The winds were very cold, and the sea state threatened all but the most stalwart of sailors and, of course, us pirates. Of all the passages of the world, Cape Horn was the most unforgiving, and it is impassable three to four months a year.
Two great oceans, the Atlantic and Pacific, come together there like the clapping of giant, watery hands, and large ships have been known to capsize and sink in less than five minutes with all hands lost. Even sailors lucky enough to be left on the gelid water’s surface would die of the cold in ten or fifteen minutes, their only consolation being the comatose state they would reach after the first five minutes overboard.
The shores of the land called Tierra del Fuego were littered with the flotsam and jetsam of centuries of shipwrecks, and in between raids on the main, I sent my hearties scavenging. You never knew what useful things might be found among the jumbled remains of those hundreds of lost ships.
We had been hunting for merchants in those treacherous waters, sometimes sailing to the Atlantic side to catch a ship as she tried to get her bearings after passing around the Horn, but mostly we worked the west side of the Cape where ships, having passed the most dangerous trials, would drop their guard and become easy pickings.
We had sailed northwest out of the East China Sea when the Japanese warships made things difficult for pirates off their island shores. We finessed Korea because little of value went into or out of that hermit kingdom. Captain Morgan’s grand plan was for us to sail around the great Pacific Ocean until we reached Cape Horn, where we would never lack for prizes if we could stand the elements.
It was a good thing we had the company of my woman Xiaohong, who now shared my bed in the Captain’s cabin, because she was the scion of a nautical Chinese merchant family and therefore knew how to dress for sailing in the frigid northernmost and southernmost climes. She warned us to sail first to the northern strait between the two great continents of Asia and America, where she advised us to gather the warm skins and garments that we would use whenever we reached Cape Horn.
So we had sailed into the land of ice, sish, slush and snow, and we traded with the Eskimos for huge mounds of their skins and hides. With those raw materials Xiaohong fashioned me, herself, and each of my hearties on the Night Lightning, a warm suit of clothes that made Captain Morgan’s crew jealous. Xiaohong then made cold weather garments for the Captain and all the other pirates of the Sweet Cutlass as well.
We wore those garments as long as we sailed in the Arctic waters, and when we boarded merchantmen who dared to sail those waters, we looked like Eskimos with our cutlasses and grappling hooks. Our captives were freezing and their teeth were chattering. Their vessels hung with ice. They put up no resistance, and only when they walked the plank into the green, icy waters did they realize the meaning of surrender.
Our time in the Arctic was excellent training, and we learned how to deal with chilblains and frostbite. Captain Morgan liked to shake out his long icy hair and his icy mustache and beard, and he would laugh for the fun of the experience and drink his rum. He took aboard his ship an Eskimo woman who had lost her husband on a walrus hunt.
Eida was her name, and she knew how to make meals from the fatty creatures of the region. She and Xiaohong became famous friends, and they shared Xiaohong’s clothing when we sailed through milder climes as we headed south along the western coast of the Americas. When they worked side by side, I could tell the women apart, but at a distance and wearing the same clothing, they appeared to be identical twins. They both worked constantly to make us Captains’ happy, and they were cheerful and sometimes playful with the hearties, who always treated them with respect.
Before we headed south, in addition to fresh water we took aboard barrels of whale meat, walrus meat and ivory, tuns of rendered whale oil, slabs of dried fish, skins of Arctic foxes and hares, three huge chests of old, blue Russian trading beads and twelve kayaks with oars—six kayaks for each ship.
We followed the old Russian trading route along the western shore, and we anchored out of Indian villages to trade, hunt and take on our usual provisions.
Captain Morgan received gifts when he went ashore, including a totem pole that he fastened to the mainmast of the Sweet Cutlass so that its many faces looked him in the eye when he was in the area of the helm.
We did not meet any Russian traders as we passed through those waters, and we were well south of the farthest reach of the Russians when we began to encounter large Spanish merchant vessels, many of which became our prizes.
By then we had shed and stowed our Eskimo clothes and once again paraded around the decks in our pirates’ rags. The warm sun felt better and better as we approached the Equator, and the hearties grew brown and orange on the weather decks.
