CHAPTER FOUR

Bristol Finds a Ship

THE Terror put about and headed west, with the wind astern and the dying sun turning the spritsails into sheets of beaten gold. The low-hanging clouds along the horizon were pinnacles of flame.

The Anegada Passage—that strip of water which separates the Nevis–St. Kitts group from the Virgin Islands—was, for once, empty of ships. It was the main channel for incoming vessels, in spite of the hazardous sand spits and islands that dot the choppy seas in that region.

Bristol drew a black sea cape about his shoulders and went up on deck. The quartermaster detailed three men to watch him, then went into the great cabin. Presently he came forth, dragging Ricardo.

Hoisting the late captain up on the quarterdeck rail, he dumped the body into the sea. It floated for a moment, black hair sprawling along the surface, and then the foamy wake swallowed it up forever.

The quartermaster approached Bristol. “I suppose we can use the course you already plotted.”

“Yes,” said Bristol. “When you see Bryce, tell him the truth.”

The quartermaster raised himself up on the rail and looked ahead. Squinting his eyes against the red blaze of light on water, he made out a black dot off the larboard.

“Boat’s crew!” bellowed the quartermaster. “Man the longboat and prepare to lower!”

Six brawny lads swiftly unlashed the longboat and stood by. The helmsman gave the wheel a spin and the wind went out of the sails. The Terror began to roll into the trough. The spars slammed and the canvas cracked, whipping and restless, as though anxious to be gone.

Bristol stepped into the boat. The six followed him. Strong hands began to lower away on the falls. The longboat smacked into the sea and drifted away. The six unshipped their oars and laid them in the double pins in the bulwark. Bristol stood at the tiller.

“Prepare to give way,” said Bristol. “Give way all together. Stroke!”

It was the last command he would ever give these fellows—perhaps the last command he would ever give. Looking ahead, across the gay headsilks of the oarsmen, he could see the island rise out of the waves. It was but little better than a sand bar, and there would be neither water nor food upon it.

The Terror alternately appeared and disappeared as the longboat swooped from crest to trough and back again. The keen salt spray fanned back to Bristol to stand like pearls on the black broadcloth of the sea cape.

They were going in under the lee of the island. The water was quieter, the surf less severe.

“Oars!” said Bristol.

The sweeps came up. A comber caught in the keel and the boat catapulted in toward the beach. The harsh grind of sand was under them.

Bristol picked up the rifle, the bottle of water and the bag of shot. Walking along the thwarts, he stepped to the sand.

Behind him one of the six took the tiller. They ran through the surf, spray flying up from their churning boots. The longboat drifted out.

“Prepare to give way!” cried the coxswain. “Give way all together! Stroke, stroke, stroke . . .”

Bristol did not look back.

A scraggly line of shrubs lined the beach. He went up to them, looking through the tangle, long and shadowy in the setting sun. His own shadow was a thin black line on the white sand.

Striking out, Bristol skirted the shrubs. The sand was hard to walk in. He was going to make certain that he was alone here, and that there were no springs.

He knew what would happen to him. Although ships passed this point regularly, he would never dare signal them. They would understand only too well that he was a marooned pirate. And if a ship did take him off, he would be promptly hanged from a yardarm.

When his water gave out, that would be the end.

It was almost dark when he had completed the circle. He could see a vague blur of white to the southeast. That would be the Terror, sailing to meet Bryce off Martinico. He wondered what Bryce would say—but then, Bryce could say nothing. The law of the pirate was inflexible, and he had been guilty of two offenses.

It mattered nothing that Ricardo had tried to kill him first. If that pistol ball had struck where Ricardo had thought it would strike, then Ricardo would be here instead of Bristol. But Ricardo would be drifting slowly down to Davy Jones’ locker by now, accompanied by hungry sharks.

Of course it was barely possible that another pirate would pick him off, but buccaneering activities here in the Caribbean had diminished since the English suppression at Port Royal. The mightier buccaneer captains were across the Isthmus, fighting the don in the Pacific.

Bristol sat down and watched the darkness grow thick across the passage. For a while the tip of Nevis still caught the sun, and then that too was gone. Poor Jim! Sir Charles would suspect a lot that wasn’t true—and even if he didn’t, it would be bad enough to have to live with Sir Charles.

Wrapping the sea cape tight about him, Bristol lounged back on his elbow. The sand was still warm, but it would be cold before morning.

A small sound came to him. The creak of a gaff being run down a mast, accompanied by the fitful whisper of disturbed canvas.

