The Buccaneers (7 page)

“I'm on the run,” he said, and so began his tale.

It started in
1778
, when Horn was pressed aboard the
Prudence
to the Indies with Bartholomew Grace for his captain. “A toff,” Horn called him; Grace had risen through the ranks like a rocket, from midshipman to post captain in less than ten weeks. “His father was an admiral,” said Horn. Then he paused and chewed at his lip.

“The Indies do strange things,” he said at length. “The heat, the sun, the wildness of the place. They get inside a soul and twist it up like old rope. They drive some men to madness.”

“You?” asked Butterfield dryly.

“Bartholomew Grace,” said Horn, ignoring that jibe. “He was young and full of fancies about pirates and buried treasure, barely out of boyhood. Sent to the land of the buccaneers, to sink ships and kill men—is it a wonder that he came to think of himself as a pirate?”

“He commanded a warship,” said Butterfield.

“But in his mind a pirate ship.” Horn smiled. “Piracy was all around us. Where we anchored, the buccaneers had anchored. Their ports of call were ours. He took to pirate ways; you can win a battle before it starts if you fight hand in hand with fear. Fly a bloody flag, come blazing down like a thing from hell, and who won't run from you?”

He paused, and the captain said, “Carry on.”

“We did well,” said Horn. “We drove the French from the Windward Isles and followed them through the Caribbees. We lived like pirates, from our plunder. Every ship we took was a new suit of sails, a stronger spar, a galley full of food.”

Horn shuffled sideways then, and stood to his full height below the skylight, his hands hanging at his sides.

“We lived by the Black Book,” he said. “The old laws of Oleron.”

“Oh, nonsense,” said Butterfield. He leaned back in his chair, staring up at Horn. “The Black Book hasn't been used in centuries.”

“Except on the
Prudence,”
said Horn.

“It vanished from the High Court—”

“Because he had it.” Horn leaned forward, and his big hands lay flat on the table. “Sir, it's the truth. Bartholomew Grace, I tell you, kept that Black Book in his cabin, and he called us down to stand there as he turned through its pages. Every crime you could think of was in there, and for each, a punishment you couldn't imagine. I saw a lookout nailed to the mast when he fell asleep at his post, another tossed overboard for stealing a drink of water. He was a mate of mine, that one. I told Grace it was murder. I called him a devil, and he took me below. He thumbed through the Black Book until he found what he wanted. He said, ‘Ye shall be taken on deck and a rope shall be fixed round thy middle, and ye shall be put over the side and keelhauled.’ “

Butterfield scowled. “Is this the truth?”

Without a word Horn turned his back. He lifted the tails of his shirt, and I looked quickly away. I'd seen his scars and didn't care to see them again. But I thought of the horror of how he'd got them, and imagined
myselfbeing
tossed to the sea, being hauled right under the ship as the barnacles cut me like knives and my lungs ached from a want of air.

“Cover yourself, man,” said Butterfield. He was very pale, sitting with his hand over his eyes. He waited until Horn turned back, then asked, “But how could this happen? A ship of the British navy.”

“The navy made Grace a captain,” said Horn. “Nay, it made him a king, with a ship for a kingdom. The wonder is that this didn't happen more often.”

“But what happened, exactly?” asked Butterfield.

Horn was tucking in his shirt. “Bartholomew Grace took
it into his head that he knew where Captain Kidd's treasure was buried. Why, I think he took it into his head that he
was
Captain Kidd. When the peace came, we poked around the islands for months, until the navy sent us home. It might have ended there, if we hadn't stumbled on the
Meridian Passage. “

“You attacked her,” said Butterfield.

“Not I,” said Horn. “For three days we followed her, both of us bound for England. Then we had a mutiny of the strangest sort, not the crew against the captain, but the captain against the crew. ‘We'll go buccaneering,’ said Grace. ‘We'll take that ship,’ he said. I told him I'd have no part of it, that I'd kill him if he tried. But I was the only one who stood against him—-who dared to stand against him—and he bundled me below and read from that cursed Black Book, and set me adrift in the lifeboat. Just me and my sea chest, to rid the ship of all I was.”

“And then he attacked the
Meridian Passage?”

Horn nodded. “Apparently so.”

“But an English ship?” Butterfield held up his hands. “It makes no sense.”

“It would if you knew him,” said Horn. “By that point he hated the English as much as he hated anyone.”

“Why?”

