The Emerald Storm (30 page)
Authors: William Dietrich
I was amazed there was not more rape and murder, given the conflict’s history. At my advice, Dessalines kept a stern rein on his men to avoid a retaliatory bombardment from European ships. On board the vessels was chaos, as an escaping throng squeezed between guns, pushed into sail lockers, and tucked under longboats. Even madmen were evacuated from the city’s asylum and chained to a gunwale, raving in the confusion. Mothers sobbed, children wailed, dogs barked, and army officers climbed aboard with pet monkeys, macaws, and parrots. The vessels were so jammed that some of the baggage was heaved overboard by impatient sailors.
A few blacks fled as well as whites, some servants refusing to abandon their masters. And some whites and mulattos chose the risk of staying ashore. But the overwhelming effect of the surrender was a final division of the races. The ships, their decks crammed with pale faces, visibly settled in the water. Some quarterdecks were so crowded that the helmsman could scarcely turn the wheel. The vessels did not so much sail as lumber out of the crowded harbor.
On shore, the Paris of the Antilles, newly renamed Cap-Haïtien, smoldered.
As night fell, the victors rejoiced and danced in the streets with that rhythmic energy I’d seen in the jungle. Burning homes threw lurid light on the celebration. There was a pungent smell of smoke, gunpowder from shots fired aloft in victory, rot from broken larders, and roast pig, goat, and chicken cooked in street bonfires. I saw a few white and mulatto faces, but they were rare and subdued, watching the slave army from the shadows with apprehension.
Impatient as I was, I knew better than to approach Dessalines at the height of his triumph; he was preoccupied with organizing a nation. I applied for an appointment at his convenience and remained at my inn, since there was no one left to collect rent. The general didn’t even enter the conquered city until November 30, 1803. I finally got to see him the following afternoon, where he reigned in the ballroom of Rochambeau’s Government House, looking weary but grimly powerful, the western half of Hispaniola finally his. He had a steady stream of visitors seeking promotion, trade, or redress of grievances. On a long table to one side of his desk, aides kept tally of what had been captured and lost. Officers bustled in and out on assignments to put Cap-François in order again, and newly appointed ministers began forming a permanent government. I realized I was witnessing something akin to the start of my own nation thirty years before. I should have taken notes, had I pen and paper. But no, I was impatient to find my family, not play historian.
“I congratulate the new Spartacus,” I greeted, after waiting more than an hour past my appointed time.
“I have exceeded L’Ouverture and shall crown myself emperor,” the general pronounced. “Napoleon himself could not stand before me.”
Napoleon was five thousand miles away, and Rochambeau had been no Caesar, but I knew better than to amend this self-assessment. I changed the subject. “I did what you asked to help win our victory, and now I can do even more for Haiti,” I said. “All governments need gold. Maybe I can find some.”
“Those legends you spoke of.”
“Lend me Jubal, Antoine, and a few companions, and I’ll search for the treasure of Montezuma. I’ll split with your regime and finally retire from public life.”
“You want my help to search for your wife and son.”
“Of course.”
“Then Haiti has given you sense, perhaps. Family is worth more than baubles.” This was a pronouncement, spoken loudly enough so that all in the hall could hear it. “Loyalty worth more than fear.”
I understood the need to express such sentiment. He was a new Moses for a new kind of country, but a bloody-handed Moses with a dozen years worth of enemies waiting for him to fall. Somehow he had to establish an ethic, and I didn’t envy his power or his responsibility. “Then I can have your men to go look for my loved ones and the relics that Maroons are rumored to have hidden away?”
“If my men will come back. You’ll look where?”
“Martinique, the
loa
told me. My enemy Leon Martel has gone there.”
“Perhaps we blacks will rise in Martinique next.”
“Let me have a look around first.”
He waved me away, our interview over. “You should be sailing already. Next!”
T
he ruler of France and his wife both came from island colonies. Bonaparte is Corsican, the real spelling of his name Italian, and his heritage is of Roman generals and Renaissance plotters. Martinique, the island of Joséphine’s birth, childhood, and the place where I hoped to bargain for my wife and son, is languid paradise under the slow match of a volcano.
