Admiral (2 page)

Heffer was a suspicious and bilious man who always kept a door shut; to him an open doorway was only an invitation to eavesdroppers. As one of Cromwell’s generals (although as a colonel his role in the Western Design had been minor and the recent news of the Lord Protector’s death had left him feeling lost like an orphan), he was ready enough to suffer for the cause: the Lord Protector had first ordered him to the West Indies to serve in the army intended to carry out the Western Design and then later honoured him with the appointment of acting governor of Jamaica. It was given to few men to serve both their God and their Leader, and Heffer was thankful he had been one of those chosen.

Though quite where he stood at this moment he was far from sure, and he was even less certain about the future of Jamaica. Somehow he had stumbled (or been manoeuvred) into a position where, for the moment at least, his fate and the island’s both seemed to depend on the ideas and activities of the two buccaneers standing the other side of the table, Edward Kent and Thomas Whetheread, men who were almost strangers to him. It was in some ways fortunate that the Lord Protector was not alive to hear of it. What would his son Richard Cromwell, who now ruled in his place, think? Or supposing, as Whetheread seemed to think, Richard would by now have resigned or been overthrown by sterner officers in the army? Heffer had never met Richard, but the rumours he had heard in the last few years – that the Lord Protector’s son had neither the ability nor inclination to succeed his father – had been more than confirmed by gossip. By reports, he corrected himself.

The man Heffer knew as Whetheread pointed at the map. “Did you draw this?”

Heffer nodded modestly.

“But you actually surveyed it some months ago?”

“Er, yes, before you arrived here.”

“You were going to send it to the Lord Protector, eh, and when you heard that the Good Lord had suddenly withdrawn His protection from Oliver, you hurriedly redrew it without your original dedication and all the New Model Army embellishments.”

Heffer, startled and unsettled by Whetheread’s insight, said nothing. He was tall and painfully thin and had a remarkably long face. His head, with protruding teeth and odd tufts of hair clinging to the skull like a monk’s moth-eaten tonsure, reminded the other men of a poor-quality drumskin stretched over a sheep’s skull.

The heat dried the chevaux-de-frise of teeth so that as he spoke the inside of the general’s lips stuck and his tongue, constantly darting round to wet them, gave the impression it was trying to stop loose ones popping out.

Heffer had long ago discovered what he considered the road to success: merely surviving. From being a lowly officer in Fairfax’s army he had stayed alive, and always agreed with alacrity with his senior officers. As they were killed in battle, died of illness, or were arrested for showing Royalist tendencies, they left vacancies, steps up the ladder of promotion which the ever-pliant and ever-present Heffer had managed to climb. Having no sense of beauty, history or colour, but an abiding hatred and jealousy of tradition, honour or anything else he did not understand, he never hesitated when ordered to smash all the stained-glass windows whether in a modest church or an ancient cathedral like Ely: having his troops take axes to carved altar rails or mauls to chip away the marble of graven images gave him a thrill he never understood or admitted even to his wife: he needed only to know that he was doing the Lord’s work. He recalled arresting one rector who had protested that wrecking the Lord’s house could hardly be carrying out the Lord’s will, and proved him to be a Royalist and probably a Papist too.

Given command of a battalion and sent out in the expedition to Hispaniola, Heffer knew that he was lucky to have so far escaped the cholera that killed thousands of men, and even luckier to escape Cromwell’s wrath over the enterprise’s failure. He
survived
…he had been alive and blameless and a colonel when the Lord Protector was looking for a governor of Jamaica, after the expedition’s leaders, General Venables and Admiral Penn, had gone back to England (and the Tower) to face a disappointed Cromwell’s anger. Promotion to major-general and the appointment as acting governor was not bad going, he told himself, for a man who had joined Cromwell only because he seemed to hate the same things.