Xiaohong and Eida wore fewer and fewer garments also, and they lifted the spirits of the hearties by sunning themselves where everyone could see them. Seeing how the Captain reacted when Alia slept with Benjamin, I was pleasantly surprised by his approval of the women’s behavior.
“It does no harm to give the crew a glimpse of our rewards as Captains, Abe—as long as they don’t try to sample our ladies’ charms!” He laughed deep and long when he said this while his eyes noticed how every man on board admired the view.
We knew that we would not see much by way of silver and gold as we transited towards Tierra del Fuego, since the days of the Sixteenth-Century Spanish galleons with their loads of fabled yellow and white metal cargo had largely passed. Regardless of their cargo, any Spanish ship we saw caught our fancy. We did like the tuns of Spanish wines, and liquors that we took from the holds of some of those Spanish merchants.
Wherever the Spanish had sailed, they planted trees, shrubs and crops that could be harvested by later Spanish mariners and others also. Where we found them, we harvested those same Spanish-planted fruits and vegetables and included them in our diet.
Captain Morgan liked to squeeze oranges, lemons, limes and grapefruits into his rum and into red Spanish wines. Sometimes he would eat an orange or a lemon whole with peel, seeds, pith and all because he thought oranges and such were healthy. He encouraged his hearties to eat them, and some ate them with rum.
As we passed the Equator and the midday and early afternoon sun pounded the sea like a hammer does on an anvil, Captain Morgan would lounge under a canvas parasol on his flying bridge and sing his pirate songs and toast his hearties.
I could hear him from my deck as I watched Xiaohong comb out her beautiful black hair with a cunning comb she had brought with her from China. She sang her own songs, and sometimes she taught me what they meant. Her family had been pirates, and her songs told of her family’s exploits in the East China Sea. One haunting song told of a woman who had drowned at the mouth of a great river called the Yangtze where it met the sea. The drowned woman’s ghost haunted the intersection, where it waited for the man who had betrayed her and left her a spinster without hope of a child. When Xiaohong sang that song, the salt tears streamed down her face, but she would not tell me why she was crying.
We passed down the coast and heard tales on shore of other voyagers who had come from far to the west in the time of the native peoples’ ancestors. Since we were not Spanish, we were a novelty, but the people, particularly their priests, were suspicious of us.
One Holy Father asked Captain Morgan in his cups whether he was a pirate. The Captain told him that he was a pirate when the mood struck him to be one, and he asked the Father whether he had any objection to that. The Father unfortunately began to lecture the Captain about changing his ways and renouncing his chosen vocation. Captain Morgan listened intently to the Father, and then he drew out a pouch with a string around it and placed it on the table.
He asked the priest what he would do with twenty gold coins if he had them. The priest answered that he would use the money to build a new chapel to honor the Lord. The Captain then opened his pouch and poured twenty gold coins on the table. He said the priest could take the coins as his offering and build his chapel and give any residuum to the poor.
The priest was now in a quandary because if he took up the gold coins, he was taking stolen money from an acknowledged pirate, but if he did not take up the gold coins, he would not be able to build his chapel or feed the poor.
Captain Morgan laughed heartily and began to recite the Nunc Dimmitis. He then recited the Ave Maria and Pater Noster.
I who was there beside him had never heard the Captain utter as much as a word of Latin before. I had never suspected him of knowing anything about the papist religion or any other religion for that matter.
When Captain Morgan was done with his recitations, he stood up from the table and departed the establishment, leaving the gold coins and his empty pouch lying on the table. I followed him out the door.
When we reached the village square, the Captain burst out laughing and slapped me on the back. He drew a bottle of rum from his pocket and offered me a swig. Then he took a long draught, smacked his lips, and told me that he once had studied to be a priest. He laughed again, and he said the trouble was that he liked women more than he liked the men who did not like women. Then he became meditative and we walked back to our whaleboats by the shore in silence.
I do not doubt the Captain’s word that he once considered being a priest. I thought no less of him for admitting the fact. I marveled that I was still learning things about this complex man despite all the time we had spent together roaming the world as pirates.
The Captain had heard of a place where gold ore was mined. The ore was refined, and the refined gold was shipped to Spain. Spanish merchant ships came to pick up the gold in bars and returned an equal amount in weight of gold coins. Captain Morgan wanted to assess whether it was true that the gold in bars was of equivalent weight to the gold in coins. The only way to do that, he said, was to obtain both and do the comparison.
