An Introduction To The Eternal Collection Jubilee Edition (11 page)

She was not to know the ship’s routine and Master Barlow’s question of “Hands to punishment. sir?” took her by surprise. The pipes of the boatswain’s mates began to twitter.

“All hands to witness punishment!” roared a Petty Officer on the main deck and the men began to pour up from below while Rodney stood rigid by the quarter-deck rail.

The expression on his face was severe and there was something in his attitude and in the men’s expectancy which made Lizbeth wish she had kept to her cabin. But she could not push past Rodney and leave the quarterdeck. She must stand and watch the boatswain’s mates trice a man naked to the waist up to the main rigging. Then the drums began to roll.

In her short sheltered life Lizbeth had not imagined in her wildest dreams anything so bestial as the cat-o’-nine tails whipping through the air, tearing at the naked flesh until the blood flowed in a crimson stream from the man’s back on to the clean-scrubbed deck.

As was usual with an experienced seaman the man made no sound, but at the end of two dozen strokes he hung motionless and silent. A bucket of water was flung over him. He was cut down and hustled below.

“Hands to breakfast, Master Barlow,” Rodney commanded.

The men on deck seemed to vanish as quickly as they had come and it was only then that Rodney turned to see Lizbeth with a white face and hands that were clenched together to prevent herself from fainting.

“You are early this morning.” He remarked, but she imagined he was glad to see her weakness.

All the horror of what she had just seen boiled up into a sudden hatred of him.

“Are you a devil,” she asked passionately, “that you should treat a human being in such a way?”

“The man had disobeyed an order,” Rodney answered coldly. “If men were allowed to do such things without punishment, then it would be impossible to control or direct the ship!”

“It is cruel and wicked,” Lizbeth stormed.

“They all know the penalty of disobedience,” Rodney said. “’Tis a pity your brother Francis was not here to see it.”

He turned on his heel as he spoke and went below to his breakfast, while Lizbeth stood gripping the rail and despising herself because the tears blurred her eyes. The shock of what she had just witnessed made her whole body quiver, and she felt that the sight of that man’s torn and bleeding back would haunt her all her life.

She was not to know that Rodney, sitting alone at his breakfast table, had always disliked the floggings that were the tradition of every ship that sailed the seven seas. He would rather have died than admit such a thing to Lizbeth, for he was bitterly ashamed of such weakness, but though he had seen hundreds of them, they still left him feeling sick in the pit of his stomach and any breakfast, even a more appetising one than that he was eating now, had the taste of sawdust after what he had just seen on deck.

The thought of Lizbeth’s white face and trembling fingers made him push aside his plate after he had eaten only a mouthful or so.

“Curse the wench,” he said out loud. “She has asked for it in coming. How can I help what she sees and hears?”

And yet he knew he would never be hardened to pain and suffering wherever he might find it. Just a flogging disturbed him physically every time he saw it, so Lizbeth’s distress had equally the power to hurt him.

Her little face, white and strained by the shock of what she had seen, was like a dagger in his heart. Her eyes were wide and defiant of the tears that were not far away and her lips trembled –the lips he had kissed and had never been able to forget.

He swore at himself for being a fool, and yet he could do nothing about it. He could never, it seemed to him, forget her presence aboard his ship and he told himself that his whole joy in the voyage was destroyed because of her.

Having little knowledge of women and believing them to be frail flowers who would crumple up at the first hardship, he had expected her to be ill for a few days after they got to sea, but Lizbeth had remained surprisingly well and if she had complaints, she had at least ventured no word of them to him. They had run into rough weather in the Bay of Biscay, but although she had looked drawn and white and had eaten very little at meals, she had not taken to her bed.

“Methinks Master Gillingham can be proud of his belly, sir,” Barlow had said one evening. “Most lads of his age would have been incapacitated by the seas we’ve just been through.”

Rodney felt as if Barlow were reproaching him for the uncomplimentary things he had said when he heard that Francis was coming on board. He snapped back an answer and realised that Barlow thought him unjust and not ready to give credit where credit was due.

