Buccaneer (21 page)

He finished loading his knapsack with medicines, and said goodbye to Smeeton. As he turned to leave, he said casually, ‘Have you had a chance to try out the Kuna skin ointment yet?’

‘No,’ replied the surgeon. ‘It would be interesting to do so.’

‘Captain Coxon was asking if you had anything to relieve the rash on his skin. The past few days in the jungle have made the itching much worse.’

‘So I noticed,’ said Smeeton. ‘I shall suggest that he tries the ointment. It can do no harm.’

As he headed off to where Jezreel and Jacques would be waiting, Hector was smiling to himself. It was the quartermaster’s bald head which had reminded him of Smeeton’s store of cantharides powder. Smeeton had cited it as another example – like snake venom – of a poison that could have beneficial properties. Cantharides powder was made from the powdered wings of a beetle and very popular with the buccaneers as an aphrodisiac. More prosaically, Smeeton had said, the powder applied very sparingly to the skin would encourage hair to grow. However, if used in quantity, it brought on violent itching, caused a burning rash, and raised a mass of painful blisters.

A
HUNDRED MILES
away in the city of New Panama, the governor, His Excellency Don Alonso Mercado de Villacorta, was shocked by the fall of Santa Maria. The news was brought to the city by stunned refugees who described how the Kuna, given the chance, had massacred the Spanish settlers once they had been disarmed by the buccaneers.

‘This has all the potential to turn into a disaster,’ he said in his characteristically despondent tone to the emergency meeting he had called in his office. ‘A gang of pirates is now on the loose in the South Sea. It is exactly what I and others have been warning the authorities about for years. But no one took a scrap of notice. What are we to do?’

He looked round the conference table. His glance swept past the city councillors and church dignitaries, barely paused on the two colonels who commanded his cavalry and infantry, and came to rest on Don Jacinto de Barahona, the officer in charge of the Pacific naval squadron.

Barahona was thinking to himself that the governor was being unduly negative.

‘We go on the offensive,’ he said firmly. ‘Stamp out the threat immediately. If we don’t, other pirates will follow the route they have found over the isthmus. We risk being overwhelmed.’

‘But we don’t know where to find the pirates, nor their number,’ objected the governor. He had a habit of tugging at his right ear lobe when he was worried. ‘They could be anywhere. The coast is a maze of islands and inlets. Our forces could search for weeks and not discover them. Meanwhile the city would be left without protection.’

‘Could we not ask the Indians to keep a look out on our behalf?’ The suggestion came from the bishop. He was newly arrived from Old Spain, and had yet to learn that the Indians were not the devout and loyal Christians he had been led to expect.

‘The Indians!’ exclaimed the cavalry colonel, his mouth turned down in a grimace. ‘It was the Indians who showed the pirates their trail over the mountains.’

‘There’s no need to go searching for the pirates. They will come to us,’ said a quiet, firm voice. The speaker was Capitan del Navio, Francisco de Peralta. His swarthy tan and the maze of lines and wrinkles on his face were the legacy of a lifetime sailing the Pacific Ocean. For thirty years Don Francisco had worn a furrow in the sea between Panama and the southern ports of the viceroyalty of Peru. There was hardly a vessel which he had not commanded, navigated or escorted – galleons with cargoes of bullion, tubby urcas loaded with merchandise, fast pataches carrying official correspondence, even a pasacaballo, a flat-bottomed horse ferry, out of which he had once disembarked a troop of cavalry to fight the Aurocanos in Chile. Now, as Capitan del Navio, his ship was a barca longa, an armed brigantine, anchored off Panama City.

‘The pirates have succeeded in crossing the mountains, but they find themselves in a quandary,’ Peralta went on. ‘They must have boats if they are to reach and attack Panama. To march overland along the coast is too slow and too hazardous. The only craft available to them will be small dugout canoes made by the Indians, and perhaps a piragua or two. This makes them vulnerable.’

Barahona had grasped the point Peralta was making. ‘We must shut down the sea lanes. None of our vessels are to sail from any port. All those currently at sea will be ordered into harbour,’ he said.

‘But surely we should send out boats to warn our coastal settlements that the pirates are on the prowl,’ protested the bishop. He was feeling piqued that his earlier suggestion had been dismissed out of hand.

‘No. The pirates might capture our vessels and turn them against us.’

‘What naval forces do we have to defend us if the pirates do get this far?’ The governor put the question directly to Barahona though he already knew the answer. It was better that the civilians and the Churchmen were made aware just how acute the danger was.

‘There are five merchant ships currently at anchor. One of them,
La Santissima Trinidad
, is a large galleon, but currently she is fitted out as a merchant vessel so has no armament. Then there are the three small warships of the South Sea squadron.’ Barahona was careful to describe the colonial navy as an armadilla, a squadron. Its official title might be far grander as an Armada or Fleet, but the merchants of Peru and Panama had been stingy about paying the situados, the special taxes which were meant to fund the colony’s defences. So now the royal vessels were few in number, undersize and decrepit. The warships at his disposal were barca longas like Peralta’s, a two-masted craft equipped with a dozen cannon.

‘Surely that should be sufficient to deal with a handful of pirates in canoes,’ sniffed the cavalry colonel.

‘Our main problem is not in ships, but in men,’ retorted Barahona crisply. As always the land soldiers overlooked the fact that sailors took far longer to train than infantrymen.

