Title:  The Privateer (1952)
Author: Gordon Daviot [Elizabeth MacKintosh] (1896-1952)
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Title:  The Privateer (1952)
Author: Gordon Daviot [Elizabeth MacKintosh] (1896-1952)




1


Below the veranda in the noon sunlight stood a cluster of slaves and
bond-servants, bright and noisy as macaws.

In other climes light is a negative thing: a mere absence of darkness.
But in the islands when the fronds of the palm-trees move in the wind
the light runs in and out among them like a live thing. So now when the
restless island wind played with the kerchiefs and the petticoats the
light, too, danced and ran, and the crowd moved continuously, like a
field of flowers in the sun.

Only one among them did not move: the young man with the black hair who
was leaning against the jacaranda tree. He looked equable but
absent-minded.

A house-slave staggered on to the veranda carrying the estate-book.
They greeted him with jests and laughter, and he stuck his tongue out
at them. He put the book down on the table and fled from their mockery.
Then the factor came, and waited by the table, and some of the chatter
and shrieking died away. Their interest narrowed on the book. They all
knew the book. Indeed, to some of them it represented all the identity
they had ever had. And today the book was of acute importance.

Then their master walked on to the veranda, and the crowd hushed to
stillness in the dancing wind and the light. After him came his son, to
stand behind his father's shoulder.

The factor sat down at the table and opened the book, and the tired,
middle-aged man stepped forward a little so that they might see him the
better, and began to speak to them.

They listened to him, but only with their ears. They knew already all
that he had to say. The drought. The blighted canes. The lack of work
for them. The lack of food. The lack of money to buy any, to keep them
alive until next season. They knew it all already. They had lived with
the drought and alongside the dead canes and the blasted cocoa trees.
They had come there this morning to be given their freedom. That was
all that interested them.

There was a written paper for each of them, he said, that would show to
all that they were free men and not runaways, and they must keep the
paper and show it to any who asked.

Then the factor called the first name.

'John Alison.'

A negro capered like a figure on the end of a string.

'Field hand. Slave.'

'You may go,' said his master, and the black took the magic piece of
paper from the factor and bounded laughing back to the throng.

'Michel Duchesne.'

The Frenchman came forward; a small, gnarled man.

'Field hand. Bondsman. Engaged for seven years; has served five.'

'You may go.'

'Ah Ling.'

The Chinese bowed.

'Field hand. Slave.'

'You may go.'

'Elias Brown.'

The mulatto came smiling.

'Field hand. Slave.'

'You may go.'

'Maria Perez.'

The Indian half-breed swung her full skirts in a curtsey.

'Sorter. Slave.'

'You may go.'

'William Chapman.'

The huge jailbird shouldered his way out of the crowd.

'Field hand. Slave.'

'You may go.'

'Candlemas.'

The Indian came doubtfully.

'Field hand. Slave.'

'You may go.'

'Henry Morgan.'

The young man detached himself from the tree.

'Field hand. Of late, clerk in the estate office. Bondsman. Engaged for
four years and has served two.'

'You may go.'

The young man took his discharge and was turning away when the youth
came from behind his father and said: 'Wait! It was you who caught my
pony the day he bolted. Wasn't it?'

'That was I.'

'Here!' said the youth, and flung a coin. It was a gold coin, and it
lay in the dust while the young man eyed it. And everyone else eyed the
young man.

'Does a Welshman refuse good money?' asked the youth.

'No. But a Morgan cannot pick it up.'

'It seems to be deadlock.'

'Not quite. You could make it a loan.'

'Very well,' said the youth, amused. 'A loan it is.'

'Pick it up,' said the young man to the slave who was standing nearest;
and the slave did meekly as he was bid and handed over the coin.

The young man bowed to his benefactor. 'At the usual rate of interest,
sir,' he said, and turned away.

'Jan Martin,' summoned the factor.

But the young man did not wait to see. He went back to his tree, picked
up the bundle that was lying there ready, and walked away without a
backward glance.

'Harr-ee!' cried a girl, breaking from the press and running after him.
'Harr-ee!'

She came to the edge of the terrace as he came level with her on the
path below.

'Good-bye, Chloe,' he said, without stopping.

'But, Harr-ee! You are not going now, this minute, are you? You are
staying for the festa, for the dance, for the celebration? Surely! You
are not going before tonight!'

But he went steadily away.

'Harr-ee!'

'Good-bye,' he called, without turning his head.

She stood on the terrace pouting, and watched him grow small down the
long avenue to the lane.

When she could no longer see him she went back to her fellows.

And Henry Morgan walked away into the landscape with a bundle of
clothes, and a gold coin, and his freedom.

He knew better what to do with the coin than what to do with his
freedom. Having had a more intimate acquaintance with the estate's
finances than is the lot of most servants, he had known weeks ago that
this must come, and he had lain awake of nights on his bed on the
office floor pondering his future.

That he slept in peace in the office quiet, and not among the snores,
stenches, and quarrelling in the bunkhouse was typical of Henry Morgan.
When he had first asked the factor's permission to spread his pallet
there of nights, the factor had said tartly that his office was neither
a hospital nor a flop-house. Henry accepted the prohibition with the
proper disappointment and began to make mistakes in his arithmetic. He
continued to make mistakes in his arithmetic, and when the maddened
factor asked what had come over that alert and accurate brain of his,
he had explained that sleepless nights in the bunkhouse forbade that
his brain should ever be either alert or accurate. After that Henry
slept on the office floor. And until three or four weeks ago had slept
unmoving till cockcrow.

But of late he had lain awake thinking about his freedom. And today,
walking away to his future, he still did not know what he was going to
do with it.

It was much too hot to be walking with any degree of pleasure, even in
the shade, but at least he had an immediate purpose. He was going to
keep on walking until he came to the sea. The sea was the symbol of his
freedom. The sea was freedom made tangible and manifest.

And he amused himself by picturing how it would look. In what mood
would he find it? Pale and translucent? Or patterned purple and green
by the shoals? Or leaping all over into little white tufts like a
baby's cockscomb? Or oily and dark, indigo-blue, with a sullen swell?

It was in its taffeta mood. Palest blue taffeta, of the very best
quality. He stretched himself out in the shade and looked at it. Bland
and innocent, it lay at his feet, curling at the edges into a foam
demure as lace.

The sea. He gave a great sigh and his eyelids drooped. The sea. He was
alone and free, and the world was his for the taking. What did it
matter that he was two years short of the sum he had counted on? He had
never been quite sure, in any case, what he was going to do with the
money. What most people did with money in Barbados was to buy land.
Fine, rich, virgin land that would pay a man back a hundred-fold--when
there was no drought. But not he. It was from land that he had run
away. He had had some idea of buying a place in one of the foot
companies that defended Barbados against the importunities of Spain.
That had seemed an appropriate occupation for the nephew of two
distinguished soldiers and the descendant of more. Now that was no
longer possible, but he was something short of heartbroken. It had
been only an idea. The world was full of ideas, running over with
opportunity. He could no longer buy his future, but there was nothing
to hinder his making it.

He lay supine in the shade, so relaxed that he could feel the earth
pushing up against him. The leaves whispered above him, the insects
sang past him in endless pursuit of unimaginable business, the surf
made a soft susurration in his ears. Free. He was free. There was
nothing a man could not do if he was young and free.

For an hour he lay there unmoving and dreamed; but no longer. Leisure
palled. Leisure was never a love of Henry Morgan's. Moreover, when you
are young you grow hungry, and when you are free you do not have to eat
food out of the communal trough any more. Good food waited for him in
Bridgetown. He would go and get it. He would sit like a lord at a table
covered with a fair white cloth and pick and choose from a dozen
dainties while menials hovered round to anticipate his wishes. A pair
of denim breeches and a frieze coat were perhaps not the best
introduction to the finest places in Bridgetown, but he had money to
pay for what he wanted. He might lack the sum that would set him up as
commander of a company, but he had, thank God, enough to buy himself
the best meal west of the Azores.

This more practical dream lasted him to the outskirts of Bridgetown,
where his youth and his hunger betrayed him. It was late afternoon:
dinner-time; and from all around him in the frowsy suburb there rose
the succulent smells of cooking. His boy's stomach yearned and his
teeth were awash. Ignoring the unswept porch and the fish-heads in the
dust, he stopped at a workman's eating-house and wolfed an enormous
bowlful of fish stew, hot and spiced and various. It might not be the
best meal west of the Azores, but no meal had ever tasted better.

He topped it off with the usual rum, and sat, gorged and amiable,
playing with the black babies who rolled at his feet in the dust. They
were very beautiful, the babies; fat and merry. One had found a
drooping scarlet flower and had stuck it behind his ear in imitation
of the local bloods. His innocently rakish eye, together with the
coquettish bloom, enchanted Henry, and he laughed aloud. Which had the
effect of recalling him to his own purposes. He reminded himself that
enchanting black babies grew up to be stupid and unreliable adults of
uncontrolled imagination and invincible laziness, and having by this
sternness detached himself from their infant wiles, he took his bundle
and sauntered on into the town.

The thatch and rain-stained plaster gave place to stone and tiles, and
pleasant arcades against the heat. He lingered by the shop-windows,
planning a wardrobe for himself. He hung over the sea-wall, counting
the ships in harbour and analysing their rig. The sea had stopped being
taffeta and was now a burning shield of silver, so fierce and colourless
that the ships lacked reflection and stood as if stranded on it.

'Looking for me, John-ny?' a woman said, laying her elbows on the wall
alongside him.

'No,' he said, and moved on.

Along the harbour front were the taverns and eating-houses. The more
popular hummed and clattered, and hot gusts that were as strong of
human sweat as of food came reeking from their open doors. From one a
sailor was pitched drunk into the gutter. He sat up, shaken and
bewildered, and presently began to laugh tipsily to himself. 'Change of
scene. Change of scene,' he said to Morgan as he passed. 'Vastly
puzzling.' The quieter places were not yet full--or perhaps were never
full. Henry passed them all in review--he was in no hurry to eat now,
but he had a thirst--and chose the Dolphin, one of the older and less
garish places with a garden at the back of it. After the brilliance of
the harbour the interior was so dark that he was for a moment at a
loss. He put out his hand and felt a chair-back. So it was the kind of
place that had chairs. He had no idea that such elegance existed in
Bridgetown. The chair was empty, and he sat down on it against the
wall.

A voice in the dimness asked his wants and, remembering his former
promises to himself, he said: 'I want some imported wine. Have you
claret?'

'We have claret,' said the voice, 'but I doubt if you'd like it.'

'Why? Has it not carried?'

'Claret's a wine for the quality.'

There was a moment's pause. He could see the man now, and realised that
it was not at all dark in the room. The front part of the building was
used, it seemed, for those who wanted merely to drink and talk. Three
arches divided it from the rear portion, which was furnished with
dining-tables and was open to the garden.

'Bring me the wine,' he said, 'and let me be the judge of quality.'

The quietness of the reprimand daunted the waiter, and he went away
hostile but obedient. He came back and set the wine down with a gesture
that was as near insult as he could make it.

Henry had silver in his pocket, but his Celt vanity, pricked by the
man's sneer, was too much for him. He dropped his gold piece with a
fine casual movement on to the table, so that it rolled a little and
spun before settling. The waiter checked his dawning expression of
surprise and went to get change.

Henry was childishly delighted--until he saw his change.

'Claret's expensive,' said the waiter, enjoying him.

'I gave you a gold piece.'

'You gave me a Spanish "eight".'

'A gold piece,' Henry said through his teeth.

'I don't think that's very likely, now, is it?' said the man, with a
diabolic air of reasonableness, and Henry, with contracted heart,
realised that on appearances it was indeed unlikely. Who would take his
word against the waiter's?--the word of a man in workman's clothes who
claimed to have paid for a flagon of wine with a gold piece?

'The gentleman gave you a gold piece, cock,' said a gentle Cockney
voice on his right.

The waiter favoured the man at the next table with a baleful glare.

'And who----' he began.

'Me and my friends don't like mistakes,' said the little elderly man in
the same reflective croon, and the waiter looked suddenly doubtful.

'A conspiracy, is it?' he said, and began to retreat. 'Or should I say
a cons-_pyracy_?' With which fling he gave the proper change, retired
to the doorway, and stood there glowering.

'Thank you,' Henry said to his neighbour. 'I am much obliged to you,
sir.'

'It's nothing, nothing,' said the little man. 'Your good health.'

The wine tasted thin and harsh after the island rum, but it was cool
from the cellar, and Henry was glad of it. The place was pleasant, and
the customers had the air of habitués. No one had taken any notice of
the altercation with the serving-man; perhaps they had not overheard
it.

From beyond the archway he met the glance of a man who was dining there
with a friend. The man did not look away when their eyes met, and Henry
wondered whether it was that the man found him interesting or whether
he found him so insignificant as to represent merely a blank space.

He became aware that his companion was talking to him.

'You belong to the island, young man?'

Henry said that he had been employed in Barbados, but was now planning
a different future.

'What name do you go by?'

'My own.'

'Well, well, don't jump down my throat, boy. I go by the name of
Bartholomew Kindness, and Kindness was my father's name and Bartholomew
is what I was baptised.'

'I had not meant---- My name is Henry Morgan.'

'From old England,' Bartholomew said, approving.

'Wales,' said the conscientious Morgan.

'And what, if you won't jump down my throat, are you planning for the
future?'

Henry said that he had not yet decided, but that if Bartholomew had no
immediate plans for this evening and had not yet dined he would be very
glad to be his host.

For one horrible moment, while Bartholomew hesitated, Henry was afraid
that Bartholomew was doubting his ability to afford it and was going to
refuse out of sheer good heart.

