Admiral (31 page)

By the time all the ships were under way, she could detect to the east a light pink, a delicate oyster tint that was yet only a faint wash low in the sky. This was what Ned wanted: settled weather and a smooth sea. Now she prayed that the wind would not die. A calm was the only thing that would stop them getting to Portobelo.

Oh Ned, she murmured to herself… Had he found the track? Were they all going down it to Portobelo? Were they already there and attacking the Castillo de San Gerónimo? She clasped her breasts, which were almost bursting with longing for him.

Søren Jensen came from a small village called Gilleleje, a few miles westward round the coast from Helsingør. A Dane whose first childhood memory was of being hoisted on board his father’s fishing boat in a fish bucket lined with a smelly old sack, he had long ago given up explaining to foreigners that Denmark comprised (except for the Jutland peninsula) a group of islands, and that his home village, pronounced ‘Gilly-lie’ was close to the port which the English insisted on calling ‘Elsinore’, although nothing seemed easier to pronounce than ‘Helsingør’.

Apparently the English had even written a play concerning the big castle, a story about a Danish prince. They had that name wrong too; it certainly was not Danish. Englishmen called him Amlet, though he had heard Captain Leclerc referring to Omelette. Captain Coles, the Englishman who owned the ship in which Jensen had been serving as mate for the past two years, said he had heard of the play but thought it all happened in Verona, which was near Venice, and concerned two Italian gentlemen, not one Danish prince.

The flat, green countryside which made up the island on which stood Gilleleje and Helsingør (and, further round the coast to the south, København, which these strange English insisted on calling ‘Copenhagen’) seemed a lifetime away as Jensen walked from boat to boat along the south bank of the Rio Guanche, checking in the darkness that the men at the oars were ready.

Mr Yorke had suddenly said to him: “Jensen, you will be in charge of twelve boats carrying arms or food, and you will take them round to Portobelo tomorrow morning.” Just like that. In the dust he had sketched Portobelo, showing him where the forts and castles were, and the cays and reefs. “Meet us on the jetty in front of the Castillo de San Gerónimo about an hour after dawn,” he had said, as though Portobelo was deserted and all the buccaneers had to do was climb over the mountains and walk down the track to it.

He liked both Mr Yorke and Sir Thomas, but these English
were
eccentric: they never seemed to take anything seriously. “Meet us on the jetty” indeed! Still, to be fair, there was nothing eccentric about the way Mr Yorke blew up that castle at Santiago, nor how he captured Old Providence without losing a man’s life.

Jensen paused for a moment as he made his way back to his own boat and wondered if they really
were
eccentric. If Mr Yorke had been Dutch, or a Scandinavian, or a Prussian, he would have given detailed orders with definite times and distances… All quite unnecessary instructions, Jensen suddenly realized, if you had a man you could trust: a man to whom you could say “meet me at the jetty an hour after dawn” and leave the details to him, so that if anything unexpected happened, the man could deal with it without being tied down.

Jensen looked up at the sky to the eastward. Still black. The ships would soon be leaving the Bahia las Minas. Suddenly it did not seem so eccentric that Mr Yorke had left his lady in command of the
Griffin
and Lady Diana had the
Peleus
.

The admiral, he now understood, was not risking ships and men by favouring mistresses: he knew they could do it, and that freed experienced buccaneers, masters and mates of ships, fighting men, for the attack on Portobelo. And, Jensen suddenly realized with pride, that was why Mr Yorke had picked him to bring the boats round: the admiral knew that few if any of the buccaneers had his experience with open boats.

He scrambled down in to the stern of his own boat, reached for the tiller in the darkness and gave orders to the oarsmen. Once the boat was clear of the river bank he turned and called into the darkness astern, “Kingsnorth”. He knew his voice would just reach the next boat, and once it was clear of the bank and rowing after the leader, the man at the helm would call to the third boat, and all the way to the last one.

“Kingsnorth” – that was a strange password Mr Yorke had chosen and he was not sure what the whole word meant. “King’s” he understood because it was very similar to the Danish word, and “north”, but not the two run together… Perhaps it meant several kings from the north. Anyway, the English were very proud of their new king now this man Cromsen was dead.

