The Guns of Tortuga (15 page)

“And who do they think they're firing at, I wonder?” Uncle Patch said with a snort. “As if the blessed fools could tell friend from foe down here!”

Almost at the moment he said that, a second warehouse exploded, sending a vast fireball up into the sky. Now ships were running afoul of one another, tangling their lines and spars together until they were hopelessly bound together. Still, a number of them had managed to get underway and fall in behind us and the
Fury.
Others continued to savage one another, paying off past injuries. My eyes began to ache from the horror of it all.

When my uncle's instruments were laid out and ready, he grudgingly told me I might go on deck, until casualties began to come down. I got there just as we were passing the arms of the harbor, heading out to the open sea and what waited there for us.

And that was the Spanish war galleon
Concepción.

The faster ships, the sloops and such like, had overtaken and passed us in their race to escape Tortuga. They were the first to come under the guns of the big Spaniard. How could they have missed her? She was there with all her sails set, coming down on us like a white stormcloud low on the sea. Her scarlet and gold banner caught the sunlight like silken flames and I shuddered at the sight of her.

“Lord, Uncle Patch!” I cried as my uncle came up the ladder onto the deck. “Look at her come!”

“Aye” he said, shading his eyes. “Even an elephant will move like a tiger if you give it enough of a start!”

The lead ships, finally sensing their danger, began to turn to leeward, but the war galleon blocked their escape. Then as she sailed between a brig and a sloop, her guns cut loose, both broadsides at the same time. Everywhere white smoke billowed across the water. Then the
Concepción
shouldered her way through, leaving behind her a shattered wreck on one side and mere debris on the other.

“Find the Captain,” my uncle shouted over the noise. “Tell that English madman that I'm ready for the wounded. Send 'em down as they fall!” And he dropped belowdecks again.

In a flash, I was up the ladder and onto the quarterdeck. Clouds of acrid gun smoke broke across us, and the
Concepción
let loose another deafening broadside. Our own gunners huddled around their guns, matches and swabs, powder and shot at the ready. Over the rumble and roar I
heard my gunner friend, Mr. Jeffers, yell at one of his crew, “Now that's what I call gunnery! Slow, but oh, how accurate!”

I scampered over to where Captain Hunter stood in his green coat and pirate hat. I stammered out my uncle's message and got a distracted nod for my troubles. The captain had other things on his mind.

“Now we will see what a Spaniard's word means,” he whispered through clenched teeth. “Bring her about, Mr. Adams, if you please. Come sunset or sunrise, we'll give them a show!”

The
Aurora
began to close on the
Concepción.
In the distance I fancied I could hear Captain Barrel roaring. This was going to be the trickiest part of the whole plan. The next moment was going to decide whether or not we joined the
Viper
and her burning sisters on the bottom of the sea.

“Steady, Mr. Jeffers, steady,” Captain Hunter said, slowly raising his cutlass up in the air. All eyes were on him as we closed on the great black war galleon, and I remembered the first time we had met her. The same tall black sides began to tower over us, the multiple gunports gaping wide. I could see the white-clad Spanish gunners crouched over their
massive twenty-four-pounders, matches glowing in their hands. For the longest moment we all seemed to stare at one another. Then the signal came.

“Fire and drop!” the captain roared. Men fell to the deck as the gunners applied matches to touch holes. The
Aurora
shuddered as our starboard battery all fired at once. At the same time, the
Concepción'
s two decks opened up in a thunderous blast of flame and sulfuric smoke. Cannon shot whistled over our heads, ripping holes in the lower sails and parting lines. At the same time, I could hear the almost meaty thump of our own shot hitting those great walls.

“'Tis a waste, 'tis a terrible waste!” cried Mr. Jeffers. “Full charges o' powder would hull her!”

“Aye,” cried the Captain back at him. “And full powder and shot from that behemoth would have sunk us! Half powder again, Mr. Jeffers, if you please!” As we play-acted with the
Concepción,
she was also engaging the pirate fleet that was trying to fight its way past us.

“Follow the
Aurora,
ya scurvy dogs! Hammer the Spaniard!” Even over the battle, I could hear John Barrel's bull roar. The
Fury
closed in, firing her
cannons as she came. Not playacting, she managed to blast some of the gilt off the war galleon's high stern, and a cheer went up. Then the
Concepción
boomed back, and the
Fury
disappeared in a cloud of smoke and flying splinters.

“My eyes, but the old man is a brave one!” Hunter shouted. His cutlass came down, and once again we let loose a broadside, and once again the
Concepción
fired back. More holes appeared in our sails, and a section of the forecastle rail exploded into splinters. At that exact moment, the lower spar on the foremast came crashing down. It was impressive if you didn't know two of our own sailors had cut it loose.

“Two broadsides! No more, lads—that's all I bargained for in my note to the Don!” Hunter swung his cutlass, and we heeled away from our supposed foe. Behind us rolled the thunder of another ragged cannonade, and both the captain and I turned. There, limping out of the smoke and ruin, came the
Fury,
sails holed and hull splintered. But she still had a few guns that worked and she was firing them for all she was worth. And Captain John Barrel still stood on what was left of her deck,
blackened by soot and gunpowder and roaring like a madman.

“Keep firing, ye lubbers! Follow the
Aurora
and to blazes with the bloody Dons!” Behind him, another brig was settling fast, but two other crippled sloops began to follow his lead.

We began to pull away to the northwest, faster and faster on a quartering wind, with our small fleet of stragglers behind us. The
Concepción
moved among the rest like an angry terrier among rats. Her guns boomed again and again, and the times between cannonades grew shorter and shorter. Mr. Jeffers nodded approval of Don Esteban's broadsides now that they were no longer directed at us. I could see his opinion of Spanish gunners—or at least these Spanish gunners—improving by the minute.