But Bartholomew's heart was bigger even than that. 'Thank you,' he
said. 'I should be greatly honoured.'

Before he could sound Bartholomew about his own affairs, Mad Meg came
in from the street, and made her mechanical round of the tables. That
part of her dirty white locks which did not stand on end hung down to
her sharp chin, and from their ambush her pale old eyes looked forth,
bright and glowing as coals. 'Ribbons and laces,' she said, 'ribbons
and laces,' exhibiting from her crone's fingers the same tattered
merchandise that served her year in, year out.

The proprietor noticed her with resignation, and the waiter with fury
and loathing. Neither was prepared to risk her curses. No Brahminee
bull was ever safer in Hind than Mad Meg in Bridgetown.

She paused to stare at Morgan, aware perhaps that here was a new face.
A little embarrassed by her withdrawn regard and by the attention that
her interest was bringing upon him, he bade her good-afternoon.

'Black hair and blue eyes,' she said. And then, irrelevantly: 'It's
green, green, in Kildare.'

'I'm not Irish, mother,' he said; but she seemed unaware of him.

'Tell his fortune, Meg,' someone said; and the others joined him. 'Tell
the young man's future, Meg,' they said. 'He'll cross your hand with
silver.'

'With gold, I've no doubt,' said the waiter, sourly.

But she moved on with her resumed chant: 'Ribbons and laces, ribbons
and laces...' and then, as one changing to the second motif of a
composition: 'Woe! Woe! Woe to the evildoers; the fornicators, the
lechers, the deceivers, the double-dealers, the ones without conscience
or courtesy----'

She broke off, debating with herself. And then, as if suddenly reminded
of business elsewhere, she turned and came back down the room to the
doorway. But as she came level with the newcomer she caught sight of
him again and paused. In some recess of her mind she connected that
face with the telling of fortune.

'You'll write your name in water,' she said. And while he stared, held
by the unhuman eyes beyond the tangle of hair, and dismayed by her
unhappy promise, she repeated: 'You'll write your name in water for all
the world to read.'

And she went, rapt and urgent, out into the hot world beyond the door.

'Is that a good fortune or a bad?' Henry said, into the vacuum that
personality leaves in its wake.

'It's a fine conspicuous one, anyhow,' Bartholomew said.

'It would be no comfort for failure to know that it was conspicuous.'

'Not you! I could have told you'd be a success in life without telling
fortunes. One glance is all I need. You have a nose that's broad at the
point. It's a sure sign of being able to look after Number One, a nose
broad at the point.'

Henry tried very hard not to stare at Bartholomew's nose, which was so
broad at the tip as to be practically all point. The little man was
neat and respectable, but hardly an advertisement for his theory.

'No, not my kind of "broad",' Bartholomew said, quite without rancour.
'The kind that starts bony and has a blob on the end. It's my hobby:
faces. See that man facing us through the archway? That's a clever one,
that is. You'd have to start very early to get the better of that one
or he'd make you feel unpunctual.'

'Do you know who he is?' Henry asked, catching again the absent glance
of the man on himself.

'No, I don't know this place well. Come here now and then on business,
that's all. We supply meat to ships, me and my partners. I like the
islands, but I'd give a lot to see Bristol docks this minute. Even
Bristol docks in the rain. I was born in London, but I married a
Bristol girl. When I've made my little pile, me and my old woman's
going to retire to a cottage in the Mendips.'

Henry said that he was lucky to have a home waiting for him.

'Oh, it ain't built yet, the cottage. But we've picked out the place
for it. In a green valley where the moors begin half-way up the sides.'

And suddenly Henry saw Llanrhymny.

That, too, was 'a green valley where the moors begin half-way up'. He
saw it small, and clear, and far away, like something in the wrong end
of a telescope.

Llanrhymny.

'I expect a young gentleman like you is handy with a pen,' he heard
Bartholomew say, and turned to him surprised at this apparent change of
subject.

'Fairly. Why do you ask?'

'Well, you see, I can read, but I never learned penmanship, and my old
woman, she misses hearing from me, and--well----'

'You want me to write a letter for you, is that it?'

'Oh, not a letter. A few lines would do to say that I'm keeping fine.
If it wouldn't be imposing on you.'

'I owe you much more than that,' Henry said. 'Let us dine first, shall
we, and then write the letter.'

'Well--about that dinner---- Tell me, do you like sucking pig? Roast
sucking pig?'

'Of course. Who doesn't?'

'Well, I was going to suggest that you come back with me to our hunting
camp, back up the coast a bit, and eat hearty of the best meat in the
Caribbean.'

Henry, whose appetite for the Bridgetown flesh-pots was not what it had
been before the episode of the gold coin, considered a combination of
roast pig, a hunting camp on the coast, and Bartholomew Kindness almost
too much luck for his first night of freedom. He required a pen and ink
from the Dolphin's proprietor, and wrote the letter there and then, so
that it might go to England with the _Mary Ryde_, which was sailing for
Plymouth in the morning. And in the intervals of Bartholomew's
inspiration he watched the man beyond the archway. Henry, whose taste
had a Celt flamboyance, thought his clothes a little subdued, but
admired the fineness of his linen and his ruffle's candidness. The man
had been joined by his son--a young man so like him that the
relationship could be in no doubt--and his clever, worldly face had so
softened that he looked like a different person. This was remarked with
astonishment by a Henry unprepared for the idea that a father might
love his son. Nor could he imagine himself sitting down and chatting
happily with his father's friends, on equal terms, as this young man
was doing. 'If my father had been a Royalist instead of a damned
Puritan, it might have been like that,' he thought.

'Your very loving husband, Bartholomew Kindness,' finished Bartholomew,
released from the pains of composition. 'And now we'll 'ave another
drink.'

They had their drink, and gathering up Henry's bundle and the large
sack of purchases that was the result of Bartholomew's day in town,
they made their way out of the Dolphin. As they left, Henry saw that
the party beyond the archway was also leaving, and he pulled
Bartholomew's sleeve to detain him, so that the party from the
dining-room passed out first.

'Who is that?' Henry asked the loafer outside who had touched his hat
to the man.

'That's Sir Thomas Modyford,' the man said. 'Got one of the biggest
estates in the island. Be Governor one day, if the Commonwealth lasts.'

'A _Cromwell_ man!' Henry said.

'Isn't it going to last?' Bartholomew asked with interest.

'Nothing lasts,' said the man, but his eyes were on Henry. Henry's
disappointment was too acute to be anything but genuine.

'Been everything in his time, they say,' he added, risking a mild
indiscretion, and went back to his tooth-picking.

'A weathercock!' Henry said disgusted, as they walked away.

'No, no,' said Bartholomew. 'A sail-trimmer.'

'What is the difference?'

'Oh, all the difference in the world. All the difference in the world.
A weathercock is a poor helpless thing that's twirled round and round
by every breeze that blows. No brains, no sense, no say. But a
sail-trimmer--ah, a sail-trimmer is an artist. Sees a change of wind
before it comes, chooses his course, makes the wind work for him
instead of drowning him, coaxes a little rag of sail to take him into
harbour instead of making a distress signal of it.'

'Are you a sailor?' Henry asked.

'Yes, I'm a sailor. So that's Modyford. I told you he was a clever one.
It's thanks to Modyford, they say, that the island ever declared for
the Protector at all.' Henry snorted. 'Which is no small achievement
for a man that fought for King Charles.'

'Fought on the Royalist side?' asked Henry, arrested.

'So they say. I told you he was an expert sail-trimmer. Now we'll go
down here and collect my equipage.'




2


Bartholomew's 'equipage' proved to be one small donkey with neither
saddle nor bridle. A rope had been arranged not very expertly in place
of the absent bridle; it looked like the work of someone who knew more
about ropes than about bridles.

'This is Ananias,' said Bartholomew, and hoisted himself across the
donkey's bare back.

'Why Ananias, poor brute?' asked Henry.

'Well, I did call it Anna, until I found out my mistake. So I just
tacked a bit on.' He slung the sack of purchases in front of him. 'Now
give me your bundle and I'll put it on top.' Then, to the donkey: 'Gee
up!'

But the donkey stood still.

'He doesn't understand English,' Bartholomew explained. 'I don't know
his nationality.'

'You don't need any parley-vous,' Henry said. 'Just dig your heels in
his ribs.'

Bartholomew did as he was bid, with gratifying results.

'You know as much about horse-flesh as I know about sails,' he said, as
they moved on their way out of town. 'Owned one of your own, perhaps.'

'Yes, I had one of my own.'

'What made you leave that nice home of yours? Seeking your fortune?'

'How do you know what kind of home I had?'

'It takes more than a few square yards of denim to cover up breeding,
my boy. Found your Welsh valley too narrow?'

'That's about it.' He considered the mild-looking little man riding by
his side, and said: 'I would never have said that you were a sailor.'

'Well, you see, by nature I'm not one for a wild life. But tar's the
undoing of me.'

'Tar?'

The minute I smell tar I come unsettled like.' He looked back at the
shipping in the harbour, and added: 'But wait till I get that cottage
in the Mendips. They'll have to pulley-hauley me to get me back from
there.'

They walked in a companionable silence along the dusty road.

'Think there's going to be a change at home?' Bartholomew asked
presently.

'There was no sign of one when I left. Why do you ask?'

'That's the third time lately I've heard a remark about there being an
end in sight to this new-fangled way of running the country.'

'The islands are always full of rumours. And what would they know about
it, anyhow, four thousand miles away?'

'Ah, but that's just where you do get to know first about things like
that. It's the chap who's standing outside that hears the note of the
hive. The bees themselves are buzzing far too loud to pay any
attention. Don't think that the Caribbean won't hear the change in the
bees' buzzing when it comes!'

He rode on for a little, cogitating.

'Stands to reason it wouldn't last, anyhow,' he said. 'Folk don't want
anyone just like themselves ruling them, do they?'

He was silent for another half-mile.

'You want more than a gift of the gab to rule England. No one ever
loved a Parliament. It was bound not to last.'

'What do you think they'll do? If it comes to pieces, I mean.'

'Bring the boy over to take his father's place, I suppose.'

'How can they, if the Army is still the Protector's? It's the best army
in the world, God blast it.'

'Huh!' said Bartholomew. 'Ten armies won't stop them if they've made up
their minds about something.'

The high road turned inland and left them with only a track along the
coast. But the track was shaded, and the rains that had come too late
to save the cane and the cocoa made the undergrowth green and
sweet-smelling. For another hour they followed the track, veering with
the coast until all sight of Bridgetown had long disappeared and they
had the world to themselves. Here and there a fence marked the limit of
some planter's domain, and now and then a plank flung over a freshet
showed that civilisation lurked in the background. But for the most
part it was a virgin world, full of the evening chatter of birds and
the flight of wild animals from their approach.

At a gate in a wood fence, Bartholomew dismounted and removed the sack
of purchases from the donkey. Whereupon the beast, with relief in every
line of him, made joyfully for the gate.

'Hey! Wait a minute! My rope!' said Bartholomew, and removed the
bridle. Then, opening the gate, he smacked the animal on the rump and
said: 'Good-bye, Ananias. Glad to have met you.'

'Isn't he yours?' asked Henry.

'Oh, no,' said Bartholomew, carefully fastening the gate. 'I just
borrowed him.'

He humped the sack over his shoulder and went on up the path. And
Henry, picking up his much smaller bundle, forbore to offer to carry
the larger one. To be no longer young, with all the world in front of
you, must be bad enough, without having it brought forcibly to your
notice.

Now the forest came down to the water, and the going was less easy. He
had begun to wonder how far it still was to that dinner of wild pig,
when the silence was broken by the high, hostile yelling of a dog, and
in a moment it appeared on the edge of the slope ahead of them, and
stood there shrieking their approach to all creation.

'Shut up, Killick!' Bartholomew called.

A tall man with the face of an unfrocked priest came to the edge and
watched them as they toiled upwards.

'Evening, Chris,' Bartholomew said, panting.

'Who's he?' asked the man, leaning his head at Henry.

'Friend of mine. Did me a good turn. Name's Harry Morgan. Here! Take
this for me.' He slid the sack from his back and held it out, and the
man took it meekly. Which surprised Henry a little.

They moved together over the crest, and Henry found that the edge on
which the man and dog had stood was the lip of a wide saucer of
clearing in the forest, and over the floor of the saucer was spread the
evening activity of a hunting camp. A man was pegging out
freshly-skinned hides to dry, another was jointing meat. On a clear
fire just below, a meal was being cooked; and on a second smoky one on
the other side of the clearing choice strips of meat were being dried
into boucan. Two men were cleaning guns, and one was washing blood from
his shirt.

By the cooking-fire a second dog was standing, uncertain. Chris walked
up to it and began to kick it with a businesslike detachment. Henry
knew why he was kicking it. Because it had not warned them, like the
other, of approaching visitors.

'Let him be,' Bartholomew said; and, again surprisingly, the man
obeyed. 'I think he's getting a little deaf, but he still has the best
nose a hound ever had.'

The man picked up a wooden bucket and held it out to Henry. 'If you've
come to supper, Harry Morgan, best make yourself useful. Water's
beyond, there.' And he tilted his head to the farther rim of the
clearing.

Henry took the bucket and walked through the camp, receiving nods or
stares, according to a man's mood or inclination. He climbed the
opposite lip of the saucer and found that it was the high bank of a
stream; a bank so high and sudden that no sound of water came over it
into the camp. Indeed, he found when he made his way down to the stream
to fill the bucket that he was out of sight and sound of human
activity. The camp on its high hollow shelf of land might not exist.

And then he saw the longboat.

It was drawn up from the beach under the sheltering branches.

