Buccaneer (26 page)

‘I’ve still got a few medicines stowed in my knapsack,’ Hector told the disgruntled surgeon. Basil Ringrose was originally from Kent, and Hector had taken an instant liking to him. Ringrose had a friendly manner which matched his open, freckled face topped by a mass of chestnut curls.

‘We must put together a common stock of all the medicines that remain.’ Ringrose said. ‘It’s fortunate that I always carry my surgical instruments with me in their own roll of oil cloth.’

It was Ringrose who had amputated one of Captain Harris’s legs, trying unsuccessfully to save his life. But the stump had begun to rot, and with gangrene had come death.

‘I’m only a surgeon’s assistant,’ Hector confessed. ‘I came to help Surgeon Smeeton of Captain Harris’s company, and he’s turned back. But I have been keeping notes of how to prepare various medicines using local ingredients.’

‘I saw you writing things down and thought that you were helping Dampier over there,’ explained Ringrose. He nodded towards a saturnine, lantern-jawed man who was leaning perilously far out over the side of the anchored galleon and staring down into the sea. The man was dropping small chips of wood into the water and watching them float away. Propped against the bulwark was a bamboo tube similar to the one that Hector carried.

‘What’s he doing?’ Hector asked.

‘I have no idea. You had better go and ask him for yourself. Dampier seems to take an interest in nearly everything that we come across.’

Hector approached the stranger, who was now writing down something on a scrap of paper.

The man looked up from his quill. Brown melancholy eyes framed a narrow nose above a long upper lip. He looked too scholarly to be a sea thief.

‘Tides,’ said the man pensively, even before Hector could pose his question. ‘I’m trying to work out the source of the tides. You may have noticed that here in the South Sea the tides run much stronger than those we left behind in the Caribbean.’

‘I had remarked on that,’ said Hector. Dampier shot him a quizzical glance from the sad-looking eyes.

‘Then how do you explain it? Surely if the ocean is all one body of water, the tides should be similar everywhere. Some people claim that the fierce tides in the South Sea are made by water rushing through tunnels under the land, flooding here from the Caribbean. But I do not believe it.’

‘Then what do you think is the reason?’

Dampier bent his head to blow gently on the wet ink. ‘That I have not yet understood. But I believe it is to do with the wind patterns, the shape of the ocean floor, and phases of the moon of course. What is important at this time is to make observations. Interpretation can come later.’

‘I was told that you make observations of everything.’

Dampier had a habit of rubbing his finger along his long upper lip. ‘Nearly everything. I’m interested in fish and fowl, people and plants, the weather and the seasons. It is my chief reason for travelling.’

‘Surgeon Smeeton, for whom I was an assistant, was of a like mind. Though he was mainly interested in the medical practices of native peoples.’

‘Surgeon Smeeton, I hear that he has left the expedition. A pity. I knew him in Jamaica.’

Hector felt a quick surge of interest at the mention of Jamaica. ‘Do you know Jamaica well?’ he asked.

‘I was there for a few months, training to be an overseer on a sugar plantation,’ Dampier replied. ‘But I disagreed with my employer, and the opportunity to go on the account – as these buccaneers call their adventuring – was too tempting. It was a chance to see new places.’

‘When you were in Jamaica did you hear anything of the Lynch family?’

‘Difficult not to. He was the governor, and his family possess as much, if not more acreage, than any other landowners on the island.’

‘What about the son, Robert Lynch, and his sister Susanna? Did you meet them by any chance?’

‘Far too grand for me,’ said Dampier shaking his head. ‘Though I did encounter young Robert briefly. He wanted information about the best conditions for planting indigo. I told him that he was better to consult an established indigo grower.’

‘What about his sister Susanna?’

‘I never met her in person though I saw her at a distance. A very pretty creature. Destined for a grand marriage, I would say. One day her parents will be taking her to London to find a suitable match.’

Hector felt a stab of disappointment. It was exactly what the surveyor Snead had said. ‘So you don’t think she would stay on in Jamaica?’

‘There’s nothing for her there. Why all the questions? Do you know her?’

‘I met her just once,’ Hector confessed.

Dampier treated him to a shrewd look. ‘Sweet on her, are you? Well, that’s as strange and curious as anything I’ve observed in the South Sea, a humble adventurer pining after a grandee’s daughter.’ He gave a lugubrious sniff, and began to roll up the piece of paper ready to slide it into the bamboo tube with his other notes. Then a thought must have occurred to him, for he looked up and said, ‘If Surgeon Smeeton no longer requires your services, perhaps you would lend me a hand in making my observations.’

‘I would be pleased to,’ Hector assured him, ‘though my chief duty must still be to assist the surgeons.’

‘Yes, you were talking with Ringrose. You’ll discover that he’s got clever hands and is as much interested in navigation as he is in medicine. Enjoys making instruments to read the angle of the sun and devising sighting tables, that sort of thing.’

‘I had noticed that all morning he’s been making a sketch map of the bay and its islands.’

‘A very sensible precaution. We have no charts of this area. We are utterly ignorant of the ports and anchorages, currents, reefs and islands. Such details are known only to the Spaniards. In case we come back here, Ringrose is making notes so that we know just where to anchor, find water and shelter.’

‘I worked for a Turkish sea captain once, assisting him with sea charts. But apart from a single ocean crossing, I lack practical experience of navigation.’

