Admiral (30 page)

“Orders. Guards wear breast plate, back plate and helmet.”

“What if you are not a guard, sir?”

“You’re a lucky man: no armour. Not enough suits to go round, anyway.”

“Ah, the king did not send enough!”

“No,” the soldier said, wrestling with a leather strap, “more than three quarters of our men are away and they had to be fully equipped.”

“To Cartagena on leave, I suppose. Lucky men!” Secco commented with another inane giggle.

“Leave! No, they’re away fighting: chasing those English out of Jamaica. They’ll have done it by now, I expect, and be back soon. I hope so, four hours on guard and only eight off duty, seven days and nights a week – it’s wearing me out. There!” He finally wrenched out the last strap and grabbed the breast plate before it slid off. The back plate fell with a thump and Ramirez picked it up and handed it to him.

Secco, still holding the helmet, nodded enthusiastically as he said: “This must be an important castle if all you soldiers guard it! And that one too,” he pointed to San Fernando and, indicating the Iron Fort, added in an awed voice: “That must be the most important of all, guarding the entrance.”

As Secco hoped, the soldier took the bait and sniffed contemptuously. “This is the only one that matters! San Fernando, Todo Fierra, Triana –
they
just guard the harbour. But in here –” he lowered his voice and jerked his thumb towards the great door “–is all the king’s silver. Locked up safely and waiting for the galleons to come!”

By now Secco had made himself look slack-jawed and wide-eyed with wonder. “The king’s silver? Do
you
guard
that
? No wonder you wear armour and a special helmet! Supposing the buccaneers came, or the English or French fleets!”

The soldier spat contemptuously. “None of them would ever dare think of it, let alone get within a cannon shot of Todo Fierro. Why, we could sleep on duty – to tell you the truth, some of them do. Not me, of course, but some I could mention, including a sergeant or two.”

He strapped the breast and back plates together to make them easier to carry, retrieved his helmet from Secco, and said: “Well I have a wife waiting for me, so good day to you.”

The three buccaneers watched him march past Triana along the track as it curved round to the town, and Secco murmured: “He could just as easily have arrested us as vagrants!”

“Oh, no,” Sanchez said sourly, “he could see clearly enough that you are the village idiot!”

He then bent double laughing at his own joke and suddenly disappeared.

Ramirez and Secco, several feet away, ran to where Sanchez had been standing and saw he had stepped back into an open cesspool and was now floundering up to his waist, speechless as he held his breath against the stench. Secco sniffed and eyed the walls of the cesspool. “You can climb up without our help. We’re starting back along the track.”

Two hours later the men arrived at the boats, Sanchez being forced to walk several paces behind Secco and Ramirez. His attempts to wash his breeches and himself in the water of the harbour had not been entirely successful: Secco swore that the harbour smelled only slightly less than the cesspool.

Secco reported at once to Ned, who was talking to Thomas. The three of them, Secco said, had marked the easiest path up to the track: it was about a mile long and met the track low down. The path was fairly smooth. They would have to cut away some low bushes with machetes and roll aside a few rocks to get the falcons through, but nowhere was it too steep to pull up the guns.

He then described their walk through the town and ended up with a report on the conversation with the soldier, which confirmed that the bullion was stored inside San Gerónimo, although not necessarily in the dungeon. He apologised for failing to discover the exact size of the present garrison, explaining that “acting as an idiot stopped the soldier being suspicious of me, but limited the questions I could ask…”

Ned grinned and patted Secco’s shoulder. “Once we’ve captured the castle we’ll have plenty of time to find the bullion! It’ll be in the dungeon: you can be sure of that. Old ladies hide their valuables under the bed; soldiers always choose dungeons.”

Secco spent the next hour with Ned, Thomas and Leclerc working out as precise a timetable as possible. The main task was hauling fourteen falcons over the mountains to Portobelo, along with five hundred roundshot, some langrage which the men had been making up while they waited, and a barrel of powder.

The armour, helmets, swords, pikes and halberds were no problem: they would be issued before the march started, and each recipient would be responsible for transport.

Because the hundred breast and back plates and fifty helmets were being issued to the Spanish-speaking buccaneers, Secco joked: “So there’s a tax on being Spanish: you have to carry your armour over the mountains!”