So the men disjointing pig so busily up there did not belong to the
island. That caused a great many new thoughts to race through his mind
while he filled his bucket. Something the Dolphin's serving-man had
said came back to him. Something he had not understood at the time. A
play on the word conspiracy.

He walked the few yards down to the beach, but the sea was empty.
Limpid and quiet in the evening light. They had come from some other
island, not from any ship.

He hauled the water up the steep bank and brought it to the fire. Some
of the flayed and disembowelled pig carcases laid out ready for
transportation looked a little too large and fat for wild ones, but it
was none of his business. If honest traders in meat did a little
poaching as side-line to their hunting, that, in the Caribbean, was a
very small iniquity.

The smell of the cooking pork made him faint with ecstasy, and for a
share of it he would have looked with indulgence on more spectacular
sins than cattle-stealing.

When the men gathered round for supper, each with his wooden porringer
or pewter plate, Bartholomew distributed the articles they had
commissioned him to buy. Except that he also distributed their change,
or announced deficits, he might have been a benevolent uncle doling out
gifts.

'Bluey, your jew's-harp. Tugnet, your pomade, and keep it for your
girl's benefit; it smells like a brothel. Timsy, your candy, and you
owe me two pence on it.'

When a man stretched forward to spear a piece of meat before his turn,
Bartholomew smacked him sharply on the wrist and said: 'Manners!' like
a nursery governess, and the man desisted.

It was difficult to know why they should obey him, and still more
difficult, in the absoluteness of their freemasonry, to know who the
actual leader was. There were eleven of them, Henry counted; and they
were all white except for a mulatto and a man who looked like some sort
of Indian from Campeche way.

'Know anything of sea business?' the man called Chris asked him as they
ate.

'I came out from England before the mast,' Henry said.

'That's hardly a degree in seamanship.'

'Passed his entrance examination, though,' someone said, and they
laughed a little and the atmosphere grew easier.

They argued in a desultory way among themselves where they should sell
their meat. It would be easier to get to one place because the trades
would blow them almost straight there, but they would get a better
price in the second. The pig melted in the mouth, and they ate until
there was nothing left but bones. The rum was heavy and crude and
potent. One by one they lay back replete. The dogs, gorged on the
offal, came to the fire and sank their muzzles on their paws. Bluey
took out his jew's-harp and began to play softly. The mulatto sang the
words to himself. It was all sufficiently Arcadian, and Henry was glad
that he was going to sleep in the forest instead of on the office
floor. He wondered if they would invite him to join them when they left
in the morning. He had no idea whether he was going to say yes or no if
they gave him the choice, but it did not matter. This was tonight, and
tomorrow was another day. Tonight he was free, excellently fed, and
beautifully rummed up; and he wouldn't call the King his cousin.

'Ssh!' said Chris of a sudden, sitting up and listening.

In the instant silence they all heard it. A familiar sound, it was. The
long, smooth sound of an anchor cable rolling off the windlass.

The mulatto dived for the dogs before they could move, and hushed them.

'Stay!' he said to the obedient creatures, and joined the rush to the
stream edge of the hollow. Lying there on the reverse slope they looked
down the funnel of land to the sea. There was indeed a ship there. She
had arrived, after the surprising manner of ships, from nowhere, and
now stood large and immediate in the very middle of the picture.
Already she had begun to lower a boat.

'Stopped for fresh water,' Chris said. 'They seem to know the coast
very well!'

'Seen the flag?' someone said.

'Yes. Spanish.'

'I like their nerve, anyhow,' another said. 'They refuse _us_ the
courtesy of wood and water.'

'Ah, well, we won't have to hump that meat round the Caribbean, after
all. Our customers have come to our doorstep.'

'Victual a Spaniard!' said Henry.

'Why not?' they said. 'A Spanish coin rings just as clear on a counter
as any English one.'

'But that very ship may blow an unoffending English one out of the
water six hours from now.'

'Not her,' they said. 'She's in too much of a hurry to get back to
Spain, for one thing. And for another, six hours from now she'll be
just where she is. When the wind drops like this of an evening, it
won't come up again before dawn.'

'Becalmed?' said Henry. 'Then why don't we take her?'

'Take her?' they said. 'Have you had a good look at her?'

'Yes. Why?'

'Take a ten-gun ship with eleven men and some sporting guns?'

'Twelve men. And that is not the correct odds.'

'All right, we do have some muskets. How much does that shorten the
odds?'

'The odds have nothing to do with muskets. It's a case of a dozen
brains against let us say forty men who haven't even thought about the
subject.'

'Brains!' they laughed, the only power they had ever used being force.

'How would you go about it, Brains?' asked one, spinning out the joke.

'I haven't thought about it--but I can tell you one way.' And he told
them.

They listened in silence, their eyes turning from him to the ship's
boat and back again until presently their eyes were on him alone.

'Even a small grapnel would make a noise like the crack of doom,' said
one in a slow Dorset voice when he had finished.

'Pad it,' said Henry, noting with a lift of excitement in his chest
that the questioning of a detail implied a respect for the plan itself.

'With what?'

'Moss. Creepers. Anything. You can pad it so much that it bounces like
a baby's wool ball, but it will still stay a grapnel and do what it is
meant to do.'

Their delight in contrivance, always acute in men who live
precariously, snared them into interest.

'Yes, and Chakka can do the throwing,' someone said. Chakka was the
Indian. 'Chakka can make a rope fall round a marline-spike stuck in the
sand thirty yards away.'

'Are we going to lose our market just to have our throats cut on
board?' asked a dissenter.

'As for marketing,' Henry said, 'I don't suppose she is going home to
Spain empty.'

And at that reminder interest flared to something like eagerness. They
knew the kind of cargo that ships carried from the mainland to Spain.
And if she was bound home as far west as Barbados, then she almost
certainly came from the South American coast. And South America meant
gold, and silver, and pearls. South America was the fabled El Dorado.

Their interest went back to the boat that was being now rowed ashore,
but they made no movement to go down to meet it. Instead they went over
to the sea side of the camp and watched it come, through the tangle of
creepers that screened them from the shore below. Through the still air
they could hear the men in the boat laughing and talking as they rowed.
They were glad to be setting foot on land for a little.

'I can't remember whether we are at war with Spain at the moment or
not,' Bartholomew said meditatively, making his first contribution to
the discussion.

'There is no peace beyond the Line,' supplied Chris, quoting a
well-known tag.

'It's a holy war, anyhow,' said one. 'The Protector has said that who
fights Spain fights the Inquisition and does God's work.'

'I've no mind to be strung up just to gratify Cromwell,' said the
dissenter.

'A minute ago you were going to have your throat cut,' they said. 'Make
up your mind!'

'I know a couple of ears that I'd like to hang pearls in,' said the man
who had commissioned Bartholomew to buy the pomade.

'I know a couple of Spanish necks I'd like to screw,' said the Dorset
man.

'Pipe down!' said Bartholomew as the boat grounded and the men leaped
ashore.

They humped three empty casks on to the beach and rolled them up to the
pools of fresh water in the gully. A youth dropped a small toy dog on
to the sand and began to play with it. He had brought a ball, and he
would throw it and then rush after it, accompanied by the dog, and they
would roll together in the sand, each madder than the other with joy of
living. The camp watched this pastime with mild contempt.

'Call that a dog!' said the mulatto, and went back to the fire where
the two hunting dogs were standing in unwilling bondage to their
training, whimpering with excitement and quivering all over. He soothed
them and made them lie down with whispered promises and reassuring
caresses, and then came back to watch what was happening below.

The Spaniards had discovered the longboat and had resolved themselves
into a small doubtful cluster, looking up at the unrevealing density of
the forest. One of them called something, and was hushed for his pains.
They apparently decided that, whatever the longboat might be drawn up
there for, it had no immediate significance. But they did not linger,
as they had patently been prepared to do before finding the boat. The
holiday air disappeared, and they worked quietly at filling their casks
and gathering driftwood. The silly little dog, unprepared for the
change in the atmosphere, got in their way and was cursed.

'Call that a dog!' said the mulatto again.

'See that there fellow with the black ringlets,' whispered the Dorset
man. 'He were one of the crew of the _Santa Marta_ that time I were
aboard her after they sunk the _Marie Galante_ off the Mosquito coast.
Fresh water, indeed!' He watched the shining water being shot into the
casks. 'No water at all they gave us, and no food neither, the
bastards.'

Henry, lying silent, noticed that there was no further suggestion of
trade. Even the dissenter was no longer vocal. They watched the ship's
crew roll the barrels down the beach and up the planks into the boat,
and made no motion either to stop them or to go down and do business
with them. Indeed, their only personal reaction to the Spaniards'
departure was to criticise their boat-work.

'What a lot of lubbers!' they said, watching the Spaniards' way with an
oar. 'What a lot of tailors!'

When the boat had reached the ship's side and the water was being
hauled on board they lost interest and remembered that there was still
some rum. They drifted one by one back to the fire.

'If their nostrils hadn't been so bunged up with salt they'd have smelt
us for sure,' Bluey said, sniffing the smoke from the boucan-drying as
he turned away from the clean sea air.

Henry said nothing, waiting for his idea to ferment in their minds of
its own accord. They discussed the ship in general terms at first: her
tonnage, her rig, her probable cargo. Wood, they thought. Fine woods
from the wet South American forests.

'Why couldn't Chakka just rope the man in the stern?' Tugnet said.
'Just rope him and pull his throat shut?'

'Too risky,' said Chris. 'If he failed we'd have them all on us.'

And with this contribution from Chris the subject passed from the
academic to the practical. The proposition that they take the ship had
been accepted.

'It'll have to be in the first watch, if we try it,' Bartholomew said.
'The moon comes up after midnight, and they'd spot us as soon as we
left the shore.'

They lay round the fire as dusk closed in, discussing ways and means,
and every now and then referring to Henry about a point. 'What do you
think, Brains?' 'How does that look to you, Brains?' It had been his
idea, and they were playing fair by him. He was no longer a cipher in
the camp; he was, on the contrary, a potential leader. Bluey went down
to the longboat and came back with a small grapnel, and the Indian
gathered moss to pad it. They slung a canvas on the coast side of the
fire so that no hint of a hostile presence should move the Spaniards to
double a guard that night. Watching the faces as they bent to admire
the Indian's handiwork on the grapnel, Henry considered his allies.
They were not what he would have chosen, perhaps, but if the faces were
unintelligent, in some cases stupid, in some cases callous, at least
none of them was mean. There was a lack of calculation about them that
saved them from being evil, or even bad. That same lack of calculation
made them what they were, of course; hand-to-mouth spenders of all they
made, world's vagabonds and permanent tramps. Only Bartholomew, of them
all, had a kind of dignity. And he now knew why. He knew, too, why he
was looked up to in this gathering of odds and ends. Bartholomew was a
sail-maker. Bartholomew had a trade; he was an expert in one particular
line; able to make a living and take his place anywhere. It was because
of that fact that, even in the presence of a more probable leader like
the man Chris, they deferred to Bartholomew Kindness.

When the dark came they pulled the longboat carefully down over the
sand and floated her. An hour before midnight the tide would turn, and
they would let the tide float them out to the ship as far as it served
them. Then they came back to the camp and cleaned and primed their
weapons until it was time.

'Brains has no pistol, Bart,' someone said. And there was a long
discussion as to whose pistol he should take. Not because any one of
them grudged parting with his own, but because they were determined
that he should have the best.

'It doesn't matter much,' Henry said. 'I'm not planning to kill
anyone.'

'If I had my way we'd kill the whole boiling of them,' Timsy said.

'Anyone can kill a man,' Henry said contemptuously. 'It needs only a
little piece of lead and a thumb in working order.'

'Brains doesn't need to kill,' Chris said. 'He gets his own way
without.'

'And the ransom besides,' Henry added.

'Ransom?' they said.

'For the men I've kept alive,' he said; and so cancelled the effect of
Chris's half-sneer.

They went down to the beach when the time came with the idea firmly in
their minds that there were cleverer ways to their ends than by
killing. Which--as Brains had shown--was simple, and satisfying, but
extravagant.

As they pushed off into the quiet water, Henry pulled off his shoes and
left them in the bottom of the boat. He sat in the bows ready, and
beside him was the Indian, Chakka, with the grapnel. They had tried the
effect of the padding on a floor of planks collected from various parts
of the camp, and had laughed to see how their cleverness was rewarded.
The grapnel fell always head down, of course, and they padded the head
with moss until it was resilient as a 'baby's wool ball', as Henry had
promised.

The night hung round them like velvet, and the black water bore them
gently out towards the invisible ship. She had swung with the tide and
lay bows to shore, so that to reach her stern they had to pass her
broadside on. She had no riding-lights, but when they came nearer they
saw that a dim glow came up from an open hatch on deck, and a lantern
hung at the entrance to the fo'c'sle. When they came so close that her
bulk was silhouetted against the sky they could see that the guards the
Spaniards had set at dusk were still there. One in the bows, one at the
stern, and one at the ladder in the waist.

This was the crucial moment. One cough or sneeze, one incautious
movement, and any one or all of these men would give tongue, and up
from her bowels would come men by the dozen and the water would be
jumping all round them in a hail of bullets.

But the slow, breathless moments passed, and now they were safe under
her counter, and fending themselves off her rudder with their hands.
One by one in the darkness they let out the pent breath that had
suffocated them and relaxed. They sat there listening to the movements
of the man above, and to the subdued sound of talk in the cabin
somewhere. Forward of the cabin it was quiet, and it seemed that, glad
of the knowledge that they would, for this night at least, not be
disturbed in their rest to work ship, the fo'c'sle was asleep.

Henry stood up on his stocking soles in the bows, and pushed off until
he was standing directly below the ship's rail, the Indian ready behind
him.