He hatched a plan by which he would stand off the port where the Spanish merchant anchored. While I went ashore with my hearties to liberate the gold coins that had been traded for the gold bars, Captain Morgan would liberate the gold bars from the Spanish merchant ship. We would meet off the coast a few miles to do the comparison.
When we reached the small port, we both anchored out and I took my whaleboat to the shore to reconnoiter. A fort loomed on a hillside with soldiers patrolling its ramparts. Soldiers guarded a store house at the center of the village square. The problem with the Captain’s plan was clear to me; it would be impossible to steal the gold coins on shore without undue risk to my hearties.
I decided to look into matters further, and I discovered from the village prostitute that the soldiers had not been paid in many months. They were expecting to be paid their arrears when the merchantman came the next day with the coins that were to be used for payment. The prostitute said that many soldiers owed her in arrears for her services, so I gave her two gold coins and told her that I would give her two more gold coins if she told me when and how the gold bars that would be traded for the coins would arrive.
She laughed heartily and told me that everyone in the village and the fort knew that the gold bars would come by carriage two hours before dawn on the road from the refinery. She said that many soldiers guarded the refinery and the store house, but only two guarded the gold bar shipment itself.
I gave her the additional two gold coins, departed the village and went back to my ship at anchor. I signaled to the Sweet Cutlass that I wanted a gam with Captain Morgan. At the gam, I explained the situation and outlined a revision to our plan.
That evening I went ashore in my whaleboat with five of my fiercest hearties with spades, and we walked out the road to the refinery. At a likely spot, just after a slight bend in the road with foliage that could hide us, we stopped to dig a wide, steep rut in the road. We rolled five large rocks to block the passage beyond that. We lit some hemp and brought out bottles of rum that we had brought to pass the time and waited. At this same time, Captain Morgan weighed anchor and sailed out in darkness to greet the Spanish merchantman that was to bring the gold coins to exchange for the gold bars from the refinery.
Three hours before dawn, I heard the report of cannon out over the main, and I suspected that the Spanish merchant had been cheerily greeted by the Sweet Cutlass.
When the carriage with the gold bars came an hour later, it fell into the rut the hearties had dug and broke its front wheels while the horses pulling the carriage reared in confusion.
My hearties charged the two soldiers that were guarding the treasure. The whole business was done in two minutes. We harvested the gold bars and used the untethered horses to bear them to the landing, where we loaded the bars into the whale boat and departed just before dawn. As we had planned, the Night Lightning had weighed anchor and was waiting for our arrival to depart the anchorage.
Dawn came and no ships were visible in the anchorage. Three miles offshore, the Night Lightning and the Sweet Cutlass made a rendezvous and a gam.
Captain Morgan was indignant at the gam. After carefully weighing the gold coins and gold bars, we discovered that the gold bars outweighed the gold coins by three to one. The exchange, we thought, had been utter piracy. Spain was making two hundred percent on its investment!
Our piracy was at least honest labor that required nothing from anyone except, of course, the gold. The Captain and I drank rum while we inveighed against the greed and deceit of the world powers, of which Spain was only one. Then the Captain began singing his pirate songs, and I knew it was time to return to our ships and unfurl our sails.
To be fair, we split the coins and bars down the middle, though I had argued that perhaps I should keep the bars and he the gold. He may have seemed drunk beyond reason, but Captain Morgan spotted the problem with that deal immediately and fell into a dark humor. As he rowed off with his share, the Captain sang a song that ran, “Pirates be good to fellow pirates, else ‘Avast!’”
So we sailed south, and the weather became increasingly cold until we sighted a village that may have been the farthest habitation to the south before Tierra del Fuego. By then we were all wearing our Eskimo clothes again, and we were anxious to see how bountiful our new hunting grounds would be.
When we had anchored and gone ashore, we found the village was long deserted. We noted that livestock pens were still in good repair, and the buildings were in need of only minor alterations to be livable. We decided that the village was as good a habitation for pirates as we could hope for, so we brought the hearties ashore to fix things up. We named our village Hearties Village, and in no time it was shipshape.