“Tax? A bonus more likely!” Ned said. “Anyone with any sense would prefer wearing or carrying armour to hauling on the ropes of a falcon.”

Ten men were chosen to carry satchels of boucan and five more would have water breakers. If they needed more food, Ned explained, they could always raid the Spaniards in Portobelo.

“That langrage,” Thomas said. “Pity we couldn’t have made up more.” Langrage was a wickedly effective weapon: it comprised shot made up of scraps of iron, rusted bolts, old nails and any piece of metal that could be fired from a gun. The long pieces were tied together like bunches of kindling the diameter of the bore of the guns, three inches; smaller and jagged pieces were put in roughly stitched canvas bags.

“Those roundshot won’t make any impression on the walls of the forts, but if we can get the Dons to rush us, a whiff of langrage will cut them down like hay under a scythe,” Ned said.

“They won’t rush us if they have any sense,” Thomas said, “but firing langrage at the gun loops will knock the heads off anyone trying to see what we’re doing.”

“Timing,” Ned said yet again. “We’ve so few watches I want to avoid having to time anything. But we’ve got to give the boats a time.”

Thomas waved his hand airily. “If a dozen boats can’t row a couple of miles round to Portobelo carrying only a few roundshot and barrels of powder and time their arrival within half an hour, I’d flog every third man!”

Ned thought again. “Come to think of it, the timing of the boats is not so important. The vital part of this plan is having a file of men marching in those Spanish helmets!”

Hauling the guns over the mountains was a nightmare the men thought would never end. Ned and Secco had estimated it would take at most five hours, so to ensure arriving at Portobelo at dawn, the buccaneers left the Rio Guanche just before midnight. Four men were left behind with each of the dozen boats which were later to go on to Portobelo; the rest hauled guns, carried powder, staggered under panniers of shot, or looked after gear ranging from halberds to pistols. The rest of the boats, now empty, would have to take their chance; oars and paddles were hidden some distance away.

Ropes secured to the loops, the eyebolts on the outer ends of the axles of the guns, made them easier to haul and the first part of the journey, up the rough path Secco had marked to the track, was not difficult. Half a dozen men were out ahead, slashing at bushes with machetes and rolling rocks out of the way. The buccaneers heaved at each gun and, at a warning shout from a gun captain, two men would jam rocks under the wheels to stop the gun running backwards, allowing those at the ropes and limbers to rest.

During the first half an hour Ned thought sourly that the mosquitoes would suck them dry of blood before they reached the track: face, neck, wrists were viciously attacked by the whining insects, which were invisible in the darkness and quite impervious to slaps and the perspiration streaming off every man’s body. But as they hauled the guns higher, the attacks eased. “We must be getting above the mosquito line,” Thomas grunted. “Makes all the heaving worth while.”

Finally they reached the track, and the men sighed with relief as the wheels of the gun carriages began to turn more easily over a comparatively smooth surface which for nearly two centuries had been worn by the hooves of the donkeys and mules walking back and forth. The men who had been cutting down the bushes and rolling aside rocks tailed on to the ropes and Ned found his party moving steadily up the track at a good pace yet slowly enough for Ned and Thomas to walk back and forth along the column, encouraging the men, checking that no axles were running hot, and ensuring that those carrying the canvas panniers of roundshot were not surreptitiously lightening their loads.

Although the moon had not yet risen, the stars were bright and the sky clear; for once the mountains were not capped with cloud spreading to leeward as though each peak trailed a white cloak.

Secco came up to Ned to report: “We are within a hundred feet of our highest point on the track. From then on it’s all downhill to Portobelo.”

“We’ll stop there for a quarter of an hour,” Ned said. “I want to make sure the men on the ropes know they have to pull back just as hard to stop the guns running away downhill! Issue boucan and a mug of water to each man.”

As he walked along the track with Thomas he looked down at Portobelo. The harbour below was a rectangular dish filled with black water, the castles and forts crouched like toads, and he was startled to see how big was San Gerónimo. The town – as Secco had said – was little more than a large village. Everyone was sleeping – except the guards.

Dawn? Ned looked over to the eastward. There was no sign of it yet, showing they were well ahead of the schedule. The selected boats from the Rio Guanche would soon be rounding the western headland of Portobelo.

