Only Life That Mattered

by Nelson, James L.

  She had tried to get Jacob to abandon her, to stay on New Providence. She had argued that he was as yet unknown, that he could melt into the population and never be known for a pirate.

  He had stated simply that she was his wife, that he had not plighted his troth lightly, that he would not leave her. Mary was furious and relieved, frightened and bolstered by his bold act.

  For a month the new Pretty Anne again prowled the Jamaican coast, taking fishing boats, canoes, pettiaugas, a few island traders. They met with no vessels more substantial than that. Nor would they have been able to effect much if they had—they were only ten in number now, and their sloop would not have been able to run down much larger prey.

  In September they sailed from Jamaica and made their way to the French part of Hispaniola, but the taking was not much better there. They went ashore and stole some cattle, and pressed into service two Frenchmen named Peter Cornelian and John Besneck, who were hunting wild hogs.

  Soon after they had the good fortune to take two sloops whose cargo proved to be of some worth. Not a fortune, to be sure, but better than the holds full of fish that had been their lot.

  “Mary,” Jacob asked, as the Pretty Annes looted the second of the sloops, anchored in a small bay on Île à Vache, “do you speak French at all?”

  “No. I can say oui, non, and rendez, which means surrender. Nothing else.”

  Jacob nodded. “I’ve been thinking . . . there might well come a time when we must defend ourselves. In a court of law. I speak some French. I’m going to speak with those two there—” he nodded toward the two Frenchmen, sulking in the bow “—and tell them that both of us were forced to sail with the pirates, just like they were. Tell them it is best if they try to get along, as you do, that is the way to not get your throat cut. Tell them we’re looking for the main chance to escape and that we’ll help them escape as well.”

  “They might believe that of you, Jacob. They’ll never believe it of me, a woman moving so freely among these rogues.”

  “Perhaps not. It is worth a try, in any event.” Jacob stood and ambled off forward to speak with Cornelian and Besneck.

  After some weeks in Hispaniola they sailed again for Jamaica with the Frenchmen still aboard. Jacob became friendly with them, assuring them in his halting French that they were all in the same predicament, that he and Mary were feigning cooperation to save their lives, and that they should do the same.

  Mary held out little hope that the Frenchmen would believe it, but she was happy nonetheless that Jacob was making the attempt. In her mind she saw their luck as the sand in a half-hour glass—and she saw it was running out.

  On the north side of Jamaica, in Ocho Rios Bay, a bit more than twenty miles west of Port Maria, the Pretty Anne came gliding into that curved harbor, almost upright in the light breeze, moving silently, save for the little rippling sound along her hull.

  Near the middle of the bay, a big ocean-going canoe was waiting as they closed, like a deer driven until it has collapsed with exhaustion. The canoe was around thirty feet long, loaded to the gunnels, two native paddlers at either end, a white person amidships.

  The Pretty Anne had come around the point and come upon the canoe making its way from one shore to the other. The people in the boat had tried to run from the pirates, paddling furiously, but with five knots of breeze off her quarter pushing the pirate sloop along, it was futile. One shot from the Pretty Anne’s forwardmost gun dissuaded the canoe from further attempts at escape. The paddles came in; the three persons aboard awaited their fate.

  The pirates lined the rail, laughing and speculating as to what the canoe was carrying. There was no great excitement aboard—it took more than a canoe to inspire shouting and banging and firing pistols—but the mood was good.

  Anne and Mary were forward, standing on the bowsprit on either side of the forestay, each holding it for balance, and talking softly as the sloop ran down on the open boat. With the Pretty Anne going in for an attack, even as lopsided an attack as this, they had changed into their male attire, their long coats and trousers and handkerchiefs around their heads. Anne wore a cocked hat, pushed down over her hair.

  “We have been too long on this shore,” Mary said. “There can be no doubt that the governor here has had an earful of complaints about us. Soon he will have to send someone to run us to ground, and it will not be hard to find a vessel that can overwhelm our company. We are but fourteen now, if you count the Frenchmen and Jacob. But the Frenchmen won’t fight for us, and I will not suffer Jacob to.”

  “What would you have us do?”

  Mary shrugged. “Return to Hispaniola for a time? Make for the Leeward Islands or the coast of America. The Carolinas, the Chesapeake. Quit the sweet trade.”

  Anne nodded. “You would like to quit this life?”

  “Oh, Annie, dear, I do not know. Had I the money to set up in something, I think I should quit this very moment. Don’t you get the sense of our time running out?”

  “‘But at my back I always hear, time’s winged chariot hurrying near . . .’”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, just some bit of a silly poem, which was writ to rob some poor girl of her maidenhead, which I reckon is why most men write poems. But I am not so certain that I see the end, as you do.”

  “I don’t think that poor Jack can go on much longer,” Mary said.

  Anne was silent for a moment, staring hard at the canoe, one hundred yards off. “It seems I have been my whole life in the sweet trade,” she said. “I don’t know what else I might do.” She turned to Mary and smiled. “It is the only thing I have ever found to which I am so well suited.”

  And then, silent, the Pretty Anne glided up beside the canoe, rounded up into the wind, and hands at the fife rail let the halyards go and the sails came down. Harwood and Dobbin tossed lines to the native boatmen and obediently they tied the canoe to the sloop, as if this meeting had been carefully planned. Men who worked on the water in the West Indies understood the benefits of cooperating with pirates.

  Amidships, the third person sat prim and stoic. She was an Englishwoman, with a silk dress and a big straw hat and a face full of resignation.

  “Come up here, come up here and have a wet with us!” Jack roared down at the people in the canoe. The natives scrambled up the side and showed no hesitation in accepting the proffered bottles. The woman did not move.

  “Come on, dear, get your arse up here!” Jack roared, and that sentiment was echoed among the others. The woman looked up with scorn. She was of middling age, not unattractive, but tanned, as women were wont to get in the West Indies.

  “Corner, see a bosun’s chair rigged for m’lady!” Jack called, and then the woman stood and without a word she climbed up the boarding steps and onto the deck. The pirates grabbed her arms, looked her up and down with hungry, wolf eyes.

  Mary and Anne climbed down from the bowsprit, ambled aft. Mary could see the fear in the woman’s eyes, but she held her lips firm and her jaw set and displayed more courage than a lot of men whom Mary had seen in similarly dire circumstances.

  “Over here, sweetheart!” Corner said, and reached down with his big hand and squeezed her ass, and the woman spun around and slapped him, hard, with a loud, smacking sound, but the blow made little impression on the big man. He laughed out loud, as did the others, then he pushed her back against the fife rail and ignored her.

  In the canoe the Pretty Annes were pulling off tarpaulins to reveal quantities of fresh food—bread and cured hams and smoked meat, beef and fish freshly put down in barrels—and wine and brandy in bottles and breakers. This sparked even greater enthusiasm among the men, and soon the woman found herself quite alone at the fife rail.

  Mary, fifteen feet away, was looking her over and her thoughts were meandering off. What is the difference between you and me? she thought. Why do you have fine silks, and me a sailor’s kit? What quirks of fate have put you there and me here?

  And then, as if she had
heard Mary’s silent query, the woman turned her head and looked right at Mary. Their eyes met and for a moment they stood, staring at one another. And then Mary saw the woman’s eyes open wider, saw them flash down the length of Mary’s body, and then over to Anne, and then just as fast she looked away.

  “Goddamn it!” Mary said.

  “What?” Anne asked.

  “That bitch has smoked us. She knows us for what we are.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I could see it in her eyes. Damn it all! Now she will come against us, for sure.” Only another woman would see through this disguise! Mary thought. It would take no great art for this woman to realize that the two women pirates had to be Anne Bonny and Mary Read, whose fame had spread as far as Nassau and God knew where else.

