The day descended into a drawn-out agony as the full hazard of Filligrew’s plan unfolded. In tight formation, the flota forged across the seas, reaching under all plain sail along the train of the swells, the three barks in line astern, braced up on steerboard tack for a north-northwesterly course. Beneath the blank horizon lay the rocks and shoals of the southern Cuban coast, and it fell to me to Navigate a passage through these little-known waters with only a few unreliable charts. After that, there was little more than hope and a latitude.
The Saskia led the way, with the Willingminde keeping close station and the Prometheus bringing up the rear. Astern of her was an empty sea where once the Hannah Rebacka would have sailed. Each vessel had set every scrap of canvas she could bear, with studding yards run out and stunsails set outboard of the courses and topsails. The flagship, like the others, carried such a cloud that she rolled her gunnels under and left a broken wake, ploughing onwards in a wilful dash into danger.
At first the Saskia went along well. Every spare man aboard manned her pumps and made up parties for bucket chains. Breaking out her strongest sail for heavy airs — a storm-canvas fore-topsail made of the stiffest cloth — they had carried it right forward to the beak and sent ropes down to sling it like a hammock under the bowsprit. Then they had hauled the canvas down the stem and under the keel to cover the damaged underparts and wrap the hole. Bringing the clewlines to the weather-deck capstan, they sweated the cloth as tight as drum. Yet still her signals told us that the water poured in. With each league that ran off beneath her keel, the unwanted cargo of seawater increased, and she wallowed visibly.
In the Prometheus’s Great Cabin, in a lather of sweat, bent over the sea-charts and instruments, I worked up our position from the sailing-master’s logs and any scrap of the dead reckoning that came to hand. During Filligrew’s reckless chase, attention had gone from the log and the minute-glass and the compass course, and even the best estimate was going to be no more than a guess.
Sir Thomas had accepted my plea to commission into the effort any man who might contribute, so at the chart table sat old Noah Spatchears, fretting with the latitudinal calculations, muttering and scratching at his columns, bemoaning the poor quality of the angles we sighted. And when I went up on the quarter-deck, there was Adam Pyne, brought from the confinement in which he had languished since loyally refusing to serve under the commodore after my removal. He stood with the cross-staff raised, sighting the lowering sun as it arced towards the sea-horizon, calling out the angles of its descent to a notetaker at his elbow.
‘When you carry those sights down to Spatchears,’ I said, loud enough for the attentive Filligrew, standing a little apart, to hear, ‘tell him the hour’s run was two and one quarter leagues by the log. Instruct him that we kept a good course by the card, with a half a point of leeway showing in our wake.’
‘Aye aye, sir,’ said Adam and opened the instrument case to fold it away.
I took one end of the long cross-staff and helped him guide it into the open box, whispering, ‘Spatchears knows where the armoury keys are. And don’t forget the boarding axes.’
Without a nod or any indication he had heard or understood, he calmly closed the instrument case, latched its lid and placed it gently beside the binnacle before heading for the companionway. I remained on the quarter-deck, watching as the minute-glass was flipped, hovering at the taff-rail as the log-line ran out, then following the sailing-master’s hands as he reeled it back in and counted off the knots. By the wheel, I craned over the steersman’s shoulder to see the compass card yaw about uncertainly.
‘Keep your eye on that card,’ I said to the helmsman. ‘Two spokes only, if you will.’
He nodded, twirling the wheel this way and that, feet planted apart against the rise and sway of the Prometheus’s great stern as she bounded onwards.
Filligrew sauntered over, his hands stuck into the broad, tooled belt of his briches, with the air of one whose barks were at no more risk than on a breezy afternoon sailing, in the Thames between Wapping and Gravesend. It struck me his confident look might sometimes be a cover.
‘He’s the best steersman aboard, Loftus,’ he said, mildly reproving.
Ignoring him, I bent to the sea-charts and pilots laid out on the deck-boards, their edges held down by rounded beach stones. Time and again, I studied my rules and markings, measuring off the sea-miles to the Cuban coast, keeping in my head our course made good, a reckoning of our speed, an amount of leeway, a notion of the current, the wind’s heading and the distance run. It all changed by the minute and by the turn of the glass, and still we could not know for sure where our ships were in that sea.
