Coast of Europe and of Northern Africa
1685
And Midas joyes our Spanish journeys give,
We touch all gold, but find no food to live.
And I should be in the hott parching clyme,
To dust and ashes turn’d before my time.
To mew me in a Ship, is to inthrall
Mee in a prison, that weare like to fall;
Or in a Cloyster; save that there men dwell
In a calme heaven, here in a swaggering hell.
Long voyages are long consumptions,
And ships are carts for executions.
Yea they are Deaths; Is’t not all one to flye
Into an other World, as t’is to dye?
—JOHN DONNE, “Elegie XX: Loves Warre”
JACK SOBBED FOR THE FIRST time since he’d been a boy, and brother Dick had been pulled up, all stiff and white, from the Thames.
The crew was not especially surprised. The moment of a ship’s departure was commonly a time for the colorful venting of emotions, and that went double or triple for young women being left behind at dockside. Mr. Vliet was obviously worried that it would lead to some kind of legal ensnarements, and fled over the plank onto the ship, followed shortly by the duly blessed and sacramentalized Yevgeny. God’s Wounds cast off without any ceremonies and skulked out of the harbor into the Ijsselmeer, where the sails were raised to drive her through ragged, swelling seas. Yevgeny came and planted a giant mukluk against the mast and pulled his harpoon out of it, and of Jack’s arm, muttering in what sounded like embarrassment. One of the crew, who was said to have some experience as a barber-surgeon, stoked up the galley-fire to heat some irons. As Jack had been slashed deeply across the chest, as well as pierced through the forearm, there was much cauterizing to be done. Half the ship’s crew, it seemed, sat on Jack to make him be still while the irons were applied, reheated, applied, reheated, seemingly all the way across the Ijsselmeer. At the beginning of this interminable cattle-branding, Jack screamed for mercy. Some of the men who were sitting on him looked disgusted and some looked amused, but none looked merciful—which made sense when Jack recalled he was on a slaver-ship. So after that he just screamed until he lost his voice and could hear only the wet sizzle of his own flesh.
When it was done, Jack sat, wrapped in blankets, out on the bowsprit, as sort of a Vagabond-wretch-figurehead, and smoked a pipe that Yevgeny had brought him. Queerly, he felt nothing at all. Big merchant ships, locked into huge air-filled boxes to lift them higher in the water, were being towed over the sand-banks, which were all cluttered with old spidery wrecks. Beyond that, the rhythm of the ocean subtly changed, as before a play, when a frilly overture gives way to the booming music of a Tragedy or History. It got darker and palpably colder, and those ships were set free from their boxes, and began to spread cloth before the wind, like canvas-merchants displaying their wares to an important buyer. The offerings were grudgingly accepted—the sails filled with air, became taut and smooth, and the ships accelerated toward the sea. Later, they came to Texel, and all the sailors paused in their chores to view the immense Ships of the Line of the Dutch Navy riding on the huge waves of the North Sea, their flags and banners swirling like colored smoke-clouds and their triple gun-decks frowning at England.
Then finally they were at sea, bringing a certain kind of solace to Jack, who felt that he must be a condemned man, now, on every scrap of dry land in the world. They put in briefly at Dunkirk to recruit a few more hands. His brother Bob came out to visit Jack, who was in no condition to leave the ship, and they exchanged a few stories, which Jack forgot immediately. This last encounter with his brother was like a dream, a sweeping-together of fragments, and he heard someone telling Bob that Jack was not in his right mind.
Then south. Off St.-Malo they were overhauled and boarded by French privateers, who only laughed when they learned of the worthless cargo, and let them go with only token pilfering. But one of these Frenchmen, as he left the deck of God’s Wounds, walked up to Mr. Vliet, who cringed. And in response to that cringing, more than anything else, the privateer slapped the Dutchman on the side of the head so hard that he fell down.
Even with his mind impaired in several ways, Jack understood that this action was more damaging to his investment than if the French had fired a broadside of cannonballs through their hull. The sailors became more surly after that, and Mr. Vliet began to spend most of his time closeted in his wardroom. The only thing that kept God’s Wounds from becoming an ongoing mutiny was Mr. Foot, who (with Yevgeny as his muscle) became the real captain of the ship after that, stepping easily into the role, as if his twenty-year hiatus tending bar at the Bomb & Grapnel had never happened.
