Caribbean (43 page)

Although they were now on the historic island of Hispaniola, the
one from which the entire Caribbean had been settled by the probing Spanish, the part they were in was untamed wilderness of low trees, savannah, wild hogs and no settlers at all. But it remained a part of the Spanish empire, even though few in command remembered that it existed.
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In this strange but captivating mixture of wilderness and prairie, Ned was taken from his uncle’s group and thrown in with a group of six, headed by a bright young fellow of twenty-seven or so who had been hunting in Hispaniola for some years during those spells when seaborne filibustering was not under way. “My name Mompox,” he said, just that, nothing more, and in the days that followed, Ned learned that he was half-Spanish, quarter-Meskito Indian from Honduras and quarter-Negro from the Isthmus of Panamá. “Because my color, Spaniards make me slave, work in building fort at Cartagena.”

“How did you break free?” Ned asked, and the big man with roguish eyes replied: “Like him, like that one, like you maybe,” and he let it go at that. However, from things he said hunting on Hispaniola, Ned deduced that he had been a Tortuga buccaneer for some years.

Of all the group that had been assigned to hunt under him, Mompox seemed to like Ned the best, for he took special pains to instruct him in how to handle his big gun and utilize his trained dog in tracking down wild boar. And when Ned finally shot two in succession, after having missed two, Mompox showed him how to gut the animals, skin them, and cut their rich meat into strips.

When enough hogs had been slain to justify building a big fire, Mompox instructed Ned in the art of barbecuing, and for several days the boy had the job of tending the fire and watching to see that the pork strips did not burn; he also applied salt to the meat and rubbed it with a handful of aromatic leaves that Mompox provided. “This meat,” Mompox assured him in a wild mix of many languages, “will keep for months. Many ships stop by to buy it from us. It fights scurvy.”

When the older man felt that Ned now knew the basic principles of
boucan
, he led him on a long foray into the interior, and they penetrated to a point so far from shore that along with three others, they
reached a spot often visited by patrols from the Spanish part of the big island. On this day they had the bad luck to encounter one, and Ned might have been killed by a sharpshooter had not Mompox seen the Spaniard and shot him. At the end of the tangled fight which ensued, the buccaneers took the man prisoner, but Mompox cut his throat, leaving his corpse propped against a tree.

When the various hunting parties were ready to return to Tortuga, they gathered on the shore and waited two days with their huge bundles of dried meat for ships to come for them, and in that time Will observed with some apprehension the interest Mompox was taking in Ned. When they ate, Mompox slipped the boy better pieces of meat, and when they camped beside the channel, Mompox gathered twigs for Ned’s sleeping place. Tatum also noticed that even when the two were separated, Mompox’s sharp eyes frequently came to rest on Ned, regardless of where the boy was sitting.

During the waiting time Will said nothing to his nephew, but when the ships came to collect the cured meat and the hunting teams, Will interposed himself onto a bench so that Mompox could not sit beside Ned, but the big chief hunter forestalled him by saying boldly: “Sit over here, Ned.” Will ignored the move as if it were of no concern; however, when they returned to Tortuga and were off by themselves, he took his nephew aside for some fatherly talk.

“Have you noticed, Ned, how each buccaneer seems to pick out some one person to work with? Sort of look out for each other?”

“Yes. If Mompox hadn’t come back for me that time, I’d be dead.”

“You didn’t tell me. What happened?” and when Ned explained the incident with the Spanish sharpshooter, Will said approvingly: “You were lucky Mompox was there,” but then he changed his approach: “Were you there the night before we went to Hispaniola? The night one of the men suddenly leaped up and stabbed that other fellow?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you suppose he did that?”

“Maybe money?” Ned really did not know and had not the experience to make a sensible guess, so very quietly Will said: “I doubt it was money. When a lot of men gather together, with no women around … haven’t seen one for months and even years … Well, men behave in strange ways … fight each other for strange reasons.”

He stopped there, but Ned was quick-witted enough to know that this conversation had not ended: “What are you trying to tell me?”
And Will said simply: “Don’t get too close to Mompox. No, I don’t mean that. Don’t let him get too close to you.”

“But he saved my life.”