Bristol sat up, tense. Someone was putting in to the beach. His hand tightened upon the flintlock musket. Slowly he cocked the hammer. The muttering monotone of surf obscured all other sounds.

Grating sand brought Bristol to his feet. Someone was dragging at a boat. Boots scuffed up toward the trees.

“Stand!” cried Bristol.

The scuffing stopped.

Bristol raised the gun. “Approach slowly, or I’ll fire!”

“Bristol!”

The gun dropped. Bristol tried to pierce the blackness, but could not. The boots were running now, running toward him.

Suddenly a very small person confronted him—a vague whiteness of face and the gleam of a collar.

“For heaven’s sake!” cried Bristol. “Jim!”

“Yes, Bristol. I hope you’re not angry. I started toward Nevis, but then when I thought of them putting you off on a sand spit, and when I thought of Sir Charles, I turned and followed the Terror. I’ve been standing on and off, waiting for darkness. They couldn’t sight me in the sea that’s running.”

“Angry? Why should I— But look here, Jim—I mean Lady Jane—you shouldn’t have done this.”

“But I can take you off in the jolly boat. It will sail wherever we want to go in the Caribbean.”

“We have no place to go. Port Royal is closed to us, and the Dutch are trying to keep us out of their islands. If we’re picked up at sea, it’ll mean one thing.”

“I can’t go back to Nevis, Bristol. It’s too much for the jolly boat to work into the wind. It slips sideways.”

“Yes, I guess you’re right.” Bristol went down to the jolly boat and dragged it up on the beach, out of the tide’s way. There were several pieces of canvas in it, and he brought them back to the trees.

Spreading them out of the wind, he turned to Lady Jane. “There’s your bunk, sailor. I’ll keep watch, in case we have other visitors.”

She pummeled the sand until she had a hollow to lie in. That done, she sat up, placed her arms around her knees and said, “We might have a fire. It will make things more cheerful.”

“And a cruising man-o’-war would make things more cheerful for us.”

“Why so, Bristol?”

“Because they’ll know we aren’t shipwrecked sailors. Our clothing is too good, and the leather and brass haven’t been spoiled by sea water. There is no wreckage strewn along here, and people don’t go to sea in jolly boats. They’ll know we’re pirates.”

“I guess you’re right. And an English ship would hand us into Nevis immediately.”

“God forbid!”

After a little, she lay down on the canvas and drew her own cape tightly about her. Bristol heard her breathing become regular and knew that she slept. Through the rest of the night he sat with his back to the hummock, lost in thought.

Toward morning, with the bitter chill of the tropics upon them, and with the sea as smooth as the surface of a pearl, the girl rose and changed places with him.

Bristol awoke some time later with the tang of frying boucan sharp in the air and the hot midday sun beating mercilessly upon the sand. The rumble of the surf had increased under the whisper of swelling wind.

Jim, sleeves rolled up, shirt collar open, was kneeling by a smokeless fire, holding a pannikin with one hand and a cutlass in the other. Along the cutlass she had alternately placed boucan and slices of a potatolike root she had dug up with the same sword.

When she saw that he was awake, she called out, “Pipe down for mess, sailor!”

Bristol stumbled down to the surf and splashed cool saltwater on his face. It left it sticky, but it revived him. There is nothing more stifling than sleeping late on a hot morning.

Taking his small dirk from his belt, he removed “kabob” from the cutlass. “If I don’t cut my tongue out, I’ll be all right,” said Bristol, grinning.

He had just finished the breakfast when his eye caught sight of a sail. He jumped up and kicked sand over the fire.

“Ship,” he said, pointing. “We’d better get back into the trees.”

The girl gathered up her jacket and cape and started for the undergrowth. She stopped and looked back. “Bristol! They’ll see the jolly boat!”

Bristol nodded. “But that can’t be helped.”

A scraggly locust tree offered an excellent lookout. Bristol, discarding his white shirt in order to be inconspicuous, swarmed up through the branches. Bracing his sea boots in a junction of limb and trunk, he parted the branches and stared out at the sea.

The vessel was still far away, but Bristol’s practiced eye knew her for a Dutch bark of perhaps four hundred tons. There was something shoddy about the set of her sails, and the hull was far from bright. From that, Bristol took her to be a slave ship.

“A blackbirder,” he called down to Lady Jane. “She’ll pass within a cable length of the place, but she won’t do anything.” He paused, studying the horizon. “Wait!”

Less than half a league astern of the slave ship came a British cruiser, ship-rigged, with every rag set.

“A man-o’-war!” cried Bristol. “A British man-o’-war trying to catch the blackbirder!”

