The Sugar Islands (10 page)

To him it was incredible that the blue lake whose gentle washing of the gold Mediterranean coast he had watched from his village square, could achieve such turbulent effects of terror. It was magnificent; it was terrible. At times the ship would plunge between waves so high that they would feel themselves becalmed, with not a breath of air blowing on them, and the sails hanging slack upon the masts. Then a second later they would be shot skywards so that they would have the sensation of standing on the edge of a turreted battlement. At their back would be the wail of the wind against the canvas, and streaming over the bows a river of crested foam. For days they were battered, driven, drenched, and shaken. For days they shivered in wet clothes in the fetid fo'castle. The cold of the Antarctic was upon them. Even the fiery rum that burnt their throats only momentarily warmed their veins. With numb and frozen fingers they clawed at the hard ropes, swarmed over the slippery masts. Their heads ached with noise and want of sleep. There were set, sullen looks upon the seamen's faces. ‘We were better off ten days ago,' they said. ‘At any rate we were warm then.'

Their meals had ceased to be of pleasure to them. They just wolfed their stew hurriedly before a lurch of the ship should spill a valued morsel. Provisions were running short. They had eaten, during the days of doldrums, the food that they had shipped from the Guinea coast. Their biscuits were maggoty. There were two
kinds of maggots. The grey maggots were tasteless and could be ignored. The white maggots had a bitter flavour. When white maggots emerged from the biscuit they knew that all that was nourishing in the biscuit had been consumed. They made no more bones about the eating of the maggots than would their relatives in Europe over a ripe cheese. In the Sargossa they had finished their last jar of butter. It had melted in the heavy heat. As they approached the last half-pound the yellow cream was filled with hair. At the bottom of the jar they found a dead mouse, completely bald, that had fallen into the jar, sunk, and been suffocated. They put the mouse into a stew; Roger had the luck to draw it. It tasted excellent. ‘As it should do,' he answered, ‘considering the good stuff it has been nourished in.' It was indeed the general view that the mice and rats were the best food upon a ship since they had fattened upon the ship's provisions. They were hard to catch, however. Two or three a day would be a whole ship's catch. More days than not the crew went hungry.

In shivering, surly clumps they would huddle together grumbling.

‘We're pretty fair fools, aren't we?' they would say. ‘Letting ourselves be led out here, just so that some merchant in Marseilles can buy himself another house. We're treated like slaves. We are slaves with a captain such as ours.'

Every day the cold grew more intense; the soaked clothing seemed a frailer protection against the wind; the food grew scantier; the crew grumbled more. There was water to drink now; and they were no longer afraid of the thirst that strong liquor woke in them. But the liquor was running short. The captain on his bridge learned of this with a wry face.

‘Warm liquor's more important than warm clothing. We shouldn't have relied on our getting plunder in so soon.'

The outlook was difficult and he knew it. But he was not showing any sign of nerves before the men. In his detached, indifferent fashion he would stand upon his bridge, his hands clasped upon the balcony. Then he would turn back to his cabin, and with a glass of grog beside him study his maps and charts. To the men he betrayed no sign of doubt.

All the same there were rumours below decks that things were not well. The other officers, it seemed, had been trying to persuade the captain to round the Horn instead of sailing through
the Straits. The Straits were dangerous and uncharted; they were narrow, with strong tides and uncertain anchor-ground, with contrary winds and sudden gales blowing from the sn6w-bound mountains. Nor could they be sure that were they forced to land they would be kindly treated by the native Indians, who had starved where they had not slaughtered the garrison with which Spain had attempted to block up the passage to other nations. The rounding of the Cape was a tough business, they maintained, but it was safe. And, once in the South Seas, the rich coasts of Peru would be at their mercy, and there would be the Manila galleons to be plundered on their way to Acapulco.

Unmoved the captain listened.

‘My men want food,' he said. ‘The ship needs to be careened. I can't run the risk of waiting.'

Though these deliberations were staged in the secrecy of the captain's cabin, rumours of them reached the crew. By every man below decks it was known that the officers and the captain were divided.