The island rears out of the Caribbean like an emerald dream, its northern half summiting in smoking Pelee. The isle is more dramatic upon approach than Antigua, Atlantic breakers crashing on its eastern coast and turquoise Caribbean shallows lapping its western beaches. Plantation homes climb lush slopes to make a checkerboard of white and green, and French ships huddle for protection from the British under the guns of lava-stoned Fort-de-France, on the island’s principle bay. After the horror of Haiti the island looked entirely serene from the sea, but I knew my little company of Negro warriors couldn’t simply spring ashore and ask for the address of Leon Martel. They’d freed themselves, and thus were the worst nightmare of the ruling whites on this island.
My black platoon included the cheerfully practical Jubal, the logical Antoine, and six other Negroes hungry for more adventure and a glimpse of Aztec gold. Excitement is addictive. We sailed from Cap-François with a Dutch trader looking for a hire that would keep him a safe distance from British forces assaulting his own nation’s islands. The Caribbean sugar isles changed flags as frequently as a courtesan changes clothes as rival fleets swept in and out on the trades, guns thundering and marines sweeping ashore.
Our vessel was the coastal lugger
Nijmegen
, with two masts, a small cabin that the captain, mate, and I slept in as segregated whites, and an open deck where Jubal’s comrades—once they got over seasickness—made a comfortable home under an awning rigged from a damaged sail. Captain Hans Van Luven was dubious about having a Negro cargo not in chains, but he soon discovered that my adventurers, who paid in advance with Dessalines’s captured coins, were better company than cranky Europeans. They were also willing to help tack, reef, and anchor.
“It’s as if they’re as human as the rest of us,” he marveled.
We were two weeks scudding down the Leeward Islands to Martinique at the northern end of the Windwards, anchoring each night in a different bay on a different island and avoiding any sail we spotted.
Now we were at an isle where French power was still intact.
Our plan was to round Cap Salomon south of Fort-de-France Bay and put ashore at one of the coves on Martinique’s southern coast. On the charts, a valley led from the village of Trois Rivières north toward the main settlements, and I could skulk along this for more information before presenting myself to Governor Michel Lambeau with Rochambeau’s papers. Finding my wife shouldn’t be impossible. Astiza is the kind of woman who’s noticed, and unless she’d been entirely hidden away, gossip of her would filter into all corners of the island.
Then fortune provided even more clarity.
As we tacked southeast toward our goal, I noticed a peaked volcanic rock two miles offshore of Martinique. It was shaggy with shrub and reared almost six hundred feet out of the sea. Its summit came to a point, and its entire architecture was quite imposing, the monolith visible for miles. It overlooked the sea-lanes toward the island of Saint-Lucia to the south. We kept well clear in case there were fringing reefs.
“The Gibraltar of the Caribbean,” I commented idly.
“Or the prick of Agwe, the god of the sea,” Jubal said.
“If so, he must be looking at Ezili,” Antoine joined in.
“More like a diamond, Yankee,” our bearded captain replied. “Look at it sparkle in the sun.”
For a minute I let that comment pass by, and then suddenly it jarred my slow brain. “Diamond?” I sat straighter, looking at the rock.
“From the facets of the cliffs.
Le Diamant
, that’s what the French call it. It can look like one in bright light, after a rain.”
“That rock is called the Diamond?”
“Didn’t I just say so?”
I felt a chill. Ezili had prophesized that the diamond would be right in front of me. “Are you sure?”
“Read the chart, American.”
My luck had turned. “Are there caves in that rock?”
“Wouldn’t be surprised. But I don’t know anyone who goes there, unless they want cactus and gull guano. No water, and no worth. Now Martinique, in contrast, has a resource. Most beautiful women in the world. One of them captured Bonaparte, I understand.”
“Joséphine, his wife.”
“Yes, the crafty Creole. Must have been a prize.”
“Actually, he was poor, and she was desperate,” I said with the authority of knowing them both. “Her first husband had just been guillotined. Social climbers the pair, and they calculate like an abacus. Made for each other, I suppose. Joséphine is six years older but understood Paris society. She
is
pretty, or perhaps I should say charismatic, though her teeth are bad.”
“It must not be her teeth he was interested in.”
