Port Royal, Kingstown Bay, Spring 1702
It was dusk and the inn’s lamps glowed yellow in the heated Tropick air as I padded up the alleyway, come to make a trade, to sell a plain cargo honestly obtained. Here in Jamaicka the merchants gathered, lobsters in their caves, clustered together in Sally Cox’s Tavern. A handsome bargaining meant auspicious prospects, and if only I could put gold in my seamen’s pockets, their loyalty would be undivided and my captaincy assured.
Pausing, I glanced back down the sloping, crooked street towards the water’s edge a few hundred paces off, trying to pick out my bark, the graceful Cornelius. But amongst the lattice of rigs and yards and sprits of the many anchored vessels, their tracery still faintly mirrored in the darkening glassy surface, she was one amongst too many. Her swooping sheerline and three tall masts were lost in a forest of spars, for in Kingstown Roads lay a hundred vessels or more engaged in all the English and Dutch business of the Caribbee Sea.
I pursed my lips. The dark hours favoured all the base and wretched traffick of Port Royal, the painted ladies and sharpeyed gamblers, the merchants and slave-buyers and molasses dealers, the ruffians, the sot-wenches, the crimps, and the taphousemen. And each night, what was meat and drink to these thieves landed succulently on to their waiting plates: the seamen ordinary and the Navy’s impressed men alike, the renegades and buccaneers, the ships’ officers and the lawful traders, their pockets full of money and heads full of drink. What sort of plain dealing was to be found here? Had I brought the Cornelius after all to the right place?
In the vaporous heat of the Tropick night, I mopped my brow with a linen cloth, girded up my belt and checked my weapons, a brace of charged pistols and a cutlass. With a sudden burst of noise and laughter, a brawl of ruffians and their women spilled from the tavern, jostling a fellow attempting to pass inside, playfully making as if to wrest from under his arm the long paper roll he carried. Angrily pushing them away, he turned instead for a nearby doorway and began to pin up posters. The brawlers soon drifted off laughing. Putting aside all misgivings, I took my chance and strode directly into Sally Cox’s alehouse.
The sweat and noise were enveloping, the air gaggingly hot and heady, like the inside of a small-beer cask left in the sun. I shouldered my way through the press of men and women drinkers until I came to a hatch where ale was sold. A mug was filled and I passed a coin across in return. Noticing a group of sombre-faced men at a table, I made my way over. Unhatted and unwigged though these fellows were, nevertheless their cotton and silk shirts, watch-chains and felt weskits betrayed them as prosperous traders. They sucked their clays, sending up a fug, and smacked at their ale-mugs, nodding when I indicated my wish to join them. As I took up a place on the bench, a hand was laid heavily on my arm.
‘Ship’s captain?’ a voice said, and I saw a deep-lined, pinched face, bristled and pock-scarred, with its single eye fixed on me. In the matching socket where its pair should be was a blank of skin marked by a two-inch red weal crossed with the crude stitchmarks of a sailmaker’s whalebone needle.
‘Aye, sir. I am a master who wishes to announce himself and his bark.’
He thrust his face close. ‘To trade?’
‘Indeed. My ship’s name is — ’
‘What cargo? From Africka? Blackamoors — good and strong ’uns? Maybe a piece of fresh black veal-calf, tender and youthful, as Smiley likes ’em.’ He cackled to his friends. ‘Bring Smiley Bankes tender flesh and he’ll suck it like sweet sugar-cane. Give him a dark maiden-girl for his worn old bone, master, and his friendship’s yours.’
Bankes’ companion merchants grinned in concert, presenting an array of crooked gapes. One was red-faced with mirth at what he took for Smiley’s wit, gasping and hacking and banging the table until the tears sprang from his eyes, of which he still had two, one more than he owned front teeth.
‘Sirs,’ I began with a forced smile, as leery of these fellows as a seaman in a cole-mine, ‘my bark’s no slaver. And far from touching at the Africk coast, we hauled here from Carolina.’
‘From Carolina, eh?’ said Bankes, sitting back. ‘What commerce did you make there?’
He had betrayed an interest of sorts, so I pressed onwards. ‘I must tell you we made a good bargain with the native tribes of that country, and I have no doubt you shall find our trade rewarding.’