“That he did, and you owe him a great deal. But not too much.”

Both Will and Ned, and Mompox too, were disappointed when, on their return to Tortuga, they found no plans under way for either an attack on a Spanish treasure galleon or a land assault on a city in Cuba or Campeachy, and they were appalled at what was proposed. McFee explained as best he could: “We’ve sold all the
barbacoa
we can, and there’s no money coming in from any raids. But those two big ships out there, one English, one Dutch, have promised they’ll buy all the logwood we can cut …”

At even the mention of logwood the older buccaneers groaned, for there was no job in the Seven Seas worse than cutting logwood. As one old sailor who had once been forced to work the salt pans at Cumaná said: “Logwood is worse. At Cumaná you at least worked on land. Logwood? Up to your bum in water eighteen hours a day.” But with Spanish treasure nonexistent, McFee’s men had no choice but to sail due westward to the distant shores of Honduras, with the two big ships trailing behind to purchase such logwood as the buccaneers felled. When Ned saw the forlorn tangle of sea and swamp in which the many-branched trees grew, and imagined the insects and snakes and panthers infesting that jungle, he lost heart, but his uncle, who had been two days from death in that Cádiz cell, encouraged him: “Six months of hell, Ned, but they do pass. And for years after, we’ll tell others how bad it was.”

It was exactly what Will had predicted, six months of the most torturous work men could do, up to their thighs in slimy water, beset by cruel insects, attacked now and then by deadly watersnakes, and arms tense from chopping at the tangled logwood trees. It was difficult to believe that these ugly trees were valuable, but one old fellow told Ned: “Pound for pound, about as valuable as silver,” and a fight broke out when someone else shouted: “Horse manure!”

Ned would have had a difficult time in the logwood forest had not Mompox been at hand to look after him, tend the horrendous insect bites when they festered, and see that he received adequate food. Once when Ned nearly fainted from a fever caused by bites and constant immersion, Mompox persuaded the Dutch ship to take Ned
aboard so that he could at least catch some uninterrupted sleep, and while there the weakened lad asked the captain: “What do people do with this damned logwood?” and the Dutchman explained: “Look at the core of that exposed piece. Have you ever seen such a beautiful deep, dark purple-brown … maybe even a touch of gold?” And when Ned looked, he saw how magnificent the corewood was that he had been harvesting.

“I still don’t see what you do with it.”

“A dye, son. One of the strongest and most beautiful in the world.”

“I thought dyes were yellow and blue and red. Bright handsome colors that women like.”

“Those are showy, yes, but this … this is imperial.”

When Ned was able to go back to work he chopped at his trees with more respect, but as for the occupation of logwood cutter, he had to agree with the men who had described it before he came to Honduras: “It’s hellish.”

On the voyage back to Tortuga he asked in some irritation: “When do we strike the Spanish?” and a longtime member of the force on the island reminded him: “We wait for the right year with the right wind and the right advantages for our side. Remember that in 1628, Piet Heyn, the great Dutch pirate, waited two years for the moment—but he caught the whole silver armada on its way home to Sevilla. In a daring move never to be repeated, he captured not three treasure galleons, not four, but the whole fleet. Yes, fifteen million guilders in one shot, and a guilder was worth more than a pound. That year his company paid a fifty-percent dividend. I sailed with Heyn, and we got so much prize money I could have bought a farm. But I didn’t.”

In the tedious months of 1667 and early 1668, Captain McFee’s buccaneers in their perky little
Glen Affric
participated in no such lucky assaults, but they did manage to engage in two rather sharp fights in which, in tandem with three other small ships, they attacked two isolated Spanish galleons, losing one and taking the other after a difficult boarding fight. The galleon yielded gratifying prize money for the four crews, and Ned had a chance to watch how his uncle and Mompox treated Spanish prisoners—they shot all of them and pitched their bodies overboard.

That January, when McFee told his crew that during the forthcoming quiet season, when no Spanish ships could be expected, they
had two choices: “Hunt wild boar on Hispaniola or go back to Honduras for more logwood,” they rebelled: “No. We took great risks to come here to fight Spanish ships, and that we shall do.”

