Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (88 page)

There were Negroes, some with large gold rings hanging from one ear; Negresses in their bebustled gingham dresses and bare feet, their foulards or varicolored head handkerchiefs topped by the broad-brimmed plaited straw hats which are still to be seen along modern St Thomas’s concrete drives and sidewalks. There was the executioner, a huge, burly, fierce-looking black man; with the police-master standing beside and a little behind him, gorgeous in his glistening white drill uniform with its gilt-decorations. The two stood on the central and largest of the three scaffolds.

The executioner was naked to the waist and had his woolly head bound up in a tight-fitting scarlet kerchief. He had only that moment sprung the drop, and there at the end of the manila rope (upon which the artist had carefully painted in the seven turns of the traditional hangman’s knot placed precisely under the left ear of the miscreant now receiving the just reward of his innumerable villainies) hung Captain Fawcett himself, the gruesome central figure of this holiday pageant – wearing top boots and a fine plum-colored laced coat.

On either side, and from the ropes of the two smaller gibbets, dangled those two lesser miscreants, Fawcett’s mates. Obviously their several executions, like the preliminary bouts of a modern boxing program, had preceded the main event of the day.

The three gibbets had been erected well to the left of the central space which I have described. The main bulk of the spectators was consequently to the right as one looked at the picture, on the fort side.

After more than a fascinating hour with my magnifying glass, it being then eleven o’clock and time to turn in, I carried the brittle old canvas into my workroom and by the rather dim light of a shaded reading lamp fastened it carefully at a convenient height against the south wall with thumbtacks. The last tack went through the arm of the hanging man nearest the picture’s extreme left-hand margin. After accomplishing this I went to bed.

The next morning, as I have mentioned, being curious to see how the thing looked in a suitable light, I walked into the workroom and looked at it.

I received a devastating shock.

My eye settled after a moment or two upon that dangling mate whose body hung from its rope near the extreme left-hand margin of the picture. I found it difficult to believe my eyes. In this clear morning light the expression of the fellow’s face had changed startlingly from what I remembered after looking at it closely through my magnifying glass. Last night it had been merely the face of a man just hanged; I had noted it particularly because, of all the more prominent figures, that face had been most obviously an attempt at exact portraiture.

Now it wore a new and unmistakable expression of acute agony.

And down the dangling arm, from the point which that last thumbtack had incontinently transfixed, there ran, and dripped off the fellow’s fingers, a stream of bright, fresh red blood . . .

2

Between the time when the clipper schooner, which had easily overhauled the Macartney trading vessel
Hope
– coming north across the Caribbean and heavily laden with sacked coffee from Barranquilla – had sent a challenging shot from its swivel-gun across the
Hope
’s bows, and his accomplishing the maneuver of coming about in obedience to that unmistakable summons, Captain Saul Macartney had definitely decided what policy he should follow.

He had made numerous voyages in the
Hope
among the bustling trade ports of the Caribbean and to and from his own home port of St Thomas, and never before, by the Grace of God and the Macartney luck, had any freetrader called up on him to stand and deliver on the high seas. But, like all seafaring men of Captain Macartney’s generation, plying their trade in those latitudes in the early 1820’s, he was well aware of what was now in store for him, his father’s ship and the members of his crew. The
Hope
would be looted; then probably scuttled, in accordance with the freetraders’ well-nigh universal policy of destroying every scrap of evidence against them. As for himself and his men, they would be confronted with the formula – ‘Join, or go over the side!’

A pirate’s recruit was a pirate, at once involved in a status which was without the law. His evidence, even if he were attempting the dangerous double game of merely pretending to join his captor, was worthless.

There was no possible ray of hope, direct resistance being plainly out of the question. This might be one of the better established freebooters, a piratical captain and following whose notoriety was already so widespread, who was already so well known, that he would not take the trouble to destroy the
Hope
; or, beyond the usual offer made to all volunteers for a piratical crew – constantly in need of such replacements – to put the captured vessel, officers and crew through the mill; once they were satisfied that there was nothing aboard this latest prize to repay them for the trouble and risk of capture and destruction.

The
Hope
, laden almost to her gunwales with sacked coffee, would provide lean pickings for a freetrader, despite the value of her bulk cargo in a legitimate port of trade like Savannah or Norfolk. There were cases, known to Captain Macartney, where a piratical outfit under the command of some notable such as Edward Thatch – often called Teach, or Blackbeard – or England, or Fawcett, or Jacob Brenner, had merely sheered off and sailed away in search of more desirable game as soon as it was plain that the loot was neither easily portable nor of the type of value represented by bullion, silks, or the strong box of some inter-island trading supercargo.

It was plain enough to Captain Saul Macartney, whose vessel had been stopped here about a day’s sail south-south-west of his home port of St Thomas, capital of the Danish West Indies, and whose cargo was intended for delivery to several ship’s brokerage houses in that clearing house port for the vast West Indian shipping trade, that this marauder of the high seas could do nothing with his coffee. These ideas were prominent in his mind in the interval between his shouted orders and the subsequent period during which the
Hope
, her way slacking rapidly, hung in the wind, her jibs, booms and loose rigging slapping angrily while the many boats from the freetrading vessel were slung outboard in a very brisk and workmanlike manner and dropped one after the other into the water alongside until every one – seven in all – had been launched.

These boats were so heavily manned as to leave them very low in the water. Now the oars moved with an almost delicate precision as though the rowers feared some mis-chance even in that placid sea. The
Hope
’s officers and crew – all of the latter Negroes – crowded along their vessel’s starboard rail, the mates quiet and collected as men taking their cue from their superior officer; the crew goggle-eyed, chattering in low tones among themselves in groups and knots, motivated by the sudden looming terror which showed in a gray tinge upon their black skins.