I reached into my jacket pocket for Abigail’s manifest. Mister Jeffreys’ daughter had enscribed it with all her usual care and faith, working under a candle-lamp at the table in the Cornelius’s Great Cabin, now and then glancing up to smile my way. Merchant Seth Jeffreys himself had begged to accompany me ashore, but though his knowledge of commerce might be wide I reckoned him untrustworthy in bargaining and he remained aboard, sulking.
‘Allow me to describe what we offer,’ I said, and read off the list. ‘A hundred dozen skins for tanning, the finest of deer and fox and suchlike, just the variety to fetch fine prices in Amsterdam for hats and mitts and coats. Also forty hundredweight of horn for tool-making, and two hundred quarters of hoof for boiling into glues. We hold a quantity of handsome American timber such as pine-wood and log-wood in lengths for planking and studding, amounting to twelve tuns.’
I glanced up, only to be met by silent stares. Even to me, such merchandise began to sound out of place.
‘As you are aware,’ I said, clearing my throat, ‘demand for timber and tools is much enhanced by the Navy’s station here.’
The merchants gave no sign, encouraging or otherwise, so I read on.
‘Well now, in small stows and caskets, we offer a variety of scarce herbs and potions for ailments such as the fevers and the pox. Balms to ease the condition of bursted belly, a medicine for contradicting black gum, and many other valuable Physicks unknown to English apotheckaries.’ I laid the list on the table. ‘If you study this manifest, sirs, we may quickly agree a price, for like your goodselves I have no time to waste on idle talk.’
I took up my ale and swallowed half of it, confident at least of having laid out our wares in a direct and merchanting a manner. Wiping my mouth, I set down the mug and looked expectantly at my commercial counterparts, from one to the other and back again. Their faces were as blank as statues of stone. Their lips were drawn — set tight, rather. It began to enter my mind that they were not such canny merchants after all, for they seemed slow.
Smiley Bankes’ one eye flickered, and the lid twitched and trembled as if he were struggling within himself. His shoulders began to heave. At last, his mouth opened, the awful gape reappeared and a harsh, rasping noise like a mule bewailing its burden emanated from the cavern. The head went back, the horrible eye screwed itself shut, and he roared and roared. His mates joined in, guffawing, casting aside their clays, banging their chests, spitting yellow juice on the straw-strewn floor, thumping the table-top and drumming their feet. The laughter all but silenced the whole tavern.
‘What the Devil’s the matter?’ I said, casting around in annoyance.
Their mirth abated but the company retained their flushed faces and smirks. Bankes put a paw up and knuckled his weeping eye, then turned his peculiar gaze on me.
‘Master, what you bring to trade’ — he jabbed a bent finger at the Bill of Lading on the table — ‘is an assortment of goods valued by us less than straw. If the Good Lord grants you a next time,’ he went on, ‘load your bark with salt-cod or with whale oil, so we can fill our bellies and light our lamps. Better still, bring strong black men without no red-spot or pox on them. Or silver and gold and jewels taken from the Dagoes, or muskets and powder lifted off the Frenchies.’
‘Sir, my offer represents a trade in necessary plain goods, fairly obtained,’ I protested. ‘A bounty of materials for colonists and Naval authorities alike.’
‘Not at Port Royal,’ said Bankes. ‘This is the last place on God’s globe to make a trade of such stuff. We want flesh and muscle and gold and arms. You’ll get no price for this.’
Suddenly their game unfolded in front of me. Merchants commonly drive down a price by demeaning what was on offer, and it was fair play in commerce, as the weasel-faced sometime-merchant Mister Jeffreys liked to say. Sitting back in my chair, I levelled my gaze with Bankes’ lopsided countenance.
‘Let me invite you to name the value you would put on these goods,’ I said, and made ready to bargain lower than I had intended.
‘I make no offer,’ he said, ‘and shall not bargain.’
‘Indeed?’ I said, unsmiling, and turned to his companions. ‘Let us see who else is prepared to strike a deal. Sirs?’
Every man seated round the table folded his arms, or shook his head, or lifted his mug to drink. No one made an offer.
‘In that case,’ I said, with a shrug, ‘this table misses the chance. I shall be obliged to make my way to other merchants.’
‘Save yourself the voyage, master. These fellows here are all the merchants you shall find in Port Royal.’
There was unmistakable threat in Bankes’ tone. At once, my skin felt hot. The shirt under my confining jacket had crept into the folds of my armpits, clinging damply. No doubt of it, this was a thieves’ den and best done with altogether.