‘Bring the flota half a point to the wind, commodore,’ I told him.
Filligrew craned up to scan the broad, lofty sails, watching every nuance of their set and trim, keen to spot the slightest hint of a luff.
‘No closer than that, Loftus. We shall pinch.’
‘Aye, but we must arrive a little upwind.’ I drummed my fingers on the taff-rail. ‘We should spy the land before sunset, but quite when or how far off it might be, I can’t say for sure.’
‘I have the fullest confidence in your skills,’ he said, the eyes turning on me again.
Soon the Cuban shore appeared, at first sight no more than a smoky mark on the horizon, then spreading like fingers either side until it lay all across our heading. Surveying the sky in the west, I reckoned there was barely more than an hour’s light remaining. The lookouts, from their hundred-foot vantage, called down that they could distinguish no features such as an entrance or indent, but in the further distance, they saw a range of mountains lurking in the failing light.
‘How do they bear?’ I called up.
‘A point off the steerboard bow.’
‘What description can you give?’
‘Two peaks of equal height and close paired,’ called the lookout, swinging his spy-glass back and forth. ‘A third mount, lower — perhaps a league or so to their east.’
When this floated down to me on the breeze, I quickly knelt by the sea-charts. There they were — three mountains as described, · marked on the chart three or four leagues behind the littoral. The name of my chosen carenage stared back from the sheet. By some stroke of fortune, or the guiding hand of Fate — or even by dint of my Navigation, I allowed — we had come nearly dead upon the only possible anchorage for leagues around. All I had to do was get us through the entrance.
Bahia Delgado, read the chart, in curving letters along the shoreline of what appeared at first sight to be a wide open bay. Below the name were a few pilot’s notes, handwritten.
‘The Bahia Delgado,’ they declared, ‘is a tenable anchorage protected· at the eastward side by the Caho Delgado, a low ground of rock and reef that breaks the prevailing swells.’ So far so good, but as I read on, the hairs tingled down my spine. ‘On approach, first find a reefy spit thrusting four or five cables southwestwards, consisting of rock and coral of sharp character. Immediate to east is a reef of like kind which closes upon the other to not more than one cable apart. Both are unseen from seaward, so that. the way in lies like a great crab, ready to pincer the unwary between its doubled claws.’
‘Well, Loftus?’ said Filligrew.
I faced him squarely. ‘No one in his right senses would run in on such a shore with night coming on. You might as well order the Saskia to round up and scuttle herself while we watch.’
He shook his head in mild irritation. ‘What should her course be now, Navigator?’
‘The Saskia must follow my orders to the closest degree,’ I said, ‘and read her signals aright.’
‘Aye, Loftus,’ said the commodore, unsmiling at the reminder of Gamble’s gross error at the reef, ‘but what course do you give?’
Still I hesitated, knowing that the moment I obliged, he would order her to plunge blindly on and bear down upon the shore regardless. Yet there was no alternative but to press onwards, and we both knew it. My heart was in my mouth when I said, ‘Steer northeast by north.’
‘Signal the Saskia,’ Filligrew called briskly over his shoulder, ‘to steer northeast by north and press on without shortening.’
My eye fell on the Saskia. She was down by the bow, but continued to push through the water, taking heavy seas over the beak. She reminded me of a hunting hound, padding along with her nose to the ground. We were going in, heedless.
The surrounding land, low and featureless, gave nothing away, no point on which to fix and let us pivot round the Caho Delgado and find the gap. Already, across the sea away to the west, the sun was barely ten degrees above the horizon, and the cotton-wool clouds of day were clumping together and spreading low across the evening sky. While Adam swung the cross-staff to sight the land for any features on which to hold a passing bearing, I put up the spy-glass and raked back and forth. At last a flash of white foam appeared — the southwestern reef, the barrier of stone and coral that lay across our course. The more I examined it, the more terrifying it looked.
‘Sir Thomas,’ I called, pointing, ‘the reef’s edge and the entrance beyond.’
He nodded and raised his tube.
‘Aye, I have it.’ He sounded pleased.