Naturally, the best two dwellings in the village were reserved for Captain Morgan and me, and our two women were delighted to have arrived at a place on land that they could call their own. Xiaohong and Eida made homes out of their two houses, planting trees, bushes and flowering plants and setting up kitchens.
Dwellings were also identified and set aside for the First, Second and Third Mates from each ship, but those mates and their hearties preferred to remain at sea and live on board their ships rather than become comfortable ashore as landlubbers. Instead of occupying the dwellings, they made one of them into a tavern, and we provisioned it with casks of rum from floor to ceiling along one wall and casks of wine likewise along the opposite wall.
Across from the tavern’s entryway was a wall that the hearties knocked down to form a large open hearth where a roaring fire raged all night long. Tables and chairs made the place a kind of mead hall for pirates, and we Captains as well as the crew drank and held forth there when we were ashore. Since the other dwellings were empty, we prudently made them storehouses for our pelf, and such was our success at piracy that it was not long before those storehouses were full to capacity. We eventually had to build new storehouses to accommodate our growing wealth.
Hearties Village was perfectly situated for piracy because the prevailing winds carried us right down to our prey running in both directions around Tierra del Fuego. After first transiting around Cape Horn, we became accustomed to the rip tides, currents and winds where the oceans collided. We also learned how we had to maneuver to our advantage so that we could plunder the merchants that we wanted and avoid the warships that would certainly come in due course.
I sailed down once to examine the ice continent that lay far to the south of the Cape, but I saw no advantage in spending time there. Huge flocks of penguins frolicked. They might serve as food if we ever had need of them. Sailing close to the eastern shore of the extreme south of the Americas for a half day’s voyage, I saw no advantage for planting a village such as Hearties Village on the western side. We had done well with our choice of habitation, I thought at the time. If only we had animals to fill our empty pens, we would have lived in paradise.
We began a routine that worked like a properly wound clock. On average, each of our ships seized, plundered and sunk three or four merchants each week. Since we had created additional storehouse space on land, we offloaded our excess valuables and stores at the end of each week, regaled our hearties with rum in our warm tavern and set out again at the beginning of the new week to continue our work off the Cape. We took Spanish, Dutch, German, Italian, Portuguese, French, English and American ships.
I raised flag poles around the village to sport the colors of the nations whose ships we had captured and sunk. It was our game to find a prize with a flag we had not taken, but we soon found that most of our booty came from only a few nations’ merchantmen.
The Asian trade and the Spanish colonial trade were the two main commercial enterprises that made the water off Cape Horn an important choke point in world commerce. Nations depended on the trade that crossed between the Atlantic and Pacific around Cape Horn.
Therefore, Captain Morgan estimated that it would take six to nine months before the big maritime trading interests would become wise to our piracy. He said that factors would report ships we had sunk as missing, and those who insured the ships’ passages would have to pay for their lost cargos. In due course insurance rates would rise.
Consequently, important, moneyed people would start wondering why so many ships rounding Cape Horn were disappearing all of a sudden. Those people would want answers, and they had the power to influence governments. Warships would be sent to assess the threat of piracy.
Then, the Captain said, our game would have to change. I understood what the Captain said, but I could not hold his ideas with the same burning sense of conviction that he did. He told me that it would be unwise to let Xiaohong and Eida know about the transitory nature of our stay in Hearties Village. When retribution came, we would either have to fight and die in defense of what we had built or pack and flee beforehand and never look back.
I knew how the women felt about settling down for good. The Captain’s decision made sense, but I knew they would be disappointed. All things considered, though, I do not like anyone’s getting rooted in one place for long. Stability makes both men and women weak and vulnerable. It is better for us to move frequently and to struggle rather than lose our souls in complacency.
I have never believed in panic because I have seen what that does to men. It makes them craven cowards and breaks their will to survive. I did see the wisdom in porting some of our pelf from Hearties Village to a new location. So I decided to look again for a storehouse venue on the eastern side of the coast leading to Cape Horn.
