The Buccaneers Read online

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  DELL YEARLING BOOKS are designed especially to entertain and enlighten young people. Patricia Reilly Giff, consultant to this series, received her bachelor's degree from Marymount College and a master's degree in history from St. John's University. She holds a Professional Diploma in Reading and a Doctorate of Humane Letters from Hofstra University. She was a teacher and reading consultant for many years, and is the author of numerous books for young readers.

  For Bruce and Lonnie,

  who came sailing for a day

  and survived both a grounding and a capsize

  CONTENTS

  1. The Lifeboat

  2. The Stranger's Tale

  3. A Jonah's Job

  4. A Death Ship

  5. Horn's Chest

  6. Fiddler's Green

  7. The Slave Trader

  8. The Black Book

  9. Afraid of the Sea

  10. A Blood-colored Banner

  11. The Fever

  12. To Davy Jones

  13. Show No Quarter

  14. An Old Friend

  15. Crawling with Cannibals

  16. Gone Aground

  17. A Strange Ambition

  18. Phantom Sailors

  19. In the Gunsights

  20. A Price to Pay

  21. The Fire Ship

  22. Bound for England

  23. A Gentleman of Fortune

  24. A Ghostly Visit

  25. Storm Canvas

  26. Plowing the Sea

  27. A Deadly Struggle

  28. The Wreck

  Author's Note

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  THE LIFEBOAT

  Iwas steering the Dragon when the lifeboat came into view. It appeared ahead, a tattered sail on a sea that blazed with the evening sun. Its canvas bleached to “white, its hull bearded” with weeds, it looked as ancient as Moses. But it drove into the teeth of the trade winds, beating toward a land so distant that there might have been no land at all.

  I felt a shiver to see such a tiny craft in such an endless waste of sea and sky. We were twenty-one days out of England, a thousand miles from any shore. But even our schooner—a little “world for the eight of us aboard” seemed almost too small for the ocean.

  “Sail!” I shouted, and turned the wheel. “Sail ho!”

  The Dragon leaned under her press of canvas. With a boom and a shudder she swallowed a wave in the huge carved mouth of her figurehead. Men stirred from the deck, rising to tend the sails, and the sounds of stomping feet and squealing rope brought Captain Butterfield up from below.

  The sun glinted through his graying hair and onto the pink of his scalp as he stooped through the companion-way. “What's the matter, John?” he asked.

  “A boat, sir.” I pointed forward.

  He'd brought his spyglass, and he aimed it at the distant lifeboat.

  “How many people?” I asked.

  He took a moment to answer. “None,” he said.

  “That's impossible,” I told him.

  He lowered the glass, wiped his eye, and looked again. The long lens stayed perfectly still as his arms and his knees bent with the roll of the ship. Then he brought it down and shook his head. “Look for yourself.”

  He traded the glass for the wheel, and it was all I could do to keep that glass aimed at the lifeboat. But I had to agree: there seemed to be no one aboard.

  “Can we fire a gun?” I asked.

  “Good thinking, John.” He shouted for the gunner. “Mr. Abbey! A signal, please.”

  For the first time in our voyage, I was glad we had our four little guns and the little man who worked them, as strange as he was. He stripped the crisp tarpaulin jacket from the nearest cannon, and had it ready to fire so quickly that I realized only then that he'd kept it loaded all the way from London.

  A cloud of smoke barked from the gun. The Dragon shook from stem to stern, and the lifeboat flew from the circle of sea in my spyglass. Then I found it again, and there was a man staring at me, peering past the edge of the sail. He had been sitting to leeward, with that tattered rag of a sail as a shelter from the spray and sun.

  “There, he's seen us,” I shouted.

  “And look!” cried Captain Butterfield. “Good heavens, he's turning away.”

  It was true. The man had put up the helm of his little boat and it now spun toward the south. As we watched, he eased the sheets and ducked his head as the sail billowed out above him. Then off he went, fleeing as fast as he could from the only bit of help that he had in all the world.

  “Confound him,” said Butterfield. “Is he mad?”

  I thought he must have been. I saw his head looking back, turning on shoulders as broad as a bull's. Then, just as quickly, he put his helm over again, and came racing toward us.

  “Heave to!” shouted Butterfield. “Best we let the devil come to us.”

  We turned the Dragon into the wind and lashed her wheel. She lay almost dead in the water, scudding sideways as the swells rolled underneath her. The captain and I—like every man aboard—stood by the rail and watched that lifeboat crawl up to weather.

  Its paint long gone, its seams plugged by scraps of cloth, it looked like a feast for the sea worms. Tangles of weeds trailed in its wake; water slopped in its bilge. But the man who sailed it was bronzed and strong, as though he'd set out just the day before to sail across an ocean. An enormous sea chest of polished wood was jammed between the thwarts.

  He brought his boat alongside, cast off his sheet, and dropped the tiller. Then he hoisted that great box onto his shoulder and climbed up to the deck of the Dragon.

  “Help him below,” said Butterfield. “Give him a meal and a hammock.”

  “Aye, sir,” I said.

