Authors: Alan Armstrong
27
A S
TORM AT
S
EA
With Salt in his pocket, Andrew spent his first days at sea exploring the
Tyger.
She was larger and newer than the cog he and Tremayne had taken to Marseilles. He clambered from hold to top deck, from stem to stern, marveling at all the spaces, every inch put to use. “When you spread it out deck by deck and add in the hold,” he told Tremayne, “it’s as big as Durham House, only the ceilings are low.”
Admiral Grenville made no secret they were English. The
Tyger
flew St. George’s great white cross on red with Sir Walter’s pennant underneath as the fleet sailed down the French coast and out across the Bay of Biscay.
The admiral kept his ships close together in what he called his wolf pack. Close sailing was his special tactic. None of the vessels they saw at a distance dared approach. None of those carried flags.
The sailors watched the sky for signs of weather. They told its future in clouds and colors:
“Red skies at morning, sailors take warning;
Red skies at night, sailors’ delight.”
One morning it dawned red. Before noon the long strands of white cloud they’d had for days gave way to lead-colored masses ranked like fish scales. A softness came into the air. As Andrew came up from seeing to the Indians, a man called to him: “A gale’s up, lad! Get set for damp and worse!”
Already the sky was darkening. The boy gritted his teeth against feeling afraid.
The weather turned fast as the wind shifted, blue water going to an ugly gray pudding, whipped and seething. Sudden gusts made the furled sails crack like gunshots. Wind with cold rain in it tore at the lines, making them snap and moan.
“You hear that?” the sailor said, coming close. “Voices of the drowned. Do you know the verse ‘Full fathom five my father lies’? Do you hear them singing it now?”
Andrew heard. His flesh prickled. He forced himself to smile. It came hard.
“Look!” said the sailor, unbuttoning his shirt to show the medal he wore. “Saint Nicholas—the protector of sailors. Pray to him, boy! He’ll save you!”
All the crew knew Saint Nicholas. Catholic, Protestant, Arab, and Jew—and there were some of each—prayed to him and felt better for it. Andrew had done so himself on the ship to Amsterdam; he did again.
He went down into the steamy, pitching, sweat-and-wet-smelling hold to join Tremayne in the galley, where the sailors drank beer and ate cold biscuit as they rested between watches and shifts at the pumps. There was no drying off.
As the waves grew steeper, the
Tyger
climbed and fell like a blind beetle going over rocks. The ship tossed and took on water. Andrew chewed ginger root. It did no good; he lost what he’d eaten.
Thunder boomed so loud he thought they’d run into a nest of Spaniards. Lightning flashes made the ropes glow white and sizzle. Water surged over the main deck. Salt lay buried in Andrew’s bunk.
He went down to the hold to see Manteo and Wanchese. They clung to each other in their corner, sick and groaning, praying to a small, carved figure of their god.
“Ginger root!” Andrew said, handing them chunks. “Chew it to feel better.” They wouldn’t.
“It won’t last long,” he said, as much to himself as to them. “We’ll be all right! You’re going home.”
They were too miserable to be cheered.
The smells and smoke in that tight place, the sight of swaying ropes and netting, the Indians being sick—it all got to Andrew. He began to feel faint. He staggered back up to the deck.
As he lurched out into the smack of rain, the small ship just ahead began to founder. The gale winds and pitching seas had cracked her spine! Smoke was pouring from the main hatch: she was on fire! After taking on water, there’s no greater threat to a ship than fire.
“The heavings and tossings broke her cook fire loose!” a sailor yelled. “There’s gunpowder in her! I helped load kegs of it!”
Tremayne and Mr. Harriot came and stood with Andrew, gripping the taffrail.
At risk of smashing the
Tyger
to bits or getting her blown out of the water, Admiral Grenville had his sailors work the few small sails he’d left up like they were butterfly wings, inching the flagship close to the pinnace.
Andrew, Tremayne, and Mr. Harriot helped feed rope to the crew as they heaved lines across and tied the pinnace to the larger ship. As side rails and scuppers ground to splinters, the pinnace crew jumped across.
Andrew could hear the fire roaring in her guts. Orange was showing at her hatches.
“That gunpowder could go any second,” Tremayne muttered.
“Count!” the pinnace’s captain yelled from her deck. “Get the count!” He wouldn’t jump until he knew all his men were safe.
“There’s courage!” Mr. Harriot yelled to Andrew, his lips pinched together as he watched.
Sure at last that his people were off, the pinnace captain took an ax to the ropes, then made the leap, the ship’s cat in his arms, wet and furious.
Andrew was watching the pinnace. “She goes down like someone pulling the covers over,” he murmured to himself. No one heard him. At that moment every man watching was beyond hearing, focused on the vessel’s death agony.
She lurched up with a muffled boom when her powder caught. Andrew held the rail so tight his knuckles went white as the
Tyger
shuddered at the shock. Bits of board and blanket boiled up, then bubbles.