‘If that is so, sir,’ I said, half rising, ‘I bid you a goodnight till the pleasure of our meeting another day.’
Smiley Bankes laid his hand across my arm with a grip like an octopus. ‘You strike me as no merchant, sir,’ he said, ‘more the master of a bad bargain. This stuff you bring is little more than heathen waste — vile poisons and turd-ridden skins and stinking horn. It insults the Guild of Merchants of Port Royal.’
‘Very well,’ I retorted, making as if to go. ‘You leave me no choice but to approach the port authorities who direct refitting and supply in the Navy’s yards.’
‘O, you shan’t be approaching them, my friend, for no one goes aside of us, not in Port Royal.’ Smiley’s hold on my arm relaxed. He picked up the manifest and held it between finger and thumb. ‘We control all the trade, our little guild here.’
With that, he tore Abigail’s list in two from top to bottom. His single eye held me as he crumpled the pieces and let them fall to the filthy floor. Dumbly, I watched them flutter downward. He had gone too far.
‘Why, dammit, sir,’ I said, standing away. ‘Take your common insults and blasted grins and go to the Devil.’
‘Blast me not, master, nor send me to Hades.’
Smiley Bankes was strangely still when he spoke. It was then I noticed the pistol in his hand, pointing at my belly. His body remained motionless and the loathsome gaze steady as his crooked thumb prised back the lock. The throng around us moved away. The hubbub of the tavern hushed to nothing.
I spread my hands wide. ‘I came to treat with fair and honest men.’
‘The way I sees it, young captain,’ said Smiley, ‘a fellow who insults the Merchant Bankes, and gives threat to the livelihood of straight-dealing traders, has the same number of chances to depart here alive as I have eyes to see with. Take his weapons.’
Smiley’s head jerked and on the instant powerful arms pinned my wrists. In seconds, a couple of fellows had stripped me of my pistols and cutlass and searched every pocket and fold of my dress. Pitched out on the table were a few paltry items, amongst them some coins and my seaman’s knife.
‘Nothing more?’ said Bankes mockingly. He fingered the weapons, assessing their value, then scooped up the coins and my knife and pocketed them. ‘Master, you must be the only unarmed soul in Kingstown Bay, and all of Sally Cox’s Tavern knows it. You shall have to be fleet of foot.’
He had as good as set the mob upon me.
Dry mouthed, I took my chance without delay. The drinkers parted, smirking and nudging each other as I crossed towards the door. Once outside, I found the street deserted, at least as far as the pools of light from the tavern windows showed. Silently I thanked the stars for a chance to escape, reckoning it best to live to trade another day. Hardly had I taken a step towards the alleyway than a rough voice croaked close by, at once whining and full of menace.
‘Over here, jack-tar.’
A hand reached out and grabbed my weskit, pulling me off balance and into a doorway. Thinking myself attacked, I brought up my fist to strike but just then a reek of cheap powder mingling with sweat reached my nostrils.
‘Save your ardour for my bed, won’t you,’ the woman spat. Her eyes rolled slug-like from the depths of an over-painted face and her breath stank.
‘I’ve no desire for your second-hand pleasures,’ I answered, lowering my raised hand, and turned to go. My eye caught the flash of white posters pinned to the door behind the raddled harlot. Startled, I shoved her aside, and none too courteously. The sheets were askew, one partly obscuring another, but the freshest one on top held me. Blaring from it in bold lettering stood out a ship’s name. In crude print, letters two inches high, the script proclaimed:
WANTED
Renegade privateer: the CORNELIUS, of Vlissingen.
Master: believed to be MATTHEW LOFTUS, wanted for PIRACY and the FOUL MURDER of His Majesty’s Loyal Servant, the FIRST LIEUTENANT of the SUCCESS, a WARSHIP commissioned into the King’s NAVY.
Wanted for the same deed, and the capital crime of DESERTION: ADAM PYNE, MIDSHIPMAN, the SUCCESS, said to be aboard the CORNELIUS.
REWARD: Two Hundred GUINEAS for the WHEREABOUTS of said vessel leading to her CAPTURE. Thirty GUINEAS for the MASTER, and Ten GUINEAS for the said ADAM PYNE, brought to the ADMIRALTY COURTS of jamaicka or the Bahama Isles in any condition, LIVING or DEAD.
