From Port Royal we rounded Morant Point and made north for the Windward Passage, intending to check things out at the French end of the island. But before I get into all that there are a few things I ought to cover first.
All the changes I wanted done to the Castillo Blanco had been completed. I did not like the new door to the captain's cabin and made the carpenters do it over and better-a heavier door with a higher sill to keep water out, a better lock, and so on. Everything else was fine the first time.
I put a stern chaser in that big cabin, a long nine that could fire out the back window right over the rudder. My idea was to have a bow chaser and a stern chaser the same size as the main battery guns, and that is what I did. We started with three guns per side, three four-pounders. We sold them and bought five nines per side, plus the stern chaser and a bow chaser. More guns always hurt the sailing qualities of a vessel because the weight is too high, but if she is not overgunned, the harm is not too bad. With twelve nine-pounders, the Castillo Blanco was not overgunned.
Speaking of that bow chaser, I saw something when we put it in that I had never realized before. A ship cannot have spirit sails set and fire a bow chaser dead ahead, not unless the captain is willing to blow his spirit sails all to heck with the first shot. That made me like jibs more than ever. We took down both spirit-sail yards and stowed them in the hold. Nobody wanted them.
Before we sailed, Red Jack came back with the men Antonio had talked to, and it was Big Ned and Mahu. Mahu talked too much and Big Ned hardly talked at all, but oh my gosh was it good to see them! The Magdelena was anchored out in the harbor by then, but Azuka spotted them and she and Willy came over in the jolly. Everybody met everybody and we had a party.
There are really three big differences between serving on a pirate ship and a merchantman, and they explain why so many sailors turned pirate. Number one is that everyone on board is easier and more relaxed. If the crew does not like the captain, they can vote him out. He has got to maintain discipline and the crew knows that, but he cannot be unfair or he goes. I would not treat a dog the way some merchant captains treat their men.
Number two is that each man does a lot less work. That is mostly because there are so many. If a man will not do his share, he generally is not made to do it. That is a danger sign, and most of the men know it. When the petty officers stop trying to put a man to work, he knows he is not going to be on board much longer. Sometimes he will shape up and work harder than anybody then, but a man like that will hardly ever keep it up for more than a few days, and pretty soon he is as bad as ever. Then he is put ashore someplace, and if it happens to be a place without water, those are the breaks. Sometimes a man like that will be put ashore on the mainland. Nine times out of ten the Spanish nab him and he hangs.
Number three everybody knows already. The money is a lot better. Sure, a pirate risks his life for it, but the merchant sailor does, too. What if pirates take his ship? Half the time they kill everybody. Do you want to be on the winning side or the losing side? The side that makes big money or the side that gets paid peanuts?
I have been surfing the Internet looking for info on pirates, and found some, too. I also found a guy who knew quite a bit, and we have been trading e-mails. One place in which he is wrong-in which a lot of books are wrong, too-is that he thinks discipline was rougher on a warship than on a merchant ship. I never served on a warship, but I talked with Capt. Burt every chance I got, and with some others who had sailed on them. Red Jack was one, and Novia was another. From what everybody tells me, a warship was about halfway between merchant and pirate.
People today can hardly bear to think of punishing anybody for anything. A kid can kill his mother, and if he cries a little and says he is sorry, they want to let him walk. (Fr. Phil is like that.) Back when I was Captain Chris, people got the merda beat out of them for petty little stuff and nobody thought much about it. But on a man-of-war, the officers knew they were going to be out in front when it came to fighting, and their men were going to be following them with cutlasses and pistols. It made a big difference.
Also the money was better on a man-of-war, at least when there was a war. If they captured an enemy ship, they paid out shares pretty much like we did. (If we had been privateers, we would have had to split with the Crown like they did.) The main difference was that we pirates did not need a war.
Here I ought to say that there were Spanish pirates, too. There were not as many because there was not as much English, French, and Dutch shipping as there was Spanish. But there were some, and they had more ports to operate out of.