It had not made him feel any more kindly towards Lizbeth and he wished that he could encounter some ship returning to England, in which case he had every intention of putting her aboard and sending her home. Lizbeth happily did not know of this intention, and as they sighted the Island of Dominica she was looking forward to their first encounter with the Spaniards as much as any of the men on board.

She had been present when Rodney explained to his officers what his plans were. He would water his ship at the island and then catch the trade wind into the Caribbean Sea. Once there, he would make for Nombre de Dios, a small but important town, which was the terminus of the Panama gold route. The treasure was brought by Spanish ships from the harbours of Peru to Panama. There it was loaded on mules and carried across the Isthmus to Nombre de Dios on the Caribbean Sea.

Drake had known of this sixteen years earlier in 1572 when he attacked the mule caravans, taking his crew over land to surprise them before they reached Nombre de Dios. He had made friends of the natives, who had helped him in every possible way, and he had left behind him a legend of kindness and justice which had never been forgotten.

But the Spaniards, having lost cargoes of great value to Drake, had taken care to preserve their gold and now not only was Nombre de Dios an armed fortress, but the treasure ships were guarded all the way back to Spain.

Privateers had given Nombre de Dios and the Caribbean Sea a rest in the past few years. It had been considered too dangerous to challenge the Spanish forces there, but Rodney thought it was worth trying to see if there was any chance of slipping into port and snatching some of the treasure before it was loaded.

If he failed in this, he could cruise down the Darien coast where there was always plunder to be found. He had hopes that natives might help him with information, but like everything else in the chancy work of privateering, one could not make too many plans ahead. One had to wait and see what circumstances were and seize an opportunity when it came.

The
Sea Hawk
reached Dominica late that afternoon and anchored in a small bay, sheltered by a high cliff. There was water in plenty, for the land was white with mountain streams. The crew were all itching to explore the tree covered hills, but Rodney insisted on the ship being watered first before anyone was allowed to stretch their legs or look for tropical fruit. He was well aware that it was dangerous to linger near these islands. The Spaniards might be on the look-out and he gave orders that the ship was to be kept ready to sail at any moment.

Another reason for getting under sail as quickly as possible was that the inhabitants of the island, the Caribs, were cannibals. A cruel, ferocious, warlike people, they had made a stout resistance to the Spaniards and seamen of all nations calling at Dominica found it wisest to avoid any encounter with them.

The place was lonely, with only the sea birds swirling and calling overhead. They stayed the night, raised anchor the next morning and sailed into the Caribbean Sea. For the next twelve days they were without a sight of land or the sail of another ship. It was very hot, and Lizbeth felt sorry for the men who must hurry about the decks, pulling on the ropes, lowering or raising the sails with the sweat trickling down their half-naked bodies.

Yet the heat made her feel strangely sensuous. She longed for wild, impossible things which had never entered her head before. She dreamed strange dreams – dreams of Rodney, so that sometimes she blushed when she looked at him the following morning.

Once, under a star-strewn sky in the airless heat of the tropical night, they had stood close together on the deck and Lizbeth had a mad desire to touch him, to make sure he was there and not a figment of her imagination.

“What are you thinking about?” Rodney asked, and his voice was unusually deep.

“You!” Lizbeth could not help speaking the truth.

“And I am thinking of you!” he spoke the words angrily.

“Why?” she hardly breathed the question.

“Because I cannot help it, because I cannot be free of you,” he hurled the accusations at her.

She stood very still, and the phosphorescence from the sea seemed to halo her hair.

“Curse you!” Rodney cried, but there was no anger in his voice. She trembled at his words, yet it was a sweet ecstatic emotion which seemed to course through her veins.

“Lizbeth!” It was the cry of a man hard-pressed, and then the ship’s bells brought them back to their senses. Without another word Rodney turned on his heel and went below, leaving Elizabeth alone, her hands to her breasts trying to quell the tumult within her.

It was getting towards dusk on the twelfth day after leaving Dominica when the look-out shouted,

“Sail ho!”

Rodney forgot to be composed on this occasion and came running up from his cabin on to the quarter-deck.

