Admiral (22 page)

“We have some documents to sign.”

“Documents?” Diana exclaimed. “Is he selling you beeves, or vegetables?”

“Oh no, he’s given us both islands…”

“Given?”

“Well, surrendered is the correct word.”

Diana turned and put her arms round him and kissed him full on the lips. “I don’t know how you did it,” she said, “but that’s your reward from me.”

He turned to Aurelia with a grin, but she shook her head. “You’ll get mine later,” she said and then blushed.

Ned led the way down to the cabin, where Lobb and Secco were lighting lanterns and the two Spaniards were trying to look at ease. The two women followed, and in excellent Spanish Aurelia asked the men what refreshment they would like. Both Spaniards refused with an elaborate politeness that made Ned think they were secretly congratulating themselves on avoiding poisoned wine.

Ned put paper, quill and ink on the table, waited while Secco and Lobb trimmed the wicks of the lanterns, and then said: “Your Excellency, let us prepare an inventory of Santa Catalina’s defences.”

He pulled the wooden plug from the ink bottle. “Now, the castle, Santa Teresa, I believe you call it.”

Vásquez told Hernández: “You know all the figures. Tell him.”

The garrison commander wrinkled his brow. “Twenty guns in four different sizes, all English – 18-, 12-, 8- and 6-pounders. Ten pipes of Spanish muskets with ten muskets to each pipe. Spanish-made swords, pikes, breast and back plates of armour…”

“Continue with the various forts,” Ned instructed, dipping the quill into the bottle again and taking a fresh sheet of paper.

“The next biggest is Fort St Jerome, by the bridge. Eight guns, all English, 12-, 8- and 6- pounders. Two pipes of muskets, I think, but I don’t know about swords and armour.”

“What about powder?” Ned asked.

“Altogether there are three hundred quintals of coarse, and fifty quintals of priming powder, Spanish of course, but it is distributed among the forts and batteries according to the number of guns they have.”

Ned finished writing and said: “Carry on with the forts – names and numbers of guns.”

“Well, St Joseph’s fort has six guns, 12- and 8-pounders. Like the rest of them it has muskets, armour, swords, but I do not know the figures. St Matthew’s Fort has three 8-pounders; St Augustine’s has three guns, 8- and 6-pounders; Santa Cruz has three guns but I cannot remember the weights, except that they were cast in Spain. San Salvador’s Fort, and the two batteries, each have two guns, Spanish, but I do not recall the sizes. And twelve falcons with carriages – they are in the courtyard of Santa Teresa.”

“And roundshot?” Ned asked.

“I cannot remember exactly, but not too many for the English guns because the shot are old and they rust and get smaller when they are scaled. You saw this morning that the shot would not reach your ships – they were such a poor fit in the bore of the guns that they rolled about like an orange in a bucket.”

“Give me a rough figure.”

“About two hundred shot for each English gun, and three hundred for the Spanish.”

“And totals of armour?”

“I think there are one hundred breast plates, one hundred back plates, and fifty helmets.”

“What else?”

“Eighteen barrels of balls for the muskets – they are all in the magazine of Santa Teresa, because we were just about to issue them. Let me see…four hundred empty grenade cases, in good condition and newly painted…fourteen barrels of brimstone, but the barrels are not in good condition…”

“Slow-match, pistols, pistol balls, flints?”

“Ah yes, a total of three hundred bundles of slow-match in Santa Teresa, and two bundles in each of the other positions. Four skips of pistols – about five hundred altogether, all fine Spanish wheel-locks. Fifteen barrels of balls for them. Flints – about five thousand: a ship brought us several barrels recently. We get them from the Netherlands,” he said vaguely.

“That is the whole inventory?”

“All that’s left. You see, the garrison –” he broke off when he realized the significance of what he had been about to say.

Ned gave a dry laugh. “The garrison was taken to Jamaica. Yes, I was aware of that.”

Vásquez said: “Do you know what has happened to them?”

Ned shrugged his shoulders expressively. “The English were expecting them and they have a large garrison…” Both facts, Ned thought, were quite true; Vásquez, judging from his long face, was drawing the wrong conclusion.