I ought to say, too, that both kinds of pirates would turn on their own flag sometimes. An English or French ship was not always safe with us, especially if there was something we needed bad and yesterday. A Spanish ship was not necessarily safe with them, either. The thing was, we never got together much. Mostly we would take Frenchmen, Dutch, and so forth, and of course Scotch, Irish, Welsh, and guys from Africa. The Spanish pirates would take black guys, too, and had a lot of them. (And pretty often they had a dozen Native Americans to keep things interesting.) But that was it. Nothing else. It was a funny setup, when you come to think of it. Ihave just come back from way out in the country. Fr. Wahl is retiring and will stay on as pastor emeritus. I will be the new pastor, so two of us for as long as he lives. (May it be long!) After that, just me.
Yet the time is coming, and when it comes I am going. I did not tell Fr. Wahl that. I have not told anyone else, either. If I have to betray one age or the other, I would sooner betray this one.
There will be a fete on Saturday. At two, I am to arrive, fetched by Fr. Wahl. We will eat and drink and socialize, and that is all I know. Eventually I will unpack in a new bedroom. I will say mass at seven that night, and at seven and nine Sunday morning. Fr. Wahl will take the last mass, at eleven. I have prayed to be a good priest for as long as I remain. Suppose I do not finish this here. Am I supposed to take it to Our Lady of Bethlehem? No way! I have to write more and better, and hurry.
I had made Ben Benson our bosun. That sounds like a joke, but it was the job he wanted. We found his body outside the sail locker. He had been strangled. There was a man on board who said he had been a hangman for a while, and I got him to take a look at Ben.
"We al'ays tries to break the necks, Cap'n. Heavy enough and drop far enough is what does it, but you can't. Not al'ays. So I'd jump up and grab the feet and swing till they died. They'd look like him when I took the cap off. A cap is what we call it, so they can't see the face. But I'd take it off, after, to use again. Then I'd see 'em. So he's choked, but no rope. I'd see the marks."
Pete and I carried Ben's body out on deck. We did that because I thought the sunlight might show us rope marks we had missed. There were none, but we did see finger marks. He had been strangled by somebody with big, strong hands.
We buried him at sea, sewn in his hammock and weighted with a nine-pound round shot. After that I talked to a lot of the men, looking at hands and trying to learn who his enemies were. Just about everybody's hands were bigger than mine and looked stronger, but I could not find anybody who did not like Ben. Most of them had not known him until he came on board. Red Jack had been his friend. Big Ned and Mahu had been his friends, too-not as close as Red Jack, but friends. All three said they wanted to kill the man who had killed him, and it sounded like they meant it.
I made it clear to everybody that on my ship, fighting was one thing but killing was something else. Tell me and I would put them ashore, each with his cutlass. Other than that, I wanted to know who did it and why. That was fine with everybody, but it did not get me anywhere. Somebody had killed Ben. It had not been Mahu or Novia, and it sure as heck had not been me. After that it was up for grabs.
When I had talked to just about everybody and gotten no leads at all, I went into my cabin, closed the door, and prayed. Novia was out on deck sketching, and I guess she knew I did not want to be bothered.
In the beginning I prayed for Ben's soul. After that I prayed for mine. I told God I knew I was a pirate and no better than Ben. Any punishment He gave me would be just. I knew that, and I told Him so. Maybe I would yell and cry and beg and squeal, but I would never say what He had done was not fair. I promised I would never be any worse than I had to be, and begged Him to forgive me for everything wrong I had done and was going to do.
That was the only time in my life that I have heard the voice of God. He answered me, not in my mind or my heart, or in my soul. He spoke out loud, and His voice was wonderful in a way that there are no words for. What he said was "Love Me, Chris, and all else will follow."
When I went out on deck again, everybody was talking about the noise they had heard. Even though there was not a cloud anywhere, Novia said it had been thunder. Bouton said no, it had been guns. The Magdelena stood north-northwest of us just then, two or two and a half miles away. He thought she had fired her larboard battery. I told them I knew what it was, it had been for me, and they could forget about it.
Before I write about the galleon, there is one more thing I ought to cover-in fact, I should have written about this sooner. You know that when I had turned Estrellita over to Capt. Ojeda, I found Novia waiting for me in my cabin. It was dark, of course, and she was in the bed I had made on the cabin floor (it is a deck, really), hidden under the blanket. We had made love and had not talked much while we were doing it, just things like "Now," and "Do that again."
