Henry Hunter and the Cursed Pirates

by John

  To my old shipmate Ian Jackson,

  who regularly sails the seven seas.

  Well, almost.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  A NOTE TO ALL OUR FAITHFUL READERS

  A CALL FOR HELP

  THE GHOST SHIP

  TALES OF HAUNTED SEAS

  ABOARD THE SPINNAKER

  WHISPERS IN THE NIGHT

  DOLF IN THE DUNGEONS

  IN THE MUSEUM

  IRON JAKE

  SHIVERING TIMBERS

  THE CURSED PIRATES

  WALKING THE PLANK

  BLACKBEARD’S GOLD

  X MARKS THE SPOT

  TREASURE!

  AN UNEXPECTED MEETING

  MEN OVERBOARD!

  MYSTERIES OF THE DEEP

  AUTHOR’S NOTE & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Copyright

  A NOTE TO ALL OUR FAITHFUL READERS

  Just in case you haven’t read the first volume of the Henry Hunter Files – Henry Hunter and the Beast of Snagov – I’d better explain that my friend HH is a normal boy who just happens to be incredibly smart. Henry is the son of Steven and Hortense Hunter, who invented a new kind of interactive computer chip and made so much money out of it they decided to use their millions responsibly and go off in search of a rare orchid that is rumoured to be the cure for half of the known diseases in the world. Before they left, Mr and Mrs Hunter made Henry’s two uncles, who are both millionaires, his official guardians, so that even if they don’t get home very often, they know their son is well looked after. They also installed him in an old-fashioned school called St Grimbold’s, where HH has his own set of rooms and only rarely attends classes because he’s actually smarter than the teachers! Because his family is massively rich, he has enough money to indulge his favourite activity – hunting for strange and weird things. I met HH at St Grimbold’s, where we became friends. Since then we’ve had many adventures in some of the most amazing places in the world. Some of them I still can’t talk about, either because they are just too frightening or because they are too sensitive to be told. But this is a story from Henry’s secret files that I can share. In fact I need to tell this story, because I need your help…

  Adolphus Pringle

  A CALL FOR HELP

  “Listen to this, Dolf,” said Henry Hunter. Reluctantly I tore myself away from Deathdealers 4: the Horde, which had been taking all my attention for the past hour. It was sports day at St Grimbold’s School for Extraordinary Boys and, since neither Henry nor I much cared for three-legged races or the ten-metre dash, we were both hiding out in Henry’s rooms.

  I was surprised to see that HH wasn’t about to quote me something from a book. Instead, he was holding a sheet of very thin paper, on which was written several lines in rather shaky-looking handwriting. Thinking that only Henry could know people who still wrote letters rather than sent emails, I gave him my full attention.

  Once he was sure he had captured my interest, he began reading.

  “Sounds a bit mad to me,” I said. “Who is Charlie anyway? And what’s a… spinnaker?”

  “Charlie Stevens is an old friend,” answered Henry. “His parents knew mine before we were even born. And it sounds like the Spinnaker is a boat, from the way Charlie writes about it. His parents were always talking about sailing off somewhere in search of buried treasure and stuff.”

  “Buried treasure!”

  “Well, Timothy – that’s Charlie’s dad – fancied himself an expert on pirates. He once told me he knew where Captain Morgan had hidden his loot.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Captain Morgan was one of the greatest privateers of all time,” said Henry. “He started out as a pirate and ended up as the governor of Jamaica. Then he either lost or hid all his money and lived out his last days telling stories in return for jugs of ale.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Captain Morgan sounded like quite a character. “What’s a privateer?”

  “A kind of licensed pirate,” said Henry. “Kings and queens used to give a letter of marque – that’s like a licence – to unscrupulous captains to go off and raid enemy ships. Then they’d bring back all sorts of treasure to fill the royal coffers.”

  As usual Henry was going into way too much detail, and I wasn’t sure of his point. “So what does all of this have to do with your friend Charlie?”