‘Somethin’ there catch your fancy better than me, queer boy?’ sneered the whore, ducking back into the tavern.
I stared stupidly at the poster. It condemned both me and my young Navigator, Adam Pyne, to be hunted like animals. In black and white, the poster advertised us as fair game for any opportunist bounty hunter — pirates, privateers and the Navy alike, on the high seas or in harbour. For two hundred golden guineas, any spy or the least of common sailors might deliver us, any private bark or the greatest of warships might launch themselves without warning in attack against the Cornelius. Two hundred guineas for the ship, ten for Adam, thirty for me — the sums tolled in my head like an execution bell.
I ripped the poster from the door and ran off down the alleyway. After fifty paces I paused, panting, to look back down the lane. Nothing moved. A clamour of coarse shouts drifted down to me from the tavern’s glowing doorway, but no one followed.
How close I had come to announcing in that tavern for all to hear my own and my vessel’s name! Thank the Lord that Smiley Bankes had cut me off. I darted anxious glances about the alley, fearing bounty seekers, believing guilt to be inked on my features as bold as the print on the poster. Pacing on, I kept repeating over and again, but we are innocent, dammit, innocent.
As the first shock of spying the poster subsided, it was replaced by outrage. How could we be so falsely accused? My men of the Cornelius were the very fellows who had fought to save her from the traitorous ship-stealers amongst her crew. Far from taking the privateer for our own ends, we had agreed, on the death of her captain, to try for honest trade, to repay the bark’s Amsterdam owners and redeem ourselves of any illegality. And after this night, when my trading bid had led only to ridicule and loss, it was not just frightening but galling in the extreme to find myself charged with such crimes.
And what of Adam — poor Adam Pyne, former midshipman in His Majesty’s Navy? He had likewise resisted a mutiny aboard his own vessel, yet in the heat of battle, and through no fault of his own, had ended up willy nilly on our privateer. He had since proved himself a most trustworthy Navigator, yet the Navy did not want him back for his skills and loyal service. No, they wanted only his neck, stretched and broken from the gibbet, to serve as an example to others. Blast and dam’ them, I cursed out loud. As long as I am captain, they shall not catch us.
The alleyway of ramshackle dwellings crowded dose and I watched for footpads at every hidden corner. To either side, glints of yellow light shone through gaps in the loose-boarded huts, and I imagined muttered plottings lit by hissing whale-oil lamps and fuelled by sugar-rum. The town to which I had brought the Cornelius only that morning was no more than a nest of rough buildings in the crook of the sand spit called the Palisadoes fringing the seaward side of Kingstown Bay. It was a dismal place of perhaps four or five hundred houses in all, their dereliction plain even in the gloom. Port Royal had burned itself to cinders not five years before, but the purge was short-lived and the town had been rebuilt, stinks and drains and crevices and all, to satisfy the greed and convenience of men. For this natural anchorage was the securest in the Caribbee Sea and, with the island in English hands and the King’s Navy vigilant in patrolling its shores, it was a true port of refuge. Whatever else Port Royal boasted, for vessels to jostle so for swinging room in its roads, at least the trade ought to have been worth the while. The trade! How wrong I had been — or rather how mistaken Seth Jeffreys in his estimations. Whatever Abigail said, her father’s designs would never again sway my mind.
Now, the Navy had set its net and, all unwitting, I had brought us into the seat of its power and justice. I had delivered the entire company of the Cornelius — not just the seamen, but Abigail and Adam too — into the very heart of danger. And what of me? With every step, I felt as if I approached closer to the scaffold.
The alleyway ended and the open strand stretched ahead. Drawn up in ranks on the beach were a dozen boats, a small portion of the many wherries, cutters and gigs that ran about ferrying officers and traders and masters and mates and supercargoes on their ships’ business. Standing by their boats, oars raised, the watchmen followed my passing with wary looks until out of the darkness appeared my own cutter. Two figures waited by it, the Dutch boy Gaspar Rittel and his sea-daddy Eli Savary, my second mate of steerboard watch, better than sixty but still as nimble aloft as a lad.
‘Quickly, Gaspar — my calf-boots,’ I said, raising one foot.
When the boy knelt and pulled off my shore-going footwear, my bare feet touched the warm cloying sand, soft and treacherous. At the strandline was a rime of blackened scum like the weed growing at a bark’s waterline, while the air reeked of tar and oil and pump-waste discharged from the anchored fleets.