We did not talk in the morning, either. We were both afraid that one of us would say something that would break us up again, so we were both pretty quiet. When she got dressed, it was the blue shirt and the sailor's pants, and I was afraid she was going to leave like before.
She did not. But after that she dressed like a man a lot more often than like a woman. At first I thought it was so she could go anytime if there was another blowup, but she kept doing it after we put out. Sometimes she wore her gowns. More often, she just dressed like everybody else on board.
Part of it was size, I know. When we first met, she had told me she wanted to be round again, to be womanly. With us she did not have to work nearly as hard and got better food, when we were in port particularly. Some of the gowns she and Azuka had made would not fit at all, and the rest were tight.
The other part was something else. I think I know, but I am not sure I can make it clear. When she wore gowns all the time, and stayed in that tiny little cabin mostly, she had not really been one of us. When I had made her get out, and she-proud as she was, because Novia was always very, very proud-had turned around and come back, she had changed. I was a pirate, so she would be a pirate, too. Right about the time we were running from the Santa Lucia, something clicked with me that I had not seen before.
Bouton was first mate, but Novia was really number two on the ship. If one of those shots from the Santa Lucia had killed me, Novia would have been captain with Bouton as her first mate. Pages and pages ago I wrote about reading about those women who had been pirate captains. That would surprise a lot of people, but it had not surprised me. It could have happened on the Castillo Blanco.
We were headed up the Jamaica Channel with the wind south-southwest, about as good a wind as you can get for that course. When we rounded Lady Marie Cape, there she was. She could not have held the wind close enough to head straight for us, but she did not want to do that anyhow. She went for the place where we were going to be, holding as close as she could with all plain sail set.
When I say now that we tacked east, it sounds like I wanted to commit suicide, I know. I did not, and I will explain what I was doing in a minute. While we were tacking, I made signal to Rombeau on the Magdelena: SPLIT. MEET TORTUGA.
He acknowledged and held his course north, which was what I wanted.
Here is how I was thinking. First off, by going east I was going straight for the galleon like it sounds. I was heading between the galleon and the north coast of the Tiburon Peninsula. It meant I was going to have to pass in front of her broadside, sure. But she was heeling quite a bit, and I could see that she was not going to bring those guns to bear. Second, that end of the island was still French from what I had heard in Port Royal. I figured a Spanish galleon was not going to want to get too close to shore. Third, with us hugging the shore, the range was going to be long. And we were fast.
From all that, it ought to be clear I was figuring the galleon would go for the Magdelena. She was on course for her already, for one thing, and for another the Magdelena was bigger. When she did, I was going to come up behind her and cross her stern. It would mean coming under the fire of her stern chasers, sure. They would be twelve-pounders or about that, and there would probably be two (though there could be four). But while they were shooting at us-probably one shot from each gun-we would be raking her stern with our broadside. If we could not disable her rudder like that, it would be mighty poor shooting and we would try again.
I have gone into all this detail because I still think what I did was logical and good tactics. The problem was that the captain of the galleon was not on the same page. She turned into the wind a lot faster and handier than I would have expected from a ship that size and came after us. What she wanted, of course, was to come alongside us. With thirty guns a side in her main battery, she would have blown us out of the water. All we wanted was to get away.
We were fast, and that was good. But after a bit of racing along and gaining a bit on the galleon if anything, it hit me that all we were really doing was racing for the armpit of Hispaniola, where the land makes a hairpin turn to run northwest. That was where Port-au-Prince was, and there were sure to be shore batteries. If we were lucky, they might protect us. If we were not, they would probably sink us.
What looked practically certain was that once we got under the protection of those shore batteries we would not get out again until they said so, if they ever did. A good big bribe might do it-one that would leave us flat.
We would not have to make port there, though. Not unless we wanted to. We could turn north and try to slide past the galleon instead. I figured we would have about one chance in ten.
Up ahead I could see Big Cayemite Island, the little shallow channel between it and the coast, and a finger of land beyond it that would force us to turn north. That looked like a very, very big break to me just then, and I decided to go for it. If the galley followed us in there, she would have to drop back, and there was a good chance she would run aground. That is what I was hoping would happen. If she passed Big Cayemite on the north-which is what she did-I had another plan.