“Brave speech!” McFee said as if applauding their courage, but then he became scornful: “And what will you eat for the next ten months? Choose. Hunting or chopping.”

It was Mompox who solved the dilemma, for he was an adroit man who listened to whatever rumors circulated: “They say there’s a captain who’s very lucky over in Jamaica. And I like to sail with lucky captains, because we share in whatever he captures.”

And for the first time Will Tatum and his nephew heard more than the general rumors that had been filtering through the Caribbean. The captain was Henry Morgan, a thirty-three-year-old Welshman who had come out to Barbados some years before as an indentured servant and who had graduated, like McFee, to a life of buccaneering, a trade in which he had known spectacular successes. He was widely regarded as a lucky captain, one to whom rich target ships were drawn as if by magnets. He had not yet enjoyed feats like the great Piet Heyn, or sacked Spanish cities the way the cruel Frenchman L’Ollonais did so effectively, but he had proved his mettle by driving his little ships against huge adversaries and coming away victorious. As Mompox told the men on the
Glen Affric:
“They say: ‘When you sail with Morgan, you come home with money.’ ” And off they sailed to Port Royal.

Ned would never forget the day of their arrival. Standing in the prow of the
Glen Affric
, he watched as they approached from the south the big island of Jamaica, and as if he might have to bring his own ship into port at some future time, he excitedly rattled on, though Will was barely paying attention to him: “From this distance it’s impossible to see there’s a port anywhere on that coast. Just Jamaica, big and looming. But look! There seems to be a chain of pinpoint islets sweeping westward, parallel to the land. They can’t be far offshore, but I can see they must shelter a bay behind them. But to enter it, I’d have to sail far to the west, turn, and then sail back east. That’s just what we’re doing.”

He had no sooner made this deduction than he gasped, for the bay subtended by his arc of little islands was enormous: “All the warships of England could find safe harboring in here. Uncle Will! This
is stupendous!” But Will was looking at the real miracle of this anchorage. What young Ned had assumed was a chain of islets was in reality a long, low sandspit curving from the mainland, and at its end stood a town.

“That must be Port Royal!” Will whispered, and the sense of awe with which he clothed the words forced Ned to study more closely the famous buccaneers’ capital: “It has a fort, so they mean to protect it. Hundreds of houses, so people live here. That’s a church. A place for hauling out ships to scrape the bottoms. And those must be shops. But look at that sign! It’s a wine shop … and that one … and that.”

Only then did he look eastward to inspect the great bay itself: “More than two dozen huge ships! They can’t all belong to buccaneers! There wouldn’t be enough Spanish ships for that many to attack.”

As Captain McFee edged the
Glen Affric
toward its anchorage, his crew caught the full impact of this fabled seaport, the most savage and uncontrolled anywhere in the western world that ships dropped anchor. From where the
Glen Affric
came to rest, its sailors were close to a most inviting town, with white houses in a row, big shore establishments for the holding of goods, four or five churches and a small cathedral of sorts. What they could not see, but which they took for granted from the stories Mompox had told, were the forty taverns and fifty entertainment houses that accounted for the town’s evil reputation.

It was not exaggerated, for when they went ashore they quickly saw that Port Royal was special. It had no police, no restraints of any kind, and the soldiers stationed in the fort seemed as undisciplined as the pirates who roared ashore to take over the place, night after night. They were of all breeds and certainly all colors, and all with nefarious occupations. In some hectic months Port Royal averaged a dozen killings a night, and prominent on the waterfront was a rude gallows from whose yardarm, “dancing in Port Royal sunshine,” was the corpse of some pirate who had attacked the wrong ship at the wrong time.

How different it was, Ned thought during his first few days, from Tortuga. The latter had been dour and barren, the food monotonous and the beer rotten. Port Royal, on the other hand, was a rollicking place. The food was excellent, with fresh fruits from inland Jamaica, beef from the plantations and fish from the sea. Whole casks of wine arrived from Europe and a rough beer from local brewers. But better
than those amenities, most pirates thought, were the women of all colors who streamed in from lands in or touching upon the Caribbean. They were wild and wonderful, addicted like the men to strong drink and riotous living, and men who came down from the womanless world of Tortuga eagerly sought the diversion these lively women could provide.