Admiral (26 page)

Ned heard the creaking of oars in rowlocks and then the bow of a boat nosed into the circle of light. There were perhaps a dozen men in it, the light reflecting from gleaming eyes and shiny teeth, but incongruously two wheels were lying flat on the thwarts forward with an axle and the trail on the floorboards, and some sacks stowed aft.

“Name –
nom de vaisseau
?”

Ned thought he could just distinguish the stocky, black-bearded French captain, Jean-Pierre Rideau, and a moment later the man stood up to call: “
La Méduse
!”

“I’ve pricked her,” Aurelia said, “She should be carrying a complete carriage and two hundred shot for a falcon.”

“How many shot?” Ned called, now able to see clearly the parts of the carriage.

“Two hundred for the falcon and five hundred musket balls.”

“Good –
bon voyage
: you can lead the way. Who’s that coming up now?”

“Leclerc,” Rideau said. “I will get out of his way!”

He growled an order to his men, who bent their backs to the oars.

One of the
Perdrix
’s boats then rowed under the
Griffin
’s stern. Leclerc had painted them yellow, but in the yellow candlelight from the lantern the boat now seemed almost grey and shapeless.

Leclerc stood up. “
Perdrix
’s first boat: two falcon barrels, five hundred roundshot, twenty-five muskets, two hundred musket balls, fifteen halberds, one barrel of powder.”

Aurelia had been pricking at her list. “He has more roundshot than we expected,” she commented.

“The more the better: the number I gave each captain was the minimum.”

“
Bon voyage
, Leclerc: follow Rideau. I’ll meet you at the rendezvous about dawn.”

Boat after boat came under the
Griffin
’s stern, reported its ship’s name and cargo, and rowed off eastward into to the darkness. As Aurelia pricked them on her list, Ned realized that all the boats were carrying more powder and shot than he had expected. The captains had taken to heart his warning that capturing four defended forts was not going to be child’s play.

Lobb, who had earlier hoisted out the
Griffin
’s two boats and three canoes, came up to report formally that they were loaded, reading from a list Ned had given him. One boat carried a complete falcon in pieces – barrel, wheels, trail and axle lashed out of the way of the oarsmen – plus roundshot and musket balls, in sacks and barrels. One canoe carried only powder, another only shot, the third drinking water, boucaned meat, a half cask of nails and several hammers, while axes and half a dozen saws, well greased and sharpened that afternoon, were stowed ready for constructing scaling ladders from whatever saplings, bamboo and timber could be found near the port.

Finally the last buccaneer boat, one from the
Peleus
and with Thomas on board, came out of the ring of darkness in which it had been waiting. Thomas sang out the contents and Aurelia checked them against her list. Like several of the other boats, this one carried drinking water and boucaned meat. Ned sent him after the previous boat, told Lobb to dispatch the
Griffin
’s canoes, and turned to Aurelia.

“Until noon on Wednesday,” he said. “Are you sure you can manage? Enough seamen? Shall I tell Lobb to stay on board?”

She sighed, an exasperated I-knew-you-were-going-to-say-that-sigh. “We’ve discussed all that a dozen times,
mon cher
. Go on, go now or I shall weep and embarrass everyone.” She kissed him fiercely and then hurried below, as if wanting to avoid watching him go down the rope ladder into the boat.

From time to time when rowing through pale-green patches of phosphorescence they could see the oar blades of boats ahead dipping into the water like blurred fireflies. Southwards on the starboard hand the coast was like a sleeping serpent, here curving out to within a few hundred yards, there swinging in to a mile, and always distinguishable as an uneven black band ending where the stars began.

A windless night… Ned had prayed but never expected it. If the north wind had continued blowing on shore and strengthened, it would have made this an uncomfortable, perhaps impossible row, probably bringing heavy swells across the width of the Caribbee which would slide under the wind waves, driving up breakers to line this coast and make it impossible to land. Northers…luckily it was still early for them, but December and January would bring the cold north winds and the rough seas riding on the swells.

He mentally ticked off each part of the coast as he identified it: both of the Cayos Naranjos had slid past, low in the water; he had picked out the peak of Cerro Merced against a background of stars. The next six miles comprised a low shore, mangrove swamps blurring where the sea met the flat land, but gradually hills now appeared as the boat moved steadily eastward.