It was unlucky that his troops – particularly the officers – loathed Jamaica (the West Indies, in fact) and plotted and schemed to be sent home from the Tropics before they were killed by yellow fever or cholera. All Heffer’s attempts to have his troops plant and harvest so that they could later eat, and start doing something about capturing some of the thousands of beeves and pigs that roamed wild across the island, were a waste of time because his officers would do nothing that could lead Cromwell to decide on a permanent garrison for Jamaica. In fact, Heffer also knew that most of the officers had sent letters home by the last ship pleading with everyone they knew in London who had influence…

Yet they were fools. Heffer saw clearly enough that the threat that could stop them ever seeing their homes again came not from cholera and the black vomit but starvation and, less imminent, the Spaniards. The only other men in the island who seemed instinctively to understand all this were the buccaneers, led by Kent and Whetheread, who so far had brought in grain (at a price) to feed the garrison and recently captured enough Spanish guns from Santiago in Cuba to build batteries to defend Cagway.

Heffer grew angry and impatient at the thought of it. Everything was in a muddle. Two buccaneers were saving a Jamaica just captured by the Roundheads while the governor himself did not know if he was still the governor, now that Cromwell was dead. Worse still, he could not rely on the loyalty of the garrison: he was half expecting some disaffected officers to mutiny and set up a council to govern the island.

That last fear he had yet to reveal to Kent and Whetheread, who had not heard the latest crop of rumours gathered (almost gleefully, he sometimes thought) by his ADC, Rowlands, who reported that the officers, regarding themselves as freed from their oath of allegiance to the Commonwealth by Cromwell’s death, considered that now they were serving only God.

The man known as Kent looked carefully at the map and wished that Heffer’s wits were as sharp as his quill. It was strange staring down at the long sandpit known now as Cagway, the English rendering of the original Spanish name of Caguas. Heffer had shown the outline, a long thumb of land sticking out of the wrist of the mainland and almost closing the great natural harbour, with the sea on the south side and the almost-enclosed anchorage, like a great lake, on the north.

Yes, Heffer had translated the Spanish name for the sand-spit,
Palizados
, into the Palisades, and called the tip Gallows Point – a warning, Kent decided, that Heffer intended as much for his own soldiers as for pirates. This little inked-in square represented the house in which they were standing: the next square was the military headquarters. And there was the jetty used by the fishermen and the buccaneers, with a few streets of shops and taverns in between.

The inked-in rectangle was the fish market, with the dotted line showing the lobster crawl built out into the shallow water near the jetty. The shaded section labelled “meat market” seemed a rather pretentious name for a few square yards of blood-caked sand where a bellowing beeve or a squealing pig was lashed to a post to be slaughtered and butchered for the fortunate few who had enough money to catch the eye of the Spanish butcher, a renegade who decided to stay behind when his countrymen fled before Penn and Venables’ expedition.

Why had the Spaniards built the capital of the island on that flat land ten miles away, well inland and a long distance from the anchorage? To be safe from marauders? They had named it St Jago de la Vega, St Jago of the Plain, although the English now called it St Jago. Still, the effective headquarters for the island was here at Cagway, and Heffer had been lucky to be able to take over a strongly-built Spanish house and make it his home, with an almost identical building next door as the garrison headquarters.

“This battery,” Whetheread said, jabbing a stubby index finger down on a point half-way along the seaward side of the Palisades, almost opposite Heffer’s house, “this is going to be the most important one, don’t you agree Ned?”

Kent nodded and indicated the arc over which its guns should be able to fire.

“Oh, well now, Mr Kent, I –” Heffer began nervously, and then went on as both Kent and Whetheread looked at him encouragingly, “I thought the most important one would be here, right at the tip: the guns will be able to fire at enemy ships if they try to pass through the channel between the Palisades and the mainland and enter the anchorage.”

“No,” Kent said, “you’re looking through the wrong end of the glass. You have to prevent enemy ships getting as close as that in the first place: you need to keep up a heavy fire on them as they try to pick their way through these cays and reefs.” He pointed to the scattering of obstructions in the approach from the south. “While they’re trying to con their way up to the Palisades, your roundshot must be sweeping their decks – and they can only do that from a battery built here.” He put his finger down where Whetheread had indicated. “You cover them whether they approach along the coast or come up from the south. Then, if any ships do get through the fire from here, they have to run the gauntlet past another battery at the end. And if they get past that, then a third battery, here, will catch them as they round up into the anchorage.”