‘Ease half a point to larboard,’ I told the steersman, and watched the signal go at once to the Saskia. Then I reached over the binnacle to spin the minute glass. I had to check our progress minutely, watch the speed and estimate for current and leeway or we would miss that impossibly narrow entrance.
The commodore went off to oversee the flurry of signals that flowed as I made rapid course alterations. He had an elaborate code peculiar to his flota, for privateering ships kept their intentions close and. their signalling secret from that of the King’s barks. This time, the Saskia, three or four cables ahead, rapidly acknowledged her orders and altered course.
The night was coming in fast. As the gloom thickened, there appeared at the Saskia’s stern quarters a row of lanterns, hung in a line from the taff-rail. They shone red, blue, green and white, the colours produced by various smoked or clear glasses. Meanwhile, at the beak of the Prometheus, a matching chain of lamps was lit and strung out along the spritsail-topsail yard and a like one at the stern. Between the two barks, the Willingminde arranged her own rainbow of lamps. For me, the scene took on the shape of a dream. When the sun had quit the day altogether, the barks themselves became nothing more than silhouettes, only their ghostly sails standing out in pale, drifting shapes lit all around with the bright-coloured lamps. Before us and after us, the rows of signal lights blinked and rocked as our plunging ships rolled and swayed along.
Somewhere in the blackness ahead, perhaps standing on the quarter-deck, or sitting at the table below in the Saskia’s Great Cabin, was Abigail. How much did she understand of the danger? Was she prepared to leap over and swim, or jump down into a launch, if the Saskia ripped into the reef and went down in a rush? At six or seven knots of speed, it would happen so fast few strong men could save themselves, least of all a slight girl never taught to swim.
Having no means of warning her, I extinguished such grim visions and instead filled my head with the plan of the bay, the extent of the reefs, the angle of the wind, the direction of the wave-train. From the wheel, I watched the compass and checked the entrance’s position by the minute. The vague white sails half-lit in the signal lamps’ glow were all we could see of the Saskia as she careered onward, and there was nothing to be done but call the course and trust our signals to be read aright.
‘Ease her another half point to larboard,’ I said, and tipped the glass again.
‘Aye aye, sir,’ called the steersman, and the signals were a-hoist in an instant.
In the lamp-glow of the compass binnacle, I caught sight of the sand grains running through the glass. The stream of falling powder fluttered each time the Prometheus raised her stern to the sea and swayed down into a trough, yet the regularity of the flow never altered and the conical pile built below. Then I thought of the Saskia’s headlong progress. She must be passing through the gap itself by now. The splash of surf on the reef’s edge looked alarmingly close either side of her dim shape. Before the grains ran through the little glass this thousandth or ten thousandth time, I knew, the fate of the Saskia would be done.
‘She’s luffing!’ came a seaman’s cry.
‘Has she struck?’ shouted another.
My heart hammered against my ribs. The Saskia’s sails flogged, her spread of canvas slack and loose as the speed came off and she slewed round. Had she come to a dead stop, stricken on a reef?
‘Look, she’s turning,’ came voices from aloft. ‘She’s hauling up to windward.’
Now we could see her courses quickly bunted up, her yards coming round and the topsails holding their wind.
‘From the Saskia, sir,’ said the signalsman. ‘She’s safely through.’
A great hurrah rose into the warm night breeze and was carried aloft into the sails. The Saskia had slipped into the bay like a nimble yawl.
Now it was up to us to follow exactly her track, and not a fathom either side. Only half a ship’s length away, the water creamed white and broken where it streamed over the outward edge of the reef.
‘Rocks to steerboard!’ came a cry from aloft.
‘Come off a point,’ I ordered.
Excited shouts rose from the larboard rail, where another line of jagged coral broke the surface, and the bark yawed and closer and closer. Disbelieving, staring at the gap through which I had just sent the Saskia, I saw it was far, far narrower than ever I had imagined.
‘Steady on the helm,’ I managed to call.
Suddenly, we careered past the foaming reefs and surged free into flat water. We had done the impossible and steered through the menacing pincer claws of Bahia Delgado.