Then, stark against a part of the sky full of stars, Ned could make out the Pan de Azúcar and Las Palmas close to the shore, with the other three peaks, including La Machina, beyond them, well inland to the south.

The slop of the oar entering the water and the gurgle of it coming out again, the creak of the oar against the rowlocks, the grunt of the oarsman and the groan made by his weight on the thwart, the chuckling of the boat’s stem as the oars thrust it through the water, the occasional skittering of a fish, probably a gar or needlefish, startled and escaping by skating along the top of the water like a flat stone skimmed across a pond… The noises were monotonous and he felt dazed; a sort of sleep without being asleep.

That was the mouth of the Rio Piedras, a scoop in the land. They had covered about six miles from the last river, the Rio Grande, which in turn was three or four miles east of the Cayos Naranjos…which made it another two miles to Punta Gorda, cliffs sticking out into the sea like a semicircular balcony… Then four miles on to their destination, the Rio Guanche. He only hoped that Thomas’ memory was good, and the river entrance wide and the banks irregular enough to hide the boats without being so swampy that they could not get ashore.

The mosquitoes had attacked his wrists so that they were hot, itchy tubes of flesh a third thicker than usual. His face too, was so bitten and puffy that his eyes were swelling up; he must look like a battered prizefighter. Mosquitoes reinforced by the almost invisible sandflies that bit like sharp needles and could hardly be seen in daylight: the West Indies, he reflected ruefully, provided man with few if any really deadly natural enemies apart from disease but made up for it with many persistent irritations.

It took an enormous effort to concentrate as the
Griffin
’s boat worked its way to the head of the straggling column. No, he told himself, he was not so much sleepy as dazed. Too much sun during the day, he supposed and the monotony of the noises in the darkness. Ah, here at last was the leading boat, from
La Méduse
and with the bearded Rideau calling a greeting.

“We’re nearly there!” Rideau called. “I can just distinguish Punta Gorda. We might arrive before the mosquitoes eat me completely. No lard or smoke now,” he added ruefully.

No lard when moving about; no tobacco leaves which they burned on land to keep the insects away. The buccaneers, Ned realized, were changing. They had started, so many years ago, as refugees and were called “The Cow Killers”: Dutchmen escaping the Spaniards occupying the Netherlands; Frenchmen, many of them Huguenots like Aurelia, escaping from the Catholics; Englishmen (and Scots, Welshmen and Irishmen) escaping the Puritans. Yes, and the scoundrels of all nations, too, apprentices breaking their articles, debtors, murderers.

Yet the majority were men who wanted to be free, and over the years they had gathered in small groups along the coasts of Puerto Rico, Hispaniola and Cuba, killing the beeves and hogs that ran wild after being left by the Spaniards working their way westward, leaving island after island in their fruitless search for gold, and finally finding it waiting in unbelievable quantities in Mexico.

Curing the hides and selling them to passing ships, or exchanging them for powder and shot to kill more beeves, or hot liquors to swamp melancholy and drown their memories, the buccaneers had smoked meat in boucans to preserve it (getting the new name of
boucaniers
), and used some of the hides to make rudimentary boots, breeches, jerkins and hats: dried sinews became laces for boots or jerkins; small bones were sawn crosswise into discs and drilled as buttons. They saw how the Arawaks made canoes by burning out the inside of a log. As Rideau’s remark recalled, they smeared lard over the exposed parts of their bodies to ward off the dawn and dust attacks of mosquitoes and sandflies. On a plantation, of course, the wealthy planter always burned tobacco leaves so the smoke drifted across his hammaco or bed, noxious fumes which drove away the insects.

By now the buccaneers had, for the most part, their own ships – captured from the Dons or belonging to bold captains who had sailed out from Europe intending to trade with the Main by smuggling or to rob the Spaniards by raiding. Eventually, when this did not yield a reasonable living, these captains had recruited the buccaneers because they were men who had little or more to learn about life – or death – in the West Indies and who seemed to have some immunity to diseases like yellow fever (known to the Spanish as the black vomit,
vomito negro
).

