The Buccaneers Read online

  I peered down and saw something solid come rising from the sea. I clutched the rail and cried aloud. It was Abbey's coffin, I thought, or his vision of a coffin somehow come into being.

  Chapter 6

  FIDDLER'S GREEN

  Long and narrow, wrapped in weeds, that thing like a coffin shot from the water, right before my eyes, with a burst of spray and a nearly human gasp of bubbles. It rose so high that it stood nearly on its end, then fell back and floated at the Dragons side. Then I saw that it was only a boat, a little dory with its oars still lashed neatly to the thwarts.

  There was something awful about that boat, as encrusted as it was with sponges and sea growth. It seemed as though Davy Jones himself had sent it back for one more voyage, to fetch another lot of seamen to his locker. But at the same time it seemed quite brave and hopeful, the only survivor of an unknown ship. And the captain said, “Haul it aboard.”

  For the first time Horn shirked a task. He would neither touch a line nor lay a hand to that boat; he was all for leaving it behind, for filling it with shot until it sank with the rest. But we raised it up nonetheless, and headed on to the Indies, which we sighted ten days later.

  I had looked forward to that moment since the day we'd left London. I had imagined that we would greet the land— the New World—-with a great celebration, that we might dance on the deck like barefooted pagans. But it was a solemn moment when the islands came into view, mere smudges on the water. Captain Butterfield stooped and touched a knee to the deck. And Horn looked at the land with despair on his face, like a man peering up at his gallows.

  The islands grew larger and darker. We saw the bright green of trees, the gray of bare rock. We saw more islands beyond the first, and more after those, until they stretched in a chain in either direction. There was no obvious gap between them, no passage to take.

  “Where are we?” I asked the captain.

  “I'm afraid I don't know,” he said. “Perhaps you'll fetch the chart.”

  I brought it up from below and Butterfield spread it on the quarterdeck. He knelt over it, looking now at the land and now at the chart. Mr. Abbey joined him and did the same, and they looked so much like a pair of chickens pecking at the deck that I nearly laughed out loud.

  “This isn't funny,” snapped Butterfield, seeing my grin. “We're lost; can't you see that?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “There's only one passage that keeps us high to windward and free of dangers. But where is it?” He waved toward the land. “Where's Antigua in all that lot?”

  “Horn would know,” I said.

  “Spinner, aye!” cried Abbey. “He'll give us a yarn and send us on a wild-goose chase, no doubt.”

  “Be quiet,” said Butterfield. “John's right.”

  So Horn, too, was brought aft. He took one look at the land, and not so much as a glance at the chart. “Turn north,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” asked the captain.

  Horn pointed. “That's Martinique you see there, off the larboard bow.”

  Butterfield spread his fingers across the chart. He measured a distance of almost two hundred miles to Antigua. “We can't be off by that much,” he said.

  “Then hail that trader there,” said Horn, “and ask her if I'm wrong.”

  “What trader?” Butterfield again squinted toward the land. Abbey stood beside him, squinting too, and I as well. Finally I saw it, white against the land, a tiny triangle scudding to the north.

  “There,” I said.

  “Blast me,” said my uncle Stanley. “I just can't see it. Still, if the boy says it's there, that's good enough for me.”

  Horn snorted. He wandered off as we turned to the north and closed on the trader. She was sloop rigged, slower than the Dragon, and we overtook her quickly, in an arc that took us up her wake. Soon we saw the helmsman, sitting lazily with his feet against the tiller. He looked toward us.

  And leapt to his feet.

  The little trader burst into activity, suddenly alive with tiny figures. Every sail that she could carry-was hauled aloft in a madman's rig of much-patched canvas. Heeling hard, nearly driven under, she raced toward a reef where the rollers were bursting in ragged lines of white.

  “Gracious!” said Butterfield, staring after her. “There's a fine welcome for us.”

  We carried on—to the north, as Horn had advised. We came across a second sloop, sailing south, but she turned and raced to the west. Then a third trader, coming out from the land, went beetling back again.