A bellow of laughter told Ned that Thomas had arrived on board, and Vásquez looked up, startled. “My second-in-command has returned,” Ned said, forestalling any protest. “There was no point leaving him standing on the beach to be eaten by your mosquitoes, which probably welcome a change to Protestant blood.”

He collected the sheets of paper listing Santa Catalina’s inventory and handed them to Aurelia. “I shall need four copies of that for tomorrow, when we start collecting it.”

He turned back to Vásquez but paused as Thomas came down the companionway scratching himself and cursing.

“Those sandflies and mosquitoes,” he growled. “They have bites like sword thrusts!”

“You’re just in time to help draw up the surrender terms.”

“Keep it short and simple, Ned. Then we can’t argue afterwards about the wording.”

Ned nodded. “You’re quite right. Let’s draft it in English on one side of a sheet of paper, and then translate it. Two copies and all four of us to sign.”

For the next fifteen minutes Ned and Thomas wrote, crossed out, altered and rewrote a draft while the two women, Lobb and Secco made criticisms and suggestions, and Vásquez and Hernández sat in the lantern light looking like subjects waiting to model for a painting by one of the sadder Dutch masters.

Finally Ned sighed and put down his quill. “I think that will do. Let me read it aloud in English from beginning to end without anyone interrupting.”

When he had finished and Thomas, Secco and Lobb agreed it was adequate, Aurelia suddenly said: “I have just been looking through the inventory. Your surrender terms really mean that the Spaniards hand over all the arms on Santa Catalina, true?”

Ned nodded warily: he knew only too well that when Aurelia used this tone of voice she felt very strongly about something.

“You are not making them provide grain, cattle, hogs; you are not even making them provide labour to restore the bridge and carry this stuff across so that you can load it from the port.”

“No, well,” Ned began lamely, and Thomas offered a tentative: “Well, you see –”

“I do
not
see,” Aurelia said firmly. “You men have made an agreement with these two – these two poltroons – where you allow them to give you back English guns, a few paltry Spanish pistols, and a few quintals of Spanish powder which is probably damp and you know is always unreliable. This,” she said with a contemptuous gesture which threw the pages of the inventory across the table and made one of the lanterns flicker, “you call a great victory. It is – for the Spanish. They give you back your guns and get rid of you!”

There was a full minute of complete silence in the cabin, broken eventually by Diana. “And take that silly grin off your face, Thomas. At least Ned bluffed them into surrendering the place –”

“He didn’t bluff them!” Thomas protested. “The rest of the ships are in sight!”

Diana waved away the protest, but Ned said: “You’re right,
ma chérie
, and I’ve handled it all very stupidly –”

“But,” Thomas interrupted, “Don Poltroon here will agree to our terms, so that’s like a contract. It’s as though we’ve given our word.”

“One does not give one’s word to a scoundrel, nor accept his,” Diana said haughtily. “Anyway, he hasn’t heard the terms yet.”

“Yes, dear,” Thomas said, a plaintive note in his voice. “But Ned and I, slow-witted coxcombs that we are, have given our word, so there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Vásquez said nervously in Spanish: “You quarrel: There are difficulties? Do we not sign the papers?”

“It is nothing,” Ned said, “my wife is complaining that she cannot read my writing – she is to make copies of the inventory.”

Vásquez smiled understandingly. “The words used by artillerymen are hard to understand, and you had to write quickly.”

Ned did not bother to translate for the others: he was becoming angry, the more so because he knew Aurelia was right. He and Thomas had behaved like two excited schoolboys raiding a neighbour’s orchard.

Yet…yet…the fact was he never wanted to capture and keep Old Providence; never even considered the idea. He wanted to seize it long enough to scare the Spanish authorities into recalling the Jamaica expedition, and while he held it he wanted to pull its teeth by taking or destroying its guns, so that when the garrison returned their only weapons would be the muskets, swords and pikes they carried with them.

The idea of holding on to Providence was nonsense, despite the arguments of Leclerc and the other buccaneers. Why burden buccaneers with guarding and garrisoning Providence as a base when Heffer and three thousand soldiers were going to do it all for nothing at Jamaica? Certainly Providence was only a couple of hundred miles from the Main and near the Isthmus, but it was further from Cuba and Hispaniola by as much as it was nearer the Main.

