and drives his men hard, but he has very little luck,’ explained Jacques. ‘He is fanatic about keeping the Nicholas clean. But in nearly a year of cruising against les Espagnois he’s taken not a single rich prize.’

  ‘So this place is a real nest of robbers,’ observed Hector. He was depressed at the very thought
of being caught up once again in the lives of men who made their living by theft and violence.

  Jacques failed to notice. ‘I have a feeling the Nicholas may not be with us for much longer. When I last spoke with any of her crew, they were on the verge of mutiny. They talked of abandoning the South Sea and sailing home. Or turning Eaton out and electing someone with more luck to command them.’

  He was interrupted by the shrill of the boatswain’s whistle. The Cygnet was on her anchoring ground, and the idlers who had been lining the rail and gazing at the beach were being summoned to their work. Hector joined them in brailing up the sails and securing the deck gear, and once the ship was safely moored, he hurried ashore, intent on meeting Dan for the first time since the events at Valdivia.

  He found his friend already disembarked from the Delight and waiting for him on the white sand of the beach. The Miskito’s face, usually impassive, lit up with a grin of delight.

  ‘Hector. How glad I am that you are safe and free.’

  Anxiously, Hector searched his friend’s eyes, trying to detect any signs of injury. ‘How are you, Dan? Jacques tells me you’ve recovered your eyesight.’

  ‘It has never been better. Now I can see just as well as before.’ The Miskito threw an arm across Hector’s shoulders and began to walk with him up the slope of the beach. ‘Let’s talk privately. How was it in Valdivia as a prisoner?’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be heading off to catch some fish or spear turtles for our food?’ Hector asked. Jacques and several other cooks had arrived on-shore and were heaping up piles of brushwood as they prepared a cooking fire. The newly arrived crews would be looking forward to eating fresh food after so many days at sea.

  ‘No need to trouble myself with that,’ Dan answered. ‘I’ll tell you as we go.’

  The two of them made their way inland through a tangle of shrubs about ten or twelve feet high. They kept to a narrow footpath, for the branches were as thick as a man’s leg and armed with rows of sharp prickles.

  ‘You would not think this place could provide anything worth eating,’ said Dan. ‘See, these bushes do not bear any fruit, and there is almost no soil. But you would be wrong.’

  They emerged from the thickets and found themselves on rough open ground strewn with rocks and small boulders. Here the only vegetation was low straggly brush, weed and moss. About a mile away there was a scatter of hillocks covered with some sort of stunted forest, and Hector expected Dan to head in that direction. But Dan veered left, following a path that was clearly familiar to him and which took them parallel to the coastline.

  ‘It was some time before I got used to this place,’ said the Miskito. ‘When I first came here, I was bewildered. Take the turtles, for example. They are the same as those I hunted on the Miskito coast. The same in size and colour. Back home they wait until dark before they come out of the sea to lay their eggs on the beach, and that is when you search the strand for them. But here they come out in daylight. So you just stroll along until you almost trip over them as they lie waiting to be turned over on their backs.’

  ‘There can’t be many turtles left with so many hungry crews about,’ observed Hector.

  ‘True. There aren’t as many as before.’

  A small flock of doves, perhaps a dozen birds, fed on some low bushes ahead of them. They ignored the two men until they were almost within touching distance, then flew up, circled and slanted down again to land no more than a couple of yards away.

  ‘Look at that,’ said the Miskito. ‘They are half tame. The birds never saw humans before we came, so they would even perch on our hats. That was before our men took to shooting them with their muskets for sport. Now the creatures are a little more wary, though you can still knock them down with a stick when you’re hungry.’

  They walked on until they came to the edge of a small glen. Here was more ground cover, mostly weeds and small shrubs, and three or four stunted trees spread their branches to provide some shade. Dan turned aside, and Hector thought it was to stop and rest, for it was now midday under a clear sky and, despite the breeze from the sea, he felt the heat of the tropical sun.

  Dan pointed to several large, brownish-grey boulders in the shadow of the trees. As Hector approached, the nearest boulder slowly began to lift itself from the ground, using four scaly grey legs.

  Astonished, Hector watched a long, serpent-like neck extrude from a cavity. The head that turned to face him was extraordinarily ugly. It reminded him of a very old, toothless, bald man with small holes for nostrils.

  He stepped back in alarm before realizing that he was confronted by a giant tortoise.

  Dan gave an amused chuckle. ‘That is why I don’t have to go striking turtle,’ he said. ‘This island is full of these creatures. Their flesh tastes like chicken.’

  The tortoise advanced with agonizing slowness, clearly annoyed. It opened its slit of a mouth and gave a loud, angry hiss.

