by Dudley Pope
By now the buccaneers had, for the most part, their own ships – captured from the Dons or belonging to bold captains who had sailed out from Europe intending to trade with the Main by smuggling or to rob the Spaniards by raiding. Eventually, when this did not yield a reasonable living, these captains had recruited the buccaneers because they were men who had little or more to learn about life – or death – in the West Indies and who seemed to have some immunity to diseases like yellow fever (known to the Spanish as the black vomit, vomito negro).
By leaving their little groups on the coast and joining the ships, the original cattle killers had lost much of their original simple life and left a peaceful existence for a fighting one. The tubs of lard, for instance. Certainly when they slaughtered beeves and hogs to boucan enough meat to go on a raid, they could stock up lard and the hides to make clothing, but mosquitoes rarely reached out across the water to where buccaneer ships normally anchored. Still, at least half the men now in the buccaneer ships had never lived the life of the earlier cow killers. Yet, Ned reflected, they were still desperate men; they hated the Spanish and they sought purchase, and he was glad he did not have to say which they put first.
Aurelia. She was alone with the Griffin. Alone, except for enough seamen to work the ship. Diana, too, on board the Peleus. Each could be the lady of a great house in England; out here they were only women buccaneers. But now, he told himself hurriedly, was not the time to start worrying about their safety or their ability to bring the ships round – to lead the buccaneers. He was thankful that all the seamen seemed proud of the two women. They could have been resentful, even refused to obey their orders or sail with them. Instead the Griffins and the Peleuses boasted about them to the other buccaneers, and both Ned and Thomas suspected that several of the other captains (Rideau and Brace, for example, who had taken to trimming their beards more carefully) hoped to find mistresses in Port Royal and persuade them to share life at sea.
Before seeing the benign influence of Mrs Judd, Ned would have been nervous about the consequences of captains taking trollops from on shore and turning them into the queens of individual ships, but Mrs Judd (far from being a trollop, of course) kept the Phoenix’s captain and crew smart and lively with masts oiled, sails always well patched and recently the hull repainted. She knew little about ships but, from Kingsnorth days, she knew how a trim kitchen should look and how a house needed care and attention.
And over there was Punta Gorda: one and a three quarters of a mile to go. The rest of the boats were still astern but bunching up, with Rideau and Thomas now only a few yards away, one on each quarter.
Slowly Ned steered closer inshore. He did it cautiously to avoid the risk of leading them all on to a particular reef which ran straight out to sea from near the headland. First he had to find it, then work round the seaward end, but at the same time he dare not risk missing the entrance to the river, the Rio Guanche, because they would then blunder into a shallow bay and two islands which were only a mile or so beyond and came immediately before Punta Cocal, the western entrance to Portobelo.
The oarsmen were tired, cursing blistered hands and aching backs, but they were lucky, because by some quirk of Nature the current along this part of the coast ran eastward. In most places the constant flow of the Trade winds pushed the water westward in a strong current, but along this stretch of the Main it ran the other way, a counter-current that was quite strong when the wind – as it sometimes did – blew from the southwest and reinforced it.
And there it was. The mouth of the Rio Guanche was a good deal wider than he had expected. The river seemed to flow from the distant foothills of La Machina, highest of the peaks, as though catching all the rain falling from the clouds which hid the top of the mountain most of the time.
A couple of minutes later a hail from Thomas showed he too had seen it, and a moment afterwards a yell from Rideau, aimed at the boats astern, made sure that no one would miss making the turn inshore.
Even half a mile up the river the banks were still high, and on the east side in several places an old track dropped down into clearings.
“Fishermen used to come here until fairly recently,” Thomas noted. “Brought in their boats and catches and gutted the fish. They’d put ’em on racks of green wood to sun-dry or smoke, or more probably they’d salt them down in barrels and take them by boat round to Portobelo. Conches, too: just look at those piles of shells. You can see where they chop the slot with the machete to cut the muscle.”
“Why not take the fresh fish direct to Portobelo? Why smoke or salt it here?”
“Probably some local tax. The Dons used to have a salt tax – probably still do. Anything a Spaniard does which seems odd or eccentric is usually to dodge a tax.”
Each boat was finding its own section of river bank in the darkness and the men, cursing, encouraging, now joking and groaning as they straightened backs and stretched legs, began unloading. Ned clambered on to dry land and began walking along the track. In the faint starlight he saw that one carriage wheel was already lying flat on the ground. He paused and watched as the axle was inserted vertically, and then men pulled over the axle and wheel so that the second wheel could be fitted. The limber was then bolted on to the axle. Several men lifted the barrel while the newly assembled carriage was pushed underneath and the barrel gently lowered into position, one of the men crouching to guide it on to the carriage. As soon as the trunnions, the stubby arms on which the gun rested, were in place, semicircular metal plates, the cap squares, were flipped over and fastened down, preventing the trunnions from jumping out again when the carriage was hauled over rough country or the gun recoiled when fired.