'Now!' he whispered to Chris, and Chris flung the stone.

It dropped into the sea on the port quarter, and the man above moved
away from his post to investigate. While the noise of his boots was
still loud in the stillness, Chakka flung the grapnel. It fell on deck
with a thud that stopped their hearts. To their heated imaginations it
sounded like a meteor landing. But Henry had no time to consider the
consequences. Chakka drew tight the rope, and the hook slid quietly
from the deck and caught sweetly and silently in the rail. And Henry
was swarming up the rope and stepping over the broad wooden rail before
he had time to think. He crouched there in the darkness.

The man took a long time over his inspection. He walked forward and
talked to the man in the waist, glad perhaps of an excuse to break the
monotony of his watch. But presently he came back, humming to himself,
and, still humming, came to stand a couple of yards from the waiting
Henry. Henry could see him distinctly against the lightening sky. He
was standing with his back to him.

His right hand with the kerchief wrapped round it went over the man's
mouth and his left with the knife in it pressed into the man's back.

'Be quiet!' he said.

He felt his knife go through the man's leather coat, and a mad longing
filled him to kill the man. Excitement boiled in him and sought an
outlet; a climax.

It was something older than either law or Christianity that stopped
him. Superstition. There must be no blood on this setting-out of his.

The man stopped his instinctive struggle as soon as he felt the
knife-point against his skin. Henry dragged him back a step or two to
the rail and tugged the rope where it hung from the grapnel; and in a
moment Chris and Bluey joined him, materialising over the rail as
darker shadows in the darkness. They bound and gagged the man that
Henry was holding, and passed him to the custody of the next man up.

Henry walked boldly forward to the man at the waist, and cut short the
man's greeting to a supposed comrade with a pistol shoved into his
stomach. The man cried out instinctively, but it was a small bitten-off
cry, and they bound and gagged him without hindrance.

The bored guard in the bows came strolling aft to find what had
interested his comrade. Henry pushed the others into the darkness and
waited alongside the silent and helpless Spaniard. As the newcomer
stopped to gossip, Bluey, not waiting for Henry, flung an iron arm
round the man's throat so that not even a bitten-off cry escaped from
his outraged gullet. Henry shoved a rag into his gaping mouth, and
Bluey drew his arms behind him and tied his hands to his ankles. The
two captives were left in charge of the Dorset man, and Henry moved aft
to that glow of light from the cabin.

The poop dropped to the deck in two shallow descents, and in the middle
of the small half-deck was a partly-open hatch. As Henry bent his head
to look down into the interior he felt a small sudden chill on the back
of his neck, and thought at first that it was the result of his
excitement. Then he realised that it was the first breath of an
off-shore wind.

In the cabin five men were sitting round the table playing cards, and
two more watched from seats at their side. A man in the forward corner
was stringing a fiddle, and two were asleep in bunks. There might be
more men asleep on bunks on the side that he could not see. The captain
was a podgy man, and he played bad-temperedly. On his right sat a man
of the same age, but elegant in dress and figure. He had the air of a
guest; a passenger. On the passenger's right, lying on a velvet
cushion, was a small bundle of silk that Henry recognised as the toy
dog. Its head was buried under its paws and its nose in the cushion.
All the prowlers in the world might be gathering within a few feet of
it without disturbing by a heart-beat its silken slumbers. As the
mulatto had remarked: 'Call that a dog!'

Judging by the volume of excited breathing behind him that the majority
of his following were now on board, Henry pressed a hand on Chris's
shoulder to make him stay where he was, and moved round to the cabin
entrance, which was on the forward side and led down a few steps from
the main deck. So rapt were the men in the cabin on their game, and so
unsuspicious of this quiet midnight on a deserted coast, that Henry
stood for a moment on the last step considering them at his leisure,
before the captain, who was facing him, looked up and saw him.

The captain's eyes bulged.

'Keep still,' said Henry, standing with his pistol levelled. 'My
friends above are watching you with interest.'

The captain understood him because he shot an agonised glance up at the
faces in the reflected glow.

'Don't shoot, don't shoot!' he said in French. 'No one will move. Don't
shoot!' his choice of tongue being an instinctive tribute to the
French, who had made their island of Tortuga the headquarters of piracy
in the Caribbean.

But his passenger was of different stuff. With a sideways glance at the
shaking captain, he bowed to Henry and said: 'You have come too late
for supper, but the madeira is good, monsieur Sansouliers.'

Even a conqueror does not feel at his best in his stocking soles; and
Henry was a very young and new conqueror, and a Celt to boot. The flick
stung him.

'You are no more effective than your dog, Señor,' he said in his island
Spanish. The animal was now standing up on its cushion and uttering
small shrill yelps, and it looked self-important and silly. And then,
raising his voice a little, he said: 'Bluey! Come down here,' and Bluey
detached himself from the gathering above and appeared beside him on
the steps.

'This gentleman is going to lend me his shoes,' Henry said. 'Will you
assist him to remove them?'

Bluey was delighted.

'With your honour's permission,' he said, bowing with a flourish, and
having removed the shoes, brought them to Henry and held them for him
with a burlesque of servitude.

'There you are, Harry boy!' he said. 'And the nicest pieces of
shoe-leather I ever did see. Might as well have a pair for myself while
I'm about it. What about yours, Cap'n?'

'Presently, presently,' said Henry. 'You can line them up in a row and
choose at your ease when the ship's ours. Is Timsy there? Timsy, you
stay with me and Bluey. Bart, you take the rest for'ard and deal with
the crew.'

He had chosen Timsy to stay with him because if anyone in the gathering
was likely to start a massacre it was Timsy.

Intoxicated at having the after-guard in their hands so easily, they
discarded caution with a whoop. Bart snatched the lantern from where it
hung and they went roaring into the fo'c'sle like a tidal wave.

'Rise and shine, my hearties, rise and shine!' shouted Chris, as if he
were routing out his own crew; and tore along the narrow alley-way of
the noisome catacomb, slapping rumps, tweaking toes, and pulling hair.

Some of the men packed in tiered layers on the filthy shelves were
drunk; more were sodden with sleep and half-poisoned by their own
exhalations. Only three were alert enough to combat an enemy on the
threshold of waking. Two reached under their canvas-bag pillows for
pistols; but one pistol misfired and the other disappeared under a
one-man avalanche which was Tugnet. The third man to be quick-minded
was the boy who had played with the dog on the beach. He came at Bart
with a knife.

'No, son, no,' said Bart in his kind-uncle tones, hitting the boy's
raised arm across the biceps with the side of his open palm. This is an
exceedingly painful thing to have happen to one. The boy yelled, and
the knife flew from his hand and grazed the mulatto's forehead. The
mulatto dropped the club he was carrying and came at the boy with his
open hands. The man whose pistol had misfired used the butt of it on
the mulatto's head. And in another second the fo'c'sle was a writhing
mass of fighting humanity.

Bart lost the lantern in the mêlée, and when he had recovered it and
held it aloft to survey the result he found the boy sitting on the
mulatto's head.

'Well, well,' he said, 'so you can take care of yourself, after all,
son!' and he looked round to see how the others had fared. No one was
dead, it seemed; not even one of the Spaniards, although several were
looking the worse for wear. In the recovered light the invaders drew
off and stood covering their captives.

'Tie them up, boys,' Bart said. 'And you,' he added to the boy, 'you
get off that brown man. He's the best man with dogs this side of Cape
Verde.'

'Dogs?' said the boy, getting up and looking with interest at the
bleeding mulatto. 'Ah, pardon, pardon.'

'Speaks English like a native,' mocked Tugnet.

'Pretty smart altogether for a Spaniard,' Bart said, mopping the
mulatto's head.

'I Portuguese,' said the boy.

'Well now! Practically an ally!' they laughed.

'I Manuelo Sequerra.'

'Maybe, Manny; but you're going to be tied up like the rest,' they
said.

He submitted with good humour to their binding, and apologised to the
mulatto for the 'accident' to his forehead.

'It was this gentleman that I try to kill,' he said, indicating Bart in
explanation.

There were fewer men in the fo'c'sle than they had expected, and they
were bound in matter-of-fact fashion in the persuasive presence of half
a dozen pistols. Once trouble seemed to be on the point of breaking out
again when one of the drunk Spaniards spat in the face of the man who
was tying him up. But the man merely hit him across the face with the
back of his hand and went on with his knots. Their triumph was so great
that their good humour was invincible.

'She's ours!' exulted Bluey, as they met in the cabin again. 'She's
ours!'

The ship's officers, together with their passenger, had been shut into
the tiny after-cabin. This led out of the cabin proper, and was an
ideal prison, in that its only windows were two small ones high up,
overlooking the half-deck.

'Now we see what she is carrying,' they said, but Henry said no; first
they must tidy up ashore. Fetch the fresh meat and the dogs. The
off-shore wind would take them out now, without waiting for dawn.

There was some argument as to who should go, but they were still large
with delight, and the impartial dice did the rest. They accepted
Henry's ruling about using the wind. They had stopped calling him
Brains from the moment when he had climbed that rope to the ship's
stern.

Those who were left explored the ship as children rejoice in a new toy.
They found that she was Dutch built; a fact which explained much that
had puzzled them when they had discussed her round the fire. More
especially her light, low poop, almost level with the waist, and her
lack of burdening ornament. She had been built by a people whose
harbours were small and shallow; and she had been built for trade, and
therefore for speed in a competitive business. That she was Dutch built
explained, too, the comparative smallness of her crew. The Dutch
designed ships that could be sailed satisfactorily with two-thirds of
the normal crew for the tonnage.

Whatever her original name had been, she was at the moment the
_Gloria_, but Henry planned to change that at the earliest possible
moment.

'Tomorrow we'll sling a man over the side, and we'll call
her--_Fortune_.'

Gradually a new, less welcome, thought seeped into their exuberance.
They had inspected her cargo (wood, as they had anticipated) and
admired her armoury. They had even routed down below the water-line to
reckon what gunpowder stores she had. But so far they had come on no
strong-room. They mentioned the lack to each other, casually at first,
and then urgently. When the longboat came back they were still
searching for it.

'Bring the captain here,' Henry said, when they had ransacked the cabin
without result.

They unlocked the after-cabin and dragged the captain out. But the
captain had either been coached by his passenger or had recovered his
nerve. He pretended not to know what they said.

Chris produced a knife and opened it with a flick of his wrist. He
thrust it within an inch or two of the captain's throat, and moved it
in half-turns so that the light from the hanging lantern glinted on it.

'I'll teach him English,' he said.

'You and your knives!' Henry said, contemptuously. 'Bluey, fetch the
steward here. I never knew a steward yet that didn't know more about
his master's business than the master knew himself.'

Bluey came back to say that the steward wasn't one of the men in the
fo'c'sle. He slept in the galley, it seemed. But they had all seen the
galley and there was no one there. When a terrified and half-suffocated
steward was at last dragged from the flour-bin in the galley they
greeted him with appreciative laughter and treated him as a hero. Who
would have thought, they said, that the man to beat them would be a
steward?

The unhappy wretch, finally unnerved by laughter that he did not
understand, made no bones about telling them where the strong-room was.
It was in the little dark after-cabin that the prisoners were
occupying. He showed them where it was, and told them were the captain
kept the key. And they all gathered round to learn what their fortune
was.

There was neither gold nor silver. But there were pearls.

Rivers of pearls. Cascades of them.

The iron box was opened on the cabin table when the key had been turned
again on the prisoners, and the share-out began. And went on, and on.
Round and round went Bart's hand, dropping pearls one by one on the
twelve small heaps; and the twelve small heaps ceased to be very small,
and grew to be heaps of a size that made their eyes first shining and
then blank with sheer incredulity.

'Eight odd,' said Bartholomew at last. 'Four of you's going to be
unlucky.'

'Unlucky!' Bluey said, staring at his heap. 'What's an odd pearl! Give
it to Chakka.'

'Throw mine overboard,' Tugnet said, running his fingers through his
heap.

'If you're all satisfied,' Henry said, 'we'll free the middle watch and
put them to the business of taking her out to sea.'

That led to a discussion as to where they should sail.

And by the time they had actually sailed it had led to something like
open warfare. Henry wanted to sail the ship straight to port and have
her declared a prize by an English Admiralty Court.

'Have her disallowed, you mean,' they said. 'And all of us flung into
jail, as likely as not!'

'Even if they allow it,' they said, 'they'll want their percentage. By
the time they've passed all their quirks and pretences on you, what is
there for a poor seaman?'

Their distrust of the law was all-pervading.

This dismayed Henry; but what shook him to the soles of his new Spanish
shoes was their plan for the future of the ship. They planned to sell
her, if that proved easy; and if not, to sink her.

'Sink her!' said Henry, hardly believing his ears. 'But with a ship
like this our fortune is made. We are set up for life.'

'What would we do with her?' they asked.

'Get letters-of-marque, and use her as a privateer. Or, failing that,
trade with her. There are cargoes for the asking all over the
Caribbean, and fortunes for the taking.'

'What! Work a ship in all weathers when we could be living like lords
in Port Royal!' they said.

'Fortune! What's a fortune to us!' they said. 'We've _got_ a fortune.'

'We're only living for the day when we can be done with ships!' they
said. 'What would _we_ want with a ship?'

And from that nothing Henry said could move them.

So at last he said: 'Very well. I'll trade you my share of the pearls
for the ship.'

At first they thought he was joking. Then they thought he was mad. Then
they remembered that he had once been called Brains, and began to
wonder how they were being cheated.

'It's too big a share, the ship,' they grumbled, with a fine
inconsequence.

Henry pointed out that they had been planning to sink her.