‘Let fly courses, clew up main and fore,’ the sailing-master sang out. Seamen ran out on the bowsprit to hand the jibsails and spritsails, others clambered aloft and began running the stunsail yards back in.
In our headlong rush to beat the sunset, we had bent on every scrap of cloth the Prometheus could carry, and now it was the work of forty seamen scrambling aloft to the yards and out on the sprit to reduce her sails. But the deed was done with perfect harmony of action, and the big ship soon slowed. The wash of water along her sides died to a burble and she heaved no more on the swells, lapsing instead into an easy canter.
While we drifted gently forward, fetching along under fore-topsail alone, still the Saskia drove ahead with topsails set and drawing, eager as a thirst-stricken fellow in a desert on seeing a well. She rolled like a hog until she gently grounded twenty or thirty yards off the sloping beach. Her gear flailed about aloft as she came to a stop, then the hull tilted a few degrees to one side, like an old woman on market day, worn out and propping her head in her hand to rest. But the Saskia was beached, and safe.
She quickly put her launches down to set out a kedge anchor and stop the stern swinging. In the glow of her lamps, shadowy figures moved about the quarter-deck. One of these, I knew, must be that misguided pedant, Captain Percy Gamble, who had idiotically risked his bark over the conventions of signalling. But beside him, was there a glimpse of a white-clothed girlish figure at the taff-rail?
Swivelling round to check our own quarter-deck, I found all eyes intent on their tasks, the steersman bending to squint at the compass, Filligrew scanning the shore ahead, the signalsman busy with his lights. From the waist came the shouts and answers of the sailing-master and seamen as the course changed and the trim altered to suit. Then came the cry I was looking for.
‘Let go the cutter with a leadsman!’
The leadline party went over the rail and into the cutter — the leadsman with his sounding gear, followed by a pair of oarsmen, a youngster and an older man. They stroked off to find a deep water anchorage for the Prometheus’s greater draught. Adam moved silently to my side as the flagship rounded up and stopped.
Even in the dim half-light afforded by the Prometheus’s signal lamps, Pyne’s uncertainty was apparent. Like me, he knew this was hardly the perfect moment, yet it was our only chance and we had to take it. When would we be let free to roam the decks again, and with such preoccupation all around us? The Saskia’s men, I reasoned, knew full well who had saved the bark from Gamble’s stupidity, and from a far worse fate on the reef than the one she had suffered. Soon they would discover the second salvation I had wrought, that of bringing her to the shore before she foundered. Rallied behind me, they would throw off the most honourable Captain Gamble, tilting the balance of power my way. We had to get aboard now, for though she might lie careened on the shore a few days until her broken planks were mended, the Saskia was our fortress. Even the commodore would balk at the price of storming her, the cost in blood and men and destruction. Then, all repairs completed and Abigail on my arm once more, I would command her as part of the flota. But this time, I swore, it shall be on my terms, and not Sir Thomas Filligrew’s.
‘Six fathoms found!’ came the leadsman’s call as the cutter nosed out ahead of the flagship.
‘Ready to let go bower,’ sang out the sailing-master in the waist.
All around, the ship was a-buzz with the business of coming to anchor. The rigging resounded with chantying as busy jack-tars hauled up the canvas folds and bunted them to the yards. The main bower was loosed from its cathead stow and a few links of heavy chain run out in readiness for letting go. The officers, the sailing-master, the bosun, the mates, all were preoccupied, and Filligrew had his spy-glass trained towards the vague outline some way astern that was the Willingminde, watching her track us through the gap. I stood near the break with Adam at my side, boxes of instruments and sea-charts under our arms, watching the bustle.
The sounding cutter returned, coming all but unnoticed under the towering hull. The leadsman balanced in the thwarts while he shouldered the coils of knotted line calibrated by fathom markers with its lead weight at one end. Then he reached for the boarding rope while the two oarsmen held the boat steady. I touched Adam’s arm. The time was now.
In unison, we hefted ourselves on to the rail and swarmed down the boarding rope. One-handed, clutching my precious instrument box, I barely touched the sides, my feet scrabbling for grip, and all but fell into the boat, knocking the leadsman back into the thwarts. He gave a muffled grunt as he tumbled in a heap, then let out a ripe curse, scrabbling about in the rocking boat. In a second, one of the oarsmen rose up and lashed him tight with his own leadline.
