Pirate Latitudes: A Novel (19 page)

He turned, startled. Lady Sarah was there, in a white shift. It looked like an undergarment in the darkness.

“You should not dress like that, with the men about.”

“It was too hot to sleep,” she said. “Besides, I was restless. What I witnessed today . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“It disturbed you?”

“I have not seen such savagery, even in a monarch. Charles himself is not so ruthless, so arbitrary.”

“Charles has his mind on other things. His pleasures.”

“You deliberately miss my meaning.” Even in the darkness, her eyes glowed with something like anger.

“Madam,” Hunter said. “In this society—”

“Society? You call this” — she gestured with a sweeping hand to the ship, and the men sleeping on the deck — “you call this society?”

“Of course. For wherever men gather, there are rules of conduct. These men have different rules from the Court of Charles, or of Louis, or even of Massachusetts Colony, where I was born. And yet there are rules to be upheld, and penalties to pay for breaking them.”

“You are a philosopher.” Her voice in the darkness was sarcastic.

“I speak what I know. In the Court of Charles, what would befall you if you failed to bow before the monarch?”

She snorted, seeing the direction of his argument.

“It is the same here,” Hunter said. “These men are fierce and violent. If I am to rule them, they must obey me. If they are to obey me, they must respect me. If they are to respect me, they must recognize my authority, which is absolute.”

“You speak like a king.”

“A captain is king, over his crew.”

She moved closer to him. “And do you take your pleasure, as a king does?”

He had only a moment to reflect before she threw her arms around him, and kissed him on the mouth, hard. He returned her embrace. When they broke, she said, “I am so frightened. Everything is strange here.”

“Madam,” he said, “I am obliged to return you safely to your uncle and my friend, Governor Sir James Almont.”

“There is no need to be pompous. Are you a Puritan?”

“Only by birth,” he said, and kissed her again.

“Perhaps I will see you later,” she said.

“Perhaps.”

She went below, with a final glance at him in the darkness. Hunter leaned on one of the cannon, and watched her go.

“Spicy one, isn’t she.”

He turned. It was Enders. He grinned.

“Get a well-born one across the line, and they start to itch, eh?”

“So it appears,” Hunter said.

Enders looked down the row of cannon, and slapped one with his hand. It rang dully. “Maddening, isn’t it,” he said. “All these guns, and we can’t use ’em for lack of men.”

“You’d best get sleep,” Hunter said shortly, and walked off.

But it was true, what Enders had said. As he continued pacing the decks, the woman was forgotten, and his thoughts returned to the cannon. Some restless part of his brain churned over the problem, again and again, looking for a solution. Somehow he was convinced there was a way to use these guns. Something he had forgotten, something he knew long ago.

The woman obviously thought he was a barbarian — or, worse, a Puritan. He smiled in the darkness at the thought. In fact, Hunter was an educated man. He had been taught all the main categories of knowledge, as they had been defined since medieval days. He knew classical history, Latin and Greek, natural philosophy, religion, and music. At the time, none of it had interested him.

Even as a young man, he was far more concerned with practical, empirical knowledge than he was in the opinions of some long-dead thinker. Every schoolboy knew that the world was much larger than Aristotle had ever dreamt. Hunter himself had been born on land that the Greeks did not know existed.

Yet now, certain elements of his formal training tugged at his mind. He kept thinking of Greece — something about Greece, or the Greeks — but he did not know what, or why.

Then he thought of the oil painting in Cazalla’s cabin, aboard the Spanish warship. Hunter had hardly noticed it at the time. Nor did he remember it clearly now. But there was something about a painting aboard a warship that intrigued him. In some way, it was important.

What did it matter? He knew nothing of painting; he regarded it as a very minor talent, suitable only for decoration, and of interest only to those vain and wealthy noblemen who would pay to have their portraits done, with flattering improvements. The painters themselves were, he knew, trivial souls who wandered like gypsies from one country to another in search of some patron who would support their efforts. They were homeless, rootless, frivolous men who lacked the solid attachment of strong feeling for the nation of their birth. Hunter, despite the fact that his parents had fled England for Massachusetts, considered himself wholly English and passionately Protestant. He was at war with a Spanish and Catholic enemy and did not comprehend anyone who was not equally patriotic. To care only for painting: that was a pale allegiance indeed.