I told Captain Morgan I would do a scouting mission for a week while he continued to plunder ships around the Cape. Accordingly, the Night Lightning proceeded north and east along the track I had already taken, but this time I was alert to nuances in the landscape that would permit us to hide our treasure and valuables at least temporarily. I sighted a river’s mouth emptying into the Atlantic and figured that fresh water could be had there, so I anchored out and went ashore with a few men to scout the areas to the north and south of the river.
The general lie of the land was perfect for burying pirate treasure. I had an eerie feeling that other pirates had reconnoitered this place before, and someone had perhaps buried treasure here. I looked for likely landmarks and found an ancient tree. With two of my hearties I circled the area around that tree in an expanding spiral, looking for loose ground or the slight declivity that might mean a former burial. We found such a place thirty paces to the north of that tree, and I asked the hearties to lend a hand and dig. Six feet below the surface they hit solid wood, and they worked fast to uncover a skeleton over a chest. Unearthed, the chest revealed gold and silver coins, a pirate’s hoard for certain. My hearties were glad to carry this unlooked-for treasure to our whaleboat and then to the Night Lightning.
Meanwhile I continued to look for other signs of pirate hoarding, and I found the hearties that had searched to the south of the river. They had found a stone with a crude marker near it in the form of an arrow. So we followed the direction of the marker and found a mild depression, which I ordered the hearties to investigate by digging a hole three feet wide and as deep as they could delve. The hearties quickly dug through scrabble and finally struck a skull with a chest below it. They unearthed the chest and saw the gold and silver treasure that was within it. They took it to the shore, and when the whaleboat returned, the coxswain rowed us all and the found treasure back to the Night Lightning. We had thus in a single landing uncovered two stores of pirate treasure worth a king’s ransom.
I had to ask myself how it was that this treasure had become interred in this godforsaken place. The treasure must be the result of other continuous pirate ventures in the area surrounding Cape Horn. I began to think why the treasures had come to be buried where they were found, and I had a wild surmise. What if, I thought, pirates had inhabited Hearties Village just as we had, and they had seen the future clearly and decided to hide their treasure on the opposite side of the Cape? They must have done exactly what I did. Coming to the river, they hid their treasure to the north and the south in the usual pirates’ way. They evidently had never returned to retrieve their wealth. But why? The only answer I could devise was that they were all killed. If they had found a congenial safe harbor in the village that we now called Hearties Village, they had been systematically exterminated or forced to flee without their treasure. It was more likely, I thought, that they had been exterminated. I now feared for Hearties Village, and as I set sail to return there, I began to devise a plan for our next steps. It would have been madness to continue as we had done for the last few months.
While I was finding pirates’ hoards, Captain Morgan had experienced the pinnacle of piratical success in his ventures against rich merchants rounding Cape Horn. He had taken five ships in my absence, and he was feeling invincible when we had our gam outside the anchorage for Hearties Village.
“Captain, congratulations on your conquests since we parted last. While you were taking treasures from merchants, I was discovering pelf buried by pirates long since gone, a tremendous hoard of gold, silver and jewels, now ours.” I told him over a bottle of rum what I had found on shore on the other side of the Cape. I explained what I had reasoned about why the gold and silver had been hidden and why the former villagers had disappeared. At first I did not think the Captain had heard me because he began to sing his usual pirate songs and took long draughts of the bottle of rum.
But he had moments of absolute clarity, and his eyes pierced me to the soul when he said, “I know that pirates preceded us. I know who they were and why they will never be returning.”
Captain Morgan then launched into a horrific story of pirates who became too soft because they had discovered a good thing.
“They had taken women and done all the things that a landlubber does to guarantee the futurity of his women and children. They were discovered by troops of one of the nations whose ships they had plundered. In this case it was the English. The pirates were wiped out in a concerted attack. All their ships were sunk, and the English marched ashore to kill everyone: man, woman and child in their pirate village. If I stretch my brain, I could tell you which warships and which Captains had been involved because only a few competent Captains know how to eradicate entire pirate communities. It doesn‘t matter what was done in the past. For now the same is about to happen, and we have to make a plan.”
“Captain, I formulated a plan while I returned from gathering the treasure on the other side of the Cape. The treasure I found dwarfs all we have amassed in the time since we arrived in this region.” I told him my plan in detail.
The Captain seemed to like my plan, but he said, “Xiaohong and Eida will not like it, not one bit.”
