by Dudley Pope
At last the wind began thinning the great cloud of power, smoke and dust as it drifted towards the harbour entrance. Already he could just see the box-shaped shadow of Todo Fierro looming high on the cliffs as though he was approaching the coast through a thick fog; now a swirl of wind cleared the other side so he could make out Cocal Point.
Slowly, so very slowly, the entrance cleared: faintly he could distinguish the line of the horizon and the Griffin, sails drawing beautifully and followed closely by the Peleus, was steering for the gap between Cocal Point on the south side of the entrance and Todo Fierro on the north. Yes, Aurelia was favouring the northern side because of the line of reefs skirting the southern. Doing exactly what she had been told to do. She would have seen San Gerónimo blow up, just as El Morro had at Santiago… She had not seen it as a warning; she – oh God! She was well within range of the guns of Todo Fierro, they would be opening fire any moment, and he was so dizzy, so dizzy, everything was spiralling down, down, and his arm was agony now and he was whirling down and down.
He emerged as though swimming up from deep water, eyes blurred and head spinning, his whole being rapidly concentrated by an excruciating pain into his left arm. He was lying flat on his back, arm by his side, and Thomas – several Thomases – was suddenly coming into sharp focus and then almost disappearing in a blur, as though someone was playing with the adjusting tube of a perspective glass. And Secco, and Saxby, and Coles and Brace were staring down at him. But Secco and Coles and Brace had taken that Spanish garrison commander to Todo Fierro…
He felt himself slipping away again and made a great effort to hold on, trying to keep his eyes focused on the tip of Thomas’ beard. “Secco…” he muttered, “…you didn’t get to To’ Fierro? Wha’ happened?”
The dam’d man was grinning and the others were laughing. Why was Secco whispering?
“Speak up…can’t hear…”
Now Thomas was speaking louder, crouched down so his mouth was close.
“The Griffin is anchored in front of the wreck of San Gerónimo and –” he stood up to look, and then crouched down again “–the Peleus is just anchoring. I can see Aurelia and Diana. They have no boats, so Jensen is going out to fetch them.”
“Todo Fierro,” Ned repeated, feeling the powerful pain in his arm again trying to pull him over the edge into unconsciousness.
Again all the faces looking down at him were distorted into puppet faces, mocking him and laughing because his arm was so painful, then suddenly they came into clearer focus and their voices became more distinct, and Secco was saying excitedly: “It surrendered, almirante, it surrendered!”
“Tell me abou’ it.”
“We saw the Griffin and the Peleus suddenly pick up a wind and approach very fast, so we made that captain hurry –”
“Tickled him once or twice with the tip of a cutlass,” Coles said. “It moved him along wonderfully.”
“So we reached the gate of Todo Fierro before the Griffin was in range, but madame was sailing the ship well: too well, we were saying.”
“That gust of wind,” Brace grumbled. “Both ships were stretching along straight for the entrance and making seven knots, I swear.”
“Anyway,” Secco continued, “the sergeant had the little door open: he recognized the captain, though the poor fellow was running in sweat, his hat had fallen off and his hair hung down like a mop, his breeches were torn and his hose shredded. His mother would not have recognized him, but fortunately the sergeant did.”
“They were covering us with muskets though,” Brace said. “They guessed the captain was our prisoner.”
Secco said: “I told the captain what to say, and he ordered the sergeant to surrender, but the sergeant still refused. He said that we had tortured the captain. The captain said that if the sergeant refused to obey orders, all the rest of the garrison would be blown up in San Gerónimo.”
“Aye, and by this time the sergeant was already shouting up orders to the men at the guns because the Griffin was very near,” Coles said.
“The captain knew the danger he and his men were in – he thought that if he succeeded San Gerónimo and the prisoners would be saved, and if he failed they would be blown up: he never did realize the prisoners had been transferred to Triana. Anyway, he lost his temper with the sergeant, who was convinced we had put the captain on the rack but would not dare blow up San Gerónimo. In fact the captain’s last words were that we would never dare, and he slammed the door shut and left us looking at each other wondering how we could warn the Griffin and Peleus that they would be coming under plunging fire in a few minutes. Moments, rather.”