The
Tyger
was crowded now, with two crews aboard along with explorers and Indians. There was no sitting down for meals; everyone stood to eat and shared bunks.
“Always a warm bed to get to,” the sailors laughed, one man crawling under the covers as another crawled out. Andrew and Tremayne shared with the Indians. The Indians would have shared with the sailors too, but those men were afraid, one muttering, “I’d sooner sleep standing up than lie down next to a heathen!”
“The admiral says there’s food enough,” Tremayne told Andrew, “but we’ll soon be short of water and out of beer.”
The storm that took the pinnace hung over them for days. They sailed in murk, seeing nothing. With charts and a sea compass, the admiral kept their course.
One morning Andrew, Tremayne, and Mr. Harriot stood together watching the admiral at his work. For Mr. Harriot, navigation was science; for Tremayne, it was a tool to be learned; for Andrew, it was magic, like Doctor Dee gazing into his crystal ball.
Even in clear weather the sea gave no hint of where they were. The magic and terror of open-water sailing was that there was no left or right, and they didn’t even know if they were going straight.
With his astrolabe, the admiral checked their north-south position against the stars when he could see them again.
“We’re about where we should be,” he said, smiling, as Andrew and Tremayne watched him work.
“Another Arab invention for you, Andrew,” said Mr. Harriot, pointing to the sea compass.
Mr. Harriot had never sailed out of sight of land before either. He began to understand some of the things the navigators he’d tutored at Durham House had found so puzzling. “Theory and practice,” he muttered. “I was all theory, they were all practice. From now on I’m for practice.”
“We’re making for the Canaries,” the admiral announced. “Off the coast of Africa. Spanish islands, the last land. There we’ll take on fresh water and the fruits for scurvy—oranges and lemons.”
“What’s scurvy, sir?” Andrew asked. He’d heard Sir Walter speak of it.
“Sailors’ sickness. Your gums go soft, the teeth loosen, every joint hurts, you bruise so much you look like a ragbag. So suck your lemon, lad, and give up whistling for an hour.”
Andrew was with the admiral as they approached Tenerife. Two Spanish ships of war moved out from the harbor.
“You’re in luck, lad!” the admiral exclaimed. “Maybe I can give you a bit of a sea fight!”
He aimed his wolf pack straight for the closest. She turned away. He went after the other. She too decided on other business.
“To keep from getting trapped in the harbor, we’ll settle well out,” the admiral explained once he gave the order to drop anchor. “We’ll take the small boat in. I have a friend here, the principal merchant. You know,” he said with a wink, “a man who buys much and pays in gold is always the intimate of merchants, whatever their differences in politics and religion.
“Just in case, though, my people will carry arms to assure a kind reception.”
There was no need: the admiral’s gift of brightly dyed English wool—the finest in the world—for the merchant’s lady inspired the offer of a banquet.
“Oh, no!” said the admiral, bowing and opening his arms. “I could only accept if my entire company were invited, and that would be too much, for in addition to my special guests”—he beckoned, waving his arm at Andrew, Tremayne, and Mr. Harriot—“my crews and the other explorers number more than a hundred and fifty.” He paused. “And we have two Indians in our party!”
“Bring all!” the Señor answered bravely. “I would not have it any other way! Pray, bring all, even your savages.”
The admiral raised his hand in mock surrender. “So, Andrew,” he laughed, “you see how it is with a Spanish gentleman!”
The gentleman’s profits eased down gullets as crew, explorers, and Indians came ashore in shifts to eat roast ox and fresh greens and drink the famous wines of that place. The wine affected the Indians; they got giddy and fell asleep.
After he got over feeling he was still on a rocking boat, Andrew wanted to explore the island and hunt for seashells like the ones the sailors had shown him.
“No,” said Mr. Harriot. “You and Tremayne must stay with the Indians. We can leave behind an explorer or a sailor, but it won’t do to lose
them
! They’re our Virginia navigators!”
The Señora had a small female dog she fanned as she held it to her bosom. When her dog spied Salt, it gave a bark of joy and leaped clear. The lady screamed, then hid her face behind her fan as the dogs tore off together, frisking, yipping, rolling, and rollicking. Only when Salt was tired and thirsty was Andrew able to catch him.
The admiral’s people left in high spirits, with oranges and lemons and almost as many casks of their hosts’ wine as their water.
Andrew went out in the last boat with Manteo and Wanchese. As they looked back, Manteo pointed. “Green, like home. Hot. Not like London.”
The enemy’s ships of war saw them off from a distance. As a courtesy, Admiral Grenville dipped the flagship’s ensign. The Spaniards did the same. “Sailors don’t hate each other the way soldiers do,” the admiral said. “We have in common a more constant enemy: the sea.”