  “Confound it!” said Butterfield. “Do they think we are lepers?”

  Little Roland Abbey was beside himself. “Let me have a crack at them with the guns,” he said. “I'll show them what we are.”

  For three days we tramped to the north, and every boat we saw fled at the sight of us. Then we found Antigua just where Horn had said, and threaded through the islands to the Caribbean Sea and its waters of blue and gold. The next morning, we saw the mountains of Jamaica, so high that clouds covered them like snow.

  It was the fifty-third day of our passage when we rounded the tip of the Palisadoes peninsula and came into Kingston Harbour. From the wheel, I saw the bay open up and the flat, bustling city appear ahead. To starboard, below the guns of Fort George, the English warships lay to their anchors off old Port Royal, packed into columns and rows like a wall of wooden bricks. We glided past them with the mainsail shaking, and a flurry of pennants rose from the ships and the naval station. Hoist after hoist went up, a furious signaling from ship to ship and fleet to shore.

  “They're gossiping like a lot of fish-wives,” said Abbey. Many of the hoists were strange to him, but he got at least the sense of what the ships were saying. “They're wondering who we are and where we've been. It seems they think we're something of a mystery.”

  “At least they're not running away,” said Butterfield. He stood with his hands behind his back, telling me to steer first for a mountain and then for a church when it came into view. We saw the docks and the quays; then he shouted, “Luff up!” and I turned the Dragon into the wind.

  She stopped, then drifted back with a slattering of sails. “Let go!” called Butterfield, and down went our anchor. And there we lay, fixed again to the earth but half a world from home, in the same bay that had sheltered Blackbeard and Morgan and Kidd.

  My legs ached for a run across the green slopes, my heart begged to explore a new world. But the ship came first, with her score of needs, before any man could leave her. And before I could hope to go, there was a cargo to unload and another to find, for a ship must earn her way. So we set to work in the heat and sounds of Kingston, and only my mind went wandering.

  It was the same for all of us. Long glances were cast at the shore as we bundled the sails and coiled the halyards. My feet were on the deck, but my head was up in the mountains when the navy sent a boat to meet us. It darted across the harbor with six men at the oars and an officer steering. He was a lieutenant, but barely older than me, a Scottish boy with a flame of hair swelling like tufts beneath his hat. He hailed the deck and asked, “What ship are you?”

  Butterfield answered him from the quarterdeck rail. “The Dragon, “ he said.

  “From England?”

  “Yes.”

  His voice was too boyish to reach very far. But it was the first that we had heard apart from our own, and the crew gathered closer to hear. Only Horn didn't bother with the boy. He stayed aloft on the topsail yard, fussing all by himself with a sail that was already furled.

  The lieutenant looked up at our captain. “Did you see any sign of the Prudence?”

  “I wouldn't know her,” said Butterfield.

  “A black schooner like yours, but with twelve guns,” said the boy in his brogue. “We thought you might be her coming in, until we saw that great beastie on your bow.”

  Butterfield muttered under his breath, then shouted down at the boat. “What of her?”

  “She's overdue in England,” said the li
eutenant. The rowers and the man at the tiller were all looking up. “It seems she's lost, sir.”

  “We saw her not,” said Butterfield. “I'm sorry.”

  The young lieutenant touched his hat and bid his rowers to backwater. He sat at his tiller, then popped to his feet again. “Her captain's Bartholomew Grace,” he said. “If you hear anything of her, will you report it to the admiral?”

  “I will, sir,” said Butterfield.

  The boat turned and started back toward the fleet, its six oars swinging like two. We went back to our work, and soon I watched our own longboat rowing away, carrying all but myself and Abbey and Horn. The huge, bronzed sailor had no wish to step ashore, and he vanished below, into the shade of the fo'c's'le. Abbey claimed to be too old for the pleasures of Kingston; he chose to spend his day among the guns, making me think that he was really hoping for a sudden attack by picaroons. And I was left in charge, a mixed blessing to be sure.