§

The entrance to the main bay of the Straits of Magellan is less than a mile across. It is set about with mountains so high that the sun rarely shines on them. It is beyond speech cold; snow falls; the nights are long. There are harbours, however, with good water and trees of an aromatic essence, whose bark smells like pepper shoots and whose green wood burns in the fire as though it were dry; there are rivers and pleasant streams. In the centre of the Straits the tides of the Atlantic and Pacific meet with a prodigious shock and noise. The floods rise to a great height from which they will subside so suddenly that there is a danger of the ship's being stranded on dry ground. The rise and fall of the tides is a matter of four-fathom depth. There is no piece of water in the world that demands more delicate navigation. As the ship passed through the high lane of rock, the sailors, for all that they were cold and hungry, sang as they laboured at the ropes. Soon they would have food and fruit; their course would be set northwards to the blue seas, blue skies, and heavy sunlight.

They were still singing when a sudden shock passed through the entire ship, when there was a scraping, rending noise, and the ship, for all that there was wind behind it, came to a sudden
halt. There was a silence. Then a pandemonium of voices through which rang loud and menacing the captain's voice. ‘Quiet there. There is nothing to be frightened over.'

Nor was there, for the moment. The ship had become wedged between two rocks that held it firmly.

‘Down into the hold,' the captain shouted. ‘See if there's a leak.'

There was no leak. The fabric had stood the strain. The ship was imprisoned but it was safe. The captain gathered the crew together.

‘There is no danger,' he said. ‘In a little while when the tide subsides we shall be on dry ground. We shall then careen the ship, loosen it, and when the tide rises, float it. In the meantime I shall send the pinnace in search of a harbour where Indians may be met and gifts exchanged with them.'

Roger was one of the sailors chosen. They took with them bangles, glass jewellery, and other such gimcrack objects as would be likely to appeal to the simple Indian. They rowed upwards of ten miles to a bay on the north side of the second narrow, where a ship could ride in clear, sandy ground.

The Indians had gathered on the shore to meet them. They were of middle stature, well-limbed with round faces, low foreheads, little noses, small black eyes and ears, black hair of an indifferent length. Their teeth were white; their faces were of an olive colour, daubed with spots of white clay and soot; their bodies were painted with red earth and grease. After the fashion of a Highland plaid they wrapped round them the skin of seals; they made caps for themselves with the skin of chickens to which the feathers remained attached; their feet they protected with skin sandals. The women wore no caps but instead surrounded their arms with shell bracelets. They were active and nimble and, in spite of the cold, went naked. Their language was guttural and slow. They displayed the highest satisfaction over the trinkets that the sailors showed them. In exchange they gave such fish and fruit as they possessed, promising to bring more on the next and following day. That night, for the first time for many days, there was revelry and song aboard the
Bordelais.

At the same time there was a feeling of discontent. There might be fresh fish and fruit upon the table, but the ship was
wedged between two rocks. The captain in whom they had trusted had wedged it there.

‘The officers were right,' the seamen said. ‘He should have taken us round by the Cape. It's mere chance that there's one of us alive.'

For the first time doubt of their captain's seamanship had come to them. Roger, lying back in his hammock, his hands crossed behind his head, listened with a sardonic smile upon his lips.

‘Yes, yes,' he said, ‘and you talk like that, and you say that he's a swine, that he's not even a good sailor, yet you'll show up quietly while the ship's refloated and set off through the Straits. You'll trust your lives to a man you hate, whom you've no faith in. You don't know where you're going. You'll be starved; you'll be cold; you'll go short of wine; and all so that some rich man in Marseilles shall grow more rich. You'll grumble, but you'll submit.'

In years of experience of the sea Roger was the junior man aboard. And though he was broad-shouldered and well-built, there were half a dozen men whose fists could have settled a quick account with him. But his voice had a note of authority that no other man's had got. His fellows listened to him uneasily.

‘What else is there for us but to submit?' they said.