‘This place stinks like a jack-tar’s briches dipped in the pissdale,’ said Eli, chewing noisily on a cheek-sized baccy plug and scowling around as if the very beach would rise up and throttle him.
‘You’re right there, second mate,’ I said, ‘even though I was assured Port Royal offered the best of prospects. And by none other than the Merchant Jeffreys.’
At the name, Savary ceased chewing and gobbed pointedly into the water. Gaspar handed my boots with care over the cutter’s stem and I boarded.
‘Back to the Cornelius, sir?’ he said.
‘Quiet!’ I said, whirling round. ‘Don’t use the ship’s name.’
Eli was already pushing the cutter out. ‘What’s happened, captain? What about the trade?’
‘There’ll be no trade for us here, old fellow,’ I told him. ‘Take up your sweeps and pull as fast as you can.’
They waded a few paces in the shallows to shove off the boat, then leapt in after me. As their blades dipped in the black water and the strand receded, I threw anxious looks astern, but our little cutter, crossing the dark surface of the roads, was quite alone.
‘There’s not to be any distribution for the seamen, then?’ asked Eli, without breaking his rhythm.
‘Not after this night,’ I told him.
Then Savary said, ‘I just want you to know, captain, I shall do my best for you with steer board watch.’ He spat emphatically over the gunnels. ‘The voting, I mean.’
Such is the lot of a privateering master, I thought grimly. The seamen may show their hand for you one day and cast you out the next. And what might they think of the bounty sums if they got to hear? Worth delivering their captain and his Navigator to the Admiralty’s hangman?
‘I’ll vote for you, sir,’ piped up the Dutch boy brightly, ‘whatever they may say.’
I caught his arm so hard he let out a yelp. He had to stop rowing and the boat spun, coming to a swirling halt.
‘What do they say, Gaspar?’ I demanded.
Eli shipped his oar and leaned forward, cutting in over the boy’s stammering confusion.
‘Captain, them jack-tars of ours does nothing but moan about the stinks from the furs and horns and stuffs in the hold. Why trade in animal skins, they say? What are we privateers for unless we get rich in silver dollars?’
‘How short their memories are. Who was it voted me captain to take the bark into trade?’ I muttered, and let go of Gaspar’s wrist. ‘Let’s stroke on, fellows.’
‘I’m right behind you, captain,’ said Savary, pulling away as if nothing had happened. ‘You shan’t hear me carping.’
‘Nor me neither, sir,’ said Gaspar, fumbling with his oar, eager to expatiate his mistake.
The cutter moved steadily, the silence broken only by the rhythmical splash of the oars as we progressed through the packed anchorage. All around loomed the dim outlines of moored barks with rigs of every shape and design. There were schooners and sloops, ketches and flyers and full ship-rigged barks, of burthen great and small alike, rafted up together, their yards boxed and their sails in tight harbour stows. There were vessels in all states of trim and readiness for sea, from wormeaten, split-planked old hulks to well-caulked, deck-scrubbed beauties with gilded work at their stern galleries and painted figureheads at the bows.
Most magnificent of all were the Navy barks — cruzers, threedeckers, schooners and ketches, all rafted up in ranks right across the bay. All at once it seemed to me as if they were blocking our path to the sea.
At last, recognising her graceful sternlights lit from inside the Great Cabin and ablaze with a welcoming glow, we closed the Cornelius. She was double-moored alongside an armed merchantman, an awkwardness made necessary by the sheer number of vessels berthed in the roads. Our companion was a powerful twenty gunner, a hundred tuns burthen bigger and thirty foot longer than us, and something of an unequal match. On the decorated stern was painted her name, the Willingminde of Dartmouth. Lord, I wondered, had there been a chance yet for her to send a party ashore who might see the bill-poster’s handiwork elsewhere in town and mark our ship’s name?
The night was damp and foreboding and the air still as a fog, the familiar eerie quiet that threatens a squall. For that alone, I was bent on clearing away to sea at once. Yet it was not the augury of a storm in the dangerously crowded anchorage that drove me, nor even the abysmal failure of my attempt at trade.
Still bunched in my hand was the reward poster, crumpled into a fist-sized ball. Tossing it away with all my strength, I watched it bob whitely on the scummy surface before disappearing astern, and wished only that I could as easily dismiss its sentence of death.