Ned waited for Secco to go on, but the man paused.
“Go on!”
“Well, just after he slammed the door, San Gerónimo suddenly blew up and the explosion blew the door open again and the sergeant came running out and then stopped and stared: it was a fantastic sight, like a great kettle boiling yellow, white, black and brown steam, with huge blocks of masonry shooting up out of it, and the boom echoing again and again and again between the mountains: I thought it would never end. The birds were going mad, the sea in the anchorage was rough from all the stones and beams and wreckage falling into it. Anyway, as soon as he could catch his breath, the sergeant surrendered and we sent him back inside to order his men to get away from the guns.”
“We’d just got these men formed up outside, disarmed and taken prisoner, and lowered the Spanish flag, when the Griffin sailed in,” Brace said. “You told madame to hug the Todo Fierro shore because of the coral reefs on the other side, and we all stood and cheered and waved and she waved back. Lady Diana came even closer, and we started the prisoners trotting back here!”
“Where are they now?”
“All locked in the dungeon of Triana.”
“You made them hurry!”
“No, it was the sergeant. He was most anxioius to please us, and I think he’s still nervous about some of the things he said to his captain.”
“This arm,” Ned said, “can we do something about it before Aurelia…”
“The surgeon will be here in a few moments,” Thomas said. “Some of the men were badly hurt by falling masonry.”
“If we blow up enough of these places, we’ll learn what’s a safe distance,” Ned said and tried to laugh, but the movement gave him such a stab of pain that he fainted just as, unnoticed by any of the men, Aurelia and Diana ran across the dried grass.
Aurelia moaned as she saw what she thought was the bloodstained corpse of Ned lying on the ground, and Diana grabbed Thomas in a tight embrace and then started a shrill harangue, blaming him for Ned’s death.
Ned regained consciousness yet again to hear, at a great distance, the plaintive voice of the surgeon asking to be let through to the admiral.
The office of the garrison commander in Fort Triana was cool: walls ten feet thick kept out the sun’s heat; a large iron-barred window facing east and forty feet high caught the wind, even if it also scooped up some of the sickly-sweet swamp smells.
Ned rested his forearm on the table that served as a desk. It throbbed, it had shooting pains, it felt as though it was badly broken into five or six pieces instead of – as the surgeon had assured him – being neatly fractured once with no puncturing of the skin. Anyway, with four short lengths of bamboo splinting it, like a broken mast or yard fished with battens, and served round with a length of marline to keep it all rigid, the surgeon was satisfied and said Ned could move about providing he put the arm in the sling made out of an old piece of sacking which, from its smell, had been used by fishermen to carry the turban shells which they pulled off rocks and boiled.
Aurelia and Diana sat in chairs behind him: with all the ships of the buccaneer fleet now anchored safely in Portobelo (and only one grazing the coral shoal and escaping without damage thanks to the wind fluking r
ound the moment she fired a gun for help), the two women had decided they would nurse the wounded.
The dead had been buried – in this heat the graves could hardly be dug quickly enough. Eleven buccaneers had been killed – crushed by stone flung up by San Gerónimo when it exploded. Thomas, reporting later on the condition of the six wounded, told Ned that he had been more than lucky: they had discovered that the actual piece of stone that dropped out of the sky to break his forearm weighed more than two hundredweight: it had landed right beside him and a jagged edge had just caught his arm. “If you’d been standing one pace to your left, we’d still be looking for you,” Thomas said. “You’d be as flat as Diana’s singing.”
He then went on to report the results of the buccaneers’ sally into Portobelo. Ned, still dizzy and dazed from his broken arm, had known that any delay gave the inhabitants of the town more time to hide their treasures, but the idea of all the silver, emeralds and pearls from San Gerónimo lying on the ground with only buccaneers armed with muskets guarding it made him order it to be carried to Triana and locked in the dungeon. The few buccaneers who grumbled at having to carry the treasure yet again were told by an unsympathetic Saxby that carrying cones and wedges of silver never tired a man that had his wits about him.