Roger made no direct reply. His eyes were fixed on the blackened roof.

‘There's plenty of time. There's no hurry yet,' he said.

He did not let the matter drop. He had learnt much in the taverns of Marseilles of the sea's life and of the ships that sailed it. ‘We're told that we've come to trade in the South Seas,' he said. ‘We haven't. We're privateers. We're looking for a ship to plunder, a town to sack or ransom. We're at war with the world, English, Spaniards, Dutch; they are free, any one of them, to attack us. We're no better off than the filibusters of Tortuga.'

In the cafés of Marseilles he had heard often of that strange group of derelicts from St. Christopher, who had banded themselves against the hazards of Spanish tyranny on the small turtle-shaped island to the north of San Domingo. From all countries they had come. There were Protestants from La Rochelle and Dieppe; soldiers unemployed after the religious war and by the disappearance of the Prince's party; Scottish Puritans and English
Catholics; cadets of Gascony, Normandy, and Flanders; sailors who had mutinied or deserted;
engages
who had broken from their servitude to the white planters in San Domingo. Inoffensive settlers to begin with, but driven by oppression to realize that they must fight or die, they had levied war in their long boats against the world. ‘No prey, no pay' had become their motto. There was no West Indian captain whose spy-glass did not nervously sweep the horizon for signs of the Brethren of the Coast.

‘If we were one of them, we should be in no worse danger than we are now,' said Roger. ‘And we should be free, we should be working for ourselves.'

The crew listened, suspicious but impressed.

In the shadowed room, lit by the wavering lantern light, he looked strong and purposeful, with his broad shoulders, his proud, high-held head, his long beaked nose, and the scar that ran along his cheek-bone.

‘We are slaves,' he repeated, ‘and we needn't be. Not so many miles away there is an island where we could live freely, as we chose, fighting whom we chose, when we chose, sharing our spoil among us.'

He paused, and when he spoke again his voice had a ringing, imperious quality, a quality that made each sailor recognize the power of leadership.

‘We are many, he is one.'

§

Two mornings later the
Bordelais
was driving fast and straight through the second narrows. That night the second mate was roused in his sleep by a foully smelling hand pressed on his mouth and the point of a dagger rested against his throat. Through the dusk of the cabin he could not recognize the faces that peered down into his; nor was the voice that whispered into his ear familiar.

‘You will make no sound or you will be killed,' the voice was whispering. ‘You will get up, and you will walk to the captain's cabin. You will knock on the door and ask him to let you in. What follows is not your affair.'

Drowsy with sleep and wine, the first mate stumbled from his hammock. With the point of the knife pressed close against his side he felt his way down the passage to the captain's cabin.

He beat with his fist on the studded door. There was silence, then a voice, angry, rough, resentful:

‘Who's that? What is it? I'm asleep.'

‘It's I, Dargot.'

‘I can hear it is. What in hell's name do you want?'

‘To see you.'

‘What about?'

He hesitated. The point of the knife was pressed tighter into his side.

‘About something very important,' he called back.

‘Ah, very well, then.'

There was the sound of a shot bolt, the creaking of a hinge. The door swung open. As it did so the first mate received a push in the back that flung him face downwards on the cabin floor. Lying there in the corner he saw what happened; saw stride into the room a young sailor, tall, lithe, broad-shouldered, with long beaked nose and a scar below the eye, with after him a half-dozen or so of sailors, three of whom pinioned the captain's arms behind the head. That he saw with his head singing, with a hand gripped upon his throat, with the cold blade of a cutlass laid against his neck; saw it, and seeing, heard the astounded, indignant boom of the captain's voice: ‘Now what in hell's name does this mean?'; heard that and heard ringing on it the reply of the young sailor: ‘What does it mean? Not more than this. That the ship's head is going to be set south; then, when the Horn is rounded, to the north.'

The captain glared with wild, rage-filled eyes.

‘And after that?' he asked.

‘After that we will decide with the filibusters of Tortuga what use is to be made of her.'