And yet the painters wandered. There were Frenchmen in London, Greeks in Spain, and Italians everywhere. Even in times of war, the painters came and went freely, especially the Italians. There were so many Italians.

Why did he care?

He walked along the dark ship, passing from cannon to cannon. He touched one. Stamped on its postern was a motto:

SEMPER VINCIT

The words mocked him. Not always, he thought. Not without men to load and aim and fire. He touched the lettering, running his fingers over the grooves, feeling the fine, smooth curve of the S, the clean lines of the E.

SEMPER VINCIT

There was strength in the crispness of Latin, two tight words, military and hard. The Italians had lost all that; Italians were soft and flowery, and their tongue had changed to reflect the softness. It had been a long time since Caesar had bluntly said:
Veni, vidi, vici.

VINCIT

That one word seemed to suggest something. He looked at the clean lines of the letters, and then in his mind he saw more lines, lines and angles, and he was back to the Greeks, to his Euclidean geometry, which had been so agonizing to him as a boy. He had never been able to understand why it mattered that two angles were equal to another, or that two lines intersected at one point or another. What difference did it make?

VINCIT

He remembered Cazalla’s painting, a work of art on a warship, out of place, serving no purpose. That was the trouble with art, it was not practical. Art conquered nothing.

VINCIT

It conquers.
Hunter smiled at the irony of the motto, stamped into a cannon that would conquer nothing. This weapon was as worthless to him as Cazalla’s painting. It was as worthless to him as Euclid’s postulates. He rubbed his tired eyes.

All this thinking mattered not at all. He was traveling in circles with no sense, no purpose, no destination, only the persistent itch of a frustrated man who was trapped and sought an exit in vain.

And then, he heard the cry that seamen fear more than any other: “Fire!”

Chapter 29

H
E RUSHED TOPSIDE, in time to see six fireboats bearing down on the galleon. They were the warship’s longboats thickly coated with pitch, and now blazing brightly, illuminating the still waters of the bay as they floated forward.

He cursed himself for not anticipating this maneuver; the smoke on the warship’s decks had been a clear clue, which Hunter had failed to understand. But he wasted no time in recrimination. Already the seamen of
El Trinidad
were pouring over the side, into the galleon’s longboats, tied alongside the ship; the first of the longboats cast off, the men stroking furiously toward the fire ships.

Hunter spun on his heel. “Where are our lookouts?” he demanded of Enders. “How did this happen?”

Enders shook his head. “I don’t know, the watch was posted on the sandy point and the shore beyond.”

“Damn!”

The men had either fallen asleep at their posts, or else Spaniards had swum ashore in the darkness, surprised the men, and killed them. He watched the first of his longboats with its complement of seamen battle the flames of one burning ship. They were trying to fend it off with their oars, and to overturn it. One seaman caught fire and jumped screaming into the water.

Then Hunter himself went over the side, dropping into a boat. As the crew rowed, they drenched themselves with seawater, as they approached the burning boats. He looked off and saw that Sanson was leading a longboat from
Cassandra
to join the fight.

“Bend your backs, lads!” Hunter shouted, as he moved into the inferno. Even at a distance of fifty yards, the heat from the fire ships was fierce; the flames streaked and jumped high into the night; burning gobs of pitch crackled and spit in all directions, sizzling in the water.

The next hour was a living nightmare. One by one, the burning ships were beached, or held away in the water until their hulls burned out and they sank.

When Hunter finally returned to his ship, covered in soot, his clothes ragged, he immediately fell into a deep sleep.

.   .   .

ENDERS WOKE HIM
the next morning with the news that Sanson was down in the hold of
El Trinidad
. “He says he has found something,” Enders said doubtfully.

Hunter pulled on his clothes and climbed down the four decks of
El Trinidad
to the hold. On the lowest deck, redolent of dung from the cattle above, he found Sanson, grinning broadly.

“It was an accident,” Sanson said. “I cannot take credit. Come and see.”

Sanson led the way below to the ballast compartment. This narrow, low passage stank of hot air and bilge water, which sloshed back and forth with the gentle motion of the boat. Hunter saw rocks placed there for ballast. And then he frowned — they were not rocks, they were too regular in shape. They were shot.

He picked one up in his hand, hefting it, feeling the weight. It was iron, slippery with slime and bilge water.

“Five pounds or so,” Sanson said. “We have nothing on board to fire a five-pound shot.”