Adam stepped nimbly aboard and I took the cross-staff box from him, stowing it roughly alongside its brother.
‘Push off, lads,’ I hissed.
‘Aye aye, captain,’ the oarsmen responded, and rowed off with a will.
‘Well done, Adam,’ I said. It was he who had found the key to release my two rebellious fellows from the commodore’s prison cells. Without missing a stroke, Eli Savary and the Dutch boy Gaspar grinned back. Their blades dug in, churning the sticky salt waters of the Bahia Delgado into a froth of pale green luminosity, and after a dozen strokes we were clear. I bent to open our boxes and reveal their treasures. There were six brace of pistols, along with shotbags, powder horns and boarding axes.
We pulled towards the head of the bay and minutes later the grounded Saskia’s great stern, beached at an angle, loomed from the darkness. There was a tremendous noise and commotion on her decks high above, orders called and acknowledged, the clack and groan of lifting gear as the yards were sent down before she was careened to expose the damaged underparts. Above all this came the regular chant of the chain-pump parties. With so much confusion and activity, there could hardly be a better chance.
We stroked in under the steerboard quarter and bumped alongside. With pistols at our belts and an axe in each hand, we were ready. Eli’s hard-muscled swing brought an axe-blade into the bark’s timbers a few feet above the waterline. It bit well, and he tied the cutter’s painter round its head.
‘No point losing a good little boat,’ he rasped, then glanced at the tightly bound leadsman. ‘Nor leaving this poor fellow adrift.’
‘All right, lads — up and over,’ I said, and lunged from the boat, at the same moment swinging a boarding axe in a high arc. It struck the wood and held, the blade’s solid clunk telling me its bite was good. Clinging to the one axe, I raised the other and swung it yet higher. Thunk! Likewise, it bit and I was up and half out of the water, swinging the axes in tandem, first the right and now the left, my bare feet scrabbling at the turn of the bilges where green weed and sharp barnacles grew. Through my leather slippers, the soles of my feet became cut and torn, but with another heft or two of the axes I had gained height and was away up the wooden wall, past the sternlights, now gripping dry planks with better purchase. I heard Adam’s and the other fellows’ double blows following close behind. At the tumble-home, the topsides leaned away from the vertical at last. Pausing under the mizen channels, hidden from above, I stuck one axe in my waistband and waited till the others joined me.
A multitude of noises reached my ears. As when we left the Prometheus, I counted on every man aboard being busy at his tasks — men aloft and alow, moving across the decks, into the rigging, stowing sails, pumping out, laying out anchors ahead to keep her ashore. All attention would be on the business in hand.
Together at my signal we progressed upwards, moving more freely now, scrambling past the deadeyes and up the shrouds. I reached the rail in a flash, with Adam, Eli and Gaspar barely a step behind. With one final heave, I swung over and planted my feet on the quarter-deck of my own ship.
There was no sign of Abigail. I trusted she was safe below in the Great Cabin. Only ten feet from the mouth of my levelled pistol stood Captain Percy Gamble. He turned at the sound of our arrival, and his doltish mouth fell open like a landed fish.
‘Loftus, you bloody oaf,’ said the man who had driven my bark on to a reef.
I could have shot him there and then, and perhaps it would have been better that way. As it was, I left him to my fellows and bade them take him captive. They fell on him as he stood there gaping while I went straight to the break of the poop. The Saskia’s men would rally when they saw who it was, and this time there would be no polite and gentlemanly bargaining with the commodore. From now on, safely back in my hands, she would sail on my terms and under my captaincy.
‘Fellows of the Saskia!’ I thundered. ‘This is Captain Loftus. I am taking command of the ship.’
Every man stopped what he was doing and stared up. No one moved.
Then I heard Gamble’s strangulated shout.
‘Soldiers! Guards! On deck!’
To my utter stupefaction, twenty fully armed marines burst from the main hatch, their weapons clattering and jangling, boots clumping on the deck-boards. At once, the seamen fell back to the rails. Muskets pointing at the ready, the soldiers advanced on the quarter-deck in a rush.