Leaving the dark green Canaries behind, they sailed southwest along the coast of Africa until they picked up the equatorial current that flowed to the West Indies.
“Watch now!” the admiral said as he pointed to the compass. “We turn to follow the directions Columbus gave his mariners a hundred years ago:
“‘West.
“West.
“Nothing to the North.
“Nothing to the South.
“West.’”
Andrew stood with the Indians and Tremayne. They felt the
Tyger
heel as she turned and left the Old World behind.
“Now we’re really on our way,” Tremayne cried, his eyes bright as he stared at the line where the western sky met the sea. “There!” he exclaimed, pointing and poking Andrew as he laughed with excitement. “Do you remember my telling you ‘There sits America, waiting for you’? Well, there she is!”
Andrew nodded and laughed as a shiver of anticipation swept over him. The Indians smiled. They understood.
That night, the ship’s wake glowed like moonlight as she cut through a swarm of tiny jellyfish.
The
Tyger
became the boy’s world as he studied the mechanics of raising the heavy sails with lines run through block and tackle to multiply the crewmen’s strength. He began to notice as sailors do slight shifts of wind and changes in the ship’s creaking. He learned how it is that some men choose to be sailors for life as he worked with the ship’s carpenters.
One day a carpenter held up a long, tapering piece of oak.
“Hi, boy! Do you know what this is?”
“A builder’s peg, sir?”
“To a landsman. To a sailor it’s a treenail: what fastens ship timbers one to another. We pare it to fit snug in a bored hole, bung it in, and then she goes to work on her own as the water swells her and she locks tighter and tighter. An iron spike would rust and work free. For building on your Virginia island, lad, treenails! From what I hear, it’s plenty wet there.”
Andrew tried to imagine what he’d find at Roanoke, what he’d build. His mind raced over the tools they’d packed. Had they brought everything they’d need?
28
P
RIZES
!
They sped west as Admiral Grenville crowded on sail. The storms they met came up from behind and pushed them on. They were not so violent as the one that broke the pinnace.
Andrew made friends with the three ships’ boys on board. They taught him to chew the ends of hemp rope to get dizzy and tried to get him to climb the masts like they did, but his stomach wouldn’t take it. They showed him how to roll dice and play a game with bright-colored cards they’d got from one of the sailors. The boys couldn’t read, but they were masters at playing cards.
Andrew was glad to have friends his own age, though they seemed more like men than boys. They talked about girls they knew and doing things he had no idea of. What he missed, home and family, counted for nothing with them; the
Tyger
was as much home as they knew.
They got Andrew to bet. He won a few times, then he began to lose.
“Pay up!” the biggest one demanded.
Andrew didn’t have any money.
“Go double-or-nothing, then.”
He lost again.
Now he owed twopence. He was employed by Mr. Harriot and earning a wage, but he was too ashamed to approach him. He went to Tremayne.
“I need twopence,” he said.
“For what?”
“To pay the ships’ boys.”
Slowly, Tremayne got the story.
“They took you!” he said with a grim smile as he handed Andrew the coins. “The old trick—they let you win just enough to make you think you knew what you were doing, then they rigged the game. You got cheated!”
Andrew said nothing. He felt sick. It wasn’t the money; it was feeling alone and different. He’d felt close to those boys—the way he’d felt about his friends at school and William. To the ships’ boys, though, he was nothing more than a pocket to empty.
They were thirty-two days out from the Canaries when Salt announced New World land, the island of Puerto Rico. He and the Indians smelled it at the same time. The Indians sang a long single-note chant as the dog barked. The breeze was sweet, full of flowers.
The ship’s water was stale, the barrels green and slimy, teeming with worms. Everyone was hungry for fresh fruit and greens, anything but ship biscuit and salt pork.
Following the map Tremayne and Andrew had stolen from the Frenchman, the admiral found an uninhabited harbor safe from Spanish eyes. The land had been freshly worked, though; there were Spaniards around.
The men were organized into teams, the largest to throw up a wall of pointed logs in case Spaniards attacked, another to scour the green mold from the water barrels and refill them, the third to go after cassava root to make bread. They found plenty in the worked fields. The bread was sweet and good. Mr. Harriot helped Tremayne and Andrew gather sugar and banana roots to try at Roanoke.
The explorers suffered from sunburn and biting flies until Manteo and Wanchese showed them a root to pulp and rub on their bodies.
Once the palisade was up, Andrew joined the carpenters building a pinnace to replace the one lost in the storm. This was the work he liked best: the tools and smells of fresh-shaved wood reminded him of helping his father do carpentry work back at Stillwell.
He was proud to show he knew how to manage the drills and planes and measure angles. “If you don’t like Virginia, lad, we’ll take you on as apprentice,” the
Tyger
’s master carpenter announced. That warmed Andrew; it made up for the hurt he’d felt at being cheated by the ships’ boys.