Following the coast, they rounded the various capes of Brittany and then steered a southwesterly rhumb-line across the Bay of Biscay, coming in view of the Galician coast after a number of anxious days. Jack did not really share in the anxiety because his wounds had become infected. Between the fevers, and the relentless bleedings meted out by the ship’s barber to cure them, he lacked the faintest idea of where they were, and sometimes even forgot he was aboard ship. Mr. Vliet refused to move from the best wardroom, which was probably a savvy position for him to take, as there was sentiment among the crew for tossing him overboard. But he was the only man on the ship who knew how to navigate. So Jack was tucked into a hammock belowdecks, peering up day after day at blue needles of light between the deck-planks, hearing little but the merry clink of cowrie-shells being sifted to and fro by the ship’s pitching and rolling.
When he finally got well enough to come abovedecks again, it was hot, and the sun was higher in the sky than he’d ever seen it. He was informed that they had, for a time, dropped anchor in the harbor of Lisbon, and since moved on. Jack regretted missing that, for there was said to be a very great Vagabond-camp outside that city, and if he’d managed to slip away, he might be on dry land again, reigning as Vagabond-king. But that was only the crack-pated phant’sy of a condemned man chained by the neck to a wall, and he soon made himself forget it.
According to Mr. Vliet, who spent hours taking measurements with a back-staff and making laborious calculations with numbers and tables, they had passed through the latitude of Gibraltar, and so the land they glimpsed off to port from time to time was Africa. But the Slave Coast was yet far, far to the south, and many weeks of sailing lay ahead of them.
But he was wrong about that. Later on the same day there was a commotion from the lookouts, and coming abovedecks Jack and the others saw two strange vessels approaching from abaft, seeming to crawl across the water on countless spindly legs. These were galleys, the typical warships of the Barbary Corsairs. Mr. Vliet watched them through his spyglass for a time, making certain geometrickal calculations on a slate. Then he commenced vomiting, and retreated to his cabin. Mr. Foot broke open some chests and began to pass out rusty cutlasses and blunderbusses.
“But why fight for cowrie-shells?” one of the English sailors asked. “It’ll be just like the Frenchies at St.-Malo.”
“They are not hunting us for what is in our hold,” Mr. Foot explained. “Do you think free men would pull oars like that?”
Now Jack was not the first or last man aboard God’s Wounds to question the wisdom of nailing their colors to the mast, but when he understood that those Barbary Corsairs intended to make galley-slaves out of them, his view changed. As when powder-smoke is driven away from a battle by a sea-breeze, he saw with clarity that he would die that day. He saw also that the arrival of the corsairs was fortunate for him, since his death was not long in coming anyway, and better to die in fighting for his liberty, than in scheming to take away some other man’s.
So he went down belowdecks and opened up his sea-chest and took out his Janissary-sword in its gaudy sheath, and brought it up abovedecks. The crew had formed up into a few distinct clusters, obviously the beginnings of mutinous conspiracies. Jack climbed up onto the prow of a longboat that was lashed to the deck, and from there vaulted up onto the roof of a pilot-house that stood just aft of the foremast. From this height, he had a view up and down the length of God’s Wounds and was struck (as usual) by what a narrow sliver of a thing she was. And yet she, or any other European cargo-vessel, was a wallowing pig compared to those galleys, which slid over the top of the water like Dutch ice-skates hissing over the top of a frozen canal. They had enormous saffron-colored triangular sails to drive them forward as well as the oars, and they were approaching in single file from directly astern, so that God’s Wounds’s few paltry cannon could not fire a broadside. There was a single swivel-gun astern that might have pelted the lead galley with a tangerine-sized cannonball or two, but the men near it were arguing, instead of loading the weapon.
“What a world!” Jack hollered.
Most everyone looked at him.
