Caribbean (51 page)

T
UE
13 O
CTOBER
:
Day after day of dull nothing heading south for Cape Horn. No fish to catch, no birds to follow, no Spanish ships to chase, nothing. These must be the loneliest seas in the world. But today things livened when Master Rodrigo challenged me to a test: “Well,
muchacho
, to be a navigator, let’s see if you can take a proper sight,” and he gave me a slip of paper, himself another, and he said: “It’s about noon. We’ll both shoot the sun, tell no one our reading, and figure our latitude on these papers, then compare them.” He allowed me to go first, and with feet steady and arms firm, my back to the sun and the magical staff held tight, I calculated a latitude of 39° 40′ South and wrote this on my slip. Then he took his sighting, much more rapidly than me, and wrote it down. “Now we’ll compare,” he said, and when my slip was laid beside his they both read 39 degrees and were only twelve minutes apart: “
Muchacho
, you’re a budding navigator. Nine more years.”

I then asked: “Master Rodrigo, if we can tell so accurately where we are north and south, why can’t we do so east and west?” and he stopped whatever he had been doing and gave me a long lesson in which he compared the two problems: “For latitude, we have two fixed marks, the sun at noon, the North Star at night. God hung those two for us, steady forever. One shot of either, you know exactly how far you are north or south of the equator.” He then said something that Fray Baltazar would not have approved: “But God was careless about His east and west. We have no fixed beacons. As to our longitude, the best we can do is guess.” And he spent more than an
hour instructing me in the secrets whereby practiced navigators guess where they are. “Suppose I know where Cádiz is as we start to sail, and I know how fast my ship is traveling and in what direction. At the end of twenty-four hours I can make a pretty good guess as to where we are. From there we make new calculations of tide, wind, drift, supposed speed, and twenty-four hours later we again guess where we are then. And so it goes. We guess our way around the world. Right now, because we have charts and know what we’ve been doing, I’d say we were about sixty-nine degrees of longitude west of Cádiz.” At the end of his lecture he frowned: “It’s infuriating to have no reliable system. Maybe someone will invent a chain we’ll drag in the water and it will tick off the miles. Or a new way to shoot the sun sideways instead of up and down. Or a clock which tells you always what time it is in Cádiz so you can compare noon there with noon here.” Pointing to the ivory backstaff, he told me: “If men can invent this so late in the day, they can invent other useful devices too.” And by making shrewd guesses together about tides and winds and whether our charts were reliable or not, we calculated that on some of these tedious days south we covered as many as ninety miles, which would be about four English miles an hour, and on one day we made well over a hundred, but on others when winds were adverse, only twenty or even less.

S
AT
21 N
OVEMBER
:
56° 10′ South. Yes, that’s right. I’ve checked it with my backstaff every time the sun has peeked through the frozen clouds and my numbers confirm a miserable story of lost channels, frustration, despair and freezing fingers. Since Master Rodrigo has never sailed through the Strait of Magellan connecting the South Sea of the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean, and since heavy cloud has enveloped us almost from the time we captured our last Spanish ship, no one aboard really knew what we were doing, and several sailors told me: “Lucky you know how to work that astrolabe, else we’d be totally lost.” If my sightings are right and if our charts do not lie, which they may, we have missed Magellan completely and are well down toward the South Pole. But at least we’ve found open water, so tomorrow the navigator and I will advise Captain McFee to head north, for I’m convinced we have rounded Cape Horn and are now in the Atlantic Ocean, but I’m not much impressed with my company of buccaneers who do not even know what ocean we’re in.

S
UN
29 N
OVEMBER
:
Day of miracles! Lost in the bitter cold of wherever we are, I calculated from my sighting of the sun that we
must be about 52° 10′ South and that the nest of feathery clouds I had kept watching for the last two days to the northeast must be hanging over some island not shown on our maps. Presenting my conclusions to Captain McFee, I recommended that he sail in that direction, but he said: “Go to hell. No boy tells me where to sail,” and he refused. Now the sailors, convening a meeting, elected to throw him from command yet again “for that he missed Magellan and the whole end of South America,” but their arrogance did not hide their fear at being lost in an unknown ocean.