There are no brakes on a ship like my dear quick and slick old slider, but there are ways to stop pretty fast, and we used two of them. As soon as the galleon was out of sight behind Big Cayemite, we loosed the sheets, which spilled the wind from our sails, and we put the rudder over hard.
I think most of the crew thought I had gone crazy, but that is what we did.
If Castillo Blanco had been a speedboat with a nice big engine, I would have done a one-eighty and come out the way we went in. With the wind the way it was, there was no way. We would have had to tack, two steps forward and one back. It would have been too slow, and there was no room for it anyway.
What we did instead was sail east again, exactly like we had been going before, then gybe and head hard north so as to come up behind the galleon as she stood out to clear that finger of land. The bad part was that it was not the perfect crossing of her stern I had visualized. We came up at a slant, so our shots were more quartering than raking, and the range was five hundred yards or so.
The upshot-and it was up, we had to elevate our guns as much as we could-was that out of five shots we got three hits and two misses, and the galleon's rudder was not touched. She fired her broadside at us as we made north, too; but by the time her captain got her swung 'round for that, the range was a lot longer. If any of those shots made it as far as we were, they did not come close. We saw an awful lot of splashes, and my guess is that none did.
I was watching her through my glass, looking for hits-you can imagine. Praying for hits was more like it. I saw three, as I just wrote. I also saw all the gilding and carving on her stern, and she was the Santa Lucia, the same galleon that had crossed the Atlantic with us when I was on the Santa Charita.
After that it was a straight chase up the west coast of Hispaniola. The Santa Lucia had a couple bow chasers, and banged away with them. I would guess they were long twelves, or about that. When our stern chaser fired the first time, I was so busy trying to get a little more speed that I had practically forgotten about it. I watched the bow of the Santa Lucia through my glass for the next shot and the one after that, and the first hit right at the waterline. The next hit on her foredeck somewhere-I saw the splinters fly.
It was mighty good shooting, and I felt like I ought to run down and give the gun crew a pat on the back. Down I went, and guess who was aiming the gun and touching it off?
It was Novia, and that was when it really hit me that if something happened to me, she would be the new captain. The men swabbed the bore, loaded the new charge and the new ball, and ran the gun out again. She sighted the gun and fired it. I did not see where that shot went, but I saw the men cheer and heard her yell, "That's the way, my braves!"
When they were swabbing the bore for the next shot, I just backed out of the cabin and went up on the quarterdeck again. She was taking care of things down there as well as I could have or better. Anything I said or did was a lot more likely to hurt that operation than help it.
Right here is where there ought to be a desperate sea fight, with the Castillo Blanco slugging it out muzzle-to-muzzle with the Santa Lucia and me leading a little party of desperate men from our sinking hamburger stand onto the Spanish galleon. I would have a knife in my teeth, but I would shout something thrilling anyway.
Well, sorry. I am writing the truth here, and that is not how it was. We ran north into the Gulf of Gonave with the galleon in hot pursuit. She lost her bowsprit, and when one of Novia's shots broke her foremast main yard, the Spanish gave up. Rombeau had circled around with the idea of coming up behind her, but by the time Magdelena came into sight it was all over.
Here I ought to say something about shooting big guns at sea. It is a whole lot worse than shooting wild cattle with a musket. On land, you can generally steady your musket on a tree or a rock, or lay the barrel in a forked stick you carry. There is no way to steady a big gun at sea.
What is almost as bad is that you cannot be looking through the sights when the gun fires. The recoil would kill you.
Here is what you have to do. First you notice how much the ship is rolling or pitching-most of the time. (Every so often a big one will fool you.) Then you aim the gun. The best aim is to have the base of the enemy's mast in your sights at the top of the roll or pitch. You jump out of the way and grab the slow match. You stick the burning end in the touchhole, timing it so the muzzle will be as high as it is going to go when the gun fires. It will take a quarter of a second or so for your gun to fire after you touch it off.
There is a lot of luck involved. There is also a lot of skill, particularly in knowing the roll or pitch and knowing just how long it will be before the gun fires. A pretty bad shot may get lucky. It is bound to happen now and then. But in the long run, a good shot will beat a bad one hands down.
What I did was to say a Hail Mary, starting at the bottom of a roll or pitch, and notice where the top came, then touch off the gun one word before that. I do not know what Novia did. I only know it worked for her.