Sea Robber (13 page)

Over the next two hours Captain Garza’s tactics were borne out. The colour of the sea changed from dark blue to opaque grey-green as the sloop fled into shoal depths, running fast and keeping well ahead of the pursuit. Hector saw they were steering directly for a narrow channel between a small island and the shore.

‘The
Delight
can’t follow us through there without the risk of running aground,’ he commented to Jezreel. ‘She’ll be forced to turn back.’

‘Maybe Cook, if he’s still captain, will catch us as we come out from behind the island at the far end of the channel,’ said Jezreel hopefully.

‘More likely the aviso will drop anchor in shallow water behind the island, and wait. We’re in plain view of the coast, and messengers will already be on their way to alert a Spanish warship to come to the rescue. The
Delight
can’t afford to linger like a cat in front of a mousehole.’

Abruptly Captain Garza blurted out what was clearly a Basque profanity. His attention was fixed on the channel ahead.

Looking in the same direction, Hector saw the masts of a ship beyond the island, and the flash of canvas as she spread her topsails. Soon afterwards the vessel herself came in view, sailing down the channel towards them. An instant later he recognized the
Cygnet
.

Behind him Jezreel let loose a great whoop of pleasure. ‘Who’d have thought it? Our high-principled Captain Swan has turned pirate. Ha-ha! He’s working with the
Delight
.’

The ambush became clearer by the minute. The aviso was now too close to the coast to double-back and flee, and if she continued on her course, she was sure to run into the
Cygnet
’s guns. Captains Swan and Cook, if they were still in command, had executed a neat pincer movement. Their prey was caught.

Certainly the sloop’s Basque captain thought so. With a snarl of disgust, Garza cupped his hands around his mouth and called out to his crew to stand by to drop sail. Then he stepped across to the helm and, taking the tiller in his hand, brought the little ship’s head to wind. The aviso carried no cannon and had relied on her speed. She was at the mercy of her captors.

The
Cygnet
maintained her confident approach. Smaller than her consort, her shallow draught allowed her to come within hailing distance of the sloop. Hector could see his former shipmates lining the rail as they examined their latest prize appraisingly.

‘There’s Jacques,’ called out Jezreel. The ex-prizefighter swung himself back on the rail and let out a great roar. ‘Hey, Jacques. Have you learned to make a decent pudding yet?’

A ragged cheer went up from the
Cygnet
’s crew as, one by one, they recognized Jezreel by his size. They waved their hats, there was a confusion of catcalls and yells of greeting. Someone fired his musket in the air to celebrate. A boarding party scrambled into the longboat and was on its way to take possession of the sloop. Jacques stood in the bows, grinning broadly.

‘Mes amis! So they did not waste string to garrotte you,’ exclaimed the Frenchman as he scrambled up the aviso’s side and gave Jezreel a delighted thump on the back. Jacques beamed with delight as he turned to Hector. ‘None of us thought we would ever see you again.’

Hector was more restrained. He couldn’t see Dan among the men aboard the
Cygnet
and was worried about his friend. ‘Where’s Dan? And how are his eyes?’ he asked.

‘Don’t worry about him,’ said Jacques cheerfully. ‘He is on the
Delight
and his eyesight is as good as it ever was. In fact he’s the chosen lookout whenever we set up this little ambush. This is the third vessel we have snared these past few days.’

The rest of the boarding party were busy searching the sloop for plunder, but found little. Their only loot consisted of a few coins and trinkets robbed from the sloop’s crew, and several kegs of quince marmalade marked for delivery to a merchant house in Lima. Under Jacques’ approving gaze, the barrels were hoisted up on deck and ferried across to the
Cygnet
. Then the boarders attacked the base of the aviso’s mast with axes and a saw. In a few moments they’d cut down the mast and sent it toppling over the side.

‘That will slow them down,’ said the Frenchman approvingly. ‘We don’t take any prisoners. We have no room to hold them.’ He hustled Jezreel and Hector into the waiting longboat. ‘You are doubly lucky. Our ambush is getting too well known, so this evening we head off to careen and recuperate.’

‘Where to?’ Hector asked.

‘We have a camp on the Encantadas. They are far enough away for the Spaniards to leave us alone.’

‘Does John Cook still command the
Delight
?’ enquired Hector. He was unsure of his welcome.

‘Cook, he died of ship fever last July. The men elected the quartermaster, Edward Davis, to succeed him. The vote was unanimous.’

The longboat pushed off, and in a few moments they were alongside the
Cygnet.
More cheers and shouts of welcome greeted Jezreel as he climbed aboard. Several men came up to shake his hand and thank him for fighting a rearguard action on the beach at Niebla. ‘But for you, I’d have more than this scar from that day,’ said one battered-looking veteran, touching the mark on his cheek where a musket bullet had grazed his face.

‘The men are glad to have your big friend back aboard,’ said a familiar voice behind Hector. He turned and looked into a face that for a moment did not match the voice. Then he recognized Captain Swan. The man was vastly changed. Gone was the plump, fastidious merchant captain, easy-going and genial. Standing before him was a grim-faced individual dressed in a stained shirt and wearing a battered low-crowned hat, and he had a hard glint in his eyes. Swan now looked like a seasoned brigand.

‘W
HAT MADE
Swan turn pirate?’ Hector asked Jacques a fortnight later as the
Cygnet
followed the
Bachelor’s Delight.
The two vessels were threading their way through the cluster of islands where the raiders had set up their base.