  “No idea,” said Henry, smiling. “But I plan to find out.”

  We didn’t have to wait long. That afternoon, a car arrived to pick us up and drive us into the wilds of the country. Having two millionaire uncles as guardians meant that Henry could call up a car – or even a private jet – at a moment’s notice.

  We drove from St Grim’s in Sussex into deepest Oxfordshire, to the small town of Thame. There, we took a wandering single-track lane that wound away from the main road and ended up at a pair of big iron gates. A small camera mounted on a gatepost swivelled down to look at us, and moments later the gates swung silently open. We proceeded up a tree-lined drive to a big crumbling house with long, narrow windows. To one side of the solid wooden front door stood a huge statue of a raven carved out of smooth dark stone. On the other side was an even bigger and weirder creature that Henry explained was a griffin – half eagle and half lion. To be honest I found both statues a bit creepy, but Henry said they were carved by a famous sculptor. I wondered if that was meant to make me feel better about them. It didn’t.

  As we came up to the door, two huge Irish wolfhounds came bounding towards us. I know a bit about dogs from my aunt, who used to keep a poodle, but this was something else entirely. As the car stopped they stuck their faces up against the windows and barked. I flinched, thinking I’d rather be in a three-legged race at St Grim’s than chewed up by one of these things – they were easily a metre tall and looked pretty fierce. But as Henry calmly opened the door they suddenly became extremely friendly and began giving him a good licking.

  When I got out gingerly behind him, they repeated this kindness for me (on the whole I preferred the time I had to take a bath in a rusty wheelbarrow, but that’s another adventure…)

  “Can you wait?” Henry asked the driver. “If you go around to the side of the house you’ll be able to get a cup of tea from the staff.” (Yes, I know, ‘staff’. I told you Henry knows some pretty posh people.)

  The driver nodded and we approached the big front door. Henry rang the bell – it was the old-fashioned kind where you pull a rusty handle and can just hear as it rings somewhere in the depths of the house.

  It was several minutes before the door opened. Facing us was a tall, heavy-browed man with a big moustache. He glared at us.

  “Well. What do you want?” he demanded.

  Henry flashed him his best smile. “It’s Henry Hunter, Mr Bligh. This is my friend, Adolphus Pringle. We’ve come to see Charlie.”

  “What? Oh, yes, Hunter…” said the man, frowning.

  “We were sorry to hear about Mr and Mrs Stevens,” said Henry.

  The man’s face softened a bit. “Yes. Bad business. Charles is still very upset. I’m not sure he wants to see anyone.”

  “I’m sure we can cheer him up,” Henry answered. “Better than just moping about, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose you’d better come in then,” the man said. “He’s upstairs in his room, I imagine.”

  Henry nodded and I followed him in. The house was even more impressive inside. The hall was huge with lots of old paintings hung on the walls of men and women who looked as if they had been forced to stand still too long. (One of the portraits even included two big dogs that looked a lot like the wolfhounds.) A long, curv
ing flight of stairs led upwards to a landing off which several doors could be seen.

  Henry made his way straight up the stairs to one of the doors and knocked.

  It literally flew open and a tall, gangly boy with a shock of curly red hair and an enormous number of freckles grabbed Henry by the arm and pulled him inside. As I followed he stared at me suspiciously.

  “This is Dolf,” said Henry. “You can trust him.”

  “You didn’t say anything to Jack?” Charlie asked anxiously. I deduced that the sour-faced man downstairs was Charlie’s uncle.

  “Not a word,” answered Henry.

  Charlie’s room was large and airy, with a big window. I didn’t need to be a genius like HH to work out what he was interested in. On every surface, including the floor, were model boats. Some were the small kind you can sail on ponds; others were large and graceful and looked like they should be in a museum. Most of them were old-fashioned – galleons, Henry told me later – with sails and ropes and masts sticking out everywhere. On the wall hung a photograph of a very modern, white, sleek boat, like the something from a James Bond film. ‘Spinnaker’ was painted on the side in big black letters, and on the deck stood three people – Charlie, easily identifiable by his wild red hair, and two adults who I guessed were his parents. They all looked happy and carefree.