‘Stick close to Ringrose and you’ll learn a lot, though I expect it will be mostly coastal pilotage rather than deep-sea navigation,’ Dampier assured him.

S
O IT TURNED OUT
. For the next two months
Trinity
stayed near the coast, a hungry predator looking for scraps of plunder. News of her presence had yet to spread to the Spanish settlements and in the first ten days she loitered off Panama she snapped up several unwary prizes, which sailed straight into her jaws and gave up without a fight. One was an advice ship loaded with pay for the Panama garrison, fifty-one thousand pieces of eight, and – equally welcome – fifty great earthen jars of gunpowder which replenished stocks that had run low. Other hapless victims provided rations – flour, beans, cages of live chickens, sacks of chocolate beans which the buccaneers ground to powder and drank mixed with hot water. The captured vessels were small barks and of little value. Anything useful by way of rigging or sails was taken off, then the boarding party smashed holes in their planking and sank them on the spot.

But the weather was against them. Not a day passed without frequent downpours of heavy rain which soaked the men and their clothing. The sails grew great patches of stinking mildew in the muggy tropical heat, and a miasma of damp hung over the sodden vessel. The run-off dripped through cracks in the deck spoiling everything below. Guns and equipment rusted overnight. Bread and biscuits in the cook’s stores went mouldy. In search of fresh supplies of food, Sawkins the fire-eater led a raid ashore. The local inhabitants hastily threw up breastworks at the entrance to their little town, and Sawkins was tugging at one of the wooden posts trying to uproot it when he was killed outright by a Spanish shot. His death only added to the general sense of disappointment that
Trinity
was wasting too much time. When the wind failed she was gripped by unknown currents which one day brought her close to the shore, and the next night pushed her almost out of sight of land. In June the rainfall eased, but the sky remained overcast and sullen, leaving the men frustrated and discontent. They grumbled and bickered, knowing they needed to progress east and south along the coast before the alarm was raised. Instead the wind, when it did blow, was fitful, and almost always from ahead.
Trinity
was obliged to tack back and forth. The crew found themselves staring at the same landmarks – a headland, a small island, a rock with a particular profile – from dawn until dusk, and then again at the next sunrise. They did not need a chart to tell them that they were almost standing still.

‘What else did your people expect? Did they know nothing of our equatorial weather?’ commented Capitan Peralta to Hector. The Spaniard was one of the growing number of prisoners, and the two of them were in the habit of meeting in the bows of the ship where they could not be overheard.

‘Are the rains finally over?’ Hector asked.

Peralta shrugged. ‘There can be heavy downpours at this time of year, even into August. I wonder if your comrades will still want to follow their captain by then?’

Peralta gave Hector a sideways look. The buccaneer council had elected Bartholomew Sharpe as their new general, the grand title they now gave to their overall commander.

Hector hesitated before replying, and Peralta was quick to pick up on the delay. ‘There’s something a little devious about him, isn’t there? Something not quite right.’

Hector felt it would be disloyal to agree, so said nothing. But Peralta had a point. There was an unsettling quality about Sharpe. It was something that Hector had noted at Golden Island. Even then he had thought that Sharpe was a natural mischief maker. Behind the amiable smile on the fleshy, pouting lips was an evasiveness which made one reluctant to trust him entirely. Now that Sharpe had been made general, Hector was even more apprehensive. He sensed the man was self-serving and devious.

‘Don’t be surprised if some of your colleagues decide to break away on their own when conditions get more difficult,’ Peralta continued. ‘Your shipmates are easily swayed and can be pitiless.’

To change the subject Hector showed the Spaniard a new backstaff that Ringrose had fashioned.

Peralta watched him slide the vanes of the backstaff along its wooden shaft.

‘It seems a more complicated instrument than usual, more movable parts,’ observed the Spaniard.

‘Ringrose assures me that it will allow us to calculate our latitude position even where the sun is so high in the sky at noon that a normal backstaff is inaccurate. See here . . .’ Hector handed Peralta the instrument so he could inspect the extra vanes. ‘They allow readings even when the sun is at ninety degrees overhead.’

‘Fortunately I don’t depend on such a device for finding my position. I know the coast from here to Lima and beyond,’ the Spaniard answered dryly. ‘And if I am in doubt I turn to the pages in my derotero, my pilot book, and then I know where I am.’ He allowed himself a sardonic smile. ‘That’s your new commander’s real dilemma. He doesn’t know where he is or what he’s up against, and sooner or later his men will realise it too. They are a wolf pack, ready to show their fangs, and their leader may turn out to be equally ruthless.’

H
ECTOR RECALLED
Peralta’s warning in the third week of August when
Trinity
overhauled another small coaster. Unusually, her crew put up a fight. They draped waistcloths along the bulwarks in order to conceal their numbers, and men fired old-fashioned arquebuses at the approaching galleon. The battle lasted only half an hour and the outcome was never in doubt.
Trinity
was by far the larger vessel and mustered three or four times as many marksmen. Yet two buccaneers were badly wounded by enemy bullets before the bark dropped her topsail in a sign of surrender and her survivors cried for quarter.

‘Search and sink her, and be quick about it!’ Sharpe shouted angrily as he watched the canoe which served as
Trinity
’s cockboat being lowered into the water. He was in an evil humour. The enemy’s fire had cut up
Trinity
’s newly overhauled rigging which would have to be spliced and mended, resulting in further delay, and it was three weeks since they had last taken any plunder.