The Pirate Devlin (3 page)

  Devlin had become accustomed to the closeness of some of the pirate brethren to each other, and when Peter took the arm of Thomas on the island, no one had raised a head. In many ways the closeness was of benefit to a ship. Some of the men worked in pairs like twins, and worked gladly. Every man seemed to be a 'bosun' rather than just a mate, running the shrouds and ratlines as smoothly as painting a wall.

  Despite the drunken nature of their days, there was no job neglected or position lacking. That which could not be spliced or repaired could soon be stolen or bartered, and every sheet hauled or rope reeved was done for the purpose of filling the coffers of all. Their songs were sung for the joy of the life and not just to bolster the rhythm of the work. They had an envious camaraderie that Devlin had not seen since his days out of the close-knit ports of St Malo. Peter Sam's dark gaze from across the boat, however, suggested there were exceptions.

  The boat was belayed to the
Lucy,
left to loll alongside as the lads all clambered up the tumblehome with a rampant thirst.

  The lack of the
cochon-marron,
the marooned brown pig that the Frenchman had promised with his drawings and mime, was disappointing, but there were goats, most probably landed by some long-dead Portuguese adventurer as a larder for the world, and an oasis of fruit that might inspire the captain to stay and supply.

  Not that food seemed to be a concern in the company that Devlin now kept. On his first day, the afternoon the
Noble
had been lost, Devlin and Alastair Lewis, the only prisoners from the English frigate, ate a pork and mango stew with cobbles of fresh bread and a shilling's worth of butter, whilst being questioned by the charismatic captain, Seth Toombs, who sliced corners of cheese and wedges of apples straight into his mouth off the back of an ivory-hilted blade.

  Now, Captain Toombs lay sprawled on the deck in front of his open cabin, all limbs outstretched across a red and gold Indian carpet that, back in London, would have graciously filled any gentleman's hall, but perhaps not in its current frayed and rent condition.

  It was hours past noon. No course to go for. Every soul on board had supped a draught or two whilst waiting for the longboat's return. The captain's burgundy tricorne lay across his eyes, and he lifted a corner of it to watch Peter Sam as he approached.

  'Ah, Peter,' Toombs yawned, 'I gather there be no pig farm on that there island? Seeing as we are now absent of our French lubber?' Toombs's dialect was as far westbound as Peter's.

  'Aye, Cap'n. No pig farm. But there be plenty of goat if we want to stay. Fruit too. Mangoes, plantains.'

  'Not plantains, please, Peter. Say not plantains! Mate, my guts will turn blue for another!' He lay back down with a belch.

  'Aye, Cap'n.' Peter bent down, swooped up the captain's leather mug and idled over to the half-hog of punch that was permanently on deck.

  Devlin watched the party from the longboat dissipate amidships. The dead goat, his sorry head hanging, was carried below. The quartermaster had his back to him and was on his second draught. Toombs appeared to be asleep; then the glint of a catlike eye beneath the cock of his hat betrayed otherwise. A hand beckoned to Devlin.

  Devlin came across the wet deck towards Seth Toombs, who was now raised on an elbow and smiling him closer, quite gentrified in his brown twill coat and scarlet brocade waistcoat. He was as young as Devlin maybe - not yet thirty, but rough drink and Newfoundland winds had weathered his face and made coarse his blond hair. Toombs, Peter Sam and old William Magnes were the original three who had stolen a sloop out of Newfoundland two years before.

  They were codmen, pressed into freezing their youth away along the harsh North American coast. One winter had been enough, and the three Bristol men slipped away in the night, just after Peter had slipped away the life of the sloop's master. The first man he had killed for Seth Toombs.

  A dozen stories later, Toombs was the elected captain of a hundred men, but Devlin had summed him up as all swagger and stagger. A lucky, dirty soul.

  'Now, Patrick. Mister Devlin, sir.' Still looking asleep, Toombs spoke on. 'I have had a wonderful conversation with Mister Lewis this fine morning.'

  'Captain?'

