Lempriere's Dictionary (68 page)

For the first week the weather was fine, the wind set fair and the
Tesrifati
ploughed westwards towards her landfall. Hamit decided to abandon the Straits of Messina for a course skirting Sicily, and so enter the Tyrrhenian Sea from the south, between Marsala and Carthage. The Syrtes sandbanks were kept well to port and the constant weather meant little work for the crew who were intent on inner demons and angels, marvelling at the sea-surface with eyes like saucers as they packed their pipes and sent sweet clouds of blue aromatic smoke rolling through the decks. Then, on the eighth day, the sirocco began to blow.

All day the hot wind took them north. Hamit fancied he saw the Egadi Islands slip past to starboard. When evening came and the sails were lowered, Hamit walked the length of the ship telling the crew to expect fog. The hot wind would draw up vapour from the sea and, at the first lull, lower it in dense banks all around them. The crew did not care. Some were slumped unconscious in their hammocks, others sat bolt upright, staring ahead with eyes of glass. Some moaned and flopped helplessly in the grip of private terrors, others jabbered to non-existent companions. In the surrounding quiet of the sea, the
Tesrifati
floated like a cradle set adrift. The only lights were dim flares from the pipes, the only sounds the moans and babbled nonsense of their smokers. Night fell. One by one the stars were eclipsed. By morning, as predicted, the ship was drifting in fog.

Hamit stood alone on the quarterdeck. Fog shut the ship in a world suddenly reduced to the narrow apron of sea, a few yards at most, encircling the hull. Banks of white rose up on all sides, formless giants dissolving as the ship moved through them, or they passed over the ship, for Hamit did not know whether his vessel moved or was becalmed there. He threw fragments of wood into the water which drifted away but all in different directions, some returning, some swallowed up by the mist. He could barely see the far mast and thought the ship might be anywhere, drifting onto rocks or reefs, drawn by the tides into a hostile harbour. The cocoon of white would lift and…. No, he would hear the breakers, the rush of water over coral, the shouts of the sailors, and the fog which surrounded himself and his vessel was soundless. Only the waves lapping at the hull broke the quiet. Hamit faced blank walls of grey, and the fog went on and on, neither thickening nor thinning, simply rolling over the still ship in wave after wave. By midday the fog had still not cleared. The sun had not been glimpsed. He fancied he saw huge shapes moving alongside the
Tesrifati
. His crew drifted listlessly about the upper deck, but Hamit paid
them little mind. Standing motionless, staring ahead into walls of dissolving white, Hamit and his ship were drawn further and further into the mist.

Then, the dark mirage. At first it was the
Tesrifati
’s own shadow. Some strange refraction of the nowhere-light had thrown a dark double of his vessel off to port. Then it was his imagination, an image rising out of the silent hypnotic hours, now redoubled and returning. And then it was a black ship bearing down on him out of the fog. Hamit turned and began to shout. A dark form was running alongside his ship, the angle of coincidence so narrow it must have been there for hours. Hamit scrambled down ladders, through hatches, along gangways, shouting, cuffing the heads of the crew. None of the guns were primed. He could hear water rushing in the channel formed between the hulls. Two or three of the men were stirring themselves. Hamit looked and saw the black ship loom out of the fog to fill the gunport. He was hammering down the powder, tamping the ball. Lining the wales of the black ship from prow to stern were faces withered with age. Two crew men were pulling at his arms. He pushed them away. The ship was almost on him, filling the sky, blotting out the fog, huge and black as night. He lit the taper. The crew men were shouting at him, moving backwards. Hamit touched the fuse and turned to see them running away from him with their hands to their heads, away from the cannon. The fuse hissed, he heard the first grappling hook fall with a thud on the deck above. Then the cannon exploded.