Still grinning, he led Hunter aft. By the light of a flickering lantern, Hunter saw another shape in the hold, half-submerged by water. He recognized it immediately — it was a saker, a small cannon no longer much used on ships. Sakers had fallen out of popularity thirty years earlier, replaced either by small swivel guns or by very large cannon.

He bent over the gun, running his hands along it, underwater. “Will she fire?”

“She’s bronze,” Sanson said. “The Jew says she will be serviceable.”

Hunter felt the metal. Because it was bronze, it had not corroded much. He looked back at Sanson. “Then we will give the Don a taste of his own delights,” he said.

The saker, small though it was, still comprised seven feet of solid bronze weighing sixteen hundred pounds. It took the better part of the morning to wrestle the gun onto
El Trinidad
’s deck. Then the gun had to be lowered over the side, to a waiting longboat.

In the hot sun, the work was excruciating and had to be done with consummate delicacy. Enders shrieked orders and curses until he was hoarse, but finally the saker settled into the longboat as gently as if it were a feather. The longboat sank alarmingly under the weight. Her gunnels clearing the water by no more than inches. Yet she was stable, as she was towed to the far shore.

Hunter intended to set the saker on top of the hill that curved out from Monkey Bay. That would place it within range of the Spanish warship, and allow it to fire on the offshore vessel. The gun emplacement would be safe; the Spaniards could not get enough elevation from their own cannon to make any reply, and Hunter’s men could shell them until they ran out of balls.

The real question was when to open fire. Hunter had no illusions about the strength of this cannon. A five-pound shot was hardly formidable; it would take many rounds to cause significant damage. But if he opened fire at night, the Spanish warship might, in confusion, cast off and try to move out of range. And in shoal water at night, she could easily run aground or even sink.

That was what he hoped for.

The saker, lying in the wallowing longboat, reached the shore, and thirty seamen groaned to haul it onto the beach. There it was placed on rollers, and laboriously dragged, foot by foot, to the edge of the underbrush.

From there, the saker had to be pulled a hundred feet up to the top of the hill, through dense clusters of mangrove and palm trees. Without winches or tackles to help with the weight, it was a forbidding job, yet his crew bent to the task with alacrity.

Other men worked equally hard. The Jew supervised five men who scrubbed the rust from the iron shot, and filled shot-bags with gunpowder. The Moor, a skilled carpenter, built a gun carriage with trunnion notches.

By dusk, the gun was in position, overlooking the warship. Hunter waited until a few minutes before darkness closed in, and then he gave the order to fire. The first round was long, splashing on the seaward side of the Spanish vessel. The second round hit its mark, and so did the third. And then it became almost too dark to see anything.

For the next hour, the saker slammed shot into the Spanish warship and in the gloom they saw white sails unfurl.

“He’s going to run for it!” Enders shouted hoarsely.

There were cheers from the gun crew. More volleys were fired as the warship backed and filled, easing away from the mooring. Hunter’s men kept up a steady pattern of shots, and even when the warship was no longer visible in the darkness, he gave orders to carry on firing. The crack of the saker continued through the night.

By the first light of dawn, they strained to see the fruits of their labors. The warship was again anchored, perhaps a quarter-mile farther offshore, but the sun rose behind the vessel, making her a black silhouette. They could see no evidence of damage. They knew they had caused some, but it was impossible to judge the extent.

Even in the first moments of light, Hunter was depressed. He could tell from the way the ship rode at anchor that she had not been seriously injured. With great good fortune, she had maneuvered the night waters outside the bay without striking coral or running aground.

One of her topsail spars hung cracked and dangling. Some of her rigging was ragged, and her bowline was chipped and splintered. But these were minor details: Bosquet’s warship was safe, riding smoothly in the sunlit waters offshore. Hunter felt enormous fatigue and enormous depression. He watched the ship some moments longer, noticing her motion.

“God’s blood,” he said softly.

Enders, by his side, had noticed it, too. “Longish chop,” he said.

“The wind is fair,” Hunter said.

“Aye. For another day or so.”

Hunter stared at the long, slow sea swell that rocked the Spanish warship back and forth at anchor. He swore. “Where is it from?”

“I’d guess,” Enders said, “that it’s straight up from the south, this time of year.”

In the late summer months, they all knew to expect hurricanes. And as consummate sailors, they were able to predict the arrival of these frightful storms as much as two days in advance. The early warnings were always found in the ocean surface: the waves, pressed forward by storm winds of a hundred miles an hour, were altered in places far distant.