  The men scattered as I went forward, the hands to the sails, Abbey to his gun. Only the stranger was left, sitting astride his chest and looking very much at home. His hair was tarred in a pigtail, and though his skin was deeply tanned, his eyes were a very clear blue.

  “Where have you come from?” I asked.

  “From the sea,” he said. And that was all. He came to his feet, towering above me, and glanced up at the topsail, aft to the stern—everywhere but down at his boat, which wallowed in the swells as we left it behind.

  I bent to take the man's sea chest, the finest one I'd ever seen. The rope beckets—the handles—were so elaborately knotted that months of work must have passed in their making. The wood glowed with its warm finish of oil. But I grunted at the weight of it. Though stronger than most boys of seventeen, I couldn't hope to lift that enormous box.

  The stranger laughed and put it up to his shoulder again. The sound that came from inside it—a rumbling and a clinking—made me think that coins and jewels were nested there. Then he followed me down to the fo'c's'le, where I hung a hammock that he climbed into without a word of thanks.

  “Would you like some food?” I asked. “Some water?”

  He shook his head, his eyes already closed. In another moment he was sound asleep, swinging in the canvas as though in the great cocoon of some enormous insect.

  I found a blanket and covered him, then went up to help Mr. Abbey secure the gu
n. We stretched the tarpaulin jacket in place and lashed it down.

  “There you go,” said Abbey, stroking at the cloth, smoothing it over the muzzle. “You rest awhile.” He had a habit of talking to his guns, and it always unnerved me. “That will keep you dry, my handsome little man-eater,” he said.

  He loved his guns, but I despised them. Their weight made the Dragon roll badly at times, and only batter through waves she would have hurdled without them. But my father had insisted on arming the Dragon, and whether or not to carry guns was the only decision he hadn't left to me. “You're going to the Indies,” he'd said. “There's pirates in the Indies.”

  I laughed now, to think of that. What a dreadful place the West Indies had seemed from the way Father had described them. He'd filled the waters with sharks and wood-eating worms, the sky with hurricanes that blew all the year round, and the islands with swarms of cannibals. “Yes, cannibals,” he'd said. “They cook you alive, or so I've heard. They shrink your head to the size of a-walnut.”

  But his fear of pirates had been the greatest of all, and he'd paid a fortune for the little four-pounders that sat on the deck, two to a side, with their muzzles pointing over the rail. Then, true to form, he'd found a bargain in the gunner. “Same wages as an ordinary seaman,” he'd boasted. “Yet the man was serving in the navy before you were born.” So great was Father's love of bargains that he overlooked Mr. Abbey's years, his oddness, even the glass marble fitted in place of his left eye, in a head as round as a cannonball.

  That marble gleamed crimson now, as Abbey looked up from the lashings. The sun was turning red, staining the sails. It lit a blaze right across the horizon, scattering embers of light on the sea.

  “I don't like the looks of him,” he said.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “That fellow from the lifeboat. Where did he come from and where was he bound?”

  “I'm sure I don't know, Mr. Abbey,” I said.

  “Why was he sailing into the wind?” Abbey tilted his head. “I'd ask him that, if I were you, Mr. Spencer. I'd ask him why he was tacking east when he might have run to the west, where the land was closer.”

  “Perhaps you'll ask him yourself,” I said. Then I turned away and stood at the rail.

  “Count on it, Mr. Spencer.”

  I didn't care very much for the gunner. He still sported the rags of his old naval uniform, and seemed to think that his faded gold braid and his little brass buttons made him equal to an admiral.

  “I'll ask him this as well,” he said, coming up to my side. “I'll ask him what he carries in that bureau of his.”

  I laughed. The stranger's sea chest was enormous, but not quite as big as a bureau.

  “I think he's a Jonah, maybe,” said Abbey.

  “That's absurd,” I said.

  “Is it? Does he look like a man who's been adrift for weeks?”

  “Perhaps he hasn't been,” I said.

  Abbey grunted. “But his boat has.”

  I wouldn't admit it to Abbey, but I'd had the same thought. The boat had grown weak, but the man was still strong.

  “Try it,” said Abbey. “Get into a boat and drift out there. In a matter of days, the sun turns you into a cinder. In a fortnight it makes a mummy of you, dry as old leather.” He spat into the sea. “A man outlive his boat? Not a chance!”

  His one good eye was closed, yet he stared straight at me with the reflected sunset glaring in his glass marble. It was a most disturbing thing, as though he could actually see with some kind of fiery vision.

  “Look in his sea chest,” said Abbey. “If he's a Jonah, he'll carry his curses in there.”

  “That's enough!” I said.

  Abbey cackled. He turned his head and looked down at the sea. The water seethed below us, and the Dragon churned on toward the west. She rushed down a wave, rose on the face of the next. The sun flared once more and disappeared. And Mr. Abbey gasped.

  He reached out and clutched my arm. “Did you see that?” he cried.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Right there!” he shouted. “You must have seen it.” He stretched over the rail, staring straight down at the sea, then aft along the hull. He squeezed shivers of pain into my arm. “Tell me you did.”

  “See what?” I asked again.