  ‘Does it bite?’ Hector asked.

  ‘It is harmless. The creature feeds on leaves and grass, and its jaws are only useful for nipping,’ said the Miskito. He stepped forward, threw a leg over the creature’s back and rode the animal as it inched forward, still making a sound like escaping steam.

  ‘There are not many this big left,’ he said. ‘The men carry them back to the ships as food. It can take four men at a time to lift one. Aboard ship the creatures keep alive and well. Jacques would get a good twenty pounds of fine oil off this one. He likes to flavour our breakfast dumplings with it.’

  He dismounted from the back of the tortoise. ‘A child could locate and capture these creatures. But there is something else I want to show you.’

  Another half-hour’s tramping brought them to the end of the island. Here they crunched across loose plates of rock that shifted and clattered under their feet, before they arrived at a small rocky promontory, which sloped down to a reef where the sea was breaking in regular bursts of spray.

  Dan found a convenient outcrop on which to sit. ‘This is where I come when I need some peace,’ he said.

  Hector sat down beside his friend. ‘I know what you mean. When I was a captive in Valdivia, I used to go down to the harbour to get away by myself.’

  ‘You have not told me what it was like to be a prisoner of the Spanish.’

  Hector paused for a moment before replying. ‘It’s made me see things differently. I was well treated. The Governor of Valdivia was a decent man, and I can’t say I relish the thought of plundering Spaniards once again.’

  ‘Maybe that is because your mother was from that country,’ said Dan. ‘It would be the same among the Miskito. When someone has a parent from another tribe, it is difficult to go fighting them.’

  The two men sat silently for a while, watching a frigate bird as it wheeled and swooped, harrying a pair of gulls, bullying them to disgorge the fish they had caught.

  Eventually Dan broke the silence. ‘What about Maria?’ he asked. ‘Have you found out anything about her?’

  Hector felt the familiar hopelessness creep over him. ‘Maria is no longer in Peru. I brought you and the others on a futile quest.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  Hector nodded towards the horizon. ‘Somewhere out there. Her employer was transferred to a post in the Ladrones.’ His voice was dull and flat.

  ‘I never heard of them. I thought the Encantadas were as far out in the ocean as you can go.’

  ‘The Ladrones are much, much farther, nearly all the way to Asia.’

  Dan seemed unconcerned. ‘And do you still want to find her?’

  Hector shrugged. ‘There’s no point. Maria is out of reach.’

  Dan was persistent. ‘These Ladrones, how many days would it take to sail there?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe six or seven weeks in a well-found ship.’

  ‘The Nicholas is a well-found ship, and with a nice clean hull.’

  Hector looked at his friend, astonished. ‘What on earth are you talking about? Why would Captain Eaton w
ant to go sailing off across the Pacific?’

  ‘Captain Eaton might not want to, but his crew could be persuaded.’ Dan picked up a loose piece of rock and threw it, waiting for the splash as it hit the sea. ‘Remember how Cook and his men took the Carlsborg on the Guinea coast? You and I, Jezreel and Jacques had little choice but to go along.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well, we could do the same and take the Nicholas.’

  ‘That’s preposterous. The four of us could never handle such a ship.’

  ‘I don’t mean to steal her. Just to use her for what we want. I think that can be arranged.’

  Suddenly the Miskito pointed downwards to where the foam was frothing on the rocks. ‘See there. That is another thing that bewilders me on these islands.’

  It took Hector several seconds to pick out what Dan had spotted. Crawling up the nearly vertical weed-covered rocks were three or four lizard-like creatures nearly as long as his arm and shining wet. They had just emerged from the water.

  ‘They’re iguanas, aren’t they? Like the ones we used to catch and eat back on the Main.’

  ‘Yes, but we never saw iguanas swimming in the sea. Here they behave like seals.’ The Miskito got to his feet. ‘Come, Hector. There will be plenty of time to tell me more of Valdivia once we are aboard the Nicholas and she is heading across the Pacific. Right now we must get back to camp so that I can speak with Jacques and Jezreel. I need to put matters in hand before everyone at Jacques’ barbecue is too drunk and the food has all been eaten.’

  Hector was confused and continued to sit looking out to sea. ‘It’s no good, Dan. Whatever your plan is, I don’t want to go back to a life of piracy, sailing with men who think of nothing but plunder and prize.’

  Dan touched him on the shoulder and pointed into the air. ‘Hector, look at those frigate birds up there. See how they behave, robbers in the sky. That is their nature. Just as man’s nature is to thieve when he can. You cannot change that. Just turn it to your advantage.’