Hunter looked at the still-cloudless sky. “How much time, do you reckon?”

Enders shook his head. “It will be tomorrow night at the latest.”

“Damn!” Hunter said. He turned and looked back at the galleon in Monkey Bay. She rode easily at anchor. The tide was in, and it was abnormally high. “Damn!” he said again, and returned to his ship.

He was in a foul mood, pacing the decks of his ship under the hot midday sun, pacing like a man trapped in a dungeon cell. He was not inclined to polite conversation, and it was unfortunate that Lady Sarah Almont chose this moment to speak with him. She requested a longboat and crew to take her ashore.

“To what end?” he said curtly. In the back of his mind, he wondered that she had made no mention whether he had visited her cabin the night previous.

“What end? Why to gather fruits and vegetables for my diet. You have nothing adequate on board.”

“Your request is quite impossible,” he said, and turned away from her.

“Captain,” she said, stamping her foot, “I shall have you know that this is no mean matter to me. I am a vegetarian, and eat no meat.”

He turned back. “Madam,” he said, “I care not a whit for your eccentric fancies, and have neither the time nor the patience to oblige them.”

“Eccentric fancies?” she said, coloring. “I shall have you know that the greatest minds of history were vegetarian, from Ptolemy to Leonardo da Vinci, and I shall have you know further, sir, that you are a common drip-knuckle and a boor.”

Hunter exploded in an anger matching hers. “Madam,” he said, pointing to the ocean, “are you aware in your monumental ignorance that the sea has changed?”

She was silent, perplexed, unable to connect the slight chop offshore to Hunter’s obvious concern over it. “It seems trivial enough for so large a ship as yours.”

“It is. For the moment.”

“And the sky is clear.”

“For the moment.”

“I am no sailor, Captain,” she said.

“Madam,” Hunter said, “the swells are running long and deep. They can mean only one thing. In less than two days’ time, we shall be in the midst of a hurricane. Can you understand that?”

“A hurricane is a fierce storm,” she said, as if reciting a lesson.

“A fierce storm,” he said. “If we are still in this damnable harbor when the hurricane strikes, we shall be smashed to nothing. Can you understand that?”

Very angry, he looked at her, and saw the truth — that she did not understand. Her face was innocent. She had never witnessed a hurricane, and so she could only imagine that it was somehow greater than other storms at sea.

Hunter knew that a hurricane bore the same relation to a fierce storm that a wild wolf bore to a lapdog.

Before she could reply to his outburst, he turned away, leaning on a pastpin. He knew he was being too harsh; his own concerns were rightly not hers, and he had every reason to indulge her. She had been up all night treating the burned seamen, an act of great eccentricity for a well-born woman. He turned back to face her.

“Forgive me,” he said quietly. “Inquire of Enders, and he will make arrangements for you to go ashore, so that you can carry on the noble tradition of Ptolemy and Leonardo.”

He stopped.

“Captain?”

He stared into space.

“Captain, are you well?”

Abruptly, he walked away from her. “Don Diego!” he shouted. “Find me Don Diego!”

.   .   .

DON DIEGO ARRIVED
in Hunter’s cabin to discover the captain drawing furiously on slips of paper. His desk was littered with sketches.

“I do not know if this will succeed,” Hunter said. “I have only heard of it. The Florentine, Leonardo, proposed it, but he was not heeded.”

“Soldiers do not attend an artist,” Don Diego said.

Hunter glowered at him. “Wisely or not,” he said.

Don Diego looked at the diagrams. Each showed a ship’s hull, drawn in profile from above, with lines running out from the sides of the hull. Hunter drew another.

“The idea is simple,” he said. “On an ordinary ship, each cannon has its own gun captain, who is responsible for the firing of that single gun.”

“Yes . . .”

“After the gun is loaded and run out, the gun captain crouches behind the barrel and sights the target. He orders his men with handspikes and side tackles to aim the gun as he thinks best. Then he orders his men to slide the wedge to set the elevation — again as his eye thinks best. Then he fires. This is the procedure for each individual gun.”

“Yes . . .” the Jew said. Don Diego had never actually seen a large cannon fired, but he was familiar with the general method of operation. Each gun was separately aimed, and a good gun captain, a man who could accurately judge the right angle and elevation of his cannon, was highly regarded. And rare.