'No,' they said. 'We were going to sell her.'

'Very well. I'm offering you a fortune in pearls for her. Try to sell
her--in Tortuga, I suppose--and you may find no bidders. There's my
bid, there on the table.'

He emptied the little leather sack of pearls on to the table under
their eyes; and, watching their faces, knew that he had a ship and was
penniless.

But his heart was filled with glory.

He went on deck, and left them to their celebration. In less than an
hour they were all roaring drunk.

Sometime before dawn, prowling round the deck and listening to the riot
below, he came on Bartholomew sitting all alone on the fo'c'sle head
polishing a pistol.

'Bartholomew! Can it be that someone is sober?'

'Ay, I'm sober.'

'I congratulate you.'

'You needn't. I'd like to be drunk as well as the next man, but my
stomach won't let me. A real trial my stomach is to me.' And then, with
sudden venom: 'And the way that bastard is handling the wheel takes my
appetite away.'

'Can you sail her?'

'I would sail her between Silla and Caribbees and not as much as scrape
her paint.'

'Get aft, then, and take the wheel.'

Henry stayed there for a little, listening to the rush and creak of a
ship dipping to the sea and thinking of his future, but presently he
went aft to join Bartholomew, and they stayed there together in
unspoken communion above the rioting ship.

'Whose ears are you going to hang your pearls in, Bart?' he asked.

'Nobody's ears. I'd as soon push them down their throats. All the
trouble in this world started when women came into it--bar my old
woman, of course.' It was clear that Bartholomew was out of temper.

'For a man who has just come into a fortune, you would seem to have a
jaundiced outlook on life,' Henry said, wondering whether that cottage
in the Mendips was looking suddenly less desirable now that it was
possible of realisation. 'Does nothing give you pleasure tonight?'

Yes,' said Bartholomew, indicating the spread of canvas above them in
the night. 'That does.'

After a pause, Henry said: 'Will you sail with me, Bart?'

'I'll sail with you--Cap'n.'




3


A man may own a ship, but unless he is captain of a crew he goes where
the ship goes. And not one of the men from that camp in the forest
would go anywhere near a British possession as long as they had
anything to do with the ship they had taken. They would go to Tortuga,
they said. From that bleak and wind-swept little island off the north
coast of Hispaniola they could get passage anywhere. It was a sort of
clearing-house for the whole Caribbean; and, for those who needed it,
an unfailing source of employment, lawful and otherwise. To the
sheltering wing of the French and the gratifying tolerance of Tortuga
they would go; far from Admiralty courts and the stinking English
conscience and the curiosity of the official mind.

So north away from Barbados sailed the _Fortune_, beating up through
the islands into the north-east trade, day after blue-green day. Her
Spanish crew worked the ship, and the victors lay about the deck in
attitudes of ostentatious idleness. They ate, slept, and gambled; and
were monumentally bored. The stores of pearls changed hands
continuously. By early afternoon they were drunk. By night they were
either moribund or quarrelsome.

It was Chris, that man with the face of an unfrocked priest, who kept
them in order; and that was because Chris could drink immense
quantities of neat rum without succumbing and because they were afraid
of him. Even Timsy, who when drunk was a maniac, kept in some recess of
his crazy mind a recognition of the lethal quality in Chris, and would
stop in his tracks and whimper as the long, thin man got to his feet to
correct him. When at last peace reigned because everyone else was
insensible, Chris would pour a final mugful for himself and would fall
asleep only one degree short of flash point.

Only one man on board the _Fortune_ had a harder head than Chris. And
that was Henry Morgan.

'You do not drink, Señor?' Don Christoval de Rasperu asked him, as the
'passenger' was having his daily outing and they were walking round the
deck together.

Henry said that, on the contrary, he drank a great deal. But it went
missing somewhere between his throat and his stomach. Which was a sad
thing for more reasons than the obvious one. It snared one into
drinking more than was good for one in the tropics.

'It is sad,' said Don Christoval, looking at the large, slack form of
Tugnet lying unconscious in the evening shadow below the break of the
poop, 'it is sad to be given this precious gift of life and to find
nothing better to do with it than seek ever for temporary death. Life
embarrasses them, it would seem. They run away from it. They do their
best to give it back.'

Don Christoval de Rasperu had been sent from Spain to inspect and
report upon the colonies on the South American seaboard, and Henry
regarded him with the tender interest of a man for his latest
investment. Spain might or might not be willing to ransom the crew of
the _Gloria_, but for the excellent Don Christoval de Rasperu they
would pay willingly and high. It was important that Don Christoval stay
whole and healthy. Don Christoval therefore got the choice times of the
day for his enlargement from the after-cabin, and if sometimes he
forgot to go back when his appointed time was up, no one was officious
enough to call his attention to the lapse. Unless it was the captain.
Who, having got over his initial fright, and being now fairly certain
that neither death nor torture lay in the offing, lived in a state of
fret and fume that was melting the flesh from his bones even more
effectively than the heat of the after-cabin. To be a prisoner on his
own ship was bitter, but to take second place to a passenger was gall
and wormwood. The only person who did his best to make Don Christoval's
life a misery on board the _Fortune_ was his fellow-captive and
countryman, the late captain of the _Gloria_.

The Spaniard with the dark ringlets was kicked daily by the Dorset man
for his bad taste in having once made one of the _Santa Marta's_ crew;
but that little matter of principle having been attended to, he was
left in peace. Indeed, he sometimes fell heir to the dregs in the
Dorset man's mug because they shared an experience that was not common
to anyone else on board.

The mate of the _Gloria_ was freed altogether, so that he might run the
crew and attend to the navigation; and Henry became his pupil in the
matter of chart and compass. Don Christoval, who was a mathematician,
would make a third at these sessions; and he and the mate would compare
and argue this still new science, Don Christoval full of theories and
the mate stubborn with practice; and Henry listened and learned.

This was his first real voyaging among the islands that he came to know
so well--the magic, small, anonymous islands of the Caribbean. In
endless permutations of innocence they stood about the empty seas
fresh, it seemed, from creation's dawn. The little bays with sand so
white, so virgin, that it was one with the breaking wave; the reefs
with their single rank of crazy palms, like some divine awkward squad.
To a practical sailor-mind they represented shelter or a lee shore, as
the case might be; fresh water, food, and refreshment of body; landfall
or bearing. But long after they were commonplace he would pause in the
ploy of the moment to stand astare, mazed with their beauty.

And the _Fortune_ was their equal in the mind of every man who sailed
in her. She had been careened in America, and she handled like a
dinghy. She would come about 'like a lady going back for her
prayer-book', as Bartholomew said. And her speed in a following wind
was such that her victors, used all their lives to the sheer dead
weight that crusted the products of English and Spanish slips, could
hardly believe it. It took only a week for boredom to drive the
conquerors to the ship's service, and they polished, spliced, caulked,
cleaned, and painted with a proprietary pride; half-surreptitiously at
first, as if it were beneath their new dignity as millionaires, then
openly when no one remarked on their activities. Bart contrived a Union
flag out of the store in her sail locker, and it was under the proper
colours that she sailed into the roads at Tortuga.

She came nosing her way through the reefs round Tortuga on a day when
the wind was blowing the tops off the cobalt seas, so that the whole
dark-blue ocean was shot with rainbow as the sunlight caught the
spindrift. On the innermost reef, cruelly bright and clear in the
pitiless light, was the remains of a ship, and they crowded to the side
to look as the _Fortune_ picked up her skirts and sidled past.

'That looks to me like Jack Morris's ship,' Bluey said, watching the
waves spout up from her broken bows. 'I mind them dolphins as I mind my
girl's eyes.'

'Your girl got eyes?' they mocked, Bluey being no beauty.

'The _Dolphin_, she was called, cause of them there dolphins at her
bows. Or t'other way about. But that's Jack Morris's ship. Take my oath
on that.'

They looked at her with the slight embarrassment of sailors in the
presence of a wreck. Bart, standing by Morgan, said: 'She looks sort of
ashamed, don't she? As if she was naked and we shouldn't be looking.'

But they kept on looking, fascinated.

'She can't have been long there, or they'd have broken her up,' Chris
said. The seas, he meant. The seas combed over her tilted stem and
rocketed into the air.

'Well, praise be to Christ and all His angels, I don't never have to go
to sea again,' Tugnet said, turning away. And that was the verdict of
them all. They went below for their little handkerchief bundles and
their fortunes of pearls, and when the _Fortune_ anchored off the port
they rowed themselves ashore. They did not want any of the
problematical ransom for the Spaniards, they said. They had more riches
now than they would ever spend if they had nine lives, and they wanted
no more.

'I'll miss Bluey's jew's-harp,' Bart said, leaning over the side,
watching the boat pull away. Their farewell to him had been of the
briefest; not because he had chosen to stay behind (in the weeks at sea
it had become obvious that Bart was Morgan's ally, and they had
accepted the fact without remark and without rancour) but because
casualness was their way.

Henry wanted to say: 'How long do you think it will be before they are
penniless?' but he did not know how much Bart himself had left of that
heap of pearls. Bart had gambled like the rest, and it was understood
that he had been unlucky; but to what extent Henry did not know. It
warmed his heart, and would warm it as long as he lived, that Bart,
with his fortune intact in his pocket, had elected nevertheless to sail
with him.

'Well, what now?' asked Bart, at last; having watched the _Fortune's_
boat pull ashore, and having reviewed the ships in harbour.

The Spaniards, with the exception of the mate, who was standing at
their elbow, were locked up below. They were alone with their captives
and the ship.

'There will be a bumboat along presently, trying to sell us stuff, I
don't doubt. I'll go ashore with it and see if I can muster a skeleton
crew to take us as far as Jamaica. It can't be more than two hundred
miles from here, and the "trade" behind us all the way.'

But the day wore on to noon, and then to afternoon, and no boat came
out to greet them or to hawk their wares. They freed the cook and set
him to cooking dinner for all on board, and dinner was almost ready
before a sail came shooting over the water in their direction.

'Too small and fast for a bumboat,' Bart said, watching the light craft
come. 'Perhaps they're going to arrest us.'

The same thought had crossed Morgan's mind, and he was therefore very
scornful of Bart's silly idea. What would they arrest a ship flying an
English flag for?

'Yes, mighty fast and official-looking to be just paying a social
call,' Bart said, glowering at the approaching boat.

The boat lowered her sail and swept round to the ladder on the lee side
with an effortless piece of timing that spoke louder of seamanship than
of pen-and-ink.

'_Not_ so official,' Bart said, in a more hopeful tone.

There were three men in the boat, and they came up the ladder with no
sign that any one of them had ever held a pen in his life. The first
over the side was not very much older than Morgan; a spare,
self-contained young man in good clothes that looked as if they had
been made for him but were nevertheless not the clothes he habitually
wore. Seaman ashore, said the clothes.

The man looked from Bart to Henry and then said to Henry: 'Captain
Morgan?'

And with the magic word 'Captain', Henry's belief in his luck came back
full and strong. He never forgot that Jack Morris was the first man to
give him the title.

'My name is John Morris. Old John Morris's son, if you ever knew my
father.'

'It's your ship----' Henry began involuntarily.

'Yes, it's my ship out on the reef yonder. And several good men
besides. I don't beat about with words, Captain Morgan, so I'll tell
you straight out that I heard you were looking for a crew. The
_Dolphin's_ crew are looking for a passage out of this hell-hole, and
we'd be very glad to sail with you if you're bound for a British
possession. Or anywhere, for that matter of it. This is my mate,
Bernard Speirdyck, and his nephew, Cornelius Carstens.'

The stocky, blond man bowed in a jerky continental fashion, and the boy
with the thatch of taffy-coloured hair smiled.

Henry, aware that his clothes were the best he could do with judicious
confiscations from the Spaniards' wardrobes and that he had never in
his life commanded as much as a yawl at sea, was a little overcome. He
wanted to blurt out: 'You mean you'd sail under the command of a tyro
like me?' But his unfailing vanity shook him to rights. 'You're not
only captain of this vessel, you're the owner,' his vanity reminded
him. 'You're the owner of one of the fastest craft of her size anywhere
in the world today, with a clean bottom and well found, and you're a
very desirable person to be acquainted with.'

So to John Morris he said that dinner was ready and they were about to
sit down and they would be honoured if Captain Morris and his friends
would join them. It would be sea fare, since they had not yet
replenished, and not as good as Captain Morris would get ashore, but if
he did not mind salt pork they would be glad of his company.

'Mind!' said Jack Morris. 'You don't seem to understand, Captain. We
are on our beam-ends. We are on the rocks even more hopelessly than the
poor _Dolphin_ out there.'

And Henry, who if the positions had been reversed would never have
confessed to any such state, loved him for his frankness. As they went
below it occurred to him that dolphins brought him luck. A Dolphin in
Bridgetown brought him the _Fortune_, and now a Dolphin in Tortuga was
providing him with a crew. He must remember dolphins when he was in
need of luck.

Over the enormous meal of meat and strong drink that they thought
suitable for a tropic afternoon, Henry explained that he was looking
for an English authority to take custody of his prisoners and
eventually accept ransom for them on his behalf. Where was the nearest
English official? Jamaica, presumably?

'Here,' said Morris, and began to laugh.

'In Tortuga!'

'He must meet our Elias, mustn't he, Barney!'

'But Tortuga's French!'

'Not just at the moment. The Spaniards threw them out not long ago. But
when we took Jamaica from the Spaniards they fled out of Tortuga in a
panic to defend San Domingo against becoming a second Jamaica. And in
walked Elias Watts with wife and family. He's living up at the castle;
with his wife and brats and a battery of four guns, one of them
workable. Making a success of it, too. Very popular, our Elias is. The
French will be back in no time, of course, but until then Elias is the
official governor.'

