Authors: Mark Keating
Phipps did not smile or patronise. He stated facts, undeniable truths. Coxon could stay here. Why not, indeed? Removed and remote, checking over the guns and textiles coming in from England and shackling the slaves that went out in exchange. But there was something that perhaps Phipps could never understand. On a ship the world shrunk to a fingernail of existence. Every part of your day was ordered to a bell. You ate to it, you worked to it, you slept to it, the decision of what to do and when removed. You wore the clothes of your position. You mingled with the same people all year round, and the world ended at the rails. In that life all the exterior, superfluous nature of society was gone. A man was stripped down to what he was, not what society made of him.
Some could not face the introspection of the life, and Coxon himself had come across midshipmen who on land were the lord of the dance and kings of the set yet after a year at sea they could no longer look at themselves in the mirror.
Some, a rare few, he had even found lifeless in their cots, with the blood spilling from their arms.
Phipps could never know what it was like to live inside a bell jar and appreciate it. He attempted another approach.
'Do you know turtles, General?'
Phipps stared back vacantly. Coxon continued, 'A turtle always returns to the place of its birth to mate and to lay its eggs. In the Caymans we deliberately wait on shore before dawn for the harvest. Turtles, as you know, General, are a delicious if slightly repulsive-looking green meat, but are a luxury to a sailor. It takes two men to turn them and we leave them writhing on their backs. After a few hours the sand is almost gone from view, so covered is the beach by these beasts.' Coxon slyly noticed that Phipps's mistress had stopped fanning, beguiled, and the children had lifted their silent heads to stare at him.
'The strange thing is that they don't stop coming. They can see and hear the distress of the others, but still they struggle onto the beach, oblivious to our presence. Do you know why, General?'
'I rejoice to say that I do not, Captain,' Phipps mumbled.
'It's because when he is born and digs his way out of the sand and down to the sea, the turtle carries in his mouth a grain of sand from that beach. He carries it with him for the rest of his days, and returns to that very same spot year in, year out. He has to. Regardless. Regardless of any danger or will to do otherwise.' Coxon stood and bowed his head to the elegant concubine, and then to the general.
Phipps bowed his head, and smiled. 'A dog also returns to its vomit, sir. Against others' better judgement.'
'I should like to return with your outgoing post, General. Please inform me when a ship is available. Good morning, sir.' He bowed again, took up his hat and left.
Fourteen hundred miles and eight degrees of latitude away, Patrick Devlin sat on the floor of Captain Seth Toombs's cabin. He had breakfasted on rice, pork and peas, all fried on a skillet by a man with one hand. On His Majesty's ships the man with one hand would have been cast off and left to fend for himself back home. Here, he would be compensated for his joint: two hundred pieces of eight, and given a less trying position. In Dog-Leg Harry's case, ship's cook.
Devlin had risen with the sun and slung his hammock. Generously he had been given the canvas bag that held Alastair Lewis's few remaining possessions. The only one he cared for this morning was a square shaving mirror. In the twilight he had seen his face clearly for the first time in years. The tanned reflection and dark eyes were still young, but now cynical and hard. His hair seemed lighter than the black he remembered, but the years at sea had probably seen to that. Four years as factotum to John Coxon, sleeping on the floors of cabins and rooms in Portsmouth or London. Two years among the citizens of '
la Cité corsaire',
St Malo, where he lived and laughed with the fishermen and brushed shoulders with the privateers who ruled there. The young Irish butcher boy and poacher had gone, and he wondered if he now looked like his father; his memory of the man who had passed him on to the butcher when he was barely eight had long since dimmed. He could remember his father's arms swinging him along, and the huge, rough, square hands, but the voice and the face were in darkness.
He took the mirror and, with his shaver tucked in his belt, walked to the fo'c'sle, over the bodies of his sleeping comrades. Picking up a swab bucket, he sat on the deck in the violet dawn and shaved away the last two months.