The boat was beginning to butt into small waves and he could see the river bank on the starboard side beginning to trend away. He eased over the tiller a few inches and looked astern, where he could just see the stem of the next boat as it cut a tiny bow wave. A man would need to have sharp ears to hear the boats tonight. Supple leather and cloth were wrapped round the oars where they pressed against the rowlocks.

Jensen prided himself on not being what he called a “dreamer”, a word he had taken from the English. No, he was a practical seaman who preferred to name his destination after his ship had arrived. But now, as the boat moved eastward in the darkness, seeming with its muffled oars to be gliding through the water like a great fish, he allowed his imagination to wander.

At the moment the boat carried some baskets of roundshot for the falcons, two or three baskets of ball for the muskets and pistols, a barrel of powder carefully protected from spray by an old piece of canvas, a cask of water and several satchels of boucan. All were to be landed on the jetty of the Castillo de San Gerónimo. What would the boat
then
load to carry out to the
Argonauta
when she had arrived from Bahia las Minas and anchored in Portobelo? Ingots of silver stamped with the arms of the king of Spain and canvas bags of coin and gems, pieces of eight, emeralds, doubloons…all the things that they dreamed about? The purchase that could then be changed so easily into rumbullion, tobacco and wine, and women who never tired while there were coins to clink one against the other. Or would the boat be carrying out wounded buccaneers to the nearest ship that could treat them?

In the darkness, death seemed very close and he tried to drive it away by thinking of women. He was glad that they had left Tortuga – which was simply that damned French fort, an anchorage and a rumbullion shop – and were going to make their base at Port Royal. Tortuga was a fine little island if you wanted to shoot pigeon (he had never seen so many before), if you enjoyed looking at the
bois de chandelle
and liked to use it as a torch at night to catch fish, or wanted to shoot wild boar, but for Jensen being in an anchorage meant drinking and wenching, and the devil take where you woke up in the morning.

Port Royal had the women, and many more were expected. And the liquor, too. Port Royal had promise; give it six months to get used to the new king, and it should be able to cater for every pleasure and vice devised by pliant women and imaginative buccaneers with their pockets full of gold. Even during their recent brief stay he had heard stories that some of the richest folk in Jamaica were the whores, who demanded payment in advance and locked the money away before starting business.

There was the headland half a mile ahead. Cocal Point was a black shape in the darkness and visible only because it outlined itself against the stars. He knew where to look for the three islets about three cables off the end of the point. Six hundred yards…yes, there they were, the largest one being the furthest out and called San Buenaventura.

So that was the southern side of the entrance to Portobelo! He felt a mild excitement as he slowly put the tiller over to pass a hundred yards to seaward of Buenaventura. Mr Yorke had impressed on him that there were many coral reefs between and round the three islets, and Jensen glanced astern to make sure the next boat was following him. He was startled to see it only four or five yards away – a tribute to the muffling of the oars.

Although they were meeting only wavelets, there was an occasional underlying swell, and he could hear the hollow boom as it buried itself among the rocks round Buenaventura – a useful sound because he would be able to locate the islet long after it had passed out of sight.

He steered to starboard in a slow curve which should bring him round Cocal Point and into the anchorage of Portobelo, giving them about a mile to row down to the castle of San Gerónimo, keeping close in to the southern shore but not running on to the straggling reefs of staghorn coral extending half a mile into the harbour. Harbour? It was a big anchorage really, with a village down at the end: Jensen, remembering the orderly villages at home, thought that calling the whole place by a single name gave the wrong idea of what it was like. The English did not make that mistake: in Jamaica, Port Royal was only a tiny town built on a spit which almost closed off the great bay. No one made the mistake of confusing it with the anchorage.

Suddenly Jensen realized that dawn was turning the blackness of night into grey and he was actually looking eastward into Portobelo through the wide entrance. As he instinctively moved the tiller he hurriedly tried to identify everything. Yes, there was the headland forming the other side of the entrance – Portobelo Point, and just inside a blacker smudge which must be the first castle, San Felipe de Todo Fierro, and which everyone called the Iron Fort.

