Galleon (17 page)

“No. I ’eard they pretended to be offended at the very idea. Come and take all the water you want, they said. Five or six wells right at the village of Boquerón, a few ’undred yards back o’ the beach, with a track to roll the casks. It all looked so easy, an’ the Dons so ’elpful. Fooled us all, they did. Our men start rolling the casks up the track – leastways, all they could get in the boats. The three of us was off the ship.”

“How did the three of you escape?”

The seaman now looked embarrassed. “Well, to be honest sir, we all fancied a bit o’ fresh fish, so as soon as – I shouldn’t be admitting this – soon as Sir Thomas and the lady was out of sight below and the other three boats ran up on the beach and started rollin’ the casks, we went off in the fourth boat with fishin’ lines. Not far – not more’n a quarter o’ a mile. We’d put the lines down and was rowin’ slow when we heard shots an’ the next minute saw a crowd of Spanish soldiers gallop along the track to the boats and some fishermen come out of the bushes behind the beach, and they drag the boats down to the water and start rowing towards the ship. We watched for a minute or two, then guessed what was going on. We moved so’s the ship was between the Dons and us, so the soldiers couldn’t see us, and rowed out of the bay, and the minute we got through the reef and clear the land so we ’ad a bit o’ breeze, we hoisted the sail. The Dons must ’ave seen us then, but they didn’t worry.”

“Why couldn’t you catch fish to eat?” Saxby asked.

The seaman shook his head angrily. “We did, big ones, an’ every time they broke the line and we lost the ’ooks.”

“The pistols and cutlasses?”

“Well, Mr Saxby, we was also guarding the ship, as you might say–”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Saxby interrupted coldly, “the Dons took the ship, didn’t they?”

“–well, yes Mr Saxby, but we weren’t daft enough to go off unarmed. We took a pistol each and a cutlass.”

“Very useful, the cutlasses. You could cut a notch in the thwart each day and keep a reckoning.”

“Mr Yorke,” the man said, directing his appeal to Ned, “we admit we was wrong goin’ off fishin’, but three of us couldn’t ’ave ’eld the ship against all them Dons – three boats full o’ ’em – and if we ’adn’t escaped, you wouldn’t know nothing about wot ’appened.”

Ned nodded. “That’s the only thing in your favour. What’s the last landmark you remember?”

“The other two was unconcherous, o’ course, but I just saw the eastern end of Jamaica. I wasn’t making much sense by then; just hollering for help although the land must have been ten miles away, p’raps more. A long ’ard sail it is, from Boquerón to Port Royal.”

Ned looked at the man in the second hammock. “Did you hear all that this fellow said?”

“Yes, Mr Yorke, an’ what you an’ Mr Saxby said, too.”

“Has he forgotten anything that we ought to know – about the
Peleus
and Sir Thomas, and the men?”

“Nothin’, sir. To begin with the Dons was all nice an’ friendly. Proper took Sir Thomas in, they did – I was with him when he went on shore the first time, with a flag of truce. Everyone was nice – not just the mayor but the fishermen: even the little kiddies came out an’ smiled an’ waved.”

“Very well,” Ned said, “we’ll be sailing in a few hours. Mrs Judd will be going back to her own ship, but you’ll be looked after. As soon as you’re fit enough you’ll have to help work the ship.”

A brisk wind settled down from the east as soon as the
Griffin
cleared Port Royal. Ned commented sourly to Aurelia while they inspected the chart spread on the saloon table (the ship pitching into the head seas and rolling with a corkscrew effect was both tiring and irritating): “Draw a straight line directly into wind and sea, and that’s our course for Boquerón, six hundred miles of this crashing about!”

A ruler with one end on Port Royal and the other on Cabo Rojo, at the south-western tip of Porto Rico, close to Boquerón, showed the course as a straight line if the
Griffin
could sail directly into the wind, but she had to keep tacking, the wind first on one side and then on the other, the ship progressing like a crab scrabbling along a narrow gully.

For four hundred miles the mountains and forests of Hispaniola would lie to the north of them, a land barrier preventing the
Griffin
taking long tacks to the north, so that the crab might well have been lamed, able to take long strides to the southwards but only short ones to the north.