‘After Valdivia he tried several more times to open a legitimate trade. But each port turned him away,’ answered the Frenchman. ‘His crew became more and more restless. Then we met again with the
Delight
cruising for prey, and half the men threatened to desert to the other ship. They said that plundering the Spanish was the only way of making any money.’

‘So he had no choice?’

Jacques grinned sardonically. ‘Captain Swan has taken to piracy like a duck to water. A good joke, no?’

Hector could only smile weakly. He thought back to the letter Swan had asked him to deliver to the Governor of Valdivia. In it Swan hadn’t hesitated for a moment to betray his fellow countrymen by warning that an English pirate ship was prowling off the Peruvian coast. He wondered if Swan now regretted rescuing the messenger who might know its treacherous contents. The thought left him very uneasy.

A few feet away from him the
Cygnet
’s helmsman cursed softly. An awkward eddy was pushing the vessel off-course. The helmsman – as seasoned a mariner as one could expect to find – complained darkly that the currents among the islands reversed direction whenever the moon was full, and flowed against the wind, and that was against nature. They were the Devil’s work, he muttered. To Hector the islands did seem abnormal and strange; there was something otherworldly about the way they rose abruptly from the surface of the ocean so far from any land mass. The archipelago, 165 leagues from Peru, was so remote that the number of its islands was in doubt, and no one had yet charted them properly. The more credulous said the task was futile, for the islands floated from one location to another. That was why the Spaniards called them the Encanta-das, the ‘Enchanted Ones’.

‘I’m surprised you managed to find fresh water on such harsh-looking shores,’ Hector commented to Jacques. The slopes of the nearest island appeared to be nothing but cliff and collapsed scree of dark-brown crumbling rock.

‘We searched and found only one place where we could bring our casks.’ The Frenchman pointed up ahead. ‘There, on the island just coming into view and a little beyond where the
Delight
is about to drop anchor. It has a spring at the east end of the beach.’

Hector saw that another ship was already at the same location. She was canted over to one side as if she had run aground.

‘That will be Captain Eaton with the twenty-six-gun
Nicholas
,’ Jacques explained. ‘He too is harassing les Espagnois.’

Hector noted a thin haze of smoke rising from the stranded vessel. What he had at first taken to be a shipwreck was in fact a small brig being breamed. Men moved about her hull, knee deep in the sea, as they burned off the layers of weed and fouling that had accumulated on the vessel’s hull and would slow her down when chasing her prey. At high tide they would float her off again.

‘Eaton is energetic and drives his men hard, but he has very little luck,’ explained Jacques. ‘He is fanatic about keeping the
Nicholas
clean. But in nearly a year of cruising against les Espagnois he’s taken not a single rich prize.’

‘So this place is a real nest of robbers,’ observed Hector. He was depressed at the very thought of being caught up once again in the lives of men who made their living by theft and violence.

Jacques failed to notice. ‘I have a feeling the
Nicholas
may not be with us for much longer. When I last spoke with any of her crew, they were on the verge of mutiny. They talked of abandoning the South Sea and sailing home. Or turning Eaton out and electing someone with more luck to command them.’

He was interrupted by the shrill of the boatswain’s whistle. The
Cygnet
was on her anchoring ground, and the idlers who had been lining the rail and gazing at the beach were being summoned to their work. Hector joined them in brailing up the sails and securing the deck gear, and once the ship was safely moored, he hurried ashore, intent on meeting Dan for the first time since the events at Valdivia.

He found his friend already disembarked from the
Delight
and waiting for him on the white sand of the beach. The Miskito’s face, usually impassive, lit up with a grin of delight.

‘Hector. How glad I am that you are safe and free.’

Anxiously, Hector searched his friend’s eyes, trying to detect any signs of injury. ‘How are you, Dan? Jacques tells me you’ve recovered your eyesight.’

‘It has never been better. Now I can see just as well as before.’ The Miskito threw an arm across Hector’s shoulders and began to walk with him up the slope of the beach. ‘Let’s talk privately. How was it in Valdivia as a prisoner?’

‘Shouldn’t you be heading off to catch some fish or spear turtles for our food?’ Hector asked. Jacques and several other cooks had arrived on-shore and were heaping up piles of brushwood as they prepared a cooking fire. The newly arrived crews would be looking forward to eating fresh food after so many days at sea.

‘No need to trouble myself with that,’ Dan answered. ‘I’ll tell you as we go.’

The two of them made their way inland through a tangle of shrubs about ten or twelve feet high. They kept to a narrow footpath, for the branches were as thick as a man’s leg and armed with rows of sharp prickles.

‘You would not think this place could provide anything worth eating,’ said Dan. ‘See, these bushes do not bear any fruit, and there is almost no soil. But you would be wrong.’

They emerged from the thickets and found themselves on rough open ground strewn with rocks and small boulders. Here the only vegetation was low straggly brush, weed and moss. About a mile away there was a scatter of hillocks covered with some sort of stunted forest, and Hector expected Dan to head in that direction. But Dan veered left, following a path that was clearly familiar to him and which took them parallel to the coastline.

‘It was some time before I got used to this place,’ said the Miskito. ‘When I first came here, I was bewildered. Take the turtles, for example. They are the same as those I hunted on the Miskito coast. The same in size and colour. Back home they wait until dark before they come out of the sea to lay their eggs on the beach, and that is when you search the strand for them. But here they come out in daylight. So you just stroll along until you almost trip over them as they lie waiting to be turned over on their backs.’

‘There can’t be many turtles left with so many hungry crews about,’ observed Hector.