Ah, this course should take them all safely down the south side, as far as the village of Portobelo, when they would turn to larboard to pass Triana, which they said was a little fort, before reaching the jetty of San Gerónimo.

How were Mr Yorke and his party doing? They should be coming down the track to the village by now. There were no flashes of musket or cannon, so they had probably been delayed.

Dawn took so long! He wanted some light to come faster so he could see where the devil he was leading the boats, yet he wanted to hold on to the darkness to give them all something to hide in. He reached down under the thwart and brought out his cutlass, calling quietly to the oarsmen to do the same, but without breaking their stroke. They might meet Spanish fishermen along here rowing out early to their fish pots, and there was only one way of preventing them from raising the alarm: cut them down with cutlasses while their jaws were still dropping in surprise.

Rowing down the anchorage towards the castle was like entering a cavern. Outlined against the stars on his right, to the south, were high mountains – the ones across which Mr Yorke was coming; on the left, northwards, steep cliffs formed the other side of the anchorage. It was flatter at the far end, according to Mr Yorke: down there, round San Gerónimo, it was marshy. And for now it was quiet: just the distant metallic grating of tree frogs, the occasional splash of a fish leaping to escape, the gurgle round the boat’s stem sounding like a fast rocky stream.

Not like Gilleleje… Here it was so hot and humid that perspiration was streaming down his face and tickling as it ran down his back under his jerkin – and he was not even rowing. In a month or two they would be breaking ice off Gilleleje…

Secco had the men lined up along the side of the track in what passed for a military formation. They were still exchanging helmets with each other, men cursing blistered brows and trying for a better fit, and against the first hint of dawn in the sky behind them the shadows made them look like goblins. As soon as he saw Ned waiting to inspect them, he called the men to attention.

Secco himself looked exactly like a Spanish army officer: he had trimmed his beard to a sharp point, his moustaches now curved up and out like bull’s horns. Ned was delighted to see that Secco had relieved a Spanish officer at Old Providence of his army breeches. They were of a distinctive cut, bulging as though each leg between knee and thigh was inserted in a pumpkin. His hose were clean and his high leather boots, the tops folding over at the knee, were polished. The original owner, Ned reflected, would be proud of them.

As Ned complimented Secco, he proudly put on his helmet and showed that he had selected the one helmet that had the plume.

Thomas inspected him too. “You look like a Roman centurion,” he commented. “That helmet – I must say it’s well designed. A sword slash might lose you the tip of your nose, but that’s about the only part of your head that shows! And this sash!” He pointed to the red sash that Secco was wearing across his left shoulder. “What’s that mean – you’re a general?”

“No, a captain,” Secco grinned happily, wriggling slightly in his armour, and calling one of his seamen to slacken a strap on one side holding the breast plate.

Ned then noticed that Secco’s armour had shoulder pieces: like the overlapping pieces of shell forming a lobster’s tail, the armour covered the shoulder and half-way down to the elbow. Secco had more cunning then the rest of the captains: at Old Providence, although he did not have the slightest idea that Ned’s plan would involve him disguising himself as an army officer, he had appropriated everything he needed.

Ned continued to walk round Secco, impressed in the first light of dawn with the care the man had taken: like an actor with the most important part in the play (which he had), Secco had gone to a great deal of trouble, yet there was no sign that the breeches, hose, polished boots and flowing plume had been carried by open boat and then in a bag to this point in the mountain track to Portobelo which served as the Spaniard’s dressing-room.

“Well, captain,” Ned said, “let us inspect your men!”

Over to the east there was more than a hint that dawn was pulling back the black of night like someone stripping a blanket from a bed, but because they were still high above Portobelo the anchorage and town was still heavily shadowed.

The first man, standing to attention with a halberd by his side, looked as Spanish as Secco, except that his beard was trimmed square. His armour fitted him well, the helmet sat on his head as though he always wore one. He had a long sword hanging at his left side, and in a scabbard slung diagonally across his back was a short, broad-bladed stabbing sword, not more than eighteen inches long. The hilt was high on the man’s left shoulder.