Now he leaned against the cabin wall, warming a pipe and waiting for Toombs to awake. He had not dared look at the folded parchment hidden in his right boot, and in his mind's eye he began to see it fading away, an intangible promise.
They were still anchored and there was no watch on deck. The lack of a watch had seemed strange to Devlin, so familiar had the morose chimes of the bell become, but it was just the assertion of another freedom that normal seamen did not have.
Rather than the four-hour shifts between a starboard and a larboard watch, as the men-of-war dictated, Toombs's pirates generally favoured an 'all hands' approach ordered by Peter Sam for the work that wanted, although there was always a soul aloft on the mainmast looking for sails - a favoured task, for if he spied a prize he would have first choice of pistols from her spoils.
Devlin himself had been spared the labour of the watch on Coxon's ship, being a servant, but if he were to be Toombs's artist he would need its discipline.
'Maybe you should have wakened me, Patrick.' Toombs effortlessly got out of his hammock, awakened presumably by his bladder or an aching head.
His coat and hat were slung across the table and he instinctively put them on with his eyes still closed, Devlin noticing that without these accoutrements Toombs looked like any other seaman, if not thinner than most, but with the same hunched shoulders until the burgundy tricorne tipped his head up like a prince's.
'What time is it?' This was his own question, as Toombs had Lewis's timepiece set for London, and his own watch that he reset at noon each day.
'Almost half past ten. Show us your preparations, Pat.'
He swept towards the deck with a yell. 'Dog-Leg! Coffee!' He kicked the nearest man to him. 'Get up, you lazy dog! Prepare to shift that capstan, and fetch me Peter Sam!'
He pulled his pipe from his pocket and took a few steps forward, loading as he went. Glancing upwards at the crosstrees and the man above, seeing him still awake and silent, he knew they were alone for at least a dozen miles in any direction. Eighty feet in the air, the wind strafing his ears and smarting his eyes red until he was weeping, not even able to light a pipe in the wind, standing more over the sea than the deck, he was the loneliest man on earth.
'Any man who calls himself an officer move himself to the cabin! I want movement and breakfast, you dogs! Hands to braces!' He turned, lighting his pipe from his tinderbox, and walked back to the cabin with a wink to Devlin. 'Now you can officially meet the others.'
In the past, Devlin had been privy to many an officer's meeting in the capacity of servant, tray in hand, but this one had a different edge to it. The room stank of drink. In the mid-morning heat it sweated from the men's pores, although no one showed ill of it.
Devlin knew Peter and Seth; the others he knew of - had even worked with - without names being passed between them. Around the table he nodded greetings to the sailing master, William Vernon, or Black Bill as he was known to all, a dark, broad Scot with a great black beard that covered his neck and face. He stood next to 'Little John' Phillips, bosun, whom Devlin supposed was no more than twenty- five.
William Magnes he fairly knew, the tall, nervous-looking carpenter with the grey sideburns, the only one to offer his hand to Devlin that morning. John Watson was the cooper, and a great bawdy storyteller below deck, who fought constantly with Magnes over tools. Lastly, Gunner Captain Robert Hartley, formerly of His Majesty's ships. A half-deaf drunkard, obsessed with sponges and tallow, who spent all his time drinking, sifting powder and swearing at the damp. Devlin felt he was backstage at a French
cirque
, Toombs the ringmaster to the freaks.
Earlier it had been in his mind to share Philippe Ducos's last will and testament with his captain, for last night a drunken
Toombs joyfully declared that he knew Devlin to be one like him, just by the way he wore his sword all the time he was not at work, 'like a lord'.
In truth Devlin wore the sword and crossbelt with a misplaced sense of duty. It was one of Coxon's that he had liberated in defence of the Noble. It would be worth twenty guineas if he ever got it to a civilised shore. By wearing it he felt still a part of that orderly world, Coxon hanging at his side. This morning he held back the thought to share his newly found destiny. Meeting the swaying corps had given him confidence. He would stay his hand.