  Anne looked at the woman for a long moment and the woman, bold and defiant, looked back. Anne turned back to Mary. “She will testify against us. We must kill her,” she said, loud enough for the prisoner to hear.

  Mary frowned and stared off to sea. Oh, God, could I live with her blood on my hands? Will Annie and I hang if we do not do this thing?

  But of course they could not kill her, not in cold blood, and they both knew it. If Billy Bartlett had been there, she realized, he would have cut her throat with pleasure, and solved this problem for them. Now I am sorry I skewered that little bastard . . . she thought, and cursed herself for a coward.

  Ten minutes later the canoe was empty of everything that the pirates wanted, which was practically everything it had been carrying, and the native boatmen were sent back aboard, having enjoyed their stay with the pirates.

  The woman, still frightened, still determined, climbed down after them. She could hardly believe that she was still alive, and unmolested —Mary could see it in her face. She did not say a word, did not look up, kept her eyes well away from Mary and Anne. She knew there was still time for her fortune to change.

  Five days later, as Anne Bonny drew a deep breath and pulled the unconscious Jack away from the cabin door, where he had passed out and was obstructing the way, as Mary and Jacob, curled in their nest among the spare sails forward, talked in the low tones of lovers, as Richard Corner and George Fetherston took the five-pound top maul and smashed in the head of the penultimate breaker of brandy liberated from the canoe to get at the last, recalcitrant inches at the bottom, they were, all of the pirates aboard the Pretty Anne, at that moment, the topic of conversation at the highest levels of colonial government in Jamaica.

  “You know this John Rackam and his little band of rogues?”

  Governor Archibald Hamilton, Captain General and Governor-in-Chief in and over His Majesty’s island of Jamaica and the territories thereon depending in America, Chancellor and Vice Admiral of the same, sat behind a great, cluttered desk in his airy office.

  In front of the desk sat Captain Jonathan Barnet, a merchant captain and sometimes privateer. Five years before, Hamilton had granted him a commission for the suppression of pirates, and the man had managed to suppress a few in that time. He was tough and fearless in the naval line. Hamilton had always figured him for a frustrated captain of a man-of-war.

  “I’ve heard of him,” Barnett said. “He’s making something of a pest of himself around the island, robbing fishing boats and the like. I had heard he was off to Hispaniola.”

  “He is back, I believe. He and his band stole a sloop from New Providence belonging to someone from whom a sloop should not be stolen. Yesterday I received a report from a very distraught woman from Ocho Rios, Dorothy Thomas. Do you know her?”

  “I do not.”

  “Good woman. Her husband has a small plantation out there, and he has the ear of some damned influential men. In any event, she was taken in a canoe by some villains and they had in their company two women, dressed as men. Rogers at New Providence issued a proclamation for Rackam, said he had two women with him. Must be Rackam who stopped her; any other would be too great a coincidence.”

  “I would reckon so. Was Mrs Thomas molested in any way?”

  “She says that the women were for running her through, but in the end did not. She says she was unharmed.”

  “This is all quite against the nature of things.”

  “Might you be in a position to go after this Rackam and bring him in?”

  “How many are in his company?”

  “Mrs Thomas told me not above a dozen, or fifteen.”

  “My sloop is readied for a trading voyage to the South Keys, in Cuba, but it would be no great hardship for me to ship extra men and go in pursuit of Rackam on the way. With a good company aboard there should be no difficulty in taking twelve or fifteen of the villains.”

  “Excellent, sir, excellent. Mrs Thomas said they was bound west from Ocho Rios Bay, and that five days ago.”

  “Then west it is for me.” Barnet stood. He was an active man, eager to get under way.

  “You will sail soon, Captain?”

  “I can hope to sail on the next tide. There can be not a moment wasted when hunting these rogues.”

  “No indeed, sir. I wish you Godspeed.”

  They shook again and Captain Jonathan Barnet took his leave, his heels making clicking sounds on the tile as he strode out. He walked with the stride of a man to whom the very idea of failure had never occurred.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  THE PRETTY ANNES could feel fortune turning in their favor.