‘We have enough competent seamen to man just one of the warships. They are mostly Biscayners, so they are prime seamen and excellent at their job. But the other two vessels will be relying on locally raised crews.’ Barahona’s eyes flicked towards Peralta and the officer seated next to him, Capitan Diego de Carabaxal. The latter was a competent seaman but Barahona was not sure that Carabaxal would have the necessary courage when it came to a fight. ‘Both those vessels are short-handed. So I propose stripping the merchant ships of their sailors and redistributing their men to the warships.’

‘Is that wise? Without crews they cannot save themselves,’ objected one of the councillors. From the note of alarm in the man’s voice Peralta suspected that he was part-owner of one of the merchant ships and dismayed at the threat to his investment.

‘If any merchant ship is about to fall into the hands of the pirates, it will be scuttled or burned on my orders.’ Barahona had the satisfaction of seeing the councillor go pale at the prospect.

‘Then it’s decided,’ announced the governor. ‘The armadilla will put itself in a state of readiness to intercept and destroy the pirates while they are still in small boats. The land forces are to concentrate in the city and look to the defences should the pirates succeed in coming ashore.’

The bishop closed the meeting with a prayer for salvation, beseeching the Almighty to thwart the evil designs of the heathen sea robbers, and Francisco de Peralta left the governor’s office. He had only a short walk to where his ship’s cockboat was waiting. As he crossed the main square of New Panama, he remembered what it had been like the last time the pirates had attacked. Henry Morgan, the great pirate, had marched across the isthmus with 1,200 men. A garrison of four regiments of foot and two squadrons of horse had failed to stop a ragtag force so poorly supplied that the bandits had been obliged to eat their leather satchels during their advance. The entire city, seven thousand households, had panicked. People ran about, frantically hiding their valuables down wells and cisterns or in holes in walls. Then they fled into the countryside, trying to escape before the city was invested.

Peralta had received orders to warp his ship up to the quays. There he had taken on an astonishing variety of refugees and their baggage – nuns and priests, high-born ladies with their children and servants, senior government officials. They had brought the contents of the city treasury, boxes of official deeds and documents, sacks stuffed with church plate, paintings, sacred relics hastily wrapped in altar cloths, chests of privately owned jewellery, gold, pearls, all manner of portable wealth. The value of the cargo rushed aboard his vessel that day had exceeded all that was left behind in the city for the pirates to plunder. In vain he had warned that his vessel was not fit for sea. Its sole defence was seven cannon and a dozen muskets, and her sails had been condemned and taken ashore. No one listened. Everyone begged him to leave port at once and save them and their goods.

What followed had seemed like a miracle. His grossly overloaded vessel had cast off, and his crew had spread a set of topsails, the only canvas they still had on board. It was barely enough to push the vessel through the water. Half-sailing, half drifting on the current, his ship had limped away from the city, and Peralta had spent the next forty-eight hours waiting for the pirates to commandeer local boats, catch up and take their plunder. A score of pirates in a piragua would have been enough. But it never happened. The enemy failed to appear, and for years he had wondered why. Eventually he had learned that the pirates had got drunk. They had wasted so much time on shore, guzzling captured wine, that when they emerged from their stupor Peralta and his precious cargo had drifted away over the horizon.

Don Francisco allowed himself a wry grin at the memory. The ladrones del mar, the sea thieves as he thought of them, were courageous and unpredictable. But they had two weaknesses: a love of strong drink and a tendency to quarrel among themselves. Given enough time, they usually fell into disarray and returned from where they had come.

The Spanish captain reached the little creek where his cockboat was waiting for him. Every member of its crew was a black man because Don Francisco preferred to work with negroes. Most were freed slaves and he found them loyal and less likely to desert in search of better pay in the merchant marine. Now they would have half an hour of steady rowing to bring him to his ship. After Morgan had sacked Panama, the city had been rebuilt in a safer location and the planners of New Panama had been so fearful of an attack from the sea that they had picked an easily defended promontory with shoal water all around it. This meant that the merchant ships and the armadilla were obliged to anchor well away from the shore and had no protection from the city’s gun batteries. Don Francisco’s earlier moment of cheerfulness subsided into a mood of resignation. Whatever happened in the next few days, he and the two other captains would be on their own. There would be no assistance from the landsmen.

He turned to look back over his shoulder as the cockboat pulled out of the creek. He had a clear view down the coast in the direction from which the pirates would come, and towards the ruins of the city that Morgan had sacked and burned. Most of the buildings had been of fine cedar wood, with beautiful carved balconies. All that had gone up in flames. Only the stone-built structures had survived, and one of them still rose above its neighbours. It was the old cathedral, still in use because its replacement in New Panama had not yet been consecrated. But Morgan’s pirates had not got away with everything. Hearing that an attack was imminent, the priests had cleverly camouflaged the cathedral’s beautiful altar piece, a soaring masterwork of carved wood smothered in gold leaf. They had painted it black, and the pirates had been duped. They ransacked the cathedral but failed to see the deception. The altar piece remained, and the citizens of New Panama still worshipped before it. As he settled back in his place in the stern of the boat, Don Peralta wondered if he too would be able to use deception to hoodwink the new invaders.

H
ECTOR WAS
thankful that he had been selected for Captain Sawkins’ vanguard. It put him well out of reach of Coxon. The buccaneer had tried using the Kuna balm spiked with the Spanish Fly, and the last time Hector had seen him, Coxon’s face and neck had been disfigured with a great throbbing rash, a seeping expanse like a grotesque birthmark which was giving Coxon agony. Clearly, Hector felt that it was small retribution for what had happened on the ridge before Santa Maria.