Buccaneer (31 page)

When
Trinity
arrived on a grey, windswept day in early December the island was uninhabited. But it was obvious that people had visited Juan Fernandez because someone had stocked the place with goats. The animals had thrived and wild herds of them roamed the broken scrub-covered uplands. Their flesh was much to be preferred to seal meat, so Dan and the other remaining striker, another Miskito named Will, went off daily with their muskets and came back with goat carcasses draped over their shoulders. However, it was Jacques who had provided the most certain proof that other sailors had used the island as a resting place. Shortly after landing, he had come hurrying back, beaming with pleasure and brandishing a handful of various leaves and plants. ‘Herbs and vegetables!’ he crowed. ‘Someone planted a garden here and left it behind to grow! Look! Turnips, salads, green stuff!’

The crew of
Trinity
had quickly made themselves comfortable. They draped spare sails over the branches of trees to make tents, set up frames on which they barbecued goat meat and fish, filled their water jars at the stream which emptied across a beach of small boulders and into the bay. On Christmas Day itself Jacques had cooked the entire company a great dish of lobsters, broiling them over the fire. He insisted on calling them langoustes, and they crawled in the shallows of the bay in such numbers that one had only to wade out into the chilly water and gather them by hand, dozens at a time. For their vegetable the company had eaten finely sliced strips of tree cabbage cut from the tender head of sprouting palms.

Yet the atmosphere continued to be very sour and unhappy. The crew grumbled about the lack of plunder. The sack of La Serena had yielded barely 500 pounds’ weight of silver to be divided between nearly 140 men. They felt this was a paltry sum for all the risks they had taken, and it made matters worse that many of the malcontents had gambled away their booty in the long, dull sea days that followed. By the time they reached Juan Fernandez, a majority of the dice and card players were virtually penniless, and they muttered darkly that they had been swindled. When they did so, they looked towards Captain Sharpe. Unable to prove it, they were sure that he had somehow gulled them.

To leave behind the bickering and the acrimony of the camp, Hector had got into the habit of going for a long walk each day. From the pleasant glen where the sailors had set up their shelters, a narrow goat track climbed steeply inland, leaving behind the groves of sandalwood and stands of pimento trees and passing up through dense thickets of brush. The path doubled back and forth, and after the long weeks spent on board ship he found that his legs were quickly tired by the demands of the steep ascent. Now his leg muscles were aching, and it would take him another hour of hard climbing to reach the crest of the narrow ridge where he liked to spend a few moments looking out over the ocean, quietly contemplating. This morning he needed to hurry because there was to be a general council of the expedition at noon, and he wanted to be back in time to attend. The men were to vote whether Bartholomew Sharpe was to continue as their general and – equally important – what was to happen when
Trinity
left the island.

Hector took deep breaths as he scrambled upward. In places the bushes grew so close together that he had to force his way through, the branches snagging at his clothes. Occasionally he caught the distinctive acrid smell of goat hanging in the air, and once he startled a small herd, three billies and as many she-goats, which ran up the path ahead of him with their odd mincing stride, before plunging aside into the thickets and disappearing. As he ascended, the sounds of the seal colonies grew fainter and fainter from below, and whenever he stopped to turn and look down into the bay,
Trinity
looked increasingly small and insignificant until finally a turn in the path meant that he could no longer see the ship at all. From now on he might as well have been alone in the entire world. To his left rose a mist-shrouded mountain, a gloomy square mass with the shape of a gigantic anvil. On his right the island was a densely forested jumble of ravines and cliffs and spurs and ridges which were impenetrable to anyone except an expert hunter.

Eventually he reached his destination, the narrow saddle of the ridge joining the anvil mountain to the wilderness, and sat down to rest. The crest of the ridge was no more than a yard or two in breadth and the view to either side was magnificent. Ahead of him the ground dropped away in sheer scree and he was looking out over a wave-flecked ocean which spread out to a horizon of cobalt blue. When he turned in the opposite direction, he was facing into the sun and the surface of the sea became an enormous glittering silver sheet across which drifted dark shadows cast by the clouds. Everything seemed far, far away, and the high ridge was exposed to a wind which rushed past, swirling over the crest of land.

He sat in the lee of a great flat rock, clasped his arms around his knees, and gazed out to sea, trying to think of nothing, losing himself in the vastness of the great panorama before him.

He must have been sitting silently for five or ten minutes when he became aware of an occasional small black speck which sped past him, flitting through the air. To begin with, he thought the specks were a trick of his vision, and he blinked, then rubbed his eyes. But the phenomenon continued, momentary glimpses of some tiny flying object which came up from the scree slope behind him, moving so fast that it was impossible to identify, then vanished ahead, dipping down the slope in front of him. He concentrated his gaze on a clump of bushes a few paces below where he sat. That’s where the flying specks seemed to disappear. Cautiously he eased himself off the ridge and, still seated, slid down towards the bush. There was a slight brushing sensation on his cheek as another of the little specks flew past, so close that he distinctly felt the wind of its passage. It vanished so quickly that he still could not identify what it was. He suspected it was some sort of flying insect, perhaps a grasshopper or a locust. He came to within an arm’s length of the bush, and waited motionless. Sure enough, there was a quick darting movement as another of the flying specks came up from behind him, slowed in mid-air for an instant, then plunged in among the branches. Now he knew what it was: a tiny bird, no bigger than his thumb.