  “A coffin,” he cried. “It looked like a coffin all nailed together, the lid swinging open.” He stared at me with utter horror. “Tell me you saw it.”

  I tried to shake him off, but his fingers held me like talons. “I saw no such thing,” I said.

  “Then I'm doomed!” He let me go and slumped at the rail. “I'm finished. We all are, maybe.”

  “No one's doomed,” said I.

  His glass eye burned. “Oh, we are, young Mr. Spencer. There's a Jonah come aboard.”

  Chapter 2

  THE STRANGER'S TALE

  It was near the end of my watch—my turn at the wheel—“when the captain came up from below, still in his nightclothes”. He “wore a purple robe that fluttered and billowed around him, baring legs as knobby and“ white as those of a poorly built table.

  He stood behind me at the “wheel”. “Should we reef?” he asked. “Should we strike the topsail? Are we driving her too hard?”

  “Oh, she can carry her sails,” I said.

  He laughed, delighted, and clapped his hand upon my shoulder. “Fancy this,” he said. “Did you ever think we “would play our game on a schooner's deck?”

  “No, sir,” said I.

  The “wind pulled at his robe and pushed at his nightshirt, and he took his hand away to draw his sash more tightly. When your ”watch is over, fetch that stranger and bring him down below,” he said. “I “would like to hear his tale.”

  I nodded. “Yes, sir. So “would I. And Mr. Abbey, too.”

  “Abbey?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He told me the man's a Jonah. He saw a coffin in the sea, and now he thinks “we're doomed.”

  Butterfield snorted. “Doomed to listen to rubbish.”

  “He was quite distraught,” I said.

  “Well, can't say I'm surprised. Gunners are mad, you know. The whole lot of them.” Butterfield snatched at his robe as it flapped open again. “I think all the noise—of their cannons and their infernal banging about—must knock something loose in their skulls.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Now let her have her head.” He was already going below. “I'm afraid we'll drive her under.”

  I turned the wheel, smiling at the memories he'd raised of my childhood, of the hours we'd spent crouched on the floor, pushing my little wooden boats across a carpet bunched into monstrous waves. He was my father's closest friend, Uncle Stanley to me, though we weren't related by blood. He would come to the house, in those days, straight from the sea, smelling of salt and wind. “Should we reef?” I would ask. “Are we driving her too hard?” And Uncle Stanley would say, “Oh, she can carry her sails.” I'd thought him absolutely fearless; it never occurred to me that he might have only wished to fetch the edge of the carpet as soon as he could, and end our game more quickly.

  I nudged the wheel and sent the Dragon back on her wilder course. She flew along toward fading stars as the sun came up behind her. Then poor Dana Mudge emerged from the fo'c's'le and patrolled once around the deck, as he did every day at dawn. Here and there—between the guns, against the fo'c's'le break—he stooped and straightened, then waddled to the rail. It was a ritual for him to collect the flying fish that had come aboard during the night and return them to the sea.

  As always, he made a report when he came to take the wheel. “Ten of the brutes this morning,” he said.

  “Very good,” I told him.

  Then he blinked and squinted, and put his hands on the spokes. He was the son of a farmer, with a plowman's strength. But Mudge always stood to the helm like a man to a battle, wrestling the Dragon through the waves as though he hoped to knock her flat as soon as he could.

  I went forward to wak
e the stranger, but found him instead at the foot of the foremast. He had his clasp knife out, and was whittling at a piece of wood. “The captain would like to see you,” I said.

  We went below, to a cabin lit only by the skylight. The broad windows across the stern were covered with heavy curtains, which Butterfield had fixed in place the day we'd left the land behind and hadn't opened since. He sat at his table, before a chart of the North Atlantic, under a lamp that swung wildly on its hook. His head tilted back as he took in all of the stranger's height. “What's your name?” he asked.

  “Horn,” said the stranger. He stepped under the skylight, the only place where he could stand erect. There, with his shoulders above the deck beams, the lamp swinging at the height of his elbows, he seemed as massive as a giant.

  The Dragon staggered along, though the seas weren't big at all. A wooden box with Butterfield's pipe and tobacco slid down the length of the table. He watched it, then looked at me. “Mudge?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Confound him.” He shook his head, then smiled at Horn. “Well, it's fortunate we found you.”

  “Why?” asked Horn.

  “Well, come on, man,” said Butterfield, perplexed. “I'm not asking you to thank me, but you were lost. A thousand miles from land.”

  “A little more than that, I think,” said Horn. “But I wasn't lost at all. I was making for the Ivory Coast.”

  Butterfield looked down at his chart. He frowned at what he saw. “Do you have a sextant?”

  “No.”

  “A log? A compass?”

  Horn shook his head.

  “Do you have charts?”

  “No,” said Horn. “But I know where I was going. I know where I started from.”

  “And where was that?” asked Butterfield.

  Horn named a position in degrees and minutes. The captain touched his chart, his finger running west across it, nearly to the Indies. He said, “You could have fetched the Indies in a week.”

  “Yes, more or less,” said Horn.

  I frowned. “Then why sail east?”

  Horn looked at me with a quick turn of his head, a gesture like a hawk's. “I wanted to go to Africa,” he said.