If the English government (providing ships) wanted to control the West Indies, then having Barbados to windward of everything and Jamaica to leeward and covering it from the north and acting as a main base, was sound strategy, with Providence a hornet’s nest close to Portobelo and Cartagena. But let the King provide troops, guns, powder and ships; the buccaneers were being generous enough already, taking on the seaward defence of Jamaica.

“Well?” Aurelia demanded. “You are just daydreaming.”

Ned picked up the sheet of paper on which they had drafted the terms of surrender and sat down. He read them through and then said in English to Secco: “As it can’t complicate anything now, would you like to read this to the governor in Spanish? I don’t want any misunderstandings.”

Secco grinned wickedly. “It will be an honour. And from now on each of them will fear a knife in the back!”

Ned looked puzzled and Secco explained: “I am his enemy but I am also Spanish, so they trust you but won’t trust me. They know I would be happy to use a knife; they know you never would.”

Ned shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t be too sure about that. Now, read it aloud and then write a copy in Spanish.”

The remaining twenty-one buccaneer ships arrived off the island just after dawn to find an open boat – a local fishing boat confiscated by Ned – tacking back and forth under a tattered sail a couple of miles offshore, ready to pilot them in, round rocks and coral reefs that would not be visible under the water until the sun was higher in the sky.

With their ships anchored, the twenty-one captains had themselves rowed over to the
Griffin
to get the latest news and describe how, after being scattered by the hurricane, they collected themselves together, waited out the subsequent calm and then, led by Brace, made for the rendezvous at Old Providence.

Because they had noted that the seven ships were all anchored out of the arcs of fire of Santa Catalina’s forts, and probably out of range anyway, they did not think to ask what had been happening; instead they wanted to hear Ned’s plans for attacking both the large and small islands.

Two or three of them had noticed that Puerto Catalina was deserted, and guessed that the inhabitants had fled across to the little island. Most of them at first thought Ned was joking when he said that the governor had surrendered both islands the previous evening, and the seven ships had the purchase from Puerto Catalina waiting for the share-out, but in the meantime all the weapons, powder and armour on Santa Catalina were waiting for them to collect or destroy.

After the captains were convinced and left hurriedly with their orders, Ned had himself rowed to Santa Catalina, collecting Thomas from the
Peleus
on the way and joining Leclerc on the beach, where he was waiting with the captains and crews.

As soon as all the captains were standing about waiting on the strip of sand, he climbed on to a flat-topped rock at the eastern end so that all could hear him and read out the inventory provided by Hernández.

“Our first task is to get the bridge hauled across again. Then we need to confiscate all carts – and horses, donkeys and mules. We need to bring everything across the bridge and take it down to the port so that we can carry it out to the ships. Now, who needs more cannon? They are mostly iron guns. I need a couple of light bronze, but the twelve falcons on field carriages we’ll take with us to Portobelo.”

Several of the captains spoke up for guns, but all agreed that using Santa Catalina’s falcons to attack Portobelo would be a fine joke to play on the Dons.

The breast and back plates of armour, and the helmets, one of the captains pointed out, would be useful at Portobelo. “No man using it should put it on until he’s landed,” Brace warned. “Anyone who falls into the sea wearing a breast plate and back won’t come up again, and anyway that’s the way armour goes rusty!”

The five Dutch captains did not laugh, Ned noticed, and wondered if it was the lack of a sense of humour or if anything significant had happened to them concerning armour.

All the captains wanted a few muskets, pistols, swords and pikes, and it was agreed to share them out once they were brought down to the port. Everyone was suspicious of Spanish powder until Ned pointed out it could be used for blasting, something they might well be doing against the forts in Portobelo.

One of the captains pointed out that if they all scattered and began work at different forts, some unsuitable guns might be moved to the bridge, causing unnecessary work when men could be used more usefully elsewhere. This led to Ned and Thomas deciding to go first to each position and inspect the guns, marking with a piece of chalk which should be taken and which spiked or destroyed. Leclerc was told to pick a hundred men to start moving armour, muskets, pistols, swords and pikes.