  This must the boat from which Charlie thought he had seen a ghost ship.

  Henry examined the photo for a moment. Then he turned to Charlie. “So, tell us what happened.”

  Charlie sat down on the bed and stared at us glumly. “I’m not sure where to begin,” he said slowly.

  “Beginning at the beginning always works for me,” grinned Henry, pulling up a spindly-looking chair and dropping into it. I hunkered down on the wooden floor and found a rather squashed but perfectly edible bar of chocolate in my jacket pocket. Together we listened to Charlie Stevens’ strange and scary tale.

  THE GHOST SHIP

  “It was supposed to be a dream cruise,” Charlie began. “My parents had always wanted to go to the Caribbean – especially my dad. You remember how he loves everything about pirates, HH? I think he’s watched all the Pirates of the Caribbean films about a hundred times. Then this guy who owns his own yacht offered to take us all on a trip around the Caribbean and he was pretty psyched. Started planning it right away.”

  “Who was the guy with the boat?” asked Henry.

  “Nathan Trueblood,” Charlie replied. “My dad met him though business and they were mates in no time. He would come here and they’d hang out for hours, looking at charts and talking about seventeenth-century pirates. To be honest, I didn’t like him much. One of those people who ruffle your hair and call you ‘old chap’.”

  “So when did you leave on the cruise?” asked Henry.

  “Last June,” replied Charlie. “We flew to the US, to Florida where Nathan’s yacht was moored at Key West. Then we headed down towards the Bahamas.”

  I wondered when he was going to get to the point of the story, but decided not to say anything and took another bite of my chocolate bar.

  “When we got there everything was great. The boat was fantastic. Talk about luxurious! The weather was perfect – the sun shone all day every day and the sky and sea just seemed to get bluer. My dad wanted to stop at as many of the major pirate landmarks as possible, like Port Royal and Nassau. Port Royal was a bit of a disappointment. There was an earthquake there in—”

  “1692,” put in Henry. (I wasn’t surprised.) “It destroyed the place and it was no longer a pirate haven. Most of them moved off to Tortuga, further along the US coast.”

  “Yeah,” said Charlie quickly, apparently just as keen as me to avoid HH launching into a lecture. “Anyway, Dad got into a bit of an argument with some bloke he met on the docks.

  Apparently they disagreed about some local legend,” he added vaguely.

  “Any idea what the legend was?” Henry asked.

  Charlie shook his head. “Something to do with treasure, I think, but I can’t remember whose.”

  “Never mind,” said Henry. “Go on.”

  “Well, we left Port Royal on the fifth of July, heading for Nassau in the Bahamas. We’d been at sea for about a day and dusk was falling. We dropped anchor and my parents sat on the deck ‘taking the night air’, as my mum calls it. I was up on the bridge asking Captain Trueblood questions about the engines – that’s what Nathan said we should call him when we were on board – when I glanced out of the window. There was a lot of mist over the water, but I was sure that I saw it!”

  “What?” said Henry and I in unison.

  “The ship,” said Charlie.

  “What ship?” There we were again, a regular duo.

  “The ghost ship.”

  “Ghost ship?” said Henry, his eyes gleaming. “The one you mentioned in your letter?”

  Charlie nodded. “I told Captain Trueblood I’d spotted something – without telling him what, in case he thought I was crazy. But he looked and said he couldn’t see anything. So I went out on deck with a pair of binoculars.”

  Charlie stared uneasily at us and shifted on the bed. He chewed his lip, not speaking for several seconds. Then he went on with his story.

  “OK. This is going to sound mad but… well, when I looked through the binoculars I couldn’t see anything at all. Just mist floating on the sea. But when I looked without them I could definitely see a ship.”

