Pirate Freedom (5 page)

"Yes! It will stand tall and proud." With a whole lot more, some of it pretty dirty. Italian is a real good language to talk dirty in, but sometimes I think Spanish must be the best in the whole world. Those girls had a great time teasing me, laughing at me and anything I happened to say, and enjoyed themselves so much that I told them, "Listen up! You owe me, all of you, and one of these days I'm coming to collect."

The next day the captain put me back on starboard watch. We worked until it got hot, cleaning up the ship and replacing some of the rigging that was getting worn, and then we got to go ashore again. This time I knew that most of the men who promised they would come back did not mean a word of it and would not come back until somebody came and got them.

Which I was not about to do again. At first I thought I would just find a place on shore where I could get some sleep, maybe in the church where I had gotten to know the priest. Then I decided that the thing for me to do was to sneak back on board without Señor's seeing me. If I could do that, I could come back early, sling my hammock in the forecastle the way I always did, and crash. That would be a lot better than sleeping in a hiding place in some alley—I had done that a lot before I joined the crew—and I would not be breaking my word. I had not promised to report back to Señor, or any such thing. Just that I would come back to the ship that night.

The first thing I did, though, was to strike up a conversation with somebody in the market and find out where the treasure house was. It turned out it was behind where the fort was being built, and I had been pretty close to it without knowing when I had watched the slaves work there.

I went there to see it and hung around looking at it, and pretty soon I had a real piece of luck. Mules and soldiers came—there must have been a hundred mules—and the big doors were opened. Those mules had been carrying silver bars, each bar heavy enough to make a pretty good load for one man, and I got to see the soldiers unload them and carry them inside.

The treasure house was not very big, or very high either—not even as high as our little chapel at the monastery. The walls were thick just the same, the doors were big and heavy and bound with iron, and the top of it looked like the top of a castle, with openings between the big stones for soldiers to shoot through. I was not thinking of getting the silver or anything like that
then. But I saw right away that if somebody was, the thing to do was to get it while it was still on the mules.

After that, I went back to the harbor for a look at the
Santa Charita
before sunset. There I got lucky again. A big galleon was making port, and I got to watch the whole thing. It was about five times the size of our ship, with crosses on all the sails and a lot of carving and gilding on the stern.

It tied up at a different pier, and I went over there for a closer look and so I could see who got off. It was a pretty good show, too, with trumpets blowing and soldiers with red pants and polished armor escorting the captain. I jumped up and touched my forehead the way you are supposed to, and nobody said a word to me.

Walking back to the quay, I could see the starboard side of the
Santa Charita
, and I got an idea. If I could get something that would float that I could stand on, I could reach up and grab the edge of the anchor hawse, pull myself up, and climb in through the hawsepipe. That would put me on the weather deck, where the capstan was, forward of the foremast and right over the forecastle. Señor and whoever he had with him would be in the waist where they could watch the gangplank. If I stayed low, I could keep an eye on them over the edge of the weather deck. When they were busy with something, I could hold the edge of the deck and swing myself down into the forecastle. All I had to do was wait until it was good and dark, and borrow a boat to climb up from. I found a nice shady spot to sit in, and dozed off for a couple of hours.

WHEN I WOKE
up I went looking for the kind of boat I needed, one small enough that I could manage it by myself but big enough that it would not capsize when I stood up in it. Of course it had to be a boat nobody was watching. Once I got into the hawsepipe, I would let it drift away. The owner would probably be able to find it without too much trouble unless the tide carried it out to sea. Still, he would not like what I was going to do, and I knew it.

That was a pretty tall order, and I had hardly started prowling through the hot, dark night when I spotted a boat in the harbor with two men rowing and another in the stern who seemed to be looking for something too. I thought they were probably soldiers or night watchmen or something, so I strolled along like I did not have a care in the world when they seemed to
be looking my way. Out toward the end of one of the piers, I stepped on a round piece of something—probably a boat pole—that rolled under my foot. I just about went into the water, and I yelled, "Oh, shit!"

As soon as I said that, the man in the back of the boat sang out, "Ahoy there! You speak English?"

He had a British accent and was a little hard for me to understand, but I waved and yelled, "Sure!"

The other two rowed him over and he jumped up on the pier. I am taller than most people—my father told me once he got me engineered that way—and I was taller than he was by quite a bit. It was too dark to see a lot, but it seemed to me that he had more hair on his face, even though he did not seem like he was a whole lot older than I was.

"Say, this's luck! We've been hours tryin' to get our bearin's. None of us speaks the lingo, you see." He held out his hand. "Bram Burt's my name. Midshipman Burt that was, late of His Majesty's
Lion
and these days skipper of the
Macérer
."

He had a good handshake. I could tell the name of his ship was French from the way he said it, but I did not know what the word meant. I gave him my name, called him sir, and explained that I was just an ordinary seaman from the
Santa Charita
.

"Bit of an accent there, eh? You're a Day—You're Spanish?"

I said, "I'm from Jersey, but I speak Spanish."

"That explains it. Have to, on a Dago ship. Parlez-vous français?"

I told him I did, a little, saying it in French. Then I started trying to tell him about the monastery.

