FROM THE MASTHEAD, the Spaniard was clearly visible, at least through a telescope. She was hull-down, running west along the coast under easy sail. She was ship rigged—three masts, square sails on all masts— though she was not a large vessel. What the British would call a sloop-of-war. Perhaps eighteen great guns, nine- or twelve-pounders. Not huge, but vastly superior to the Pretty Anne. She seemed in no great hurry.
“Could we not run for it? Sure we could sail away from that beastly thing?” Anne asked. She and Mary were in their favorite spot, up on the crosstrees, enjoying their rare privacy.
“Beastly she may be, but she would run us down,” Mary said. “The speed of a vessel has much to do with her length, you know. And see here, she sails in company with another.”
Mary had just seen the second vessel. She was off the Spaniard’s lee quarter, and the guard ship hid her from the Pretty Anne’s view, until that moment when the guard ship sagged off to leeward, exposing the other ship.
“Deck, there!” Mary called out.
“Aye, aloft!”
“There’s another there as well, off the Guarda del Costa’s lee quarter. Looks to be a sloop. Could be a prize, can’t tell.”
How that news was greeted on deck, Mary could not tell either. She and Anne turned their attention back to their approaching enemy.
“You said yourself that she is not a man-of-war of any great size,” Anne continued, “and they are only Dons, for the love of God. I don’t see why we do not attack them and take their ship. This sloop is halfrotten; we need a new one.”
Mary shook her head. “She may not be of a great size, my dear, and they may be but Dons, but they are too much for us.”
“No, but neither am I a fool.” Mary paused for a moment and then added, “I would be afraid, were we to attack them.”
“Well, I am not afraid, nor am I a fool. I reckon I am just too brave, is all.”
Mary smiled at her friend. “You would be surprised at what close cousins bravery and foolishness be.”
“Humph,” Anne said, and said no more.
The two women watched the slow approach of the Spaniards for ten minutes more and then returned to the deck. They slid down the backstay and right into the midst of a hot debate on the best course of action.
“Damn them, the damned bloody Dons!” George Fetherston was ranting. “Ain’t but a sloop, and them just Dons, I say we are for them!” He shouted the last words in such a way that he hoped would bring a cheer from the men, but they remained silent and stared at him.
“There, do you see?” Anne said to Mary in a soft voice. “I am not the only one who is for attacking.”
“Yes, Annie, but Fetherston is a fucking lunatic. I would expect better from you.”
And then Richard Corner stood and said, “What ho, Jack? You are captain here, what say you?”
“What? Well, see here now, you know . . .” Jack was pacing. His sword was out and he was casually swinging it, using it as a walking stick in a most dramatic fashion. He stretched and yawned in a great display of disinterest.
He is scared half to death, Mary thought. She looked around at the others to see if they, too, could see how the captain’s guts were churning, but she saw no sign of it. Perhaps these wild men had not witnessed as much fear as she had. She kept her mouth shut.
“Well, this is a hell of a spot, you know.” Jack was still extemporizing. “And seeing as how we are not in a fight, I am not, as it were, in sole command, so I would leave it to you gentlemen—” he bowed an elegant bow that brought a few smiles “—to decide on the course of our action.”
“They’ve bloody got us now, was we to show ourselves,” offered Noah Harwood, a simple statement of fact. “I reckon we should tow the sloop into the channel best as we can, see if these bastards don’t sail on past and never discover we’re here.”
This at last met with murmured consent, Mary adding her sounds of affirmation to the others. It was the only course that made sense.
“Are we agreed then?” Jack asked brightly. He seemed buoyed now that a decision had been rendered. Mary suspected that he was relieved that the others had not voted to attack, but she was loath even to think it. Cowardice was the most heinous of things; she could not accuse anyone of it, not even in her thoughts alone, without genuine and irrefutable proof. She would not brand Jack a coward.
Being afraid was not cowardice; Mary understood that. Everyone was afraid, save for madmen like Fetherston and dumb beasts like Corner. It was what you did with the fear, how you used it, that would make a man a hero or a coward. She wondered what the bold Calico Jack would do if the iron really started to fly.
But Jack was giving orders now and his old aplomb had returned. He slid his sword back into his sheath and said, “Let us have the longboat over the side with the five-inch cable to the bitts. I reckon that will do it.”
The men moved fast, despite the hard night of drinking they had had, despite the still air and the sweltering heat and the bugs from the close-by swamps.
They swayed the longboat over the side and attached to the samson post in its bow the cable, a hemp rope five inches in diameter and nearly two hundred yards long, the lightest of the cables.
With the windlass they hauled up the anchor by which they were attached to the bottom, their hands sweating and slick on the oiled handspikes they used to turn the big winch. It took half an hour and then the anchor was up and hanging from the cathead, and Mary and ten of the others took their place in the longboat, the long oars held straight up like columns in a Greek temple.
“Very well,” said Dicky Corner, standing in the sternsheets and holding the tiller. “Ship oars! Give way, all!”
The oars came down and the boat crew pulled and fathom by fathom they hauled the cable out, rowing farther up the narrow channel that ran between the island and the mainland. The water grew more still, the air more close and oppressive, and the men and Mary rowed on.