“She was the more worldly of the two, at least in the beginning. She netted his ambition like a fish.”
“And now she sits on top of the world. You can’t tell me, Gage, that the whole stinking mess of life isn’t chance piled on circumstance, multiplied by calculation, and divided by luck. There’re a thousand women ashore lovelier than Joséphine, I’ll wager, but what does it matter when God rolls his dice?”
“I’m looking for just one woman. My own wife, stolen by another man.”
“Ja
, now there’s trouble. Ran away from you, eh? And you’re asking for more trouble to land with these blacks. Slaves from Haiti? Your reception will be torches and pitchforks.”
I’d been pondering that. “We need to camp quietly, not parade into port. How much do you want for your longboat there and some fishing line?” For expenses, Dessalines had given me some money looted from Cap-François.
Being a Dutchman, Captain Van Luven named a price double the craft’s real worth. You can be fleeced in New York or shaven in Amsterdam.
“Done,” I said, since it wasn’t my coin. “And food?”
That was triple.
“Done again. Work in close at dusk, and then we’ll launch your longboat. The blacks will put me ashore.”
“And what about us, Ethan?” Jubal asked.
“I anoint you free fishermen, plying your trade around Diamond Rock. That may be where Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Black Spartacus himself, told us to go.”
I
landed on Martinique armed, but not with something as conspicuous and primitive as a spear. My work at negotiating the evacuation of Cap-François resulted in the rebels awarding me a pistol, powder, ball, officer’s sword, a dagger sheathed under my coat in the small of my back, and a tiny gambling pistol tucked up one sleeve. If I discovered a blunderbuss on this new island, I’d buy that, too. I expected I might have to shoot my way to success.
My little company came ashore by moonlight on a beach of sand as fine and white as sugar. It glowed, the lapping water phosphorescent. We slept by the sigh of the sea as the Dutch vessel tacked for Cartagena. The next morning I directed Jubal and his team to make a secret camp and discreetly scout Diamond Rock, fishing to supplement the provisions we’d purchased from the sharp-fingered Dutchman.
Meanwhile, a two-hour hike down the shoreline took me to a plantation, its lane, and then a road, and I soon hailed a passing cane wagon and begged a ride. The slave teamster had no objection to my company. When we came to the first village, I paid two francs to switch to a swifter and more respectable carriage, explaining I was a French-speaking American dropped rather abruptly by a Dutch vessel fleeing a British frigate. I said I was making my way to Fort-de-France to discuss business opportunities that had arisen with renewed European war, and showed my papers from Rochambeau.
Since the United States made good money selling to belligerents on all sides, this explanation was readily accepted. By day’s end I was in the island’s capital, a place immeasurably gayer, more prosperous, and crowded than Cap-François. Some Haitian refugees had come here, and inns were crowded. Nonetheless, I bought my way into the best hotel, had a bath and the finest meal since I’d left Paris, and sent word to the island’s Government House that I was an American trade representative with French papers requesting to see Governor Michel Lambeau. There I would inquire about beautiful but distressed Greek Egyptian females accompanied by a disreputable roach of a man who thieved other men’s belongings and kept small children in bondage. If Martel was a criminal, why not get French help in tracking him down?
I’d settle accounts, and then search Diamond Rock.
A letter came directing me to call on the governor at half-past ten, and I brushed out my coat and trousers as best I could. But when I came onto the dazzling street, palms waving in the breeze, I was quickly accosted by a tall, thick, ruggedly built European with tropic tan whose eyes darted as watchfully as a reptile’s. He was dressed in dour black, was poorly shaven, and had teeth the color of rancid butter. His smell made me instinctively pull away.
He gripped my wrist and hand with both of his own, a fierce familiarity I didn’t expect, his smile broad but not friendly. “It’s Ethan Gage, is it not?”
“Do I know you, monsieur?”
“We met in Paris.”
I looked him warily up and down.
“In Nitot’s jewelry shop. You knocked me over and broke the nose of my employer.”
That got my pulse up. My other hand went to the butt of a pistol. “And you missed me with your shot, if I recall. I’ve found it works well to practice; otherwise, the target survives to possibly shoot back.”