Ned had intended to lead two hundred buccaneers in a raid on the town but had not reckoned on Aurelia.
“What good will you be able to do?” she asked, pointing at his arm in the sling. “Thomas will command the men; you will stay here and rest for an hour or two.”
Diana, seeing that Ned was going to argue with Aurelia, signalled to Thomas, who merely said: “I’ll be back soon, Ned; I’ll take Saxby with me.” With that he was out of the door.
“Don’t ever do that again,” Ned told Aurelia angrily. “I’m in command of this expedition. Leave the decisions to me.”
Aurelia smiled and said to Diana, as though Ned was not in the room: “He has so much to think about, and the pain of his arm makes his mind wander.”
“I’ve seen it happen to Thomas,” Diana said sympathetically. “He roars: ‘I’m captain of this ship!’” she shrugged. “I usually leave him to it, and if he doesn’t realize his mistake he finds he’s sleeping alone.”
“When the men complain they’ve only half the purchase they expected, I’ll send them to ask you about it,” Ned growled.
At that moment there was a hurried banging on the door and a voice cried urgently: “Mr Yorke… Mr Yorke!”
“Come in!”
Barnes, a seaman from Coles’ ship, hurried in gasping painfully for breath and holding his side with a painful stitch. Slowly he managed to blurt out that he was one of the two look-outs left at Todo Fierro, keeping a watch to seaward, and they had just spotted five ships.
“At least, sir, five when I left. Hull-down on the horizon to the nor’ard they were, but there might be more in sight by now.”
“Could you see enough from their rig to distinguish if they were ships of war?”
“No, sir, but they didn’t seem really big enough, although they’re all different sizes. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be getting back. The other look-out was going to wait ten minutes and then follow me round to give you a later report. I’ll look and be coming back while he is making his report.”
With that Barnes was gone and Ned was left staring at the bamboo battens splinting his arm. Five ships? Not buccaneers, that much was certain, because all the known buccaneers were with him. Individual new ships might have arrived at Tortuga intending to join and gone on to Port Royal looking for the admiral and the rest of the Brethren, but they could not have gone on to Old Providence because the buccaneers themselves did not know where Ned was taking them when they left Port Royal.
Yet…wait a minute. Leclerc and a few buccaneers knew about the year’s uncollected bullion waiting at Portobelo, but Leclerc and his men were here – at this very moment they were with Thomas searching Portobelo town for purchase. Did anyone else know about the bullion who had not come on the expedition but might be trying to catch up now? No. Certainly not five ships.
Five ships…his head was spinning and it seemed as if a blacksmith’s bellows was pumping blasts of roaring pain through his ears. Five ships, they had to be Spanish. But coming from the north? Yes, sailing here from Cartagena could mean a westerly run to leeward and then a stretch to the south. Five ships…why did the phrase “five ships” seem to have a deeper significance, to strike some chord in his memory?”
Again there was a banging at the door and a breathless shout for Mr Yorke.
He recognized the buccaneer coming into the room as a Norfolk man from Beccles who had worked on the plantation and was now in the Phoenix with Saxby. Woods, that was his name.
“The ships, sir!” he exclaimed. “Five of them, and they’re Spanish, I’ll stake my oath on that. Sheer, cut of the sails – aye, and the way they’re being sailed too.”
“Men of war?”
“Oh no, sir!” Woods said, as though reproaching Ned for using strong language in front of the ladies. “Transports, or more likely they’re local ships being used as transports, and sailing together in convoy to avoid all those nasty buccaneers!”
Woods said he was returning to Todo Fierro and Barnes would be back in fifteen minutes with later news. Then Ned remembered. Five ships. Five transports. Five Spanish transports… Now he had it! General Heffer had the report of five Spanish ships intending to land troops in Runaway Bay and then the miserable captain left in command of the garrison here, who had tried to persuade the sergeant to surrender Todo Fierro, had bewailed the fact that each fort had been left only twenty or so men. “When the five transports took all the rest of the garrison to Jamaica.”