"Belay that. Bit too quick for me, eh? You'd be a handy sort to have 'round, though. Half my bloody crew's French. See here now, the dear old
Macérer
's markin' time out there, eh? Outside the roadstead. They goin' to get huffy if we make port tonight?"

I explained that some of the guns were up in the fort already, said I would not try it, and showed him where he could find the harbor master in the morning.

"What do you think our chances are of gettin' a cargo here? Sold every-thin' in Port Royal, eh? No cargo for us there, so we're lookin' about.
Saint Charity
havin' much luck?"

I shrugged. "They say we'll load tomorrow, Captain, but I don't know what it is."

"That's interestin'." It was too dark for me to be sure, but I believe he winked. "Gold doubloons, hid away ever so snug. Put it in kegs marked BEER, eh? They're shippin' gold back to the Spanish king like 'twas sand, we hear."

I shook my head. "I'm sure it's not that, sir."

" 'Cause of that big lad?" He pointed to the galleon.

"Yes, sir, the
Santa Lucía
there. She'll carry the treasure."

After that he asked me what treasure I meant, and I told him about the treasure house and seeing the mules unloaded there. I offered to take him to see it, and he thanked me.

"Interestin', I'll be bound, but my duty's to my ship, eh? Got to get back to her. I'll go sightseein' tomorrow, it may be."

"In that case, could you run me by the
Santa Charita
? It won't take you much out of your way, and I'd like to get aboard without being seen."

He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. "Slipped off, did you? I've done the same once or twice. Got a masthead for it once, too."

I jumped from the pier into his boat and sat in the bow, as he directed. When we lay against the hawse of the
Santa Charita
, he whispered to the rowers to ship oars and join him in the stern. That raised the bow a foot or more, and it was no trick to pull myself into the hawsepipe, or to slip into the forecastle as I had planned. The next day I looked around the harbor for the
Macérer
without finding her, and I soon forgot Capt. Burt and his ship in the work of stowing cargo.

It was mixed, as they say. There were big bales of leather, box after box of dried fruit, and crates of terra cotta cookware. There were also seven parrots in cages, a private investment of Señor's. They had to be carried out of the hold in fine weather and set on the weather deck, and carried back to the hold at night for fear they would catch cold.

The rest of the crew hated them because of the extra work they made, and their noise and dirt. I thought they were cute and did my best to make friends, talking to them and scratching their necks the way Señor did. After one died, I was assigned to water and feed them, clean their cages, and take care of them generally.

It brought me closer to Señor, and that soon paid off in a big way. He would come out and shoot the sun at noon every day, check the logbook just like the captain did, and calculate our position. Then he and the captain would compare their results, and go over their calculations, too, if the results
were too different. About the time we went through the Windward Passage, I started asking him about it.

I had been taking care of his birds and talking to him about them, and we were pretty good friends. He was still Señor to me, and I still touched my forehead and all that. But I had showed him he could relax with me and I would still jump when he gave an order. So he answered my questions when there were not too many, and showed me how to work the astrolabe. Basically what he was doing was measuring the angle of the sun at noon. Once you know that and the date, you know the latitude. The farther north you are, the farther south the sun rises and the lower it is at noon in the winter. If you know the date, the table gives you your latitude. Certain stars can be used the same way.

There are a bunch of problems with this system, as you can see. For one thing, it is hard to get a good measurement unless you happen to be standing on a rock. When the sea is calm, you take three measurements and average them. When it is rough, you can forget the whole thing.

And that is not all. In dirty weather you cannot see the sun, so no measurement. On top of that, your compass is pointing to magnetic north, not true north. There were tables for compass deviation, too, but you had to know your position to use them. So what I used to do (now I am getting ahead of myself again) was check the compass bearing against the North Star. If this is starting to sound complicated, you have no idea. I have just given the high spots.

When you have found out your latitude, you still need your longitude, and for us the only way to know that was to measure our speed with the log, and record it in the logbook, which we did every hour. The log is on a line with knots in it to measure speed. You throw the log off the back of the ship, watch the little sandglass, and count knots.

Of course if you are in sight of land, it is all different. You take bearings from objects on the chart, which gives your position—if the chart is right, and if you have not picked the wrong island or mountaintop or whatever.

By the time I had learned even half this stuff, we were a long, long way out from Veracruz. So good night!

WE CROSSED THE
Atlantic with the galleon, which meant we had to match its speed. In light airs, it would hardly move, so we spent days and days creeping along under reefed topsails. When the wind whistled in the rigging and spray came over the side, the old slowpoke
Santa Lucía
turned into a racehorse, setting sails in places most ships do not even have and creaming the sea for a mile behind her. We had to do our best to keep up, all plain sail set and the deck so steep you couldn't walk on it without holding on to something. I do not know how close we were to capsizing, but I would not want to come an inch closer than we came a dozen times a day. When we finally split up—us heading north to Coruña and the
Santa Lucía
east for Cádiz—we were all praising God and blessing the Virgin. It was the only time I ever saw the whole crew smiling.

We unloaded at Coruña and were paid off, each of us going up to the captain one at a time and having the book explained to us before we got our
money. That was when I found out that I had worked for a week to pay for two shirts and two pairs of pants.