  'Mister Lewis.' He rolled himself up to sit. 'Your former navigator on that burning frigate you frequented? Come closer, man!'

  Devlin moved forward to within a step of the captain. All about them, men were laughing in cross-legged groups, sharing mugs of punch: their diet of rum, water and limes stirred with muscovado sugar.

  'Who has my mug?' Toombs asked the air about him. 'Never mind. Sit down, Patrick, and listen to me.' He patted his carpet to motion Devlin to him. Devlin shifted his sword and crouched, one knee down, his left hand on the hilt.

  'You have performed well, Patrick. I be proud of your schooling.' Toombs smiled. 'On that French sloop you fought like a true pirate. I'm shining of you, sir, so I am!' He slapped Devlin heartily. 'But,' he whispered, 'did you not think that those few men fought rather hard for what little they had to offer? Would you not be of a mind to think that now?'

  'I don't know, Captain.'

  'Shush, never mind, sir, never mind.' He patted Devlin's forearm patriarchally. 'However, as I say, Mister Lewis and I have been a-talking.'

  Alastair Lewis was the navigator on board the
Noble.
Like Devlin he had resisted capture. But whereas Devlin gave defence to the ship when the dead no longer could or the living had fled to the boats, Lewis and Acting Captain Thorn had locked themselves in the Great Cabin. The pirates had broken through the door just as the blaze got beyond Thorn's control.

  They had used Thorn for target, hanging by his arms across I he main's yardarm, after they discovered he had burned all I he charts, the cause of the fire, and thrown Lewis's tools to the sea. Then the fire had spread, assuring the pirate's half- victory, and the loss of the ship.

  When they drank to the tale the day after, the more 'romantic' of them told how they had heard the beams of the old girl scream.

  'Come and see what we were talking about.' He had stood up and gently tugged Devlin into the cabin, or rather the shell of one.

  The doors were missing and every chair. The customary accoutrements that Devlin was used to were absent. There were no bookshelves, no desk nor cot, no personal effects. Everything that could be ripped out was gone. Only the hanging lanterns, the lockers beneath the windows and the large table remained as furniture. The austerity of the rest of the room made the table seem cluttered and chaotic, piled as it was with navigational instruments and towers of papers.

  The three small paned bottle-glass windows were open but, even from this distance, Africa crept in with a dark humidity and Devlin's trailing hair clung to his neck, filtering a trickle of sweat down his back.

  Toombs ambled forward, his hat brushing the overhead. He leaned on the far side of the table and waved Devlin closer; on its return his hand strayed over a bottle of Jerez wine and he took a swig.

  Devlin stepped to the table. This was the first time he had been in the cabin, despite the truth that, unlike on a regulated ship, the pirate captain's cabin was not sacrosanct, merely a sleeping berth for the captain - a small reverence to title but a room that belonged to the whole.

  The captain ate or drank no better than any other soul on board, and God forgive him if he did.

  He rarely even fought in boardings but took two shares in all that was taken in deference to the fact that he would most surely hang when the day came to remove his hat and bow his head.

  He had one overpowering responsibility that his leadership was based on: 'To where do we sail?' His was the plan. The luck. The path.

  For this a good navigator was essential. On a pirate vessel, common sailors made up the ship. What often surprised their victims was not the pirates' interest in their gold and jewels but the ravenous search for medicines, tools and sea charts.

  To many the navigator's skills were nothing short of necromancy and his capture mandatory. To this end Alastair Lewis was their prize on seizing the
Noble,
but Thorn's panic in burning everything he was able to had cost them dear.

  'I have a problem, Patrick.' Toombs motioned a hand across the objects on the table. 'I have sailors and gentlemen of fortune up to my ears, but no dedicated soul to navigate.'

  Devlin looked down at the charts and tools. A wooden Portuguese astrolabe, a Mercator world map, an African coastal chart that took in Madagascar, a map of the Antilles and the Florida coast weighted down by conch and stone, and an enormous French backstaff stretching across the table.