I now took a long draught of the rum and told Captain Morgan, “It’s only a matter of a little time before we have to execute my plan.”
“I agree, but I have a few modifications for our plan.”
I listened with increasing interest because he seemed to have thought everything through beforehand. I was convinced when we had finished our gam that we had to act at once. We anchored our ships, and I went directly to Xiaohong and told her the situation.
“In short, we have to pack and depart right away. The alternative is slaughter. We would not stand a chance.”
Xiaohong was not surprised. “My people always had to keep on the move. They never rested because they knew that their pursuers would never relent. So I’m ready to leave everything that we’ve built tomorrow.”
I knew then that I loved her, and I told her, “Prepare and be ready to leave when the decision is made. In the meantime, gather what you treasure to take with her.”
With tears welling up in her eyes, she hugged me close. “What I treasure most is you.”
I met Captain Morgan in the tavern, and he told me that Eida had told him much the same thing that Xiaohong had told me. I suggested that we execute our plan as soon as possible. He was, as always, a step ahead of me. He had already prepared his hearties to transport half the treasure and valuables that we had amassed to the Sweet Cutlass, and he advised me to have my hearties transport the other half of our pelf to the Night Lightning. He said that we should leave the village exactly as we had first found it, so everything we had done had to be undone.
All this took another two weeks of hard labor involving the crews of both our pirate ships. Finally, the village was empty and as void of evidence of recent habitation as when we first came upon it, with our women living again aboard the ships and the village looking as deserted as it had been when we had arrived.
The one exception was the flags of many nations that hung from poles at the village’s center and played in the winds. Liking what we saw, we weighed anchor and made headway as the sun rose that final day off Hearties Village. We were not leaving under the threat of immediate attack; instead, we were leaving on our terms, with our treasure and all our hearties alive and our women content to make the shift to other quarters.
As we rounded Cape Horn with our false Spanish colors flying, we passed a group of American warships that may have been sent to discover our whereabouts and destroy us, but we would never know the truth of that since we had already vanished from our haunts.
I was too wise to think that we had escaped just in the nick of time or any such rot. We had made a business decision that required our relocating. We had not waited to be evicted or to be threatened with extinction. Rather, we had taken what we had earned and departed. We were riding heavy in the water because we had loaded all our treasures, but we were still sea worthy.
We continued within visual range of the shore up the Americas, stopping to take on provisions and trade. Since we saw increasing signs of genuine Spanish vessels, we shifted to the false flags of the Netherlands. Neither off Portuguese Brazil, nor off Spanish Argentina, were we challenged as we sped north with full sails.
We reached the Caribbean Sea before we stopped worrying about pursuers. We were now too far away from Tierra del Fuego to be considered credible perpetrators of what had happened there. No one would suspect that the empty village had been used by us pirates. No one would check on the opposite side of the landmass to find the exhumed remains of the burial of treasure that had been removed.
Captain Morgan reasoned that Davy Jones himself would have to be subpoenaed to testify against us in a court of law, but Davy did not care who had sent vessels his way. He reveled in the mayhem on the high seas, as everything on the sea finally ended in his domain on the sea bottom below it, and Davy Jones’ locker attested to his gains and the mariners’ losses.
Captain Morgan did not believe in looking backwards. He was now again in prime hunting grounds that he knew—the Caribbean. He had been around the world again searching for better, but he had not found it.
I had to agree that we had seen the world together. Partly because of the Captain’s former experience, partly because of our combined ingenuity and partly because of luck, we had survived our ordeal and returned to tell our tales.
The Captain’s songs reflected what he had seen this time around. He sang of an Eskimo lady whose husband had not returned, but she had found a pirate who loved her better than her former mate. He sang of a fool who fell in love with a Chinese woman who knew he was a fool and would betray him. He sang lots of new songs that I’m sure he composed on his own. After all, he was a man of many talents, a genius poet, a genius pirate and a natural drunken rogue.
We buried treasure all around the Caribbean in the pirate way. Eida may have marked one such hoard, because she disappeared on the day Captain Morgan set out in his whaleboat to hide a large part of his treasure in Dominica. Xiaohong may have marked another because she disappeared the day I set out to bury a hoard of gold bars and coins in Haiti. That was what the hearties thought, and we did not contradict them.