Elias Watts, however typical a piece of English colonial history, did
not seem to Henry a very safe deposit for his prisoners. He still
wanted to go to Jamaica, where he would find English officials of a
more permanent type; officials who would not only accept his prisoners
and give him his due share of their subsequent ransom, but would also
supply him with letters of marque as a privateer.

'They are not very fond of privateers in Yamaica yoost now,' Speirdyck
said. 'Every time a privateer slap Spain in the face, Spain come and
slap Yamaica. The planters they do not like that.'

'Ay,' said Morris. 'They yell for help and say the Spaniards are
treating the seas like their own, and then when we do account for a few
Spanish privateers they yell because Spain is offended and comes and
burns a village or two. They can't have it both ways.'

'These planters,' the Cornelius boy said, pausing in his swift, silent
consumption of food to speak for the first time, 'they care for nothing
but their crops. They do not care what Spain does to poor sailors or
how many innocent men are rotting in Spanish prisons. For them it has
never been a holy war.'

'I know someone who would think it a holy war,' Morgan said suddenly.
And then, a little dashed: 'But he is away off in Barbados.'

'What's Barbados!' said Morris, whose world was the sea. 'Just a
biscuit toss. I could find my way there blindfold, any time out of the
hurricane season. If it's letters of marque you want, let's go to
Barbados and get them. Who is your man in Barbados? Goodson?'

'Is that the Governor? No, there's a man who is just going to be
Governor. A good Cromwell man,' said Henry, trying to keep his lip from
curling. 'The great under-propper of the Roman Babylon, Cromwell says
Spain is. I think Sir Thomas Modyford will be prepared to fight the
Lord's battles to the extent of letters of marque. His estates in
Barbados are not as handy to Spain as the Jamaican ones are, so he can
serve the Lord, and Cromwell, and himself at the same time. There's
just one thing. The _Fortune_ will have to be victualled to take us
back there, and I haven't a penny until I get the ransom for the
prisoners.'

Bart looked up from his plate and said: 'If five pearls are any good to
you, Harry, they're yours.'

'Five!' said Henry, involuntarily.

'Yes,' Bart said, shamefaced. 'That's all.'

'Bart, I'm ashamed of you. Who was the lucky one?'

'Not any one of them specially,' Bart said. 'They just went little by
little. I'm still better off than I was before,' he added; and then,
looking up at Henry: 'Much better off.'

Because Henry for once had no words ready, Morris said: 'Five pearls
wouldn't get us far, but you can turn your prisoners over to Elias and
get credit in the town for them. I hear you have an important one. On
security like that Tortuga with supply you with anything you like to
ask for.'

'I see my late colleagues have been talking.'

'Fluently.'

'I think when we have dined, Captain Morris, you and I had better go
ashore and have a talk with your Elias.'

And so it came about that Don Christoval de Rasperu found himself being
welcomed on the most infamous and disreputable of all the Caribbean
islands by a worthy British matron of the most domestic type: a kind
little woman who fussed over him, wiped her son's running nose, and
lamented the shortage of gunpowder all in the same breath. Her husband
accepted the custody of the crew on condition that he might put them to
'honourable employment' until such time as ransom was forthcoming for
them. Tortuga swarmed with men of all nationalities, but not one of
them would do what his lady called 'a hand's turn' on the island. They
were prepared to be blown up, drowned, maimed, starved, and overworked
at sea, but at the sight of a spade or a hoe they blenched. As long as
the Spaniards were prepared to work for their keep, Elias was prepared
to be responsible for them. For their health, that was. For any escapes
from the island he could by no means hold himself responsible. He had
no space to imprison nearly forty men, even if any of the Castle locks
had keys. And with the sea at their doors escape was an ever-present
possibility. But he would try to make their stay so pleasant that a
normal return to Spain in due course would appear to them more
desirable than turning themselves adrift on an unfriendly ocean.

The two sea-captains shared family dinner at the Castle, which was
enlivened by the sneezes of one child and the proud recitation of the
nine-times by another, admired Elias's highly ornamental battery, took
a friendly farewell of an amused Don Christoval, and went down to the
port to profit from the unbridled boastings of Chris, Tugnet, Bluey,
and company.

And so next day, the third since the _Fortune's_ arrival at Tortuga, a
two-way traffic was being conducted over the ship's side. Boats brought
stores in quantity and took away prisoners in batches. The prisoners
shook hands all round before they left. They had had a wonderful time,
they inferred. Short of a permanent pension, give them a cruise as
prisoners of the English any day.

Only two made a scene. One was the boy who had played with the dog on
the beach at Barbados, and the other was the ship's cook. The boy said
that he, Manuel Sequerra, was a Portuguese, that he had done nothing
against the English, and that in any case he wanted to sail with the
Captain Morgan, who was his _beau ideal_ of what a commanding officer
should be. Toni, the cook, said that he was a Neapolitan, and as such
had nothing to do with these insane wars that everyone was always
indulging in; a stove, he inferred, was of all things the most
international; it was inconceivable that he, Antonio Toscanelli, a
Neapolitan and an artist, should be left to rot on Tortuga.

Since they were still short-handed on the _Fortune_, and since one of
the men drowned on the reef had been the _Dolphin's_ cook, neither
Manuel's tears nor Toni's dramatics were necessary. Henry was very glad
to have them. Toni was a very bad cook, but he was cleaner than most,
and drank hardly at all.

On the night before they sailed, very late in the evening, the mulatto
arrived at the bottom of the ladder, having spent his last poor coins
in hiring a boat to take him out. Indeed, he had not had quite enough,
and the boatman was loud in his demands for the balance from the
_Fortune_; the mulatto had promised that the few odd pence would be
paid when he arrived at the ship, he said. The mulatto was in tears.
They had sold the dogs to a man who was going to Cuba, and the man had
no need of him. He was lost without the dogs. He had also lost every
pearl that he had ever possessed, but that seemed hardly to concern
him. He could think of nothing but the parting with the dogs that had
been his life. If Captain Morgan also had no use for him, then indeed
his life was at an end.

'Manuel!' shouted Morgan.

'Captain! Sir! I come! I come!' Manuel came plummeting to the deck with
a swoop that gave the unnautical Henry heart-failure.

'Kringle here has lost his friends the dogs, Manuel. He is----'

'Amigo!' said Manuel, throwing his arm round the mulatto and not
waiting for further explanation. 'And your heart is torn open and you
are as if you had no skin. Come! I know. Come, and we will talk!' And
he led the weeping man away forward without a backward glance.

'We didn't need that mulatto,' Bart said, watching them go.

'I wouldn't turn a dog away tonight,' Morgan said.

So the _Fortune_ when she sailed with the tide in the morning, for the
first time under her new name, was a happy ship. She had no pressed men
on board and no prisoners. She was, on the contrary, the symbol of
fortune and freedom to all on board. To Henry, who had taken her, and
who had preferred her to riches. To Jack Morris, and his crew, whom she
rescued from the beach. To Bart, who was Mr Kindness again and a person
of importance in the world of the sea. To Toni, who was back in his own
galley. To Manuel, who was sailing with his hero. And to a greatly
comforted mulatto, who had strong hopes of taming a rat before they
reached Barbados.

Bernard Speirdyck, being a Hollander, took personal credit for the
_Fortune's_ good points, and at each evidence of adaptability would
say: 'Ah, yoost look at her, yoost look at her! A Hollander down to her
bilges.' He called them 'biltches'. And Cornelius, when reproved by his
uncle for some shortcoming, would retire to the fo'c'sle and imitate
him. 'Ah, yoost look at him, yoost look at him! A Hollander down to the
biltches!'

Jack Morris made good his boast of being able to sail to Barbados
blindfold, and the _Fortune_ dropped anchor outside Bridgetown long
before the mulatto had tamed his rat. Indeed, it was a little too soon
for Henry, who had secret qualms about the coming interview with
Modyford. He kept remembering the elegant clothes and cool, expensive
air of the man who had dined that day at the Dolphin, and wondering
what such a man would think of his borrowed Spanish finery. Which,
since he had no ready money, were all the clothes he still possessed.
He longed to borrow that very fine bottle-green suit of Jack's, but
could not bring himself to suggest it. He would have to go ashore in
his Spanish things.

Bridgetown looked very neat and civilised in its green setting after
Tortuga; and its familiarity after so many strange scenes made it seem
oddly like home. And Henry, being rowed ashore, took comfort in the
thought that Spanish clothes, however outlandish and open to
misconstruction, were an undoubted improvement on denim breeches and a
frieze coat. It was a thing to marvel at that only the other day he had
trudged into this town carrying a kerchief bundle that might have
belonged to Bluey or Tugnet. His affection for Bridgetown increased
every time he remembered it. When Elias Watts had asked him where, in
this new unstable world, a letter would find him, he had said: 'The
Dolphin at Bridgetown will always find me.' The Dolphin had seen the
beginning of his luck; it should witness the progress of it. Every now
and then he would come back and trail his latest successes through the
dark, cool room on the harbour front where he had spun his first gold
piece.

'Meet me at the Dolphin,' he said now to Jack Morris, who had come
ashore with him, 'and we'll drink to the letter-of-marque.'

Morris had come ashore entrusted with one of Bart's five pearls and
instructions that he should buy drink for the whole crew with it. The
crew had been promised time ashore as soon as the _Fortune_ was proved
acceptable to the authorities, but they had said: 'Pad round Bridgetown
with nothing in our pockets! Not us!' And when the third mate had said
couldn't Mr Kindness treat them to the pearl's worth just as well on
shore, Bart had said dryly: 'It's drink I'm treating them to.'

It amused Morgan to find that the same loafer was still leaning at the
door of the Dolphin and still picking his teeth with a fish-bone. He
stopped and said: 'Well, is he Governor yet?'

'Who?' asked the man.

'Sir Thomas.'

'Modyford? Oh, aye, he's Governor. What made you ask?'

'You prophesied that he would be very soon.'

'Prophesied to who?'

'To me.'

'Never saw you before in my life,' said the man.

Upon which Henry laughed and said: 'See how easy it is to leave denim
behind, Jack!' and walked away, still laughing, to call on the
Governor.

Henry had imagined himself walking into a room and talking man to man
across a table with the man who had sat across the room from him that
afternoon at the Dolphin. But it turned out to be not at all like that.
At the official residence of the Governor a secretary interviewed him
and asked him to state his business, informed him that the Governor's
day was nearly over and that in half an hour or so he would be leaving
for his home in the country, and that the press of affairs was very
great.

Henry said that he, Henry Morgan, was one of those affairs, and the
secretary left him to wait in a little hot room, where his heart grew
less joyful and his head less confident. When at last the pen-and-ink
man came back and said: 'Captain Morgan, please,' irritation, plain
itching irritation, had taken the place of that fine flourish with
which he had parted from Jack Morris.

And irritation was no quantity to take to an interview with Thomas
Modyford.

Sir Thomas was very polite, and apologised for keeping his visitor
waiting. He looked tired but not unfriendly. The apology did something
to soothe Henry's ruffled vanity, and he in turn had the grace to
regret in suitable words his belated arrival; and then, the amenities
having been observed, he stated his errand.

'The _Fortune_?' said Sir Thomas. 'That is the newcomer, out in the
roads.'

They were right about this man, Henry thought. Bart was right in his
face-reading: you would have to start very early to get the better of
Sir Thomas, or he would make you feel unpunctual. The ship had been
there not more than an hour and the Governor had had 'press of affairs'
all the afternoon, but he knew about the arrival.

He also knew what the arrival looked like. It looked, he said, very
like a ship called the _Gloria_ that the Spaniards were much worried
about. The _Gloria_ had disappeared off the coast of Barbados, and
pressing inquiries had been addressed to the authorities about her.

'She _is_ the _Gloria_,' Henry said. 'We took her, up the coast a
little from here.'

'Unprovoked?' asked Modyford.

'No,' said Henry; 'they provoked us past bearing.'

'What had they done?'

'There wasn't a man of them who hadn't been born in Spain.'

'So you took her on principle. Or was it that you perhaps wanted a
better ship than your own? What, by the way, did you take her in?'

'Our stocking soles.'

'What!' said Sir Thomas, startled out of his urbanity.

'Our stocking soles, I said, sir.'

'Yes, but with what ship?'

'We did not have a ship. We were hunting boar in the forest, and the
ship put in for water. We liked the look of her and we didn't like the
flag she was wearing, so we went out in our longboat after dark and
seized her.'

'We?' said the Governor faintly. 'How many?'

'Ten white men, one mulatto, and one Indian.'

Sir Thomas sat digesting this for a little. 'Would it be indiscreet of
me to inquire what became of the Spanish crew?' he asked at last.

'It would be very natural, sir. They are on Tortuga, waiting to be
ransomed.'

'All of them?'

'When we sailed from Tortuga they were all there. I don't know how many
are there now. The castle has no keys, and Mr Elias Watts has plans for
them that I don't think they are going to like.'

'Plans?'

'Spade-and-hoe plans, sir.'

'Ah. Torture. That will be another black mark against us in Spanish
archives. Am I to understand, then, that there were no--casualties?'

'Only some blood-letting.'

'And this Señor de Rasperu? This Don Christoval?'

'I victualled the ship with him.'

'What!' said the Governor for the second time.

'I exchanged him for some meal and salt beef.'

'You mean that he is safe on Tortuga.'

'I'll take my oath that he is, sir. The dealers are not going to let
him out of their sight until they have their hands on that ransom.'

'Is he in prison there?'

'No, sir, oh no. He is teaching little Oliver his eleven-times.'

'Oliver?'

'Oliver Watts.'