Reports circulating in the
Ruus
and
Beylik
sections of the Scribal Office at Constantinople would later point out that, in point of fact, Halil Hamit, Captain of the
Tesrifati, did
return with his ship. A large body of internal correspondence swelled with various memoranda and recommendations, all drawing heavily on affidavits extracted from the
Tesrifati
’s crew during interrogation at the Fortress of the Seven Towers, would agree on very little beyond the one undoubted fact of the young commander’s heroism. A number of curt directives to the foundry at Heraclea would be the only official acknowledgement of the incident, but the
Tesrifati
Affair, as it later came to be known, rumbled on for some years yet. Ambitious junior officials eager to make a name would find an original and ingenious explanation of the events of that day did their chances of advancement no harm at all. Men who had proved themselves able in one of the administration’s periodic crises would be dubbed “real
Tesrifati
hands”. The documentation would grew as addenda were added, reports revised and the whole account regularly recast to suit the shifting patterns of power within the Scribal Office. Eventually, the
Tesrifati
would be enveloped in the paperwork its brief engagement had occasioned and when that happened, officially at least, the crisis would be at an end.

But on the quay at Constantinople, with the ship unloaded and the crew
in chains, the junior officials had yet to trigger this phase of the
Tesrifati
’s metamorphosis. For the moment, the ship was there as a fact, trailing from her stern the chain of facts which had brought her home. Now the administration would begin to haul them in, link by link, until the story caught up with the vessel which was its end and the events of that day found the first of their successive homes in a report filed by a junior special assistant on secondment from the Scribal Office temporarily attached to the divan of the
Reis Effendi
which read:

Becalmed in fog twenty leagues west of Sicily, the
Tesrifati
was attacked by an unknown vessel. A black ship crept out of the fog taking the captain and his crew by surprise. Captain Halil Hamit fired the only shot of the engagement from a cannon whose breach exploded and in this way the captain met his end. With his death, the crew gave up their efforts and the
Tesrifati
was boarded by unknown assailants. The vessel was stripped of its cargo, its stores and its sole passenger, known to us as
Peter Rathkael-Herbert, Internuncio to the Emperor Joseph, Our Enemy.
With its rigging cut down and only a few barrels of fish to sustain its crew, the
Tesrifati
returned to port. The Black Ship moved off from the scene of its piracy into the fog. At this point, neither its identity, nor its position, nor its allegiance are known
.

A series of appendices noted several implications from the incident. Without the
Tesrifati
’s cargo of saltpetre, the stocks of charcoal and sulphur in the arsenal at Midilli were so much useless powder. The matter of the self-destructing cannon should be investigated further. The most codicils concerned the Imperial Internuncio. The abduction of Peter Rathkael-Herbert threw all the delicate negotiations and subtle compromises which had resulted in his transport into hazard. Amongst all the indigestible elements of the engagement, the disappearance of the Internuncio, Peter Rathkael-Herbert, was going to prove hardest to swallow.

From within the confines of his crate, the Internuncio heard muffled shouting, a thud somewhere above, a deafening explosion, more thuds, a terrible grinding sound and feet running in all directions around him. The ship was being boarded. He heard barrels being rolled along the gangplanks and manhandled out of the well. The hole through which his young friend had fed and watered him allowed a view directly overhead. Useless. Then his own turn came and he braced himself against the “walls” and floor as the crate was shifted up to the deck, then seemed to hang in space
before landing on the deck of the
Tesrifati
’s aggressor. He heard voices speaking in English. The grinding sound came again. The hulls rubbing against one another, he realised belatedly, and then the ships were free of one another. He could hear the crew levering off the lids of the barrels. He raised his head to shout his presence and the sound died in his throat. His crate was positioned directly below the mainmast. Looking up through the feeding-hole he saw swirling fog, bare spars and rigging. At the top of the mast, a tattered pennant flew and on the pennant was a skull and crossed bones. They were working down the line, staving in the barrels with jemmies. Peter Rathkael-Herbert cowered in his crate waiting helplessly, hopelessly for discovery. Then his turn came. Wood splintered above his head and shattered slats rained down on him as he curled up, burying his head in his hands. The lid was prised off and a croaking voice above him said, ‘Ah ha!’ before strong hands reached down to pluck him from his refuge and deposit him on the deck. Crumpled, wracked with aches and pains, exhausted Peter Rathkael-Herbert looked up to see an old man, grizzled and weather-tanned, standing over him. The old man reached down and offered the Imperial Internuncio his hand.