So for some minutes we were without a captain, and then the miracle happened, for my uncle cried in a loud voice: “The islands! Just where the lad said they’d be!”
^*4
And when the frightened men looked, they saw the fine green islands promising fresh water and fresh deer meat, and Will shouted again: “Damn me, only one seems to know where we are is the lad,” and the men cheered and elected me their captain, with the firm orders: “Take us home, son.”

So here I am at age twenty, nigh onto twenty-one, in command of the Spanish galleon, later English fighting ship
Giralda
, with a crew of forty-one battle-tested Englishmen, nine Spanish sailors who chose to stay with us and seventeen slaves, fourteen Indians, Mompox, Master Rodrigo, Fray Baltazar and the two Ledesma women, plus a hold heavy in silver bars.

Where are we? I know only that we have come safely into the Atlantic and that our home refuge of Port Royal lies some six thousand seven hundred miles to the north, if our captured charts are correct. As captain responsible for the safe passage of my ship, I have to suppose that sooner or later we must encounter some big Spanish warship that can outman, outgun and outfight us, and that I want to avoid. In the few hours since I was given command, I have thought not of the easy way we captured small Spanish ships but of the way we fled before big Spanish ships at Panamá, Lima and Arica, and of how Spanish soldiers, when in good supply, punished us at the silver port. I have decided that to be a proper buccaneer, a man does not have to be a fool.

S
AT
12 D
ECEMBER
:
34° 40′ South off the coast at Buenos Aires, where an entirely new event has occurred, to my enormous surprise. As captain of our ship I now take my meals in the cabin where the Ledesma women and their priest eat, and this has put me face-to-face,
three times each day, with the adorable Señorita Inés, and I think I can speak for us both, certainly for me, when I write with trembling hand and beating heart that we have fallen wonderfully, magnificently in love. She has proved highly skilled in slipping away from both her mother and her priest and finding me where they cannot. The other evening we had near to three hours alone, and it was, well, sort of overwhelming. When she slipped away she whispered: “Ned, I feel it in my heart that at the end of this cruising we shall be married,” and I assured her: “That becomes my whole aim.”

This noon, after I had shot the sun, with the results penned above, I asked at the table: “Where’s Señorita Inés?” and her mother said smugly: “Locked in her cabin,” and when I gasped, the priest asked with a slight sneer: “And who do you think’s guarding the door?” and when I said I couldn’t guess, he said: “Your uncle.”

Yes, the sternest enemy of my love for Inés is my own uncle, who said, when I stormed out to challenge him: “Boy, your life could be …” I tried to brush him aside: “I’m not a boy. I’m the captain of this ship,” but I could not budge him. He was siding with the priest and Señora Ledesma for the good of my soul, he said, and because no Englishman with Tatum blood in his veins should marry a Spaniard.

So three determined people, two Spanish, one English, have banded together to prevent headstrong Señorita Inés and determined me from a pledge of our love. Last night, I can tell you, they failed, not because of anything bold that I did but because Inés escaped while Fray Baltazar was guarding her, ran swiftly into the cabin where I was sleeping, and barred the door from the inside. With sweet abandon she threw herself into my arms, crying: “Ned, I cannot live without you … so brave … captain of your own ship … so much desired.” Well, I can tell you I was overwhelmed by her bold action, and especially what she kept saying as she poured kisses on my trembling lips: “We shall be married.” This was exactly what I had dreamed about on the long passages south to the Cape, and I began to think that marriage with this delectable girl was possible, regardless of how vigorously her mother and my uncle might object.