Once out of Port Royal there had been the familiar beat to windward as far as Morant Point, the eastern end of Jamaica; then the seas had become wilder and – although it might have been their imagination – the wind freshened as they crossed the 120-mile gap to the western end of Hispaniola which further north became the Windward Passage between Cuba and Hispaniola.

Tack, tack, tack, with the
Phoenix
following astern at the
Griffin
’s heels like a well trained dog. By now spray and the occasional sea sweeping the
Griffin
’s decks had washed away the evidence of more than a month in port. The whiskery tails of frayed ropes had been cut off before serving or resplicing, wood shavings from the final tapering of the yard to take the end fittings for the braces, pieces of old canvas cut from the sails when they were being patched…all the scraps that the wind blew to hiding places behind coamings, gun carriages, the tails of ropes made up on kevils – all were sluiced over the side. But if the constant spray and the occasional sea washed the decks clean, some of the water found its way down through the deck seams, working its way past the pitch and the caulking beneath it to drip usually on to a sailor’s last dry blouse or the cook’s bag of rice or flour.

Water, Ned had noticed years ago, never dripped directly into the bilge, where it would do no harm and the pump would later clear it; no, as if directed by a wilful spirit, it fell on any dry object that would be damaged by salt water. A keg of gunpowder, a wooden box (assumed to be waterproof) of wheel-lock pistols which were not inspected until too late to stop the pistols rusting despite the grease smeared on them, sacks of freshly boucanned beef, a bag of clothes…all were sodden by the time the
Griffin
had thrashed her way up to Cape Gravois, at the Jamaica end of Hispaniola, and once again tacked south-eastwards. The men at the helm kept steering as close to the wind as possible, without slowing down the ship, but as soon as Hispaniola’s mountains were low on the northern horizon, almost a grey smear like a distant cloud, and the
Griffin
was tacked north again, they found that because the ship’s usual leeway had combined with a strong west-going current driven by the Trade winds, by the time they reached the coast of Hispaniola again they were depressingly close to Cow Island in the wide and shallow bay beyond Cape Gravois, having made little progress towards Boquerón.

As they tacked south-eastwards yet again, Ned inspected the rigging with Lobb. They found, as expected, that the ropes of the mainmast shrouds had stretched so that now the shrouds on the lee side were much too slack.

“Not dangerous,” Ned said, shrugging his shoulders, “but if there’s much more stretch we’ll have to find a quiet bay on the lee side of one of these headlands and go in to anchor, so we can take up on these lanyards.”

Lobb looked up the mast with a critical eye: the masthead was gyrating like a man waving his stick in the air and drawing imaginary circles on the blue sky: the sails were bulging with the weight of the wind, but there was no sign of chafe on the canvas nor the peephole of blue warning that the stitching of a seam was beginning to part.

“A new mast and green wood,” Lobb commented, “so it’s got plenty of spring in it. Enough to take care of those slack shrouds, I reckon.”

With the sun dipping down towards the western horizon and darkness due in a couple of hours, Ned began timing the length of each tack. He had already noted that the
Griffin
had stayed on the last tack to the south for three hours. It was well over a hundred miles from Cow Island to the two islands off the end of the next bight – Alta Vela (which, as its name implied, looked from a distance like a high sail) and Beata Island, which was just lodged off Punta Beata, the southern-most tip of Hispaniola. With this damned current running so strongly to the west and heading them, they would be lucky to sight Alta Vela by nightfall tomorrow…

Aquin Bay, tack to the south-east… Tack to the north-east… Cape Raimond, tack to the south-east… So the
Griffin
and
Phoenix
worked their way eastward: Cap Jacmel, False Cape, Alta Vela, Punta Beata, Punta Avarena, Punta Salinas… Ned noted them down in his log and was thankful he had several Spanish charts, taken from captured prizes, which he could piece together to give a continuous picture on parchment of the coast. On the evening of the third day he called Aurelia on deck and pointed to the land lying on their larboard bow: flat, with mountains beyond and what seemed to be the mouth of a river well the east.

“That’s where Cromwell’s plans for the Caribbee started to go wrong.” When Aurelia looked puzzled, he explained: “Out of sight over there to windward is the city of Santo Domingo, where Admiral Penn was supposed to anchor his ships and land General Venables and his army to capture the whole of Hispaniola…”

“Don’t laugh at them, Ned,” Aurelia said. “If they hadn’t failed here and then gone on to take Jamaica instead, we’d have had nowhere to go after escaping from Barbados!”

Out of curiosity Ned held on to within five miles of Santo Domingo before ordering the
Griffin
to tack yet again to the south-east. There were plenty of flat stretches of coast, and he could imagine the nervous Penn and the indecisive Venables slowly passing their objective as the following wind and the current carried them on westward…to a marshy stretch of coast where thousands of their men would perish from disease. Poor planning, poor leadership and poor troops had thwarted Cromwell’s plans (grand enough, Ned admitted) and left the Spaniards still owning Hispaniola.

Finally, after tacks which took them into San Pedros de Macoris and La Romana (with Catalina Island lying just off it), they reached the south-eastern tip of Hispaniola, which looked on the chart like a rabbit’s head nibbling a piece of lettuce which was Saona Island.

Once they tacked clear of Saona Island and could no longer see any more of Hispaniola to the north, Ned sighed with relief and showed Aurelia their position on the chart. They were now entering the Mona Passage, some sixty to seventy miles wide, separating Hispaniola from Porto Rico. It showed on the chart as a neat, parallel-sided channel between the two islands, with the tiny deserted island of Mona almost exactly midway.

There was another small island, Desecheo, at the northern end of the Mona Passage, much closer to the end of Porto Rico. “Very convenient, that one,” Ned said. “We can make long tacks north-east now, and as soon as we sight Desecheo it’ll show us where we are, so we then tack to the south-east until Mona gives us our position on the other leg and we can tack again.”

Aurelia ran her finger in a straight line from Saona Island, through Mona Island, and into the bay of Boquerón.

Ned nodded and said: “Yes, it’s easy to see why Thomas chose Boquerón to look for water. It was the nearest place with a sheltered bay and took him only a few miles off his course to St Martin.”

Aurelia then ran her finger eastwards from Cabo Rojo at the end of Porto Rico, passing the towns of Guánica, Ponce and Jobos to the headland at the far end of Porto Rico. She continued in a straight line, eventually reaching St Martin while leaving many smaller islands (the Virgin Islands, the chart said) to the north and one, Santa Cruz, to the south. Santa Cruz? That would be St Croix in French.

“We are getting so close now I am getting more frightened, Ned,” she said, holding his arm.

“We faced bigger odds at Santiago and Portobelo than we’ll ever find here,” he said reassuringly.

She shook her head. “No, I didn’t mean that. I mean, when we land at Boquerón, or wherever you decide, and find out.”

Ned, for the moment engrossed in the chart, was not concentrating on what she was saying.

“Find out what? It’s all here on the chart. It looks quite straightforward.” A moment later he was trying to put his arm round her, bracing himself against the roll of the ship as she started sobbing. “Oh Ned, Ned… No, I mean when we find out about Diana and Thomas: if they are still alive…”

Alive, dead or just locked in a dungeon? Ned had asked himself those questions almost hourly, it seemed, since the three survivors had first landed in Port Royal. Alive – well, to be still alive meant that the Spanish authorities did not know or guess two things: Thomas’ real identity and that he was second-in-command of the buccaneers, of the Brethren of the Coast. Diana’s fate was wrapped up with Thomas’, of course. If the Spanish neither knew nor suspected, then there was a chance that both of them were being held under an easy form of arrest somewhere near Boquerón while the local mayor, or
alcalde
, sent a messenger to the island’s capital of San Juan to know what the Governor wanted doing. And providing no one knew the identity of the prisoners, there was a chance (a slight chance? good chance?) that they would be freed, and the
alcalde
would be told that he could also release the ship. Thomas had broken no law – he had been scrupulous, using a white flag. But…

Dead? In that case, the Spaniards knew (or had discovered) Thomas’ identity, or guessed it from the name of the ship. They would probably have put him on the rack to try to discover what he was doing as far east as Porto Rico, but even if they knew one of their plate galleons was stranded off St Martin, they would never guess that Thomas was on his way to look at it: they knew the buccaneers had twenty or thirty ships, and the lure of such an enormous haul of gold and silver would bring them all out – there was no chance that the Governor of Porto Rico had yet heard of any raids on the ships called to Cartagena.