'Gentlemen, I want you to treat Patrick as kindly as you do each other!' An evil laugh pervaded as Dog-Leg poured coffee into pewter mugs.
'What's our plan, Captain?' Black Bill spoke for all.
'A fine, bold plan, Bill. Bold as brass!' Toombs began the rough detail of his scheme. The attack on the frigate had gone badly. Toombs had taken the chance against the sixth-rate ship, but the fire had ended all that. Then, running west, they had met the French sloop - and that had turned out empty.
A pirate captain's tenure was only as substantial as the goods in his hold. To that end, Toombs had dreamed up the audacious kidnapping of the Portuguese governor of one of the Verde Islands.
They would present themselves as English merchants and ingratiate themselves with the governor. Toombs would then Invite him aboard for dinner, whereupon they would place a pistol upon his breast and a ten-thousand-doubloon ransom on his head. The ring of the Spanish coin still the finest in all the world.
Peter Sam felt obliged to express that they were already running late in the year: they should be on their way to the
Newfoundland coast by now to avoid the summer heat which bred disease. Black Bill shouted home that if they were not to 'trade up' - fix themselves to a new ship - then they needed to careen and smoke out the vermin before the season changed. Bill always courted the worst of looks from Toombs.
'All of this we know, gentlemen. But am I sailing with women here? Careen! Smoke the hold! Pitiful swabs. I'm talking of giving the Portos the vapours here! Enough coin for us to suckle for the whole summer in Trepassey! Vane has done it, why not I?'
'Aye.' John Watson, the cooper, sucked on his pipe. 'The scheme's good enough, but how's it to be done, patroon? We don't look like no English coffee boys.'
Toombs laughed and slapped the table. 'That frigate wasn't a total waste, lads. Did we not grab us sackfuls of proper seaman's slops?'
Dog-Leg silently produced a bowl of Italian grapes and each grabbed a handful.
'And are we not flying an English pennant now, sir?' He took a hold of Devlin. 'Sow the seed, Pat! What we be doing?'
Devlin came to the edge of the table, map under his arm. He pushed away the litter of mugs and spread the Mercator chart over the table, dragging the mugs back again to fasten down each corner.
'Pay attention, boys, to the hydrographica tabula.' He sang the words, and enjoyed his audience.
'Bill?' The black eyes looked dolefully upon him. 'I'll need you to get me seven knots at least, against the wind as we are. We'll have a northwest tack for two hours, then a northeast for one, then back again. That way we should stay away from the coast but still keep to this course.' He pointed on the map with a divider to a course he had mapped.
'Beating upwind as we are and as weatherly as the
Lucy
is, the sails are up to you. Close-hauled and no pinching, if you please. I wants and needs no more than seven knots, but I needs them. That should bring us here' - he stabbed with the divider a few points north of St Nicholas - 'by this time in two days, where we can sail downwind and around her eastern cape into Preguica harbour.'
All looked down at the small clump of islands scattered off the coast of Africa like dice on a table.
'The Islands of the Blest', the Portuguese had named them. Almost in the middle of the scattering sat their destination: Sao Nicolau. St Nicholas.
Long and thin, Sao Nicolau was pinched almost in the very middle to less than six miles across, its mountain ranges skirted by small colonies of towns, each one full of winding streets and alleyways lined with a colourful collection of terracotta- roofed dwellings.
The capital, Ribeira Brava, nestled below the watch of Monte Cordo, the largest mountain on the island, but the governor had made his home south of Preguica, at a far quieter locale on the south coast, which suited the pirates' needs.
'You're sure you know where we be starting from, then, Patrick?' Peter Sam asked quietly.
'The latitude I took this morning by God Himself don't lie. But we'll take another at noon today before we leave and I'll show you, Peter.'
'You can show me!' Bill bellowed.
'All are welcome, lads.' Devlin smiled as everyone looked upon him with different eyes. 'But there's one thing I have to insist on, boys. That is, if you're not going to shoot me in two days' time when we don't make it else.'