A shadow of suspicion was perceptible in Sir Thomas's grey eye. But he
said smoothly: 'I am glad to hear that the gentleman is living
comfortably _en famille_ with the Governor.'

'Well--_en famille_,' said Henry; and the shadow in Sir Thomas's grey
eye deepened almost to a smile.

'So you want me to give you a letter-of-marque?' He paused and looked
benevolently at Henry. 'I think, do you know, that as an example of
impudence that defeats even your taking of the _Gloria_.' And as Henry
looked startled: 'You must be aware, young man, that letters-of-marque
are given only to men of reputation; to masters of vessels who are well
known to us and answerable for their actions. An English commission is
not merely handed out to anyone who asks for it.'

'I am not "anyone"!' Henry wanted to say. But instead he said: 'I have
taken a ship from my country's enemies without the loss of a life, and
I have handed over my prisoners for ransom. What more do you want?'

'I should want, in the first instance, to know more about _you_. How
did you come to be hunting boar in Barbados, for instance?'

Now if I tell him I'm a freed bondsman, thought Henry, he'll never
accept me. 'Is there anything of ill-repute in hunting boar?'

'No. But a great many ill-reputed persons do so. I never saw you before
this afternoon----'

'But----' began Henry, and stopped. Then, after all, he had been for
Sir Thomas only a blank space: a place on which to rest his glance.

'But?'

'Nothing, sir.'

'I had never seen you before and know nothing about you. I have,
indeed, only your word for it that Don Christoval is instructing the
young in the mysteries of the multiplication table and not being
digested by sharks. You must have some background, my friend, before I
could be responsible for giving you a commission.'

'I thought the war against Spain was a holy war!'

'It has been so far,' Modyford said with a dryness that was lost on the
angry Morgan.

'How immaculate must one be to take part in a holy war? I have never
heard that the Crusaders were asked for testimonials or guarantees
before they went to fight in Palestine.'

'No,' Modyford said with a half-smile. 'The Crusades might have proved
a greater success if they had. I admire your exploit, young man, and I
would give you official recognition if it were within my power. But I
have a great responsibility vested in me, and I cannot abuse it. If I
can help you unofficially, of course, I shall be glad to do so. You
want to dispose of the cargo, perhaps. What is it, by the way?'

'Wood,' said Henry, almost unable to get the monosyllable out.

'Wood for dyeing? Logwood?'

'No. If it had been logwood I could have sold it in Tortuga. Wood for
building.'

'Oh. Not so good. But perhaps I could find a purchaser for you.'

'I should not dream of putting Your Excellency to that inconvenience.'

'I am not planning to confiscate the ship when you bring her in, if
that is what is in your mind.'

'That is very generous of Your Excellency,' said Henry through his
teeth.

Modyford cast him a glance that was almost pitying, but Henry did not
see it. Even if he had been aware of it, it is doubtful if he would
have pleaded where he had requested and been refused. He was sick with
disappointment and aching with hurt pride.

'I am sorry not to be able to be of official help to you,' Sir Thomas
said.

'And I am sorry to have taken up Your Excellency's valuable time,' said
Henry with a sarcasm he was too young and too angry to make light
enough to be effective.

He went out in a blind anger, and stood in the dusty road until the
mist cleared from in front of his eyes and his breath came more easily.
Then he walked slowly back to the Dolphin. The Dolphin that had been
going to witness all those progressive triumphs of his.

Jack Morris was sitting where Bartholomew had sat on that afternoon a
few weeks ago, and Henry slumped into the seat by his side without
looking at him, and reached for the mug on the table. He finished what
was in the mug and called on the serving-man for more.

'No?' said Morris, into the silence that followed.

'I made a mistake,' Henry said.

'What kind of mistake?'

'I did not go to school with his son.'

The equable Morris let this pass in silence and waited until Henry had
had the drink he had sent for.

Then he said: 'So _that_ was his excuse.'

'That was his _reason_.'

'Oh, no, it wasn't.'

'What do you know about it!'

'I don't know what his excuse was--except what I can guess--but about
his reason for saying no I know a great deal, and believe me, Harry
Morgan, it had nothing whatever to do with you. The excellent Governor
is teetering on the edge of a chasm, and he isn't going to take any
step that may overbalance him. Was he civil, by the way?'

Henry tried to think back beyond the blackness of his defeat, and
confessed that yes, he supposed Modyford had been civil.

'Well, that is something to his credit.'

'What chasm?'

'You said you came to Modyford because he was a good Cromwell man and
would consider war against Spain a holy war.'

'Yes.'

'Well, it isn't going to do him any good any more to be a good Cromwell
man.'

'Why?'

'Because Cromwell's dead. He's been dead for months.'

'No!' said Henry, all his personal failure and fury vanishing in the
wonder of this news.

'The town's got over their excitement because they've known for a week,
but they're waiting with their breath held for the next news. The
gossip is all that young Charles will be king. And the person who is
holding his breath tightest is your friend the Governor. The holy war
is at an end, and he doesn't want to take any part in anything that has
become unfashionable. He wouldn't give his best friend a
letter-of-marque against Spain this week.'

'So _that_ was it!' Henry's shrivelled 'conceit of himself' swelled and
unfolded into healthy bloom again. 'It wasn't----'

He began to bask. And then, looking back at Modyford from his recovered
security: 'The damned sail-trimmer!' he said.




4


Now that he was no longer a snubbed nobody, and could look down with
cheerful superiority on a sail-trimming Governor, the world was once
more Henry's. But if it was still a world full of opportunity, the
opportunities were hardly as insistent as they had been.

What were they to do now?

'There's always trade, I suppose,' Henry said, a little dashed at this
unexciting way to fortune.

'Not in this part of the world,' Morris pointed out. 'The Spaniards
don't allow it. They don't even allow us the freedom of watering our
ships, God blast them. The trade's all Spain's. Unless you were
planning a ferry service between Barbados and Jamaica.'

Henry did not bother to answer that.

'You could sail her home, of course.'

'I'm not ready to go home,' said Henry shortly.

'You could sell her there for a good sum. They're short of ships,' said
Morris, who had long ago come privately to the conclusion that Henry,
who was so obviously neither criminal nor born pauper, had run away
from England to avoid a debtor's prison.

'I'm not ready to go home.' Henry looked in some surprise at him and
said: 'Would you and the crew go home in her?'

'No. My life is here.'

'So is mine,' said Henry, 'so let's hear no more of England. You don't
think,' he added, the mention of England reminding him, 'that they're
going to make peace with Spain at home, do you?'

'I think it's highly likely.'

'But they can't!' said Henry.

'Why worry?' said Morris, amused at Morgan's heat. 'It means only some
ink on a paper; and perhaps more comfortable sleep for the gentlemen at
home. They can't change Spanish habits with a scrape of the pen. It
will make no difference to us.'

'It will make no difference to what they do to us, you mean. It will
make a very big difference to what we can do to them.'

'For a little. It won't last, you know. The Spaniards always overdo
things. In no time at all they'll do something that even the gentlemen
at home can't overlook, and then it will be once more legitimate to
what Barney calls "slap Spanish faces".'

'There are times when I could throttle you, Jack. You talk as if you
were going to live for four hundred years and time was nothing to you.'

'Things always turn up,' Morris said, with a sailor's easy philosophy,
and looked at the descendant of soldiers with something like affection.
'Drink up, and look on the bright side.' He summoned the serving-man.
'We have a ship, and that's something. I know a great many good men
knocking about the Caribbean who'd give their right arm for that.'

'We also have a cargo,' said Henry, not too happily.

'Did your Governor show any signs of wanting to confiscate it?'

'No. He offered to help us get a buyer.'

'He did! That was vastly obliging of him, upon my word.'

'I would dump the whole lot in the sea sooner than let him get a
percentage of it.' What he really meant was 'sooner than let him help
me'.

'Perhaps he didn't want a percentage.'

'I never came across an official yet that didn't.'

'You didn't discuss it with him, then.'

'No,' said Henry. 'He was too busy explaining to me what an undesirable
piece of flotsam I was. Did you buy the rum for Bart?'

'Yes. They've sent it down to the ferry steps, and we'll take it out
with us. About the cargo: I know a little man here that used to be a
carpenter in the Navy. Was chips on a frigate, and lost both his legs
when a gun blew up. He makes furniture for all those new people coming
out. Planters and what not. Perhaps he would take some of the wood off
our hands.'

So they went to look for Mr Boobyer, and found him on the farthest edge
of the town on the inland side, out of sight and sound of the sea, and
half buried in exotic greenery. They followed the sound of a saw and
the smell of cut wood up a little alley, and there was the ex-Navy man,
looking oddly like a piece of Plymouth dropped down in the tropics.

'Well, well. Jack Morris!' he said, laying the saw carefully down and
sweeping the sawdust off a bench with a fine hospitable gesture. 'You
fetched up on a lee shore again?'

Not exactly,' Morris said, and presented Henry.

'Captain!' commented Mr Boobyer. 'You haven't been wasting time, young
man. Is it true what I hear about the _Dolphin_, Jack?'

'Yes. She's on the reefs outside Tortuga.'

'Too bad. Too bad. Fog, was it?'

'No. Hurricane.'

'Ah, a man's mad to go to sea when he could stay on shore. Look at me.
Nothing to do all day but work with the sweet wood. Can't even smell
the sea from here. Cosy as a weevil in a biscuit.'

Henry complimented him on the chair that he was making.

'Ah,' agreed Mr Boobyer. 'Nice, that is. That's for the Governor. A set
of six it is. Governor's a Devon man, like me. Knows a good bit of work
when he sees it.'

'What will happen if they string him up?' Morris asked.

'What for?' asked Mr Boobyer, startled.

'Treason. Or even regicide, perhaps. The Royalists are coming back, it
seems.'

'Ah, Governor's a Devon man. He'll come out on top. _You_ see. Any
come, it has nothing to do with me. Anyone in the island will be glad
to get this set of chairs. You don't get wood like that every day. No,
nor workmanship, neither.'

'Find it difficult to get wood?' Morris asked, and broached their
proposition.

At first Mr Boobyer was not interested. What would he do with a whole
ship-load of wood?

'Not a whole load,' Henry said. 'We'll keep some as ballast.'

'Ah,' agreed Mr Boobyer. 'At least it won't sink you.'

But it was not until he had heard the tale of the _Fortune_ that he
really considered the deal. When Henry and Jack Morris between them had
made clear to him how the _Gloria_ became the _Fortune_ and how the
_Fortune_ by being crewless had rescued the marooned crew of the
_Dolphin_ from boredom and semi-starvation on Tortuga, he began to
wheeze, then he began to heave, then he sat down on the bench beside
him and mopped his eyes, and it was clear that Mr Boobyer was laughing.

'Well!' he said, when speech was possible to him. 'If that don't beat
cock-fighting!'

Then, when he had heaved and wheezed and mopped his eyes a little more,
he said: 'Now about this wood.'

And it seemed that although he would need only a small amount himself,
he would undertake to sell the rest for shipbuilding. He would pay them
for his share now, and pay them the rest as he sold the wood.

'And I know what's troubling you, so you needn't tell me,' he said,
with a sly glance at their faces. 'You're afraid to bring the _Fortune_
in. Afraid they'll disallow and confiscate her. Ain't you? Well, you
don't have to bring her in a fathom. You drop the logs overside and let
the tide bring them in, and my boys'll rope and chain them on the beach
till I want them. How's that?'

'Mr Boobyer, you put away your saw and come down to the Dolphin with
us,' Henry said.

'I don't have to stump as far as the Dolphin for good liquor,' Mr
Boobyer said, and produced a bottle. Then he climbed into the loft
above his workroom as neatly as if he had a pair of feet instead of two
wooden pegs, and brought down the price of the wood in good English
currency. Henry could have embraced him.

'If they get rid of Modyford,' he said, as they went back to the
harbour, 'they could do worse than appoint your Mr Boobyer as Governor.
He doesn't waste any energy balancing himself on a fence.'

They felt very rich as they walked into the hot town again, and Henry
lingered in front of the shops as he had lingered on that other visit,
planning wardrobes for himself. But where on that previous occasion it
had been an academic delight, it was now a very present form of
torture. He need not wear his Spanish clothes any longer; he had money
in his pocket, and he could walk in and buy the best the island had to
offer. But the _Fortune_ needed the money. He was poorer personally in
the matter of money today than he had been that day weeks ago with a
gold coin in his pocket.

But in all other ways infinitely richer, he reminded himself. So what
did it matter that he must wear his Spanish clothes a little longer?

He would be at sea tomorrow, and there would be no cool grey eyes there
to look him over and judge him by his garments.

'Anyhow,' he said aloud, 'they would take too long to make them.'

And Jack Morris, who had understood every unspoken word of this
self-communion, and who had known all his life what it was to have the
ship come first, finally rendered his allegiance.

Henry's method of compensation was to over-pay the ferryman who took
them out to the _Fortune_. In what way this should comfort him for not
being able to buy himself clothes, he could not have said. If he could
not be elegant, he could be large.

The crew were gathered round the ladder watching them come, and it
endeared them to Henry that their interest seemed to be first for the
future of the _Fortune_, and only secondly for the barrel.

'What did they say, Captain?' they shouted, hanging over the side.

'Are we privateers?'

'What luck, sir?'

'Did they make you a knight. Captain?'

When they heard that they had no official standing, there was a loud
groan, frank opinion of the Governor, and franker suggestion of what
they would do to him and what he could do to himself.

'He may not be Governor much longer,' Henry said; and found that the
news about the changes at home, after the erratic manner of rumour,
had, even in harbour, passed them by.

The news of Cromwell's death shattered their unanimity.

'Well,' said a man named Wish, in a Sussex drawl, 'the old bastard'll
be havin' a deal of explainin' to do at this moment.'

'Oliver Cromwell was the greatest man who ever lived!' a Lincolnshire
man called Benrose said.

'He was a damned murderer and a king-killer,' said a third.

'Oh, go roll your barrel,' said Morris.

And they rolled the cask away for'ard, the fight growing louder and
wordier at every step.

'There will be murder,' said Morgan, 'if that is how they feel about it
sober.'

'Oh, no,' Morris said comfortably; 'there's seven Royalists to every
Cromwell man.'

'I've never asked you how you feel about it, Jack?'

'About them beheading the King? I suppose I was too young to care much,
and too much out of England for it to concern me very close.' And as
they went down to the cabin he added amiably: 'But I hate their damned
Puritan faces.'

Toni put a meal in front of them, and hastened away to make sure of his
share of the barrel. They ate largely, but in silence.

'There's always piracy,' Morris said at last.

Henry did not even bother to smile.

After another silence Henry said: 'Perhaps if I had played my cards
better he might have listened. If I had been cooler. He might have
given you the letter-of-marque, if I had only thought of it.'

'He wouldn't give his own brother a letter-of-marque today.'

'He might have risked it for a Morris. Someone of reputation in the
islands.'

'He isn't going to put his name to any commission against Spain only to
find that a treaty with Spain was signed a month ago. You never had a
hope with Modyford.'

Henry scraped his plate and pushed it away from him. He sat back in his
chair, pushed his long legs out under the table, and lay there glooming
down his nose at the debris.

'Of course,' he said suddenly in the quiet tones of one to whom a great
revelation is being vouchsafed, 'there is nothing to hinder me from
defending myself.'

Morris thought this over, and smiled.

'Trailing your coat, is that it?'

'Yes. Trailing my coat. You don't need any commissions and
letters-of-marque to resist capture.'

'No, but you need a deal of luck.'

'I have all the luck in the world. And brains besides. And a whole
stock of ball and powder that was loaded for the voyage from America to
Spain and has never been touched. How many of your men were gunners?'

'Twelve. And three more could probably serve them at a pinch.'

'And we have the fastest ship in the Caribbean and the handiest. You
can turn her on a groat. I can't think why I ever bothered to ask the
damned Governor for his piddling commission.'

'It does make things easier afterwards,' Morris said, amused. 'They
don't always believe you when you explain how you came to sink a ship.'

'I'm not planning to sink one just yet. We'll look them over till we
find a good new ship for you, first of all.'

At this Morris sat back and laughed.

'What amuses you?' asked Henry.

'The breadth of your ideas. It isn't every man who designs to go
"eenie, meenie, minie, moe" round the Caribbean till he finds the ship
he wants to appropriate.'

'Laugh as much as you please. But I promise you that one month from now
we shall have a ship for you. And not any old scow, either. Something
you will be proud to sail.'

But as it turned out it was more than three months before Jack Morris
took over the _City of Seville_. This was not because Henry had failed
to make good his boast, but because the first ship they took was so
badly mauled by a final and redundant _feu-de-joie_ fired by that
admirer of zeal, Walter Benrose from Lincolnshire, that she sank before
they could board her; and all the _Fortune_ got out of the engagement
was the necessity of feeding thirty-seven rescued survivors for five
days until they could be dumped ashore on an island. In the two months
that separated this episode from the meeting with the _City of Seville_
the life of Mr Penrose was hardly worth living. And his political
friends among the crew, pinning on to the Puritans their referred
resentment of Walter, went over _en bloc_ with a fine flourish of
illogicality to the Royalist cause.

The hunting-ground for privateers was, of course, off the mainland of
America; and it was there the _Fortune_ headed as soon as she had rid
herself of her wooden burden and taken on board what stores were
urgently needed. She proceeded to saunter up and down from Cartagena to
Campeche and back again, but except for the vessel sunk by the
too-zealous Walter, the only ships she met were either English
privateers, with whom she paused to exchange news, or Spanish
men-of-war carrying tiers of guns and a crew the size of a town's
population, to whom they showed a clean pair of heels. And then one
day, watering near an Indian village on the coast of Mexico, they were
told by the inhabitants, to whom any enemy of Spain was automatically a
friend, that a small Spanish warship was lying at Vera Cruz and was due
to sail home before the beginning of the hurricane season. Any time in
the next fortnight, they thought, she would be sailing.

She came up over the horizon on a thundery morning five days later: a
brigantine carrying eighteen guns. The _Fortune_ loitered under half
her sail across the empty sea, and watched her hopefully. The Spaniard
changed course like a terrier sighting a rabbit and came bearing down
on her. The _Fortune_ waited until she was sure that the English flag
was plain and visible to them, and then, crowding on sail with every
sign of panic, she fled before them. Towing, incidentally, a quarter
ton of sea-anchor, to prevent her from falling over the farther horizon
before the Spaniard caught up with her. As they began to close the
distance she picked up her sea-anchor and with her recovered speed
crossed to the windward side of the Spaniard's bows, so that the
_Seville_ had to come up on her port side and the _Fortune_ had the
wind.

'What do you make the range?' asked Henry of Morris, watching the
_Seville_ draw level with them. 'Are we inside it?'

'Good God, we could shake hands with them!' said Morris. 'Draw off a
little or she'll blow us out of the water at that range.'

'She has to be tempted,' said Henry.

'She can be tempted just as well just inside extreme range; which was
what we planned,' Morris said, watching in agony.

In action their positions were strangely reversed: Henry being as
detached as if he were not personally concerned at all, Morris in a
fever of foreboding.

'Do you think they are not even going to challenge us?' Henry asked
with interest. 'And we an innocent English ship with our gun-ports
closed and our minds on our business.'

'All that matters to those bastards over there is that we are English
and defenceless and there are no witnesses.'

'We ought to sink them,' Henry said virtuously. 'Do you really want
this ship. Jack?'

'Here it comes,' Morris said, his eyes on the nine gun-mouths studding
the _Seville's_ starboard side. 'Dear Christ, I wish I had lived a
better life.'

The broadside rocked their eardrums and reverberated on the heavy air.
One ball carried away part of the rail on the port quarter, one sent a
shower of splinters down on to the main deck from the mast, one tore a
hole in the fore-sail, one went through the shrouds of the fore-mast
and left them fluttering like a hoist of signal flags, and the rest
sang over the heads of the crew and fell into the water beyond.

They had not only been inside range: they had been so well within range
that the Spaniard had overshot them.

Their plan had been to close in immediately they had cajoled the
Spaniards into emptying their guns on that side, but the _Fortune's_
lightness and speed frustrated them. She swept ahead of the _Seville_,
leaving her own broadside undelivered.

'Let her go,' Henry said, 'and bring her about. We have twenty minutes
before they are ready again.'

'But she'll be turning yoost now to fire the side that is still
unused,' Bernard said.

'Yes, but we'll be back before she's round. She has never seen the
_Fortune_ turning on a groat.'

And back came the _Fortune_ with her gun-ports open and swept at
point-blank range down the helpless starboard side of the _Seville_.
She had only five guns a-side, and instead of firing them as a
broadside, she fired them individually, each at a target arranged
beforehand. The five targets were gun-ports, and she hit four out of
the five. The men on deck, at easy musket-shot, picked off the few men
not engaged below with the guns. And then, as she bore away a little,
willy-nilly, from the turning ship the _Fortune_ witnessed an amazing
sight. On to the deck from both forward and after-hatches poured the
men from the _Seville's_ gun-deck.

'What is it?' asked the _Fortune's_ crew anxiously. 'Is she going to
blow up?' They were much too close for that to be a pleasant prospect.

'No,' Henry said. 'It can't be that, or they would be throwing
themselves into the water. They seem to be holding a protest meeting.'

'Always great talkers, the Spaniards,' said Bart, sucking a splinter
wound.

'Well, let's use our other broadside before they recover,' Morris
suggested.

But as they came up with her again they saw that the crew had overrun
the poop and were waving bits of cloth in sign of surrender.

'It's a mutiny,' they said on the _Fortune_.

And while they watched, wondering, the Spaniard's colours crept down
from the masthead.

'What _is_ this?' asked the _Fortune's_ crew, suspicious of this easy
victory.

'Do you want a boat, Captain?' asked Kinnell, the bo'sun.

'No; all things considered, we'll lay her alongside.'

So in the long oily swell and the subsiding wash of their contending
the ships came together, and Henry, leaving Bernard in charge, stepped
with Morris over the _Seville's_ rail to take possession; and to have
the mystery of their behaviour explained to him.

They had a runaway gun.

One of the _Fortune's_ shots through the gunports had broken the
retaining cable. This would have been bad enough in the regular swell
of a sea, but in the broken water of their combined wakes the
unpredictability of the free gun's maniac chargings about the gun-deck
had broken their nerve. No gunnery could, in any case, take place while
the blind hippopotamus plungings went on. They had seen one of their
number killed and one crushed by the runaway, and they had fled to
safety and to surrender before the _Fortune_ should begin to batter
them at her own sweet will.

'Why didn't you sail her away?' asked Henry.

'Away from that?' they said, with hand-wavings at the _Fortune_. 'One
might as well try to run away from a wasp.'

But Henry, looking at the unmaimed ship, still marvelled; and Jack
Morris said: 'God save me from ever being at the mercy of a crew like
that.'

Their precipitancy was a little explained when it was made clear that
three of the four men killed by musket-shot on the deck had been
officers. The crew had come pouring up from the nightmare below to find
no directing mind waiting for them. They had come from a small
particular chaos to a larger, more general one, and their panic had
swelled in sympathy.

'Well?' called Bernard Speirdyck, from his temporary command on the
_Fortune's_ quarter-deck. 'What frightens them?'

'They have a runaway gun. My congratulations to the _Fortune's_
gunners.'

'Send us over the captain of her, Captain,' shouted Cornelius, 'the
crew want to hang him.'

'They can't. They've already killed him. My congratulations to the
_Fortune's_ musketeers.'

They cheered at this, but someone called: 'Send him over anyway. We'll
hang him as he is.'

On board the _Seville_ the only dead apart from the three officers were
the man killed by the gun and a man who had been pierced through the
throat by a wood splinter. The man hurt by the runaway was now having
his leg amputated by the surgeon. He had been dragged up on deck by one
of the more self-possessed of his fleeing colleagues and was lying by
the main hatch, where the surgeon, with that indifference to his
surroundings which has come to be a characteristic of his profession,
was laying out his knives and saws and needle-and-thread on a napkin.
Henry, who had witnessed death in many forms on his voyage out from
home--from fever, from accident, from delirium due to alcohol--had not
so far seen any surgery performed, and he went down to the main deck to
look.

The leg had been crushed to pulp above the ankle and was a mere oozing
mess, but the man did not appear to be in any pain. He looked dazed and
indifferent. A friend was engaged in filling him up with rum as an
anæsthetic, and Henry could not tell whether his dazed condition was
the result of anæsthesia or of his injury.

'He's about ready,' the colleague said in his own tongue to the
surgeon; whereupon his friends held him while the surgeon sawed briskly
through tibia and fibula and expertly sewed up the flaps of flesh. The
man made no movement of protest, and the surgeon might have been trying
a sock on him for all the effect it seemed to have on him. Henry, on
the other hand, was acutely conscious of the sultry air that pressed
all round him; air so heavy that the sweet sickly blood smell hung on
it and lingered in his nostrils. What was worst was the sight of the
foot in its green shoe lying discarded on deck. One of the bystanders
was also fascinated by this detached part of his comrade. He picked up
the shoe, shook the bloody piece of meat from it, and walked away with
the shoe.

This finished the more squeamish Englishman. He went to the side and
was very sick.

The whole of the _Seville's_ crew had been summoned on deck, and Henry
addressed them from the break of the poop in his island Spanish.

'You have surrendered without conditions after an unprovoked attack on
an unoffending ship. You did not give us a chance to surrender; you
proceeded to murder and sink us without so much as challenging us. It
would be no more than justice to drop you over the side and leave you
to the sharks. But England does not make war that way. Your three
remaining senior officers will come with us to answer for their conduct
before a British court. My mate here will choose from among you a crew
to work the ship to port. The rest of you will be turned loose in your
own boats with the necessary sails and oars and you will, I have no
doubt, make the coast without difficulty.'

Morris, whose Spanish was much more fluent than Henry's, took
consultation with the Spanish bos'n, who had confidently expected to be
either tortured or killed outright, and was therefore in his first
flush of gratitude and relief; and with his help picked out from the
crew the most valuable and dependable members.

In less than an hour the sheep had been separated from the goats, and
the rest were put over the side together with provisions, water, and
the invalid. The invalid had passed from his coma-like indifference to
something that looked like plain fighting drunk. He had discovered that
his shoe had been filched, and was filled with fury and indignation. To
pacify him search had been instituted, the enterprising one found, and
restitution made; and the invalid went over the side clasping the
useless shoe in triumph to his breast.

Morris took over the _Seville_ with young Cornelius Carstens as mate,
leaving the experienced Bernard to be mate of the _Fortune_ and general
sea-adviser to Henry; and the two ships made for shelter and
provisioning among the South Cays of Cuba. In their search for a ship
they had left this run for shelter much too late, and there were
moments when it seemed that they would never see those delectable
islands, those 'gardens of the Queen', at all. The sullen late-July
days would break suddenly into shrieking tempest, in the black heart of
which they would struggle with halliards that seemed to have an evil
and furious life of their own; or they would be beaten to the deck by a
solid weight of rain that was like the emptying of buckets. It was not
rain at all, as the term is understood. The skies just turned to water
and fell down. And wringing the wet