“You talk like an artilleryman,” Heffer grumbled, his tongue flickering across the front of his teeth.

“No, as a seaman,” Kent said cheerfully, as though to soothe Heffer. “The best way of planning the defences of a place is to picture yourself having to sail in to attack it. Which batteries could do you the most harm here? You’ll find I’m right –
this
is the one that matters. What are you going to call it – Cromwell’s Bastion?”

Heffer flushed but said nothing: apart from not knowing what was happening in England, he was far from sure of the buccaneers: these two, the leaders, were a whimsical pair; quite irresponsible, of course, and one could not be sure if they were serious. “Cromwell’s Bastion” sounded well enough, but…

“We brought you twelve culverins and five 3-pounders back from our raid on Santiago,” Ned said. “Where are you placing them?”

Heffer hurriedly changed his plans and hoped the two men could now be talked out of the proposed inspection which he had himself arranged, but which put all the emphasis (and most of the guns) on the battery out at Gallows Point. “I was proposing to put eight culverins in the battery opposite this house, to cover the approaches,” Heffer said smoothly, finding it easy to change his plan, “and the remaining four culverins at Gallows Point, to cover the seaward end of the entrance. Then I thought the five 3-pounders would go well at the anchorage end of the entrance.”

“Mere saluting guns,” Thomas said with a contemptuous sniff. “3-pounders simply make a bang…”

“You brought them,” Heffer could not resist pointing out, but hurriedly added, “and of course we are grateful.”

Ned said: “Once the batteries are built, complete with magazines, sleeping quarters, water cisterns and kitchens, we can always change the guns for larger ones as we capture them from the Spanish.”

Thomas slapped the table and said heartily: “Quite right, Ned, quite right: with the batteries there, we can always replace the guns. Come on then, let’s look at the sites.”

Outside the sun was blinding, reflecting up from the almost white sand. “Wait,” Heffer said, “I’ll send Rowlands for horses.”

“Not for me; I want to walk,” Ned said.

“Nor me,” Thomas said, patting his stomach. “I need some exercise. Diana’s complaining about my weight.”

Heffer, who hated the heat, also hated the sensation of walking on soft sand, and had planned at most a quick canter round the sites of the batteries, relying on the buccaneers’ unfamiliarity with horses to avoid a detailed inspection. Now he followed the two men, gesturing to his ADC. “We’re walking, Rowlands. You, too.” The youngster was getting puffy faced, and from his bloodshot eyes and lethargy in the mornings, Heffer suspected he was drinking heavily. He wished Rowlands would get rid of that sulky look while the buccaneers were here.

Ned and Thomas walked the hundred yards to the water’s edge and then stopped, facing southwards towards the Spanish Main five hundred miles away. On their right the sand-spit went on to form the entrance to the anchorage; on their left the sand-spit continued until it merged with the mainland, which went on for about fifty miles to the eastern end of the island. Behind them was the great, almost enclosed anchorage, and beyond that the mountains rising higher and higher in gentle ridges to form the distant eastern spine of the island, the Blue Mountains.

The Caribbean was calm; wavelets slapped the sandy beach and occasionally a silver flash caught the eye and showed a large fish leaping out of the water to land among its prey, or a small one trying desperately to escape. Hunter or hunted came up like an arrow rising from the sea and falling amid a shoal of smaller fish which had been innocently feeding, unaware of their danger.

“Watch out for your ankles,” Ned said, gesturing at the holes which pocked the beach like small coney burrows. “I’ve never seen so many land crab holes. Plenty of land crab for dinner, eh General?”

“Er,
land
crab? No, I haven’t tried it. I thought these were rat holes.”

Ned and Thomas stopped, staring at the general, hardly believing their ears.

“I thought you said your men were starving?” Thomas said.

“They are. You know we need grain, salt meat, vegetables…”

“Yet you don’t bother with one of the great delicacies of the West Indies!”

“Why, are land crab different from the ones found in the sea?” Heffer asked huffily.

“I don’t know – ask the crab. But the point is your men can catch land crabs at night with lanterns as easily as breaking stained-glass windows.” Thomas watched Heffer and noticed the flush. “The crabs just walk about.”