But even the greatest terrier can be outnumbered by rats. Although ships were sinking all about the
Concepción,
the cannonballs that had pounded into her began to take their toll. A lucky or well-aimed shot brought down her foretopgallantmast. Seeing her crippled, the remaining pirate ships began to haul away to the west, leaving their shattered sisters
to founder and burn around their destroyer. For his part, Don Esteban seemed to sense that the day was his and that he need seek no further glory. The
Concepción
turned slowly, delivering another broadside at the fleeing pirates, and then caught the breeze and stood away, south by southwest, with the wind almost on her stern, making for the Windward Passage. More cannon fire broke out. The pirate crews, still unsure of each other, tended to blaze away at any craft that ventured too close.

Mindless of the risk, I stood at the taffrail staring backward as the paths of the vessels diverged and the remnants of battle fell behind us. Of all of us aboard the
Aurora,
I was the only one to see the sleek red galley pull away, leading a string of survivors behind her. The oars flashed, and a red silk flag with a laughing skull fluttered from her mast. For just a second I thought I saw a flash of white that might have been a long white wig. Then she was hidden in the smoke, my view further blocked by the fleeing vessels around her.

But I could guess where she was going and what great crimson ship she was to meet up with out there on the darkening seas. I had met the king of
the pirates. I had no wish to meet his
Red Queen,
for if she had arrived beforehand, even with the
Concepción,
the battle would have been in doubt.

And then my uncle was bawling for me. We had some injuries to attend to—nothing serious, but he needed my help. So I turned away from the rail.

Farewell, Captain Steele, I thought, until we meet again.

The Anchorage

HOW CAPTAIN BARREL
managed it, I do not to this day know. Somehow he bullied and cursed, threatened and pleaded, and his crew kept the
Fury
limping along, low in the water and threatening to sink at every third wave. My uncle and I went across several times to treat the wounded. Six of them died, and over the side went their bodies, with not so much as a prayer or a moment of silence.

When the water was swishing ankle-deep in the captain's cabin, my uncle whistled and said privately to Barrel, “You ought to bring your men across as soon as may be. She cannot swim another day.”

“Swim or sink,” the old buccaneer said firmly, “I
stay with the
Fury,
and so do the hands!” And he snorted so fiercely that I heartily believe not one of his sailors would have chosen to leave his vessel.

Even Captain Hunter admired the man. “By heaven, he has pluck,” he declared the next day, when we were scarcely seventy miles along and the poor
Fury
was wallowing like a dying whale. “Look how they pump! I wonder his men can even stand after so much effort.”

In the glittering sunlight, we could see jets of water shooting from the scuppers of the
Fury.
Captain Barrel himself was at the handles of the pump, and when another man relieved him at the end of his hour, he leaped to the bow of the
Fury
and gave us a cheerful wave.

That afternoon, the lookout sighted land, and as we drew near to it, Captain Hunter looked pleased. “It's Cruzado,” he said. “Hardly more than a flyspeck on the ocean, and there's no fresh water there but what falls from the sky, but it has a kind of anchorage.”

Cruzado was one of the more southerly Bahamas, entirely different from the mountainous Tortuga or Hispaniola. It rose very gently from the
sea, and no spot on it could be much more than ten feet above high tide. Low and green it was, and at first sight quite deserted. But as we came in from the southwest, I could see a scattering of buildings, leaning crazily left and right and gray with weathering. Hunter conned us in to a sort of harbor, a half-circular bite out of the shore. Some men on the land glanced our way, but paid us little attention.

Boddin laughed, a deep musical sound. He was one of the twenty-odd former slaves in our crew, who all preferred a free but danger-filled life on the open sea to security and chains ashore. “The cap'n's a fine navigator,” he said to me. “An' he found this place not one minute too soon for the
Fury.
”

With all the speed she could muster, and that was no more than a fast walking pace, the
Fury
ran straight past us, up to the shelving shore, and grounded with a sandy sigh on the beach. She tilted to the left and came to rest, and from her worn-out crew I heard a weary cheer.

You would think that after all that, after the sea battle and the desperate run to Cruzado, Barrel would have rested, and let his men rest. But no—before half an hour had passed, her boats were
busily ferrying her cargo ashore, lightening her so that later she could be hauled up and careened. Nor did the pumps stop working the whole time.

Indeed, it was three days before Barrel at last was able to see his craft high and dry. If the
Aurora
had borne an ugly hole from cannon fire, the
Fury
was all but a wreck. Her timbers were splintered and splayed, and amidships, as Abel Tate observed with a whistle, “She 'ad bloomed like a flower,” letting the sea in and almost sending herself to the bottom.

But Barrel cheerfully swore at the sight and set his carpenter to putting everything back to rights. The men ashore, I had learned, were pirates to a man. Desperate men they were, I have no doubt, and at sea as wicked as you would hope to meet this side of perdition. But Barrel was well liked among them, and they cheerfully agreed to sell him timber and other necessaries on credit.

Barrel came aboard the
Aurora
on the evening of the third day. Up close, I could see how exhausted the man was, and how his hands were cruelly blistered. “Well, well, Doctor,” he said with a gap-toothed grin as my uncle met him on deck. “And so
I'm not like to lose more o' my men, d'ye think?”

With a grudging smile, my uncle replied, “By the Powers, Captain Barrel, I do not think a man Jack of your crew would dare to die without your permission.”

Barrel threw his great head back and boomed out a laugh. Then he said, “I hear that Cap'n Hunter don't mean to tarry long, so I've come to give him my thanks and to take leave of him.”