‘I am Wilberforce van Clam,’ he told the dishevelled heap. ‘Welcome aboard the
Heart of Light
.’

The sirocco began to blow away the fog.

Aboard the
Heart of Light
, Peter Rathkael-Herbert saw sunlight for the first time in a fortnight. Looking up into the rigging and around the deck where the crew were making ready to set sail, he could not help but notice the extreme age of the sailors. Not one seemed to be under fifty. Wilberforce van Clam was at the helm.

‘Take some tea.’ He gestured to a pot brewing on an occasional table by his side. ‘Wilkins!’ he shouted. ‘A cup for our guest, if you please!’ Webley ‘Mussel’ Wilkins, a spry sixty year old with a long white moustache jumped to the task.

‘You are … pirates?’ Peter Rathkael-Herbert ventured, watching as elderly men leapt up and down the rigging.

‘Pirates? Oh yes, pirates all right, absolutely pirates we are, aren’t we lads?’

‘Oh yes!’ came the reply from all quarters of the vessel.

‘But we’re Pantisocratic Pirates,’ Wilberforce van Clam went on. ‘We never really wanted to be pirates at all.’ He paused and sipped his tea. ‘It’s society made us what we is now.’

‘Society?’ Peter Rathkael-Herbert was bemused by the notion. ‘But how?’

‘Ah ha!’ said Wilberforce for the second time that day. ‘Now that is a tale worth the telling. Wilkins! A chair for my friend!’

And so, seated in a splendidly upholstered armchair and fortified by tea, the Imperial Internuncio listened while Wilberforce van Clam unfolded the story of the Pantisocratic Pirates.

‘We first came together in London in 1753,’ Wilberforce began. ‘This was after the Great Comb Riots and alien dissenters were being interned under the Sedition Act, that was us you see. We were Poles, Prussians, Serbs, Dalmatians, any nation you care to think of. Even a Frenchman. Anyroad, we all fetched up together in Newgate gaol and waited for the business to blow over. Only it didn’t. More tea?’ Peter Rathkael-Herbert shook his head. ‘Very well, we thought, so we wait to be charged. Standard procedure you see. Get charged, plead guilty, be deported, three days at Boulogne and you’re back within the week. But time wore on and we still were not charged. In the meantime we kept ourselves busy, political debates, discussions, a little dialectics. We look back on those days as the birth of Pantisocracy. It was the only compromise we could reach. You see, when you’ve got die-hard anabaptists and Thuringian ultramontanists in the ranks, take it from me, you need something broad. Pantisocracy is broad, if nothing else.’

Wilberforce reached for his pipe and began packing it with a gluey substance. ‘All men are equal,’ he said as he lit the pipe and Peter Rathkael-Herbert smelt a sweet scent familiar from the
Tesrifati
. ‘That’s about it really. The stuff about land ownership doesn’t really apply aboard ship. Anyway, in the end we figured out the delay. The section of the Act we’d been charged under had yet to be passed, and with the threat of revolt over, no-one was very interested in getting it onto the statute books. We couldn’t be released until we’d been tried, and we couldn’t be tried because the law didn’t exist. We rotted there for over a year until the magistrate who’d arraigned us in the first place chartered a ship. This ship, in fact, though it was called the
Alecto
then.’

Wilberforce sent clouds of sweet blue smoke wafting towards his guest. ‘The idea was: stage an escape, hop aboard this ship, be charged with the escape, plead guilty, be deported to France and back in a few days. The only problem was the magistrate. He retired that very week, leaving us aboard the
Alecto
. There we were, suddenly fugitives from justice with nothing and nobody between us and the gallows. Technically, we were already pirates. After a quick debate we decided to go the whole hog. We put the master and his crew in the pinnace, hoisted the Jolly Roger and set sail that night for the Barbary Coast. It’s been thirty-odd years now and I can tell you truly, that not a man jack of us has looked back since. I still think of that magistrate and each time I do I raise my glass and toast him: “Happy retirement, Henry Fielding!” Without him, we’d all be living under the English boot, but here we are and here we stay.
It’s the rover’s life for us and a damn fine life it is too, right lads?’