“Year after year at home, chopping wood and drawing water and going to church, nothing to divert us save the odd hailstorm or famine—and yet all a man need do is board ship and ride the wind for a few days, and what’ve you got? Barbary Corsairs and pirate-galleys off the coast of Morocco! Now, Mr. Vliet, he has no taste for adventure. But as for myself, I would rather cross swords with corsairs than pull oars for them—so I’m for fighting!” Jack pulled out the Janissary-sword, which, compared to Mr. Foot’s pitted relics, burnt and glittered beneath the African sun. Then he flung the scabbard away. It fup-fup-fupped off to port and then stopped in midair and dove vertically into the waves. “This is the only thing they’re going to get from Half-Cocked Jack!”
This actually wrung a cheer from the approximately half of the crew who’d made up their minds to fight anyway. The other half only looked embarrassed on Jack’s behalf. “Easy for you to say—everyone knows you’re dying,” said one of the latter group, one Henry Flatt, who until this moment had been on easy terms with Jack.
“And yet I’ll live longer’n you,” Jack said, then jumped down from the pilot-house and began to approach Flatt—who stood and watched dumbly at first, perhaps not aware that all of his fellows had fled to other parts of the ship. When Jack drew closer, and turned sideways, and bent his knees, and showed Flatt the edge of his blade, Flatt went en garde for just a moment, then seemed to come to his senses, backpedaled several yards, then simply turned and ran. Jack could hear men laughing—satisfying in a way, but, on second thought, vexing. This was serious work, not play-acting. The only way to make these half-wits understand that weighty matters were at stake was probably to kill someone. So Jack cornered Flatt up at the bow, and pursued him, actually, out onto the very bowsprit, weaving and dodging around the points of the inner jib, the outer jib, and the flying jib, all of which were quivering and snapping in the wind as no one was paying attention to keeping them trimmed. Finally the wretch Flatt was perched on the tip of the bowsprit, gripping the last available line* to keep from being tossed away by the routine pitching of the ship. With the other hand he raised a cutlass in a feeble threat. “Be killed now by a Christian or in ten minutes by a heathen—it’s all one to me—but if you choose to be a slave, your life is worthless, and I’ll flick you into the ocean like a turd,” Jack said.
“I’ll fight,” Flatt said. Jack could see plainly that he was lying. But everyone was watching now—not just the crew of God’s Wounds, but a startlingly large crowd of armed men who had emerged onto the decks of the galleys. Jack had to observe proper form. So he made a great show of turning his back on Henry Flatt, and began to work his way back down the bowsprit, with the intent of whirling around and striking Flatt down when Flatt inevitably came after him. In fact, he was just about to do so when he saw Mr. Foot swinging his cutlass at a taut line that had been made fast to a pinrail at the bow: the sheet that held the obtuse corner of the flying jib, and transferred all of its power into the frame of the ship. The jib went slack above him. Jack dove, and grabbed at a line. He heard a sort of immense metallic fart as the shivering canvas wrapped around Flatt like a shroud, held him for a moment, and then dropped him into the sea, where he was immediately driven under by the onrushing hull.
Jack nearly fell overboard himself, as he ended up dangling by a rope with one hand, maintaining a grip on the sword with the other—but Yevgeny’s big hand seized his forearm and hauled him up to safety.
That is, if this could be considered safety: the two galleys, which until now had been idling along in single file, had, during the dispute with Flatt, forked apart so that they could come up on both flanks of God’s Wounds at the same time. For some minutes it had been possible to hear, from those galleys, a faint musick: an eerie chaunt sung by many voices, in a strange keening melody, that, somewhat like an Irish tune, struck Jack’s English ears as being Not from Around Here. Though, come to think of it, it probably was from around here. Anyway, it was a strange alien melody sung in some barbarous tongue. And until very recently, it had been sung slowly, as the crashing of the galleys’ many oar-blades into the brine had served as the drum-beat marking the time.
But now that the galleys had got themselves sorted out into parallel courses, they emitted a sudden fusillade of snapping noises—Jack thought, some sort of outlandish gunfire. Immediately the singing grew louder. Jack could just make out the heathen syllables:
Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, v’nism’chah!
Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, v’nism’chah.
“It is like the bagpipes of the Scots,” he announced, “a sort of shrill noise that they make before battle, to cover the sound of their knees knocking together.”
One or two men laughed. But even these were shushed by others, who were now listening intently to the song of the corsairs. Rather than proceeding to a steady beat, as good Christian music always did, it seemed to be getting faster.