In less than a week they’d fashioned a keel and laid the ribs out like fish bones. A week later they launched her. She was green and leaky, but the admiral ordered the fleet to sail.
Andrew stood with Tremayne and Mr. Harriot, watching as the island grew small behind them. “How soon do we make Virginia?” he asked, sure that was where they were headed at last.
“Ah,” said Mr. Harriot, his mouth tightening. “The admiral has orders from the investors to take prizes, and even if he didn’t, he would.”
Sure enough, down came the English flags and up went the Spanish. The admiral turned pirate and went hunting along the sea-lanes. Neither Mr. Harriot nor Tremayne seemed surprised, so Andrew kept his mouth shut. All hours the admiral kept the ships’ boys, slight and quick as cats, watching from the mast tops. It made Andrew queasy to look up at them swaying like birds in a storm.
It was early morning. Andrew was wetting the apple shoots with his share of fresh water when he heard the yell—
“Sail! Sail!” One of the gamblers had spotted a merchantman.
There wasn’t much wind, and the loaded
Tyger
was heavy and slow. The Spaniard tried to escape. Admiral Grenville ordered up every sail he could hang and formed teams to wet them so they’d hold what wind there was. Andrew was perched ten feet above deck, cheering and yelling in time with the others as he passed up the heavy buckets and lowered the empties.
Admiral Grenville was the better sailor. By midafternoon the
Tyger
had drawn close, firing shots from her one small swivel cannon and shooting flaming arrows to set the Spaniards’ rigging afire.
The Spaniards shot back as good as they got and more. Andrew dodged fire arrows as he raced with buckets of seawater to douse flames. Slowly they pulled alongside, splinters flying as the
Tyger
’s sailors threw anchors and grappling irons to haul in the enemy. The boy leapt to join the haulers on the thick rope just as the sailor next to him went down with a scream, blood jetting from his neck; another held his arm, half off at the shoulder. Andrew pulled with everything he had; he pulled for three.
As the two ships bumped together, scraping and grinding, the
Tyger
’s sailors, explorers, and Indians jumped across to the Spaniard, yelling like madmen and screaming an eerie high-pitched Indian war whoop. Andrew screamed too, as loud as he could, as he held on to his haul line.
He’d grown up on stories that the English are the bloodthirstiest soldiers in the world, thinking first about honor and last about safety as each goes after his own prize. That afternoon, he learned it was the same with the Indians. As for the Spanish, he discovered they could be fierce fighters too, but they were practical. When the Spanish captain realized what he faced, he allowed capture and got good treatment. Andrew couldn’t imagine Admiral Grenville giving up like that.
The boy watched as Manteo and Wanchese draped themselves in plundered calico and paraded, singing and chanting their high strange music, on the
Tyger
’s deck. Others piled up what they could use of the Spaniards’ cargo—barrels of wine, crates of cloth, coops of chickens.
Mr. Harriot and Tremayne came and stood beside him while folks on deck figured their gains. “The ship is new,” Mr. Harriot said. “She’ll bring plenty back home in England! And those fancy prisoners—they’ll bring good ransoms! The Queen and Sir Walter will do well, the investors too. And us, we’ll get shares!”
“Me?” asked Andrew. “I’ll get a share too?”
“Indeed you will, same prize money as Tremayne and me,” Mr. Harriot said with a big smile. A shiver of pride went over the boy. His father could use the money.
They sailed along the Florida channel and up the Virginia coast, stitching past its line of sheltering islands. The pilot said the one they sought lay inside the outer ones. Suddenly Andrew felt the ship turn.
The heavily laden
Tyger
rode deep. She needed fifteen feet depth of water for clear sailing.
Roanoke Island was mostly flat and low, twenty miles long, six across at the widest. On the map it was shaped like one of Pena’s Spanish roots, the plant he called potato. As they approached it, Andrew and one of the ships’ boys were sent to perch far forward on the bowsprit to measure the depth of water. Their weighted lines were marked every half foot. They took turns calling out their soundings to the admiral. It was as they’d been warned: shallows all around.
It was late afternoon. The admiral was wary. Although they were well off from the island, the ship was already in shallows. The sounders were calling, “Twenty-one!” “Twenty!” then “Eighteen!” when Admiral Grenville ordered, “Drop sail! Drop anchor!”
As the anchors rumbled out on their chains, a cloud of white cranes rose from the marsh with a cry like an army of men shouting all together. To Andrew, it was a greeting. It thrilled him like hearing that deep organ chord at St. Paul’s Cathedral a year before.
Tremayne came and stood beside him. The long line of sunset was bright gold shading up to crimson. The breeze carried a sweet scent of tidewater and sun-warmed marsh. The man who had been his teacher smiled and shook his head. “Do you remember when I saw you off to London, I asked you to bring me news? You did better! You brought me to the news!”