Another few moments passed, and then one of the diminutive creatures rose from within the bush. It ascended vertically and began to hover in the air, its wings moving in a blur. The bird was no more substantial than a large bumblebee and astonishingly beautiful. The feathers were green, white and brilliant blue. A moment later it was joined by a companion rising from the foliage. This time the plumage was a glossy dark maroon, the colour of drying blood, which glowed in the sunshine. A few heartbeats later and the two tiny creatures began to dance together in the air, circling and dipping, hovering to face one another for a few moments, then suddenly diving and turning and making short arcs and loops until they came together again and stayed hovering. Spellbound, Hector watched. He was sure that the two birds were male and female and they were performing a mating dance.

With a sudden pang of memory he recalled the last time he had seen a hummingbird. It had been just over a year ago with Susanna when they were travelling towards Port Royal and she had said he possessed the soul of an artist because he had compared the whirring sound made by the wings to the noise of a miniature spinning wheel. Now he listened carefully to the two birds dancing in the air before him. But he could hear nothing above the sound of the wind sighing over the ridge. An image of Susanna came to mind with painful clarity. He saw her dressed in a long, resplendent gown and attending a grand occasion in London where she had been taken by her father. She was dancing with her partner before a crowd of onlookers, all of them wealthy and sophisticated and of her own social standing. With an effort Hector tried to push the apparition out of his mind. He told himself that he was seated on a mountainside on the far side of the world, and this image of Susanna was entirely make-believe. He scarcely knew her. It did not matter what happened in the next months or years, whether he stayed with
Trinity
and her crew, whether he returned with riches or in poverty. Susanna was always going to be unattainable. His encounter with her would never be more than a chance meeting, however much it had affected him. He should learn from his moment of confusion when he had stood before the portrait of a young lady in La Serena and found himself uncertain of what exactly reminded him of Susanna. As more time passed, he would remember less and less of the true Susanna and what had happened during those few hours he had spent in her company. Instead he would substitute fantasy until everything about Susanna was make-believe. It was an irreversible process and his best course was to free himself of false hope. It was time he acknowledged that he was keeping alive an illusion that had no place in the true circumstances of his own life.

He shivered. A cloud had passed across the sun and the wind brought a momentary chill in the shadow. Robbed of sunlight, the plumage of the two dancing hummingbirds abruptly lost its irridescence and, as if sensing the change in his mood, they darted back into the foliage. Hector got to his feet and began to descend the path back to camp.

H
E ARRIVED
to find the general council already in session. The entire crew of
Trinity
was gathered in the glade where they had set up their tents. Watling was standing on a makeshift platform of water barrels and planks and haranguing them in his gruff soldierly voice.

‘What’s going on?’ Hector asked quietly as he joined Jezreel and Jacques at the back of the crowd.

‘Watling has just been elected our new general by a majority of twenty votes. They’ve turned Sharpe out and chosen Watling to replace him,’ answered the big man. Hector peered over the shoulders of the men. Bartholomew Sharpe was in the front rank of the assembly, over to one side. He appeared relaxed and unconcerned, his head tilted back as he listened to Watling’s announcements, his soft round face inscrutable. Hector remembered how he had thought when he had first laid eyes on Sharpe that his fleshy lips reminded him of a fish, a carp, and there was still that same faint air of guile. Seemingly, Sharpe was unaffected by his abrupt dismissal from overall command but Hector wondered what was going on behind that bland exterior.

‘We return to the ways of our gallant Captain Sawkins before his death,’ Watling was saying loudly. ‘Courage and comradeship will be our watchwords!’

There was a murmur of approval from one section of his audience. Among them Hector recognised several of the more brutish members of the crew.

‘There will be no more blasphemy!’ grated Watling. ‘From now on we observe the Sabbath, and unnatural vice will be punished!’ His tone had turned harsh and he was staring directly at someone in the crowd. Hector craned his neck to see who it was. Watling had singled out Edmund Cook, the fastidiously dressed leader of one of the companies that set out from Golden Island. Hector had heard a rumour that Cook had been found in bed one day with another man, but had dismissed the tale as mere gossip.

Watling was speaking again, barking out his words.

‘Gambling is forbidden. Anyone who plays at cards or dice will have his share of plunder reduced . . .’ Watling stopped abruptly, and suddenly his arm shot out as he pointed at Sharpe. ‘Hand your dice to the quartermaster,’ he ordered.

Hector watched Bartholomew Sharpe reach into his pocket and produce his dice. They were taken from him by Duill, one of the men who had tossed the shot priest overboard while he was still alive.

‘What’s happened to Samuel Gifford? I thought he was our quartermaster,’ Hector asked Jezreel.

‘Watling insisted on having a second quartermaster appointed. John Duill is one of his cronies.’

Duill had handed the dice on to Watling who held them up over his head for all to see and called out, ‘These are not fit to be aboard a ship.’ Then he drew back his arm and flung them far into the bushes. From several onlookers came catcalls and scornful whistles, clearly directed at Sharpe. The demoted captain still showed no emotion.

‘Where would you lead us?’ yelled someone from the crowd.

Watling paused before answering. His eyes swept across his audience. He looked very sure of himself. When he did finally speak, his voice rang out as though he was a drill sergeant.

‘I propose we attack Arica.’

There was a moment’s lull, then an excited noisy chatter broke out in the crowd. Hector heard one scarred buccaneer give a subdued snort of approval.

‘What’s so special about Arica?’ he whispered to Jezreel.

‘Arica is where the treasure from the Potosi silver mines is brought to be loaded on the galleons for shipment. It’s said that bars of bullion are left stacked on the quays.’

‘Surely a place like that would be powerfully defended,’ said Hector.

Someone in the crowd must have thought the same, for he called out to Watling, ‘How can we take such a stronghold?’