Then, in a strident whisper from the first mate, a shrewd and experienced bucko, hailing originally from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, wise in the ways of these tropical latitudes from twenty years’ continuous seafaring: ‘God! It’s Fawcett himself!’

Slowly, deliberately, as though entirely disdainful of any possible resistance, the seven boats drew toward the doomed
Hope
. The two foremost edged in close alongside her star-board quarter and threw small grapples handily from bow and stern and so hung in under the
Hope
’s lee.

Captain Saul Macartney, cupping his hands, addressed over the heads of the intervening six boatloads the man seated in the sternsheets of the outermost boat.

‘Cargo of sacked Brazil coffee, Captain, and nothing else to make it worth your while to come aboard me – if you’ll take my word for it. That’s the facts, sir, so help me God!’

In silence from all hands in the boats and without any immediate reply from Fawcett, this piece of information was received. Captain Fawcett sat there at the sternsheets of his longboat, erect, silent, presumably pondering what Captain Saul Macartney had told him. He sat there calm and unruffled, a fine gold laced tricorn hat on his head, which, together with the elegance of his wine-colored English broadcloth coat, threw into sharp relief his brutal, unshaven face with its sinister, shining white scar – the result of an old cutlass wound – which ran diagonally from the upper corner of his left ear forward down the cheek, across both lips, clear to the edge of his prominent chin.

Fawcett, the pirate, ended his reflective interval. He raised his head, rubbed a soiled hand through his beard’s stubble and spat outboard.

‘Any ship’s biscuit left aboard ye?’ he inquired, turning his eye along the
Hope
’s freeboard and thence contemplatively about her masts and rigging. ‘We’re short.’

‘I have plenty, Captain. Will it answer if I have it passed over the side to ye?’

The two vessels and the seven heavily laden boats lay tossing silently in the gentle swell. Not a sound broke the tension while Captain Fawcett appeared to deliberate.

Then a second time he spat over the side of his longboat and rubbed his black stubbly chin with his hand, reflectively. Then he looked across his boats directly at Captain Saul Macartney. The ghost of a sour grin broke momentarily the grim straight line of his maimed and cruel mouth.

‘I’ll be comin’ aboard ye, Captain,’ he said very slowly, ‘if ye have no objection to make.’

A bellow of laughter at this sally of their captain’s rose from the huddled pirate crew in the boats and broke the mounting tension. A Negro at the
Hope
’s rail cackled hysterically, and a chorus of gibes at this arose from the motley crews of the boats grappled alongside.

In the silence which followed Captain Fawcett muttered a curt, monosyllabic order. The other five boats closed in with haste, two of them passing around the
Hope
’s stern and another around her bow. It was only a matter of a few seconds before the entire seven hung along the
Hope
’s sides like feasting wolves upon the flanks of a stricken deer. Then at a second brief order their crews came over the rails quietly and in good order, Fawcett himself arriving last upon the
Hope
’s deck. No resistance of any kind was offered. Captain Macartney had had the word passed quietly on that score while the pirates’ boats were being slung into the water.

After the bustling scramble involved in nearly a hundred men climbing over the
Hope
’s rail from the seven boats and which was, despite the excellent order maintained, a maneuver involving considerable noisy activity, another and even a more ominous silence settled down upon the beleaguered
Hope
.

Supported by his two mates, one of whom was a small, neat, carefully dressed fellow, and the other an enormous German who sported a cavalry-man’s moustache and walked truculently, Captain Fawcett proceeded directly aft, where he turned and faced forward, a mate on either side of him, and leaned against the superstructure of Captain Macartney’s cabin.

Macartney’s mates, taking pattern from this procedure, walked over from the rail and flanked him where he stood just aft of the
Hope
’s foremast. The rest of the freebooters, having apparently been left free by their officers to do as they pleased for the time being, strolled about the deck looking over the vessel’s superficial equipment, and then gathered in little knots and groups about the eleven Negro members of the
Hope
’s crew.

Through this intermingling the comparative silence which had followed their coming aboard began to be dissipated with raillery, various low-voiced sallies of crude wit at the Negroes’ expense, and an occasional burst of nervous or raucous laughter. All this, however, was carried on, as Captain Macartney took it in, in what was to him an unexpectedly restrained and quiet manner, utterly at variance with the reputed conduct of such a group of abandoned villains at sea, and to him, at least, convincing evidence that something sinister was in the wind.

This expectation had its fulfilment at a harsh blast from the whistle which, at Fawcett’s nod, the huge German mate had taken from his pocket and blown.

Instantly the pirates closed in and seized those members of the
Hope
’s Negro crew who stood nearest them; several, sometimes five or six, men crowding in to overpower each individual. Five or six of the pirates who had been as though without purpose near the forward hatchway which led below decks began forthwith to knock out the wedges. The
Hope
’s Negroes, with a unanimity which bespoke the excellent discipline and strategy which Fawcett was generally understood to maintain, were hustled forward and thrust into the forecastle; the hatch of which, as soon as they were all inside, was forthwith closed tight and at once nailed fast by the undersized little Englishman who was Fawcett’s ship’s carpenter.

None of the
Hope
’s crew had been armed. None seemed to Captain Macartney to have been even slightly injured in the course of this rough and effective handling. Captain Macartney surmised, and rightly, that the pirates’ intention was to preserve them alive either for ultimate sale into slavery, which was of course then extant throughout the West India Islands, or, perhaps, to convey them as shore servants to Fawcett’s settlement which, it was generally believed, was well in the interior of the island of Andros in the Bahama group, where a network of interlacing creeks, rendering anything like pursuit and capture well-nigh out of the question, had made this private fastness a stronghold.