Sea Robber (48 page)

‘Realized what?’ he asked, though he had a shrewd idea.

‘Charles and Johanna were not man and wife, but son and daughter. She was Johanna the Mad and he ruled in her name while she was still alive.’

‘So you chose the two pillars?’

She looked at him seriously. ‘For a good reason.’

For a moment Hector was at a loss. ‘You mean “Spain and the Indies” because we find ourselves in the Orient?’

She shook her head. ‘Every child in Spain knows that the two pillars are those that Hercules set up at the Straits of Gibraltar to mark the end of the world. But Charles, when he came to the throne, changed that. He took the two pillars as his emblem, and added the motto “plus ultra” – “more beyond”.’ She paused. ‘I thought there could be no better watchword for our future.’

Hector looked at her admiringly. Maria was so calm and so certain. ‘That ship down there,’ he said, ‘it sails tomorrow for Malacca. The captain has offered to take us with him.’

‘I know,’ she said simply. ‘There’s not much that escapes the ears of the harem.’

‘In Malacca we’ll be able to find someone who can marry us properly, if that’s what you want.’

‘And what happens then? Where do we go?’ Maria asked softly.

‘I don’t know,’ Hector answered truthfully.

Maria regarded him with her large dark, solemn eyes. ‘If you’re caught and identified in the Spanish territories, you’ll be arrested, tried and executed as a pirate. My testimony won’t save you a second time.’

‘I’m willing to take that risk.’

She gave a small, tender smile. ‘But I love you too much to let you.’

His heart went out to her. He gazed over the harbour. The sea beyond had turned a deep indigo-blue in the afternoon sun, and on the horizon a procession of low clouds, touched with grey, drifted southwards. He thought of the impending monsoon winds, which Musallam had promised would carry them to Malacca. ‘Somewhere out there must be a place where we can live together, where we’ll be left alone,’ he said.

Maria lifted her chin defiantly. ‘Together we can find it. When I was a child back in Andalusia, my father used to encourage me by translating the words on the coin as “ever further”. Let that be our private motto.’

Hector slipped an arm around her waist and held her closer. Already, in the back of his mind, an idea had begun to take shape. He squeezed the silver coin tightly, felt the edge bite into his palm. ‘The waves beneath the pillars represent the vastness of the ocean,’ he said. ‘It will mean another voyage and, this time, to sanctuary.’

HISTORICAL NOTE

Several of the sea robbers whom Hector Lynch encounters in his Pacific adventure are known to history. So too are three of the ships on which he sails. The
Bachelor’s Delight
was particularly notorious, and her picture has been identified on an early eighteenth-century map of the Americas. Originally a Danish slave ship, she was seized in 1684 off the West African coast by John Cook, a seasoned buccaneer. The
Delight
was then adapted as a pirate raider by reducing her upper works so that she sailed more handily. Under Cook she was taken round the Horn and into the Pacific to begin four years of piratical cruising. When Cook died of scurvy off the island of Juan Fernandez, Edward Davis took command. He had already taken part in the overland raid into the South Sea in 1680 (see Hector Lynch’s adventures in
Corsair
) and proved to be one of the most competent buccaneer captains. In May 1688 Davis brought the
Delight
to Philadelphia, where she was sold, only to begin a second stint as a pirate ship. She reappeared in the Indian Ocean commanded by yet another sea robber, John Kelly. Based in the pirate havens of Madagascar, the
Delight
cruised for prey off the African coast before returning to New York.

The
Cygnet
also appears in the public records. Spelt
Signett
, she was ‘a ship of 180 tunns and 16 guns, formerly called the Little England’ and on 1 October 1683 sailed from the Downs bound for the South Sea with a cargo worth £5,000. Her captain, as Hector finds, was Charles Swan, who intended to open trade with the Spanish colonists in Peru. They rebuffed him at Valdivia when there was a skirmish and two members of the landing party were killed. Thwarted and aggrieved, Swan and his men eventually turned pirate and looted and pillaged the Spanish colonies and shipping until, in April 1686, the
Cygnet
headed west across the Pacific. On board was William Dampier, later renowned for his circumnavigations and scientific observations on the winds and ocean currents. The
Cygnet
visited the Thief Islands and then went on to Mindanao in the Philippines. There her crew mutinied. They deposed Swan and left him behind. The
Cygnet
spent some time voyaging in South East Asian waters – Dampier left the ship in the Nicobar Islands – and made her final landfall in Madagascar. There she sank on her moorings, her hull eaten through by teredo worm, in St Augustine’s Bay.

The
Nicholas
, twenty-six guns, was also a real vessel. Commanded by John Eaton, she reached the Pacific in January 1685 and operated with little success until her captain decided to head west and try to intercept the Manila Galleon. When she called at Guam in the Thief Islands, there was a brush with the Chamorro. As in Hector’s fictional adventures, a letter was received in French, Spanish, Dutch and Latin from the Governor of the Ladrones, Damian de Esplana, asking who they were. A brief alliance was formed between the pirates and the Spaniards, with the
Nicholas
supplying the Spanish garrison with gunpowder (not the other way round, as in Hector’s adventure). The
Nicholas
sailed on to China, but her poor luck continued. She chased (but failed to catch) a Chinese vessel laden with silver, and the ship’s master deserted in Timor. The
Nicholas
was last reported near Jakarta, Indonesia. Then she vanishes from history.

Swan, Cook, Dampier, Eaton – all were true-life sea robbers. Damian de Esplana, who governed the Thief Islands from 1683 to 1694, gained a reputation as an excellent soldier, but was less honest than he appeared. He accumulated so much wealth by selling government stores at 500 per cent mark-up, and investing the profits in shady commerce with Manila, that his heirs spent ten years quarrelling over the division of his fortune.

Hector’s adventures on the unnamed island subject to the Satsuma clan and then among the Chamorro are purely fictitious, but with regard to the assistance rendered to the Sultan of Omoro (an imaginary petty kingdom) it is worth noting that several late seventeenth-century sea robbers finished up as professional gunners in the armies of eastern potentates.

The bizarre story of the ice-shrouded vessel entombed on an iceberg is adapted from a later, nineteenth-century tradition. The
San Telmo
, a seventy-four-gun ship of the line, was purchased from Russia by the Spanish government in 1819 and sent to Peru by way of Cape Horn. Most of her escorting vessels arrived safely, but the
San Telmo
vanished. Her fate was a complete mystery. Then, according to one report, an Italian vessel negotiating Cape Horn met with a huge iceberg on which was observed the stranded hulk of a great black ship, dismasted. Going on board, the visitors were able to identify the
San Telmo
, and found the ship’s commander frozen to death in his cabin. Beside him lay the corpse of his dog.