  Our cargo of wool was ferried ashore in lighters crewed by black-skinned men. The boats left full and returned the same way, packed with water and provisions. An afternoon wind brought an illusion of coolness that pleased me at first, until the wind brought a stench from a decrepit old ship anchored deep in the bay.

  I helped Abbey polish his guns, but spent more time staring than polishing. I leaned on the rail and gazed at the shore, and at the ranks of warships with their yards perfectly squared. Behind them, the ruins of the ancient pirate haven writhed in waves of heat.

  “If there's such a thing as ghosts, that's where you'll find them,” said Abbey. “The old buccaneers stroll beneath the harbor with the fish and the worms, so they say. When it's dark, they come wading out, cloaked in dripping weeds.”

  He twitched. “I guess that's where I'll be soon enough, down at Davy Jones or aloft at Fiddler's Green.” For a moment he stopped polishing. “Do you think there's such a place?”

  “Don't talk like that,” I said.

  “Why not?” he asked. “My days are numbered, and I'd like to know what becomes of a man when he's gone. When you see a coffin passing by, you begin to wonder.”

  “You saw shadows,” I said. “A trick of the light.”

  Abbey shook his head. He started polishing again, in places already polished. “It must be cold and dark in Davy Jones's, but they say it's warm and it never rains in Fiddler's Green.”

  I watched him, and I saw a tear fall from his cheek and splash on the cannon. He rubbed it away.

  “Maybe you get a choice,” he said. “If you like the sea, you go down to Davy Jones. And if you're like me, and you do your sailing close to land, you go up to the Green instead, where there's dancing and taverns and trees to sit under. What do you think, John?”

  “I don't know,” I said.

  “We'll find out soon enough.” He patted the gun. “Not long to wait now.”

  “Until what?” I asked.

  “I don't know,” said he. “Not exactly. But I had a dream last night. I saw a rain of iron, a flood, a pestilence, and a fire. That will be the end, I think. The fire.”

  I couldn't listen anymore. I moved to the top of the cabin and sat by the little dory that had come from the drifting death ship. Its crust of growth had hardened, smelling strongly of the rich odor that makes landsmen think of the sea—but sailors of the shore—and I picked idly at the shriveled sponges and weeds. Below them the dory was white-painted, with a crisp red stripe at her sheer, a once-pretty boat that I hoped to make pretty again. I covered the cabin's top with scraps of green and gray as the lighters banged against the Dragons hull in the chop of the afternoon winds. The stronger the wind blew, the worse was the smell from the rotting ship, and I longed to get to sea again. But we unloaded only half our cargo that day.

  In the morning another ship arrived, as putrid and sea-worn as the other. It passed in a cloud of the same dreadful stench, but went straight to the wharf, where the hatches were opened. And a sound came out of that ship, a terrible moan and a howl.

  Again I was left with Abbey and Horn, and once more the lighters scuttled back and forth. Lightened of her burden, the Dragon floated higher, and I stood at the stern, staring down at her outer planks, which were thick with weeds. Like a man, the ship had grown tangled beards during the passage. There was already enough grass to feed a cow, and I was thinking that she would have to be careened and scraped before we left for home, when Horn came up beside me.

  “It's done,” he said.

  “What's done?” I asked.

  From behind his back he brought out a bottle, and a sight that made my knees feel weak. Inside, a little schooner heeled to a lively breeze. Black-hulled, white-winged, the Dragon flew through gouged-out waves.

  Chapter 7

  THE SLAVE TRADER

  The bottle glowed from the sun. Horn offered it to me, but I wouldn't take it. The curse of all his other ships suddenly seemed too real and too close. But neither could I look away. And the closer I studied his model, the more I saw that it wasn't right. The topsail was too big, the deck carved flush with only a small quarterdeck. The gaffs peaked higher than they ought to.

  I said, “You've got it wrong.”

  “I don't,” said Horn.

  “The Dragon doesn't look like this,” said I.

  “Well, it's not the Dragon, then.”

  He sounded annoyed; I had hurt him with my-words. But I felt such a strange relief that I took the bottle and told him, “It's a fine little ship.”

  “My last one,” said Horn. “That's just as she was when I left her.”

  “The Meridian Passage?” I asked.

  “No.” Softly, he added, “She was a packet.”

  “And packets don't count,” I said, repeating his earlier phrase.

  “They don't.” He reached for the bottle but I wouldn't give it up.

  “What's her name?” I asked.

  “You wouldn't know her,” said Horn.

  “I might.”

  “You wouldn't.” His hands moved fast as lightning as he snatched the bottle from me. “I shouldn't have shown you this.”

  “Then why did you?” I asked, hurt by his tone.

  “I thought we were shipmates,” said he.

  “We are,” I cried.

  “Then leave me in peace,” said Horn. His arms trembled; his fist squeezed the bottle. “That's what shipmates do. They don't badger each other like this.”

  I couldn't understand his sudden mood. “I only asked the name of your ship.”

  “Good day, Mr. Spencer,” he said with a snarl. He turned on his heels and stalked away.

  “Wait!” I shouted, but he didn't stop. I sat for a while, confused by his outburst, trying to see what I'd done to offend him. I went back to the dory and scraped at its planks as I wondered how much I knew about Horn. Precious little, I soon saw—only that he'd set off in a lifeboat from a packet called Meridian Passage, and that he once had sailed on a ship that looked much like the Dragon. Then I thought of the young lieutenant who had asked about the ill-fated Prudence. “We thought you might be her,” he had said. “Until we saw that great beastie on your bow.”

  I nodded to myself. The Prudence was a navy ship, and it made sense that Horn had been in the navy. In the last nine months, after England and France signed their peace at Amiens, thousands of sailors had been turned ashore. Horn could have been among them, or even among the thousands of others who had stayed in the navy, for the peace had not seemed likely to last. There had been talk of another war long before the Dragon had departed a cold and wintry England for her voyage to the Indies.

  Was it only a coincidence that the Prudence was reported lost just as Horn appeared in his lifeboat? His navy-built lifeboat? I felt as though I was getting close to the truth, but I had no time to think it out. Our holds were empty at last, and a man arrived just then to measure us for a new cargo.

  He was blond and fat, sunburned to a red crisp on his face and his hands. He looked like a strawberry sitting in his boat. And he heave
d himself up at the shrouds, gasping breaths through his nose. He called me “boy.” “Who's in charge here, boy?” he asked.

  “I am,” I said.

  “Oh?” He raised his eyebrows, and the burnt skin on his forehead wrinkled. “And who are you?”

  “John Spencer,” I said.

  He grunted. “Are there any men about?”

  “None who'd care to talk to you.” I didn't like the man at all.

  For half an hour he paced through the holds with small and awkward steps. He carried a little red notebook, and a pencil stub that he licked over and over. The wind picked up, thick with its odors, before the man climbed out again. He took a moment to catch his breath.

  “Well, she's small,” he said, to himself more than to me. “But she'll do, I suppose.” He picked a bit of skin from his cheek. “You'll have to be fitted for it, of course, and you won't carry half as many as the Island Lass over there.”

  With a small tilt of his head, he showed me where the Island Lass lay, and I turned to look, expecting to see a ship as pretty as her name. But I found instead the one that had arrived with the stench and ghastly moans.

  “The Lass carries nearly a thousand, but I'll tell you, boy …” His lips moved as he read his numbers, loading the ship in his mind. “You might get two hundred in your little hold. A hundred in the fo'c's'le.”

  “A hundred what?” I asked.

  He looked at me as though I were stupid. “Slaves,” he said.

  “People?” I asked.

  “Slaves,” said he, as though there were a difference.

  The Dragon's fo'c's'le was crowded with just our crew of eight. “How do you put a hundred people in there?” I asked.