Pirates of the Timestream (29 page)

AUTHOR’S NOTE

It would be dishonest to deny our continued fascination with the pirates of the Caribbean, even though it probably says something about us that we would rather not hear.

Some readers may feel that my depiction of Port Royal, Jamaica, a.k.a. “the Sodom of the New World” in its piratical heyday of the 1660s must be just a mite exaggerated. They may be assured that everything I have written about the place is fully supported by contemporary sources. If it were still in business today it would be a favorite destination for Spring Break.

Likewise, Henry Morgan’s 1669 expedition to Maracaibo and subsequent getaway, which reads like something out of an over-the-top Hollywood pirate movie, is absolutely factual—and, as far as we know, accomplished without assistance from time travelers. Equally factual, for that matter, is Morgan’s later taking of Panama with a two-thousand-man pirate army he led across the isthmus in a march of incredible privations to fight and win a pitched battle against two-to-one odds. Think about that for a moment. Try to imagine forging a disciplined army out of two thousand Jack Sparrows. The man’s leadership ability must have been off the charts. Indeed, the entire career of this remarkable (if deplorable) figure is proof of the old chestnut that truth is stranger than fiction. It seems safe to say, as the Jamaicans still do, that his was a very powerful duppy. And it is eminently appropriate that a brand of rum is named after him.

Zenobia aside, all the pirate captains I have named as associates of Morgan are factual, and commanded the ships I have assigned to them. I know of no evidence that Roche Braziliano (roughly translatable as “The Brazilian Rock,” which sounds like the professional wrestler he would probably be if he were around today) was with Morgan at Maracaibo. But since he did not disappear from history until 1671, it is not impossible that he could have been. I challenge anyone to prove he wasn’t.

Don Alonzo de Campos y Espinosa is also a true-life portrait. On his return to Spain he was court-martialed for the Maracaibo fiasco by the War Tribunal of the Council of the Indies, but his conviction was voided. The feeling seems to have been that it wasn’t his fault that he had been up against a genius of sorts.

I couldn’t make up the names of the Port Royal whores if I tried. They are authentic, although I can’t prove that all the ladies named herein were practicing their profession at the time of the story.

There seems to be some disagreement on how far back the word “privateer” goes. It may not have been coined until the eighteenth century. But the people of the seventeenth century were nothing if not familiar with the concept, so even if the word itself is an anachronism I consider it a permissible one in the interest of clarity. And “pirate” was a fighting word—especially among privateers. Henry Morgan’s sensibilities were deeply wounded whenever anyone called him a pirate. You didn’t want to wound Morgan’s sensibilities. You really didn’t.

Dates in the historical sources are often imprecise, and the course of events immediately preceding the captains’ council off Cow Island is especially unclear. One account seems to suggest that HMS
Oxford
joined Morgan there and arrested
Le Cerf Volant
, only becoming Morgan’s flagship afterwards. I find this impossible to believe. Without the instantaneous global communications we take for granted today, her captain would have had no way of knowing Morgan and his fleet were going to be rendezvousing there and therefore no reason for going to that particular speck of land. I have accepted the other version, which is that
Oxford
reported to Governor Modyford at Port Royal, and that Morgan subsequently took her to Cow Island. This involves a certain amount of “random motion,” but the math works. Incidentally, Morgan actually had a total of twelve ships there before the
Oxford
disaster, and eight for his descent on Maracaibo. I have added one: the
Rolling-Calf
, which is imaginary, as is her set-to with the equally fictional
L’Enfer.

Likewise fictional (needless to say) is my version of the
Oxford
explosion’s cause, although everything else about it is supported by contemporary accounts. These accounts sometimes contradict each other; I have picked and chosen, taking the elements that seem most plausible and rejecting things like the mainmast falling across Morgan’s dinner table. The mere fact that he survived at all was so extraordinary that it seems to have lent itself to embellishment.

The Afro-Caribbean syncretic religions are a complex and fascinating subject to which I have endeavored to do accurate and respectful justice. The same goes for Jamaican folkways, but our information on these goes back only to much later periods. I have used aspects of the “Nine Night” funeral ceremonies and of the “Koo-min-ah” as it was witnessed among the Maroons as recently as the 1930s, and have attempted to “reverse-engineer” these practices back to the seventeenth century, with reference to their West African origins. The resulting synthesis should be considered, in its totality, a product of the author’s imagination. But the elements from which it is synthesized are authentic—except, of course, for the innovations introduced by Zenobia, which needless to say are entirely imaginary. In the same manner, the fictional rites in Chapter Sixteen—aside from the participation of a Teloi—are cobbled together out of actual practices of the
Secte Rouge
that were attested to in the same period of the 1930s. In all of these matters, I make a point of acknowledging my indebtedness to Zora Neale Hurston’s
Tell My Horse
.

The buccaneers’ articles of agreement described in Chapter Thirteen are also something of a composite, incorporating some provisions drawn from similar articles dating from the early eighteenth century. I doubt if these things changed much in fifty years or so.

There is really no meaningful way to compare currencies across the centuries, but it has been estimated that a piece of eight was the equivalent in purchasing power of a little over fifty turn-of-the-twenty-first-century U.S. dollars. An English pound was worth about four pieces of eight. To put it in perspective: under the provisions of typical articles like those described herein, a buccaneer who lost his right arm on a successful expedition got something over $30,000 in “disability compensation.”