A small gasp came from the dark jungle below and then leather began to scrape on bark. Presently, Lady Jane’s yellow hair appeared below Bristol.

“The slaver’s in for it,” she said.

The distance between the two vessels was rapidly decreasing. Bristol studied the sea before the Dutchman. A white line of waves, like sharp fangs thrust up from the bottom of the sea, marked a series of shoals. It was quite apparent that the slaver would be forced to hold to her course.

A puff of dirty smoke went up from the man-o’-war’s bows. The shot skipped ahead of the Dutchman and landed in a geyser of foam. The detonation reached the island seconds later, like the beat of a bass drum.

It was not that the Englishman objected to the Dutchman’s slave-running. The British wanted the slaves and ship for themselves. According to the English way of thinking, England had the slave monopoly in the New World, and this particular blackbirder was an interloper to be properly squashed and looted.

The Dutchman was not without his defiance. A stern chaser spewed smoke and flame back at the man-o’-war. The shot fell short.

Evidently that was all the British wanted. The ship closed in swiftly and yawed. A broadside thundered, drowning the Englishman in smoke. The Dutchman’s masts erupted out of the deck and fell back, a worthless tangle of rubbish.

It required the Englishman several minutes to swing to his course, and the slaver made good use of the time. Stripped of half her motive power, she came about.

It was obvious that the blackbirder would not allow her cargo to be taken, even if she had to destroy herself to prevent it. With a bone in her teeth, she lunged for the shoals.

The man-o’-war’s bow chasers hammered out as if iron could prevent the suicide. The Dutchman’s bow jumped suddenly, and another mast came down. The ship careened drunkenly, then settled back on her side, with a bad list. Part of her keel was visible.

There was an immediate scurry on the decks. Longboats were lowered into the water. The masts were stepped and the sails hoisted. The crew—some thirty men—shoved off.

Their longboats, having less draft, could easily navigate the shoal. The scudding hulls were battered by spray, but presently all of them emerged unscathed on the far side of the white water, immediately making for the cluster of islands which rose hazily to the west.

The baffled man-o’-war stood on and off for half an hour. It did not want to trust its longboats to the treachery of the shoals. It would be simpler to surprise another Dutchman.

The Englishman disgustedly put about and headed for the Atlantic, in search of easier prey.

Bristol and Lady Jane slid down out of the tree. Bristol put on his shirt.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” said Bristol.

“Maybe.”

“I’m thinking that the Englishman did us a good turn. We can get out there in the jolly boat and take what we need by way of provisions and water. That makes things a little rosier, Lady Jim.”

“All right. Let’s go.”

They thrust the jolly boat out into the surf and pushed it through the towering combers into the quieter sea. Bristol set the sail and, tacking crosswind, they bore down upon the shoal water. Lady Jane stood in the prow giving orders which guided them away from clutching disaster.

The stern of the Dutch vessel was in deep water and they had little difficulty in lashing their painter to a trailing line. Bristol went up, hand over hand, to the deck. He pulled the girl up after him.

Bristol wrinkled his nose. “Whew! Slavers aren’t exactly perfume chests, are they?”

Lady Jane swallowed hard, a resolute look in her eyes. “But what about the slaves? They’re still ’tween decks.”

Bristol stopped and looked at the hatches. He knew the roaring mob which might leap out at him if he removed the covers. He knew he would probably have to unchain half of them. And he fully understood the gagging sights which he would face.

He took his pistols from his belt and primed them. Looking about, he saw two serpentines on this afterdeck. They were loaded and a match still sizzled, scorching a brown line along the planks.

Unfastening the lines which held them there, he turned the one-and-a-half-inch muzzles about until they commanded the first hatch. He placed the match in Lady Jane’s hand.

“We can’t leave them to die down there,” he said. “But it’s dangerous to try to let them out. If they attempt to charge you, fire these guns, and then—”

“What about you?”

“If they get as far as that hatch, you won’t have to worry any more about me.”

Bristol strode down through the wreckage of the rigging. With expert fingers he threw back the boards that covered the opening. The stench that leaped out at him was more than sickening. Along with the stench came a low mutter, like that of animals surprised in a den.

Holding a pistol in each hand, Bristol went down the ladder. His eyes became accustomed to the dim interior.

Lying along the planks, in a space which would not allow even a short man to stand, were the slaves. Their manacles clanked as they turned to look at him. They were no more than red-shot eyes in the darkness. Here and there sprawled the dead, still chained.