“In the last month of the war we were sent to Guadeloupe to sink a French cutter. We were told we'd find a single ship, but instead we found a squadron.” Horn closed his eyes. “They knocked the foremast down, and set us afire in the stern. Bartholomew Grace was burned by molten tar, and all the skin was melted from his face and one hand. He believed the English had betrayed him.”

Horn's story seemed at last to be complete. I understood why he had stayed so high aloft when the young lieutenant had come with his news of the
Prudence
, why he hadn't gone ashore at Kingston. “You're a deserter,” I said.

“Yes, Mr. Spencer,” said Horn. Then he hesitated. “Well, yes and no. I was cast adrift, so I didn't really desert. But I was in the navy and now I'm not, and that's all the admiralty needs to know to hang me. That's why I was sailing east when you found me. If I'd showed my face in England, the navy would have hanged me. If I'd gone back to the Indies, Grace would have done much worse than that. So I made for Africa, for the Ivory Coast.”

“Well,” said Butterfield. He pushed back his chair, but didn't get up. “I thank you for your honesty, as slow as it was in coming.”

“What will you do with me now?” asked Horn.

The captain looked him straight in the eye. “It's my duty to turn you over to the navy.”

I said, “Sir!”

He held up his hand. “It
is
my duty, John. However, I'm not sure if it's the proper course. We shall have to see.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Horn in the most heartfelt way. He saluted again, with that tiny toss of his hand to his forehead, and he seemed so mild and kind that I thought the world of him then.

We carried on to the east, and the wind grew light. In the evening, fog rolled in, covering the sea in dark swatches of purple and blue. And the night was so utterly black— without a single star and scarcely a swell on the sea—that Horn steered us from sunset to sunrise. Only Horn could steer a ship when there was nothing to steer her by.

At dawn he'd been standing for nearly twelve hours, but he stayed at my side when I took the wheel, and offered words of encouragement as I chased the compass round a quarter of its dial. Then the wind began to rise and slits of sunlight shattered the fog into patches and banks, and we sailed from gloom into sunshine and back into gloom.

The day was just an hour old when the merchantman came. Butterfield stood on my left and Horn on my right, and we saw her rush from a fogbank with all her sails drawing. She changed in an instant from a gray, dim shape to a solid thing in the sun. Then her yards braced back, and she turned away, becoming a ghost again as the next bank of fog closed round her masts.

We were used to seeing ships flee at the sight of us, but this one was different. She seemed stricken with terror— the ship herself driven by panic to run without aim, like a deer from a wolf.

And on her heels came another ship, black as death, with thirty men in the rigging and a spot of bright red at her helm. Painted on her hull was the name
Apostle
and the number
1219
, all crudely—quickly—drawn. At her masthead flapped a ragged flag as black as the ship herself, a white skull grinning.

The men stood along the footropes of the topsail yard, at the crosstrees, in the shrouds. We saw the flash of their cutlass blades, and heard their shouts, softened by the distance to a single voice, an awful wailing like the wind. They rode the ship through skeins of clouds, and at times the hull vanished below them, so that all we saw were those hellish figures racing through the sky. Then that ship, too, passed through the sun and back to the clouds, and only the voices were left.

All three of us trembled with fear, but Horn worst of all. He nearly fell to the deck with shock, and only I knew why. That ship had looked much like the
Dragon
, and I knew her at once as the one that Horn had shown me.

“Prudence!” I
cried. She was free from her bottle and back from a watery grave.

“Aye,” said Horn. “The devil still lives.”

“But why does he call his
ship Apostle?”
I asked.

“Who can say what a madman thinks?”

“And those numbers?” asked I. “What does it stand for, twelve hundred and nineteen?”

Horn threw his hands apart in a gesture of bewilderment. Then Butterfield startled us both by slapping hard on the binnacle.

“Not twelve hundred. Just twelve,” he said. “Twelve-nineteen. Romans, blast it!”

For a moment I feared that all captains—like gunners— were mad. “I'm sorry, sir,” I said.

“Romans: chapter twelve, verse nineteen,” said Butter-field. He made a fist and held it aloft. “ ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.’ “

Horn trembled. “God save us,” he said.

W
e saw the ships again, one fleeing and the other chasing. We saw them far away, beating to windward, and we sought the thickest of the fogbanks, hiding from the sun and those nightmarish ships. An hour later we heard cannons in the distance, from a bearing that was hard to judge.

Fearing we'd meet the