Uru, uru achim
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Havah nagilah…
It was most certainly getting faster; and as the oars bit into the water on each beat of the song, this meant that they were now rowing as well as singing faster. And indeed the gap between the bow of the foremost galley, and the stern of God’s Wounds, was getting rapidly narrower.
Uru, uru achim
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Havah nagilah.
Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, v’nism’chah!
Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, v’nism’chah.
The corsairs were singing and rowing with abandon now, easily coming up along both flanks, maintaining just enough distance to give their oars the freedom to claw at the waves. Even not counting the unseen oar-slaves, the number of men aboard was insane, reckless, as if a whole pirate-city had crowded into each galley.
The one to port came alongside soonest, its sails and rigging struck and furled for the attack, its rail, and the poop deck, crowded with corsairs, many of them swinging grappling-hooks on the ends of ropes, others brandishing boarding-ladders with vicious curved spikes on the ends. Jack—and all of the others aboard God’s Wounds—saw, and understood, the same thing at the same time. They saw that almost none of the fighting men were Arabs except for the agha shouting the orders. They were, instead, white men, black Africans, even a few Indians. They understood that all of them were Janissaries, which is to say non-Turks who did the Turks’ fighting for them.
Having understood that, they would not be slow to grasp that becoming a Barbary Corsair might, for men such as them, constitute a fine opportunity.
Jack, being half a step quicker than the average sea-scum, understood this a moment sooner than anyone else, and decided that he would blurt it out, so that everyone would think it had been his idea. He picked up a grappling-hook and coil of rope that had been rattling around in the bottom of the weapons-chest, and returned to his former podium atop the pilot-house, and hollered, “All right! Who’s for turning Turk?”
A lusty cheer came up from the crew. It seemed to be unanimous, with the single exception of Yevgeny, who as usual had no idea what was being said. While the others were all shaking hands and congratulating one another, Jack clenched his sword in his teeth, tossed the rope-coil over his shoulder, and began ascending the ladderlike web of rigging—the fore shrouds, so called—that converged on the fore-top: a platform about halfway up the mast. Reaching it, he jammed the point of the sword into the planking, and regarded the galleys from above. The singing had sped up into a frenzy now, and the movements of the oars were beginning to get into disarray, as not all of the slaves could move their implements fast enough!
Uru, uru achim
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!
Havah nagilah…
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach
Uru achim b’lev sa me ach
Both of the galleys had moved half a length ahead of God’s Wounds now. Upon a signal from one of the aghas, both suddenly folded their oars and steered inwards, falling back and converging on God’s Wounds. The oar-slaves collapsed onto their benches, and the only thing that kept all of them from landing flat on their backs was that they were packed into the hull too tightly to lie down.
“You men are only seeing the turbans and jewels and polished weapons of the Janissaries!” Jack hollered. “I can see the slaves pulling the oars now—she’s a coffin packed with half-dead wretches. Did you hear those snapping noises before? ’Twas not gunfire—’twas the long bullwhips of the slave-drivers! I see a hundred men with fresh stripes torn from their backs, slumped over their oars. We’ll all be slaves in half an hour’s time—unless we show the agha that we know how to fight, and deserve to be Janissaries instead!”
As Jack was delivering this oration, he was laying his rope-coil out on the planking of the fore-top, so it would unfurl cleanly. A grappling-hook flung from the rail of the port galley nearly struck him in the face. Jack ducked and shrugged. It bit into the planking at his feet, which popped and groaned as some Janissary put his weight on the attached line. Jack jerked his sword loose and chopped through it, sending a corsair down to be crushed between the converging hulls of the two ships.
The engagement, which had been miraculously quiet—almost serene—until now, became a cacophony of booms as the Barbary pirates fired all of their guns. Then it became silent again, as no one would have time to reload before it was all over. Jack’s view below was temporarily clouded by smoke. He was looking almost level across to the port galley’s tall mainmast, which had a narrow crow’s nest near the top. It was an obvious target for a grappling-hook and indeed Jack snagged it on the first throw—then, pulling the slack out of the line, was almost torn off the fore-top as the ships rocked in opposite directions and their masts suddenly spread apart. Jack decided to construe this as an opportunity, and quickly wrapped the rope round his left forearm several times. The next movement of the ships ripped him off the fore-top, putting a few thousand splinters into his abdomen, and sent him plunging into space. The rope broke his fall, by nearly pulling his arm off. He whizzed across the middle of the galley in an instant, seeing just a blur of crimson and saffron, and a moment later found himself hanging out over the blue ocean, ponderously changing direction. Looking back the way he’d just come, and was shortly to go again, he saw a few non-combatants staring back at him curiously—including one of those slave-drivers. When Jack’s next pendulum-swing took him back over the galley’s deck, he reached out with the sword and cut that man’s head in two. But the impact of sword on skull sent him spinning round, out of control. Flailing, he swung back over the deck of God’s Wounds and slammed into the base of the foremast hard enough to knock the wind out of his lungs and make him let go of the rope. He slid to the deck and looked around at a number of men’s legs—but not legs he recognized. The whole ship was covered with Janissaries, and Jack was the only one who’d done any fighting at all.
The one exception to that rule was Yevgeny, who had got the gist of Jack’s stirring first speech, but not understood the more pragmatic second one. Accordingly, he had harpooned the rais, or captain of the starboard galley, right through the throrax.
This and other statistics of the battle (such as it was) were conveyed to Jack by Mr. Foot later, after they had been stripped of all clothes and possessions and moved onto a galley, where a blacksmith was stoking up his forge and making ready to weld fetters around narrow parts of their bodies.
The corsairs rifled the holds of God’s Wounds in all of about fifteen minutes, and obviously lacked enthusiasm for the cowrie shells. The only captive who wasn’t transferred to a galley was Mr. Vliet, who had been ferreted out of the bilge, where he had concealed himself. The Dutchman was brought up abovedecks, stripped naked, and tied over a barrel. An African was roundly fucking him now.
“What was all that nonsense you were raving from the fore-top?” Mr. Foot asked. “No one could understand a word you were saying. We were all just looking at each other—” Mr. Foot pantomimed a bewildered shrug.
“That you’d all better show what magnificent fighters you were,” Jack summarized, “or else they’d have you chained up straight off.”
“Hmph,” Mr. Foot said, too diplomatic to point out that it hadn’t worked in Jack’s case. Though a few discreet winks from some of the bleeding sunburned wretches told Jack that his partial decapitation of that one slave-driver might make him as popular among galley-slaves as he’d formerly been among Vagabonds.
“Why should you care?” Mr. Foot asked a few minutes later, as the anal violation of his erstwhile business partner showed no sign of coming to a climax any time soon. The barrel supporting Mr. Vliet had slowly worked its way across the deck of God’s Wounds until it lodged against a rail, and was now booming like a drum. “You’re not long for this world anyway.”
“If you ever visit Paris, you can take this question up with St.-George, mort-aux-rats,” Jack said. “He taught me a few things about correct form. I have a reputation, you know—”
“I hoped that you, or one of the younger men, might show some valor, and become a Janissary, and one day make his way back to Christendom, and tell the tale of my deeds ’gainst the Barbary Corsairs. So that all would know how my story came out, and that it came out well. That’s all.”
“Well, next time enunciate,” Mr. Foot said, “because we literally could not make out a word you were saying.”
“Yes, yes,” Jack snapped—hoping he would not be chained to the same oar as Mr. Foot, who was already becoming a bore. He sighed. “That is one prodigious butt-fucking!” he marveled. “Like something out of the Bible!”
“There’s no butt-fucking in the Good Book!” said the scandalized Mr. Foot.
“Well, how should I know?” Jack said. “Back off! Soon, I’ll be in a place where everyone reads the Bible all the time.”
“Heaven?”
“Does it sound like heaven to you?”
“Well, it appears they are leading me off to a different oar, Jack,” Mr. Foot said. Indeed, a dead man was being cut loose from an oar at the stern, and Mr. Foot was being signalled for. “So if we never speak again—as seems likely—Godspeed!”
“Godspeed? Godspeed! What kind of a thing is that to say to a fucking galley slave?” were Jack’s last words, or so he supposed, to Mr. Foot.
Mr. Vliet was being pushed overboard by a couple of Janissaries. Jack heard the splash just as he was sitting down on the shit-stained bench where he would row until he died.