By leaving their little groups on the coast and joining the ships, the original cattle killers had lost much of their original simple life and left a peaceful existence for a fighting one. The tubs of lard, for instance. Certainly when they slaughtered beeves and hogs to boucan enough meat to go on a raid, they could stock up lard and the hides to make clothing, but mosquitoes rarely reached out across the water to where buccaneer ships normally anchored. Still, at least half the men now in the buccaneer ships had never lived the life of the earlier cow killers. Yet, Ned reflected, they were still desperate men; they hated the Spanish and they sought purchase, and he was glad he did not have to say which they put first.

Aurelia. She was alone with the
Griffin
. Alone, except for enough seamen to work the ship. Diana, too, on board the
Peleus
. Each could be the lady of a great house in England; out here they were only women buccaneers. But now, he told himself hurriedly, was not the time to start worrying about their safety or their ability to bring the ships round – to lead the buccaneers. He was thankful that all the seamen seemed proud of the two women. They could have been resentful, even refused to obey their orders or sail with them. Instead the Griffins and the Peleuses boasted about them to the other buccaneers, and both Ned and Thomas suspected that several of the other captains (Rideau and Brace, for example, who had taken to trimming their beards more carefully) hoped to find mistresses in Port Royal and persuade them to share life at sea.

Before seeing the benign influence of Mrs Judd, Ned would have been nervous about the consequences of captains taking trollops from on shore and turning them into the queens of individual ships, but Mrs Judd (far from being a trollop, of course) kept the
Phoenix
’s captain and crew smart and lively with masts oiled, sails always well patched and recently the hull repainted. She knew little about ships but, from Kingsnorth days, she knew how a trim kitchen should look and how a house needed care and attention.

And over there was Punta Gorda: one and a three quarters of a mile to go. The rest of the boats were still astern but bunching up, with Rideau and Thomas now only a few yards away, one on each quarter.

Slowly Ned steered closer inshore. He did it cautiously to avoid the risk of leading them all on to a particular reef which ran straight out to sea from near the headland. First he had to find it, then work round the seaward end, but at the same time he dare not risk missing the entrance to the river, the Rio Guanche, because they would then blunder into a shallow bay and two islands which were only a mile or so beyond and came immediately before Punta Cocal, the western entrance to Portobelo.

The oarsmen were tired, cursing blistered hands and aching backs, but they were lucky, because by some quirk of Nature the current along this part of the coast ran eastward. In most places the constant flow of the Trade winds pushed the water westward in a strong current, but along this stretch of the Main it ran the other way, a counter-current that was quite strong when the wind – as it sometimes did – blew from the southwest and reinforced it.

And there it was. The mouth of the Rio Guanche was a good deal wider than he had expected. The river seemed to flow from the distant foothills of La Machina, highest of the peaks, as though catching all the rain falling from the clouds which hid the top of the mountain most of the time.

A couple of minutes later a hail from Thomas showed he too had seen it, and a moment afterwards a yell from Rideau, aimed at the boats astern, made sure that no one would miss making the turn inshore.

Even half a mile up the river the banks were still high, and on the east side in several places an old track dropped down into clearings.

“Fishermen used to come here until fairly recently,” Thomas noted. “Brought in their boats and catches and gutted the fish. They’d put ’em on racks of green wood to sun-dry or smoke, or more probably they’d salt them down in barrels and take them by boat round to Portobelo. Conches, too: just look at those piles of shells. You can see where they chop the slot with the machete to cut the muscle.”

“Why not take the fresh fish direct to Portobelo? Why smoke or salt it here?”

“Probably some local tax. The Dons used to have a salt tax – probably still do. Anything a Spaniard does which seems odd or eccentric is usually to dodge a tax.”

Each boat was finding its own section of river bank in the darkness and the men, cursing, encouraging, now joking and groaning as they straightened backs and stretched legs, began unloading. Ned clambered on to dry land and began walking along the track. In the faint starlight he saw that one carriage wheel was already lying flat on the ground. He paused and watched as the axle was inserted vertically, and then men pulled over the axle and wheel so that the second wheel could be fitted. The limber was then bolted on to the axle. Several men lifted the barrel while the newly assembled carriage was pushed underneath and the barrel gently lowered into position, one of the men crouching to guide it on to the carriage. As soon as the trunnions, the stubby arms on which the gun rested, were in place, semicircular metal plates, the cap squares, were flipped over and fastened down, preventing the trunnions from jumping out again when the carriage was hauled over rough country or the gun recoiled when fired.