They pulled for one hundred feet and then the strain came on the heavy rope, and the Pretty Anne, which had begun to drift with the gentle current, fell into line with the boat. Twenty feet astern of the boat, the cable rose out of the water and ran in a great curved line to the Pretty Anne’s bow.
For a moment they seemed to be stopped. Mary glanced at the shoreline as she leaned into the oar, grunting with the effort, sweat running unimpeded down her face. They were pulling hard, but they were going nowhere, held back by the weight of the sloop.
Oars up, lean forward, oars down, blades biting into the water as they put their backs into it, and this time there was some movement, a grudging forward motion as the boat began to pull the sloop behind.
Blades up, dripping water, lean forward, blades down, pull, inch by inch the boat made forward progress, pull by pull their speed increased as the sloop built her own momentum. The thick jungle crawled by as the sweating crew of the longboat pulled the Pretty Anne farther up the channel, to a place where she might be hidden from sight of the passing Guarda del Costa.
Dicky Corner looked over the side, down through the clear water. He turned and hailed the sloop. “That’s it, lads! You may come to an anchor here!”
The channel was no more than five feet deep beyond that point, and the Pretty Anne needed nine feet at least to move. They had pulled themselves up into a dead end, and if they were seen, then they were trapped. They had gambled everything on the Spaniards’ inattentiveness.
They rowed the longboat to the edge of the mangrove swamp and with their cutlasses they hacked away what foliage they could and brought it back to the sloop. The branches were hoisted aloft and lashed to the topmast and the yard to further disguise the sloop, and then there was no more that they could do. They were hidden as well as they could be, and now it was only a matter of waiting.
The breaker of rum made another appearance. “Need something to pass the bloody time, till this damned Spaniard sails us by,” Fetherston announced as he plunged his tin cup into the little barrel, and the others concurred as they did likewise.
The sun moved off to the west and the long shadows of the mangroves reached across the channel and wrapped themselves around the Pretty Anne. The shade brought a certain relief—from the relentless sun and from the discomforting sensation of being exposed. They were not in the bright light now, but lurking in the shadows, an altogether more secure place to be.
John Howell, who had the watch aloft, came riding down the backstay and stepped onto the quarterdeck rail. “Reckon that Don will be in sight from deck here directly,” he said.
Everyone on deck fell silent, and they all gravitated toward the bow, which was pointing toward the open ocean. They climbed up on the rails and up in the shrouds and they looked out from their shadowy place, out toward the brilliant blue and flashing white of the sea. Nobody spoke. Now they were holding their breath.
They were not at the bow for above a minute when the Guarda del Costa’s spritsail and spritsail topsail, two little squares of white against the blue, appeared around the corner of the island, and then, inch by inch, the rest of the ship revealed itself as she passed by that unremarkable spot of coast, patrolling in her unhurried manner. She was a bit more than a mile away. She looked lovely in the late afternoon sun.
In her wake, trailing like a stubborn child, came the sloop that Mary had first seen from aloft. She looked very like the Pretty Anne.
Corner had the telescope to his eye, and after the pirates had watched the Guarda del Costa for some minutes he said—it was no more than a whisper—“I sees eight gunports.” Heads nodded at this news, but still no one spoke.
“Sloop’s got Spanish colors over English,” Corner announced next. That meant she was the guard ship’s prize, an English sloop that had unwisely wandered too close to the Cuban coast and had been snatched up by the Guarda del Costa.
Mary felt sorry for those poor souls on the sloop. It would go hard on them. But her sorrow was the kind that she had felt looking at the battlefield dead—sorrow mixed with relief that it was they and not she. She knew that the others felt the same, save perhaps for Fetherston, who seemed too wild to think on another’s distress, or that mean little bastard Billy Bartlett, who gave not a cuss for any person other than himself.
The guard ship sailed on. She was nearly across the mouth of the channel, her bowsprit just becoming lost from sight around the western headland with never a change in direction, and that brought a general easing of tension on the deck. Mary could see heads nodding, the first glimmers of smiles on the men’s faces. Jack Rackam seemed to be moving toward a quiet euphoria.
And then Corner said, “She’s hauling her wind,” and all that good humor was crushed under the weight of those quiet words.
Heads snapped up, men stood more erect, craning their necks out to sea. The Guarda del Costa was wearing ship, turning from her present course until her bow was pointing almost directly at the Pretty Anne. The pirates waited for her to keep turning, to spin around through 270 degrees, to sail off toward the northeast on some unknown mission. But she did not.
Instead she settled on this new course, her sails hauled over on a larboard tack, her bowsprit pointing like an accusing finger right at the Pretty Anne.
The Spaniards had seen them. They knew what the hidden sloop was about. They were coming now to pry them out of their hiding place like pulling a rotten tooth from a patient strapped to a chair.
“Come up here, then, and kiss my arse!” Fetherston roared at the Guarda del Costa.
“We’re dead men now, and that’s a fact,” said Billy Bartlett. “You done for us, Rackam, you and your little doxy.”
Calico Jack jumped down from the rail. He landed on the deck and raced below with never a word.