If his plan failed, the buccaneer ships led by Aurelia in the
Griffin
, and the buccaneer boats, would be sailing into a dreadful trap that would destroy them. Instead of capturing Portobelo – or the most important part of it – he would have warned the Spaniards of an imminent attack: an attack they never expected in half a century or more. From the day that
El Draco
died, the Dons had regarded Portobelo as impregnable. Come to think of it, Drake had died within sight of Portobelo: his leaden coffin had been buried only a few miles to seaward. That was in 1596, more than half a century ago, yet Spanish mothers still used
El Draco
to frighten their children. But across the Isthmus, in Panama, the Viceroy had obviously grown complacent:
El Draco
was long dead, and Portobelo with all its forts and castles was impregnable. Except, Ned reflected, that now the new admiral of the Brethren of the Coast had decided it was not, and had committed every life for which he was responsible to a crazy plan that rested not on cannons but on shiny breast plates and distinctive helmets.

As the
Griffin
’s mainsail slatted for a few minutes and then finally filled with the puffs of an offshore breeze that had just enough strength to make dancing shadows on the sea, Aurelia glanced astern, looking from one ship to another. All had their sails hoisted; most had weighed their anchors. The three – no, four – still at anchor had taken in most of their cable (Ned called it being “at short stay”, she seemed to remember) but obviously were getting under way in succession to avoid colliding in the light wind which was across the current, so that a ship could be carried some distance before her sails were drawing and she answered her helm.

The
Peleus
was clear and following in the
Griffin
’s wake, so Diana and her men had met no problems; the
Phoenix
was there too. Aurelia wondered who was commanding temporarily in Saxby’s place. Probably Mrs Judd! That vast woman had a cheerfulness, quickness of wit, and strength of mind that could conjure a wind from a flat calm, apart from an appetite for men that kept Saxby in an almost perpetual daze.

Ned would be at Portobelo by now. She felt a cold fear, having at last lost the struggle to avoid thinking about him. Four forts. The mayor was a man called Jose Arias Ximenez, and from what the Spaniards at Old Providence had said, he was evil: cruel and corrupt, he was a man almost ruined now because the absence of the plate fleet had cut the bribes and commissions he could extort from ship masters and traders from Panama.

Ned had fewer than a thousand men. Many fewer – there were five sailors in each of these ships, so at least 140 men were not with their admiral at Portobelo. So Ned had fewer than a thousand against four forts and castles with their garrisons, and a mountain range… He had a few of those little cannon on wheels, armour, muskets, pistols, and pikes captured at Old Providence… But those cannon fired a ball weighing only two or three pounds, although they were noisy and made much smoke. Such a gun would not knock down the front door of a house, let alone the walls of a castle. Still, Ned had a plan for them, although as far as she could see it must depend on magic.

The
Peleus
picked up a puff of wind which missed the rest of the ships and she surged ahead, closing with the
Griffin
. She saw Diana walk to the side and wave, obviously enjoying herself and perhaps remembering how they had led the way into Santiago… She had to admit that the twenty-eight ships looked impressive. They were all different sizes, different shapes – built in different countries, a fact which was reflected in their sheers, bows and sterns. Some were beamy, with a bow as round as a pendulous breast; others were lean, with sharp bows. Several had been built as coasting carriers of cargo, three or four had the fast lines of small vessels intended for smuggling or privateering. “The Motleys” was Ned’s nickname for all of them, and she was thankful that the last one was now getting her anchor on board and steering clear of the land.

The sky to the east was getting lighter, although the wavelets were still that ominous grey, almost frightening, that was part of the dawn, but looking over the starboard bow towards the mountains, she could see that the peaks were clear of cloud. Ned had worried in case low cloud over the mountains round Portobelo would mean trying to find the track in thick mist. She remembered her terror as a young girl when her father’s carriage, driving into the Pyrenees on an expedition from St Jean-de-Luz, had been trapped in low clouds that surrounded them. Neither coachman nor horses could see the road and they all sat for hours, cold and damp, shivering as the water dripped from the ceiling of the carriage and ran down the leather sides. It seemed a miracle at the time that they could breathe – she had been young and frightened enough to confuse cloud with smoke.