Now they were coming back: the Portobelo garrison with perhaps the several hundred soldiers taken from Old Providence and as many more levies collected from all the nearby towns. Suddenly the bullion seemed to be receding into the distance.
Aurelia had been watching him closely. “Five ships?” she said casually. “Who are they?”
“The Portobelo garrison coming back from Jamaica.”
“The garrison – or their ships?” she asked shrewdly.
Ned thought for a moment or two. “Both, I should think. If it’s only the ships, that means they’ve left the troops there – abandoned them.”
Diana said: “With General Heffer in command, I wouldn’t be too sure. We knew he expected the Spanish to land on the north coast. Supposing they landed at Port Royal instead – could they capture it?”
“Two thousand properly led probably could,” Ned said soberly. “Anyway, we’ve got to do something now on the assumption the ships are carrying troops”
“This is like some game,” Diana commented. “While the first robber is out about his business his home is burgled and he returns and finds the second robber still at work…”
“I wonder Shakespeare never used the idea,” Ned said. “He might have –” he stopped abruptly, realizing that the pain in his arm really was slowing down his thinking.
“Will one of you go up on the battlements and tell Burton, who is up there with half a dozen men, that I want him to fire five guns at half–minute intervals, starting as soon as he’s ready? Use guns pointing across the swamp: I don’t want sharp eyes in the Spanish ships to spot the smoke.”
Diana ran out of the room with the orders and Aurelia said: “Why five?”
“Five, six, seven – it doesn’t matter: it’ll bring Thomas and all the rest of our men back here quicker than anything else.”
“Unless any of them have gone into the tabernas.”
“They’ll have gone in all right, but to roll the barrels into the street to bring back to the ships. No one is going to spend much time looking for hot liquors to drink when he could be finding gold or silver, or jewellery.”
Aurelia made a face. “I hate to think of a woman losing all her jewellery – wedding ring, necklaces that were betrothal presents, family heirlooms…”
“If the Spanish government let us trade, we’d be buying and selling. If the Portobelo garrison has managed to capture Jamaica, I doubt if the Spanish have left any woman with her chastity or even her life, let alone her jewels – and they are regular soldiers, not cut-throat filibusteros.”
“I suppose you’re right, but… Anyway, what are you going to do now?”
“Well, when you’re trapped in a trap, I suppose the best thing to do is to try to trap the trapper.”
“Ned,” Aurelia said plaintively, “how do you expect your French mistress to understand such complicated sentences?”
“Don’t worry,” Ned said cheerfully, “I’m not sure I do, but now I have an idea.”
It took more than a quarter of an hour for all the captains and buccaneers to get back to Triana fort, puzzled and alarmed, and by then a seaman messenger had found Jensen, so that his flotilla of boats was waiting at the San Gerónimo jetty.
By then both Barnes and Woods had each been back with later reports. The Spanish ships were running into calms where the buccaneers, led by Aurelia and Diana, had found fresh breezes. In answer to a direct request from Ned that they both look, they each reported that the damage to San Gerónimo was not very obvious from as far away as Todo Fierro: the dried and stony ground camouflaged the scattered masonry and the ragged edges of the grey battlements were not noticeable outlined against the distant rocky hills.
“I don’t reckon,” Woods said emphatically, “that the Dons will notice anything – except our ships, o’course – until they’re actually in the harbour: the headsails make it hard to see dead ahead anyway.”
“Except our ships” – Woods had put the problem into three words.
Before the captains arrived from Portobelo town, Ned had tried to see the anchorage through the eyes of the Spanish senior officer of the Spanish ships. Portobelo would look the same as when they sailed for Old Providence and Jamaica, except for two things: there were twenty-eight small ships now in the anchorage and, if he looked harder, he would see that the Castillo de San Gerónimo was badly damaged: not the walls, but as though someone had sliced the top crust from a square loaf.