Out of three hundred slaves shipped from Africa, less than a hundred and fifty had lived to work in the Indies, and this humanity-crammed hull was ample testimony to the reasons. These blacks had not been unchained since they had sailed from Africa, probably months before.

A suffering voice came out of the darkness, uttering words in a foreign language.

“Anyone here speak English?” said Bristol, without hoping to hear an affirmative answer.

He was surprised when the voice changed. “Yes! Yes! You are English?”

“I’m your friend,” replied Bristol, “and I’m going to unchain you. But you’ve got to tell these men that they must not rush. The first man that moves toward me gets a pistol ball through his skull.”

“Yes, master. I understand.”

Bristol went back up the ladder and nodded to Lady Jane. “I guess it’ll be all right. One of them speaks English.” He went into the after cabins and came forth in a moment with the chain keys.

Back in the hold he went methodically down the sides of the hot, noisy, smelly interior, trying to hold his breath. The slaves climbed to unsteady feet and crawled up the companionway to the welcome sunshine of the deck. They sprawled there, exhausted by even that small amount of exertion.

Lady Jane watched them with pity. She was surprised at their height. Nubians, they probably were, most of them six feet tall or taller. Although you could see the skeletons in their bodies, at one time they must have had powerful muscles.

They were as black as ebony, except where the chains had worn raw circles about their wrists and ankles. The blood from these wounds dropped slowly, staining the dirty planks.

It was unbelievable that a small ship could hold so many men. One by one they dragged themselves into the sunlight, until there were nearly one hundred and fifty of them on deck.

Lady Jane stayed close by the serpentines, remembering her orders. Some of the blacks were less affected than the others. These went in search of the water casks and came back, ladling out the green-scummed fluid to their fellows. Others found flinty sea biscuits and broke the cases, so that many of the hard disks rolled into the scuppers, to be snatched up by the starved men and devoured with as much appreciation as though they had been cake.

Bristol, his face shiny with sweat, finally came up. “The rest of them are dead,” he told Jane.

“The rest of them! Good heavens, Bristol, how many were there?”

“I’m sure I didn’t stay long enough to count.”

A black dressed in filthy white shorts approached Bristol and saluted. “I am the one who speaks English,” he said with meticulous enunciation.

“Why . . . where did you learn that?” exclaimed Jane.

“From the English captives of the Moors. These men, my captain, were all members of an honorable regiment in the service of Badi Abu Daku, King of Sennar in the east of Africa.

“After we had fought for him, and after many of us had died for him, he forgot our pay. And when we reminded him of it, he had us come to his palace. There we were seized, and he sold us to the Arabs who, in turn, sold us to the Dutch. There were once a thousand of us. . . .”

Bristol was tall, but this man was taller by almost a foot. Some of the black’s tremendous vitality still remained. His head was well shaped, his brow was high, and his full lips opened to display even, shining teeth. Aside from a white saber slash which ran from his ear to the point of his jaw, he might have been considered handsome.

“What is your name?” asked Jane.

He bowed a little. “I am called Amara, and my rank was a lieutenant—though many years as a slave on the north coast have almost caused me to forget it.”

“You know something of the sea, Amara?” said Bristol, his eyes narrow.

Amara bowed again. “I served on the galleys of Tunisia. I was captured by Spaniards, and served on their galleys. I was recaptured and sold to the Dutch. It is only because the use of the galley has become limited in this day of sail that I was allowed to leave them at all.

“Aside from a half-dozen Christians, these men made up the entire galley crews.”

Bristol thrust his thumbs into his scarlet sash. He placed his feet wide apart and studied the Nubian’s face. “Look you, Amara. If I release you to one of these islands, you will be taken and sold again, to labor and die under the blazing sun.”

Amara bowed his head, eyes on the planking. “You freed us, Captain sir, it . . . it is not fitting that you free us only to see us die.”

“Right,” said Bristol. “You know ships, Amara. What you do not know I can teach you.”

“But, Captain sir, you have no ship! This bark is even now beginning to sink under us!”

“I’ll have a ship,” replied Bristol with a smile which expressed no humor whatever. “Amara, there’s a longboat there, left by the Dutch. This bark isn’t going to sink for a while. It has a cargo of odds and ends, and it has food and water. Have that longboat manned immediately. God knows, your men should certainly know how to row.”

“Your men,” corrected Amara, beginning to smile.

“Land your men and everything else on that small island there. And watch out for the shoals. Be quick, before a passing ship spots you.”

Amara bowed and turned to the men in the waist. He began to bark orders. Dull, listless eyes turned up to him. Life began to flicker there, life and hope and the will to do. . . .