Beside another boat he saw a barrel of gunpowder hoisted out and rolled on to a smooth stretch of land. That was followed by a two-handed saw, a tub of nails and a barrel of musket balls. A pipe of muskets and tub of pistols came next, and Brace, watching the men at work, commented to Ned: “We had the boat nearly gunwales under: lucky the sea wasn’t rough!”
“In my boat the worst part was trying to find somewhere to put my feet,” Ned said, watching the assembled falcon being hauled to the edge of the clearing where it would be almost completely hidden by bushes. Noticing Lobb, he said: “Keep an eye on the falcons; I want to see how the rest of the boats are getting on.”
Thomas had his falcon already hidden and the shot, powder, muskets, cutlasses, halberds and pikes spread out on the ground, as though opening a martial bazaar, and the starlight was reflecting from the sharpened blades. To one side were a barrel of drinking water and a stack of leather satchels packed with chunks of boucan, the smell of great pieces of smoked beef making the men slap their stomachs in anticipation of breakfast.
Slowly Ned checked them off. Coles with the Argonauta’s boats, Gottlieb with the Dolphyn’s, Leclerc with his men from the Perdrix, Edward Brace with his two boats and two canoes from the Mercury…as they were unloaded the east bank of the Rio Guanche gradually began to look like an army camp.
Ned found Secco and his men half-way along the line of fifty-six boats and sixty-four canoes, and as he arrived he saw the Spaniard carefully inspecting a pike while two men beside him were slipping cutlass belts over their shoulders.
“Ah, almirante!” Secco exclaimed cheerfully, “you are just in time to bid us buena fortuna!”
“Hasta la vista!” Ned said. “But don’t forget, as soon as you find the track, come straight back, marking the trail.”
“Indeed we shall not pause even to seek out a taberna!”
“The sooner you get back,” Ned said, “the sooner we shall take possession of all the tabernas – and every bodega, too.”
“We go, then, almirante.”
“Don’t forget,” Ned cautioned. “Not just the track but an easy way to it.”
“Old ladies on Sunday evening,” Secco said. “They will be able to make their promenade alon
g it. They’ll be so grateful they’ll call it the avenida of the filibustero. I shall become a cicisbeo and make assignations there.”
“By all means,” Ned said, “but after we’ve finished with it!”
Chapter Twelve
As the sun rose next morning over the mangroves which covered Isla Largo Remo like a thick carpet, Aurelia had tried to make up her mind whether or not to have herself rowed over to see Diana in the Peleus. She had stood in the early light at the taffrail of the Griffin – where last night she and Ned had checked the boats and their contents – and watched the pelicans glide down on their angular wings and suddenly dive vertically into the water with a crash that should break their necks. Instead, each surfaced with what could only be a grin on his face and seeming to wink conspiratorially as he squeezed the water from the sac of flesh hanging under the long beak. From the way the sac sometimes convulsed, she saw a bird often caught quite a large fish, but a toss of the head disposed of it, like an impatient toper draining the dregs in his tankard.
Occasionally a small white gull with a black head would fly down and alight on a pelican’s back with a cackling laugh, but more often, with wings outstretched to steady itself, it would land right on the domed head of the pelican, which looked like an elderly grandfather patiently suffering the attention of a scrambling grandchild.
When the pelican decided to go off on another fishing expedition the gull, tiny by comparison, flew round until the pelican dived; then, the moment he surfaced, the gull would land on the head again and patiently wait for the squeeze that drained the sac. At once the gull would drop into the water under the pelican’s beak, its head bobbing away in the water like a hen pecking up seed.
When she had first seen it, Aurelia had been puzzled; then she saw that several tiny fish, usually silversides, washed out when the pelican squeezed the sac, were sufficiently stunned or startled to be snapped up at high speed by the waiting gull.
Then, after the pelican had swallowed the contents of its pouch with another convulsive movement, like an old man with a thin neck and drooping jowls swallowing a raw egg, and the gull had finished the silversides, the gull in one elegant movement would return to balance on the pelican’s head.
Aurelia never tired of watching this duet between a bird that at first glance was a clumsy and ugly distant cousin of a goose and the little gull, among the most elegant of seabirds.
Now the last of the pelicans had flown off to the next island, Samba Bonita, on the Griffin’s quarter, where presumably the fish would be less wary, less alarmed.
She went down to the cabin and combed her hair carefully and put ribbons in the lowest ringlets. She envied Diana’s dark mass of curly hair: it had personality, a springy life of its own, and made a frame for Diana’s beautiful face. She could imagine Thomas holding Diana’s head, his hands and fingers deep in the hair, the two of them laughing or loving. But her own hair, this blonde, what Ned called ash, was colourless and lifeless: it did not make a frame for her face – more like a wrapping, in fact. And her complexion! Both she and Diana were tanned golden by the sun, but her own tan was more yellowish: Diana’s skin had life and was the mellow brown of polished wood, but hers was greasy by comparison.
Her breasts were well tanned, thanks to the canvas screen Ned had put up aft, but it had taken so long! Especially the lower parts. Ned would come and inspect them – and she would retaliate by teasing him about his white buttocks which, try as he might, refused to brown like the rest of his body.