  On one side were piles of papers and oilskin wallets holding more charts. The
Lucy's
original gimbal compass took pride of place in the centre with a couple of wooden dividers hovering near a crock inkwell.

  Innocuous objects. The only keys one needed to unlock the heavens, but to the unfamiliar hand and eye they were as unreachable as the stars they divined.

  The pirates' world was a small one. The hardest route Toombs had ever sailed was the capricious twelve hundred miles from Newfoundland to Providence on board the
Cricket,
the small sloop that the three old standers originally stole.

  Now, with a hundred able men and a larger ship, they cruised the same paths month in, month out.

  In summer, they sailed the Newfoundland coast, endeavouring to catch the cod merchants and other traders sailing to the Mediterranean or back home to England.

  In winter, they would head southeast, following the trade winds to Africa, hoping to hit the Sixteenth Parallel, close to the Verdes, to pick off the traders who waited to spy the islands before heading west to the Indies.

  Eventually the winds would carry them four degrees down to Africa's Guinea coast, where they could catch the fat galley slavers embarking on their second leg of the triangular trade that ruled the world, or the Dutch and English Indiamen on the trawl from the East, sailing low in the water, laden with spices and rich fabrics ripe for plunder.

  If their sweet trade gathered too much attention, they would head west to spend the rest of the winter in the Caribbee islands, running as close as they could back up to the Sixteenth Parallel to catch the merchantmen heading back to Europe with their rum, sugar, tobacco, cotton and molasses purchased off the backs of slaves.

  Then, as May appeared, they would sail back to Newfoundland or the inlets of the Carolinas, before the hurricanes, which wrecked unwary ships more than all the powder ever lit, came to visit the Caribbean.

  So it went on. Months of pirating interspersed with times of careening on deserted spits of land and wild carousing in wicked forsaken holes, and all the while being hunted by all the navies of the world trying to protect the interests of obese investors and mentally affected kings and queens who had made theft, cruelty and exploitation their nations' proudest achievements.

  Toombs enlightened Devlin that a pirate ship freed the men from the torturous labour of the navy watch.

  A pirate led an idle life. No longer was he expected to turn a sand glass and ring a bell on every half-hour for every four hours of the day and night; thus the calculation of time and one of the aids to accurate longitude was lost. The longitude itself depended on the varied maps acquired from ransacked cabins, for each of the voyaging nations of the old world held their own meridian.

  At local noon, the sun at its zenith, they took a latitude and a speed.

  'From this I can plot where I'll be by the same time on the morrow. If we travel at five knots I'll gather two degrees of latitude by noon the next day, don't you see?'

  Devlin saw. Any weathered salt let out of the waist of a ship could plot a course by dead reckoning, providing he knew where he set off from, his bearing and speed, and tried to maintain a constant.

  The mystery, the lost leagues, came with the clouded sky, the starless night. The man before the mast needed a Pole Star reading, where the altitude of the star against the horizon would give the latitude.

  For greater accuracy a skilled navigator, an 'artist', could measure the altitude of over fifty other stars and compare that to the astrolabe, the almost magical disc that showed the stars and their latitudes throughout the year. The Portuguese, the magicians of the sea, were its masters.

  Without the stars to guide, a navigator would rely on the ship's 'waggoner', the eclectic collection of maps and charts, and his own dead reckoning. Lonely hours spent by tallow light hunched over a chart, a loupe sweeping over reef markers and soundings, making the jump of imagination to connect the scratches of ink, the veiled warnings of dead men, to the pitching and heaving beast outside the cabin door. That was the art. Toombs needed someone to turn the flat paper charts into a globe.

  'I can't navigate like that, Patrick. It's not in my soul! I can reckon with the best of 'em, but I needs someone with the mind for the whole manner of it!' His eyes gleamed. 'My thoughts are, Patrick, that if I can navigate well, the whole world could open up to us! The East, the South Seas! Cut away from these lanes! With good longitude, I could save weeks off a voyage and run rings round those navy boys!' He slapped the table passionately and swigged at his wine.