  The booty from the canoe had set them up: good food and lots of it, liquor meant for the gentry, not the rough fare that was generally their lot. The food and drink put the edge back on, and so they were on their mettle when Thomas Spenlow’s schooner hove into sight.

  Anne Bonny, high aloft, saw the schooner first, gray sails against the sharp line of the horizon. The Pretty Anne was sailing west with the wind behind her. Spenlow’s schooner was tacking out to sea, working her way off the Jamaican coast. The pirates were flying a British merchant’s ensign, and sloops such as she being so ubiquitous in the West Indies, Spenlow thought nothing at all was amiss until the buccaneers fired into her with small arms, and ran aloft the black flag with its skull and crossed swords.

  The Pretty Anne came alongside in a great flurry of flogging canvas and the enthusiastic pirates leapt across onto her decks, shoving the crew—now their prisoners—up into the bows, and began their preliminary exploration of the schooner.

  This was what Anne loved best; it was the golden moment in the pirates’ trade, when their feet first hit a foreign deck and a prize was theirs and there was still the anticipation of what they might find below decks.

  Try as she might to shake romantic notions—and Anne Bonny knew better than most the reality of the sweet trade—she could not help but think of the massive, lumbering Spanish treasure galleons and the ships of the Great Mogul of India, the great buccaneer fleets that had roamed the Spanish Main and had stripped Spanish cities of their gold. It made the fishing boats and canoes that were their lot seem all that much more pathetic.

  But this was different. This was a schooner, a vessel that was bigger than the Pretty Anne and might well have in her hold something more valuable than rotten nets and fish guts.

  Perhaps they would take and arm her, entice some of her men to join with them. Use the schooner to take yet a bigger vessel and move on up until they might rival the exploits of Blackbeard or Ben Hornigold.

  “There we go, lads! Rip into her, let’s see what we have!”

  Anne looked up as Jack, bottle and sword in hand, directed the men in the removal of the tarpaulins over the main hatch. He was smiling wide and Anne recognized the cocky swagger in his walk. Jack was brimming with pride, acting like he had taken the entire plate fleet.

  There was Dicky Corner, strong and dumb as the ax he was using to smash in the hatch. George Fetherston, laughing at something, the perpetual joke in his head. Here were the bastard children of Drake and Hawkins and De Graaf, who had lost their way.

  Anne felt her enthusiasm melt. Blo
ody pathetic. Perhaps Mary is right.

  They plundered the hold and found fifty rolls of tobacco and nine bags of pimento, which was not a bad take at all, even if it was not Spanish gold. They spent most of the day there, the two vessels tied together, the pirates eating and drinking whatever they could find, the prisoners up in the bow, terrified, then curious, and finally bored.

  As evening came on they put four of the six prisoners, including Thomas Spenlow, the master, aboard the Pretty Anne and left the rest aboard the schooner. Then the Pretty Anne and her prize filed away, still running west, pirate and victim keeping company through the night.

  Fetherston had command of the prize, with three of his shipmates and the prisoners to work the vessel. On and off through the dark hours his booming voice would come across the water, belting out some snatch of a song or yelling some non sequitur at which he would then laugh out loud.

  All the next day they continued west, running along the north shore of Jamaica, always with some relatively sober hand aloft, searching for the next bit of prey that might be swept up into their net.

  “Now see here, Mary, dear,” said Anne as they ate their dinner on the main hatch. They were wearing their holland dresses. The cloth was cool and comfortable after their burdensome wool and canvas sailor’s rigs. The sun and the Trade Winds made for a most agreeable climate. “We have a bit of a squadron now, do you see? Two vessels, and when we have company enough to man them properly, then we shall be a formidable enemy of mankind.”

  Mary nodded. “You’re right. We have doubled the strength of our fleet.”

  They were silent for a moment as they ate, and then Anne said, “You still think we’re too long on this coast?”