Everyone else, except of course Diana and Thomas, who were doing the same thing, thought they had gone mad: it was common knowledge that the sun dried out the essential oils and left the body open to the noxious night vapours, to which everyone knew they were more vulnerable to anyway because frequently they slept on deck at night. However, Aurelia reflected as she looked at the tan on her belly, which was still as flat as when she was a young girl, everyone did not know, or believe, that the mosquitoes did not bite tanned skin as much as white, and it was mosquito bites, not the heat and humidity of the tropical showers that could make life a misery in the West Indies. At least, for an hour around dawn and from an hour before sunset until the late evening. Apart from itching and almost driving you into a frenzy, the bites sometimes turned septic. Why did the mosquitoes and sandflies concentrate round wrists and ankles, where the flesh was thin on the bone?
Suddenly, sitting naked in the cabin, she burst into tears, a hairbrush in one hand, a tortoiseshell comb in the other. It was hopeless; she could fill her mind with all this nonsense, this comparison of Diana’s hair and her own, the merits of a tanned skin, even speculate (yet again) how passionate Diana was and if the depth of her passion was indicated by her black hair, but none of it drove away this dreadful fear for Ned, a fear which soaked into her like fog drifting in along the harsh Atlantic coast of Brittany.
In Tortuga days ago it had seemed quite natural for Ned to accept the leadership of the Brethren; quite natural for him to agree to lead the attack on Old Providence and Portobelo. But now the ships were anchored and Ned and Thomas, with all the boats, were rowing along an enemy coast with little more than toy guns and swords to attack the third strongest port this side of the Atlantic. Havana and Cartagena were – so people said – enormous; but nom de Dieu, Portobelo had four castles to defend it. If anything happened to Ned – yes, she would be alone, but not for long: if anything happened to Ned she did not want to live. But how to die?
She realized that Diana, in the cabin of the Peleus, might be just as worried, unhappy and uncertain. She stood up, pulled on the divided skirt that had become famous among all the buccaneers as the wear of women on board the original three English ships, selected a jerkin and pulled it over her head and secured the lacing, and then ran the comb through her hair again. The tears had subsided into sobs; now the sobs were occasional hiccoughs which jerked her breasts uncomfortably.
The canoe took her across to the Peleus. It meant leaving the Griffin with not a man on board, because she needed them at the paddles, but there was little risk with the Peleus anchored less than five hundred yards away. A seaman took the painter and helped Aurelia on board. Her ladyship, he said, was in the cabin: a warning to Aurelia of Diana’s mood, because the approach of a canoe would have been reported and normally she would be on deck to meet a visitor.
Aurelia hurried down the companion ladder, tapped lightly on the door and went in without waiting for a reply. Diana’s eyes were red, her face puffy – and, naked, she too had been brushing and combing her hair.
“I won’t kiss you, I’m all sniffy and horrible,” she said. “I’ve been trying to pull myself together to come over and visit you.”
Aurelia hiccoughed and then laughed. “I was sitting just like you, combing my hair, when suddenly I began crying. I thought of you, managed –” she hiccoughed again “–to dress and here I am. With hiccoughs!”
“Those damned men,” Diana said, trying to smile, “there’s only one thing worse than having them around under your feet and that’s having them away.”
“They’ll be at the river mouth now,” Aurelia said brightly.
“They should have arrived there before dawn. The boats should be unloaded and everything hidden from prying eyes, with sentries out.”
“And that Spaniard should be going up the mountains looking for the track.”
Diana sniffed and then blew her nose vigorously. “Yes, but if he doesn’t find the track…”
“It must be there: Ned’s whole plan depends on it.”
“I know, and it is there, I’m sure, but will they be able to get to it from the river, I wonder? Those mountains…”
“Where there are mountains there are passes,” Aurelia said, with more assurance than she felt.
“I suppose so. I like looking at mountains but I don’t trust ’em. I come from one of the flat counties of England. A few
rolling hills, but that’s all. These mountains of the Main – particularly around La Guaira – make me nervous. Well, not nervous, exactly, but they make me feel so insignificant. Once upon a time I used to get the feeling only when I looked up at the stars and the moon; now mountains have the same effect on me, as though I’ve shrunk.”
Aurelia nodded, although they did not have the same effect on her, nor did the stars; in fact mountains always gave her more confidence – the feeling that she could range over them without the restraints of priests, governors and petty officials of any government, that she and Ned could just walk hand in hand. It was the freedom a ship had to sail towards the setting sun, where the stars dipped down…
Diana had stopped sobbing now. “Thomas and Ned would be ashamed of us.”
“I doubt it. They’d be flattered that we thought them worth a tear! Still, perhaps they don’t picture tearful women taking the ships round!”
“Aurelia,” Diana said quietly, “both men know what they they are doing and we’re lucky. A few years ago Thomas found a naïve girl whose most exciting experience up to then had been riding a steady horse in the company of a groom. Slowly he gave me confidence – why, at first I could not meet strangers without blushing. To begin with he gave me confidence in myself, and then he gradually showed me what I could do. That I could make decisions without staying awake all night worrying. He taught me how to sail a ship and proved to me that my decisions were as likely to be as right as his.”