“Where away?” he asked.

“On the port bow, sir. A carrack, I think, sir”

“Yes, a carrack. sir,” shouted another from the foretop of the gallant masthead. “She’s right to windward under all sail, sir.”

For a few seconds no one on deck could see anything, then Rodney saw a gleaming square of white rise for a second over the horizon and then vanish again. Minutes passed and now the sails were more frequently to be seen, until at last the ship was in plain view running goose winged before the wind.

“She is flying the Spanish colours at the main, sir,” shouted the look-out.

Rodney nodded. He had seen that some seconds earlier, but was afraid that, if he said so, his voice would betray his excitement.

“She is at least seven hundred tons, sir,” Barlow’s voice said at his elbow.

Rodney did not answer for a moment, he was watching the ship approach. He was well aware that her guns would outmatch his. She was big, and the ‘Spanish castles of the sea’, as they called them, could afford to carry very heavy guns and those of a long range.

“Clear for action!”

The bulkheads came down, the ship’s boys gave a cheer as they came running up with powder for the guns between which the black iron spheres were set ready for instant use. On the starboard side the guns were run out on their wooden trucks and loaded within a few seconds, on the port side the crews were ramming in the charges of shot and heaving the guns into position.

“Cleared for action, sir,” said Barlow.

Rodney opened his lips to speak, but the words were checked by a sudden shriek from the masthead,

“Sail ho!”

Rodney jerked his head upwards as the look-out continued, “On the starboard bow, sir. She’s right in the way of the sun – she’s a lugger!”

All heads turned towards the starboard. They had been so busily engaged in watching the carrack on the port bow that the lugger had come straight over the horizon before they had seen her. She was two-masted, a pearling lugger from the Gulf of Panama, perhaps, but she would be armed and there was no question as to whose flag she was flying.

Rodney began to calculate how long it would be before the ships closed on them. From the
Sea Hawk’s
masthead in the clear light of the Caribbean a ship could be seen from a distance of as much as twenty miles. But the gap between the ships and himself was shortening.

He had not long to make up his mind and he knew that, if he dithered and did nothing, he would be crushed between the two of them. He saw the men looking at him as Barlow waited for the orders. He knew in that split second that there was only one order he could give.

“Set the topsail, Master Barlow,” he said.

He fancied there was the slightest hesitation before Barlow repeated the order.

“Clap on more sail – ease the halliards,” Rodney added.

Again Barlow relayed the order.

“Keep her steady as she goes, Master Barlow,” he said a moment later.

There was a fresh breeze blowing which caught the sails. The men were scurrying about the decks, being cursed by Petty Officers as they sprang up the rigging. The crew was ready with the sheets and braces. Gun crews were waiting as a runner might wait to start on a race.

Rodney stared across the water to the carrack. She was coming more quickly than the lugger, which was beating against the wind.

“Wind shifting. sir,” Master Barlow said.

“Keep her steady as she goes,” Rodney replied.

“As she goes, sir?” Barlow repeated, the faintest question in his voice.

“That was what I said, Master Barlow.”

Barlow understood for the first time what was taking place. Rodney saw his face drop, the sudden quenching of the excitement in his eyes, and then as the
Sea Hawk
responded to extra sail and gathered speed, the seamen, too, realised that they were running away.

A kind of groan went up which seemed to Rodney in that moment one of contempt rather than disappointment, but he appeared to hear nothing. He was watching the galleon approaching on one side and the lugger on the other. Sandwiched between the two there was not a chance for the
Sea Hawk
and yet he knew only too well what his men were feeling.

“We could have tackled one,” he said to himself, “but not two.”

Even so the carrack alone could out-class them, out-gun them, and even if they grappled with her and effected some damage, there was every chance they would find themselves at the bottom of the sea before she had finished with them.

He had made his decision, unpopular though it was, and the
Sea Hawk
with every sail strained to the uttermost was running as fast as she could across the Caribbean Sea. He was concentrating so fiercely on watching the carrack that he did not at first hear a very quiet, soft voice at his side.