As I look back over our escapades since we left the Andamans, I saw a broad continuity of our actions. Pirates are romantics, and our treasures are extensions of ourselves. I laugh when I think of leaving all those flags of all those nations at our village near Tierra del Fuego. If the flags survived, they would have tantalized the warriors who pursued us. What would they have learned from those flags? Perhaps they would have learned that pirates have a sense of humor. Perhaps they would have learned that pirates know when to fish and when to cut bait. Most likely, though, they would have learned nothing. In their single-minded pursuit of an unknowable enemy, they would have missed the point entirely. They would have arrived where we had enjoyed a few months of perfect piracy only to find that their prey had fled they knew not whither.
At a tavern in San Juan, Captain Morgan and I decided we would go our separate ways.
“I’ve taught you what you need to know to survive. I’ve circumnavigated the world with you, and we have nothing to teach each other anymore.” His tone was earnest and resigned.
“Captain, it has been an honor and privilege working with you. I sincerely doubt I’ve learned all you can teach me. I must respect your wishes. Yet one day you may decide to go pirate again. On that day, think of me. We’ll hoist the Jolly Roger together.” I was disappointed and sincerely thought I had only learned a fraction of what this masterful pirate had to teach.
We drank rum, and he sang pirate songs. He stood on the table and brandished his sword. He railed at the host, and he called for the ladies to parade before him naked. Then he collapsed, and I asked two hearties to help me carry him to his whaleboat, where his coxswain was waiting to take him to the Sweet Cutlass.
What happened to Captain Morgan from that time forward, I do not know. I heard rumors of his having had many adventures in the Seven Seas. I heard that he went to Davy Jones and bested him for all his treasure. I heard that he had retired from the trade and gone to a place he had prepared for himself in Dominica, where he now lived with Eida, who was alive and well and entertaining whoever her now-husband wanted to bring home.
I thought that was the least likely of the possible outcomes, but it had the ring of truth. By my lights, at least, it had that tone, because my Xiaohong and I live well in Haiti in a spacious house with a view of the harbor.
She accommodated quickly and well to the new environment, and she loved the vegetation that luxuriates without her tending or care. She laughed when I told her I was going to give up being a pirate, and when I am sad she goads me by insinuating that I will fly the Jolly Roger again one day.
We have five children, who are the light of my life. I know where untold treasures hide around the world, and I could sail tomorrow to dig up whatever my family needs. I have a good life, and the past is forgotten because by now all my hearties have gone to Davy Jones or been hanged by landlubbers who have no earthly idea what piracy really means.
I compiled all of Captain Morgan’s songs that I remember, and I want to have them properly published someday. I will not own them because he composed and sung them, but the pirate songs were not as much his property as they were the product of the rum, his fertile brain and the people and situations that they evoked.
I thought of Captain Morgan’s women, and I wondered that all those various females could live with a pirate with such wildly varying moods. I thought of his numberless women on shore and how they served as his intelligencers and seers.
I thought of the man’s vision and insight into human beings. He was a leader among outlaws, and his presence evoked allegiance. He won mine, surely. I felt the attraction of his personality, and it changed my life entirely. He was my mentor, my teacher, my brother and my friend. I would miss him if his memory were not always with me somehow. I sometimes fancy he will pop up in a whaleboat singing his songs with a bottle of rum at the ready and invite me down to talk of some new scheme for piracy.
The Sweet Cutlass, I am told, was sunk by a British warship that took out her mainmast and then volleyed a broadside at her waterline before scattering shot across all her decks, killing all aboard. Captain Morgan had long departed before that sinking ended a legacy. The Night Lightning, I am also told, was sunk by an American warship that boarded her, killed all the hearties aboard at the time and stole all her gold before scuttling her.
Both pirate vessels suffered ignobly at the end, but then a ship is only to be known by the spirit of the men who sail her. When Captain Morgan and I departed, those ships changed utterly. We changed too.
Now I am the entity I hated most when I was a pirate sailing the main, a landlubber. Xiaohong and the children like the change, but I know that if we had to set sail again, my wife would sail with me as she always has done in the past. We would set sail together without looking back and have whatever treasure we pleased from any corner of the world.