  “What did it look like?” demanded Henry, leaning forward eagerly.

  “There were masts and sails and stuff like that – it was like a really old-fashioned ship, the kind they have in pirate films. It was even flying a flag with a skull and crossbones! I thought it must be one of those cheesy replica ships they use for cruises. You know, ‘Be a Pirate and Sail the Seven Seas’ – that kind of thing. Then I noticed the ship seemed to have a greenish glow around it, and it was full of holes, as if it had been hit by loads of cannonballs, although somehow they hadn’t sunk it.”

  Charlie stared at us with big round eyes. “The third thing I noticed was that it was headed straight for us… and it was moving far too quickly for an ordinary sailing ship…”

  “Stop there for a minute,” Henry said. “Let’s just recap. You say that through the binoculars there was no ship visible, yet when you looked with your naked eyes you could see it and it was glowing and had holes?”

  Charlie nodded and I noticed his hands were trembling in his lap. I thought he looked about as scared as I’d ever seen anyone look. I ate the last mouthful of my chocolate as Henry asked: “OK. So what happened next?”

  “That’s the worst part,” said Charlie. “I don’t know!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, all I can remember is that the ship got bigger and bigger, and that the nearer it got the weirder and nastier it looked. I tried to shout a warning to Captain Trueblood and my parents, but I couldn’t speak. I thought I could see… people…weird, ghostly people… on deck. Then this kind of… misty tentacle thing reached out for me. It seemed to come from the ghost ship, and I wanted to dodge it. But I was rooted to the spot and it curled round me, all cold and clammy, and I suddenly felt sick. Then I must have passed out or something.”

  Charlie stared at us miserably. Neither Henry nor I said anything. My mind was filled with images of the ghostly ship with its mystical crew and tentacles of mist. Henry was staring into the distance. I guessed he was thinking deeply the way only Henry can.

  Eventually he looked right at Charlie and said: “What happened when you woke up?”

  Charlie opened and closed his mouth a few times, then took a deep breath and carried on.

  “I still felt a bit funny – dizzy, I guess – but I staggered back to the cabin. Captain Trueblood was slumped over the wheel, out cold. I could see he was still breathing, so I went to find my parents…” Charlie gulped.

  “But they weren’t there. I searched every centimetre of the ship – I couldn’t find any sign of them. It was
like they’d never been there.”

  Charlie’s eyes brimmed with tears and he blew his nose on a handkerchief. Henry kept quiet for once and waited patiently, fiddling with a loose button on his shirt. I wished I had another chocolate bar hidden away.

  Charlie blinked a few times and continued. “I managed to raise Captain Trueblood and he got the rest of the crew moving. We all searched the Spinnaker from end to end. There was no sign of my parents. Not a trace.”

  Charlie jumped up and started pacing around the room. Henry was silent but I could tell he was thinking.

  “That was almost six months ago,” said Charlie finally. “No one has seen or heard anything from them since. My cousin Jack came to stay while stuff was being sorted out. He says he’s my legal guardian now and I should stop expecting to hear from my parents. Everyone thinks they were washed overboard by some kind of freak wave and that they’re gone forever. No one believes me about the ghost ship. No one! But I don’t believe them!”

  I jumped at Charlie’s sudden, loud shout – even Henry flinched.

  “I know I saw that weird ship,” Charlie kept on, “and I’m sure it has something to do with their disappearance.”

  He stopped and I realised he was looking at my raised eyebrows – I was making it much too obvious that I found all this very hard to believe.

  Charlie glared at me and unbuttoned the top of his shirt, baring his left shoulder. “If you don’t believe me, what’s this then?” he demanded.

  A large raised red welt cut across his shoulder – the kind of mark you might get if an octopus grabbed you. (I’d seen something like it on TV.)

  Henry didn’t look too closely at the welt but patted Charlie on his other shoulder in a business-like kind of way. “I think you’re right, old chap.”