But even as she made her professions of love, which I accepted as the kind of miracle that occurs when a man became captain of a fine ship, a great knocking came at my cabin door, and we could hear Señora Ledesma and Fray Baltazar, the one voice high, the other low, pleading with Inés to open the door and behave like a proper Spanish young lady. She refused, crying repeatedly: “I shall not open till you
agree that Ned and I can move about his ship as we decide,” and it seemed to me, listening to their knocking and her response, that a great scandal must be under way, with my crew aware of everything, and I wondered what the effect would be.

The problem faded into insignificance in view of what happened next, for I heard my uncle shouting in the early dawn: “Spanish ship! Attack!” and such a clatter arose that I had to know that our
Giralda
was rushing full speed ahead and girding her decks for an assault. It was, I saw, pretty ridiculous for me to be locked in my cabin, prisoner of a Spanish lass, when the ship I was supposed to be commanding was bearing down on an enemy who might prove to be well armed.

“I must go!” I cried to Inés, striving to break free, but she stood by the barred door and refused to let me open it, and I spent the next minutes in a frenzy of indecision, with Señora Ledesma banging on my door, Fray Baltazar thundering anathemas, and my uncle speeding my ship into battle against an enemy I could not see and whose strength I could not estimate. I realized it was a sad position for a captain to be in, but I saw no escape, and with Inés in my arms I awaited the clash of arms that would come when the sailors of the
Giralda
tried to board the fleeing Spanish ship.

It was a frightening two hours, locked in that cabin with the girl I loved. We could hear the ships collide, the swift movement of feet on the deck, the play of swords so far distant that it must come from the deck of the other ship, the echoes of salute guns being fired, and eventually the cries of victory. Only then did Inés let me go.

When I came onto the deck I found Will about to make eleven Spanish prisoners, weighted with chains, walk the plank to instant death. “No!” I shouted. “Let them have a small boat. Better yet, let them have their own ship with the masts cut away.”

When my uncle and the usual hotheads who could be depended upon to support his piratical deeds refused to obey my commands, I shouted: “Stop it! I’m your captain,” and two of the men shouted back in the same breath: “Not anymore, hiding in your cabin while we fight,” and a meeting was held then and there which deposed me and once again restored Mister McFee to his original command.

When buccaneers try to run ships, they can be damned fools. Imagine electing the same man to be captain three different times. But in a way I was glad he now had the command, because the first order he gave was: “Stop leading those prisoners to the gangplank,” and because he was older, the men had to obey him. He then ordered
the captured ship to be stripped of everything we might need on the final rush to Port Royal, especially the casks of fresh water and the food. Our sailors were invited to take control of as much powder and ball as they thought they might need, and the masts were chopped down to deck level. The defeated Spaniards were allowed to climb back aboard their ship and head it for the mainland, while our men fired salutes to speed them on their way.

I had been captain for fifteen days, during which time I moved our ship homeward from 56° South to 34°. It could be said that during my captaincy we captured this Spanish vessel without the loss of an English life and that I received a proposal of marriage from a most wonderful Spanish girl. A lot of buccaneer captains take a longer time to achieve less.

But with the new order of things I was no longer allowed to take my meals with the Ledesma women and the priest, so I must devise some trick to see once more the girl who loves me.

F
RI
25 D
ECEMBER
:
Well off the coast at 22° 53′ South, opposite Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. This afternoon all the bitterness I have harbored against Fray Baltazar vanished, for when the entire ship’s company had gathered on the afterdeck during a fine spring afternoon for holy services honoring the birthday of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the tall, dark priest said, following his prayers: “Let there be harmony on this blessed day. I have prayed in Catholic Spanish for my countrymen, will you pray in Protestant English for yours,” and to my amazement he placed his Spanish Bible in my hands, and I was so moved that for some moments I could not speak, but then I heard my uncle’s voice growling: “Get on with it, lad,” and a torrent of words sprang from my lips:

It was simply impossible for me to close a Christmas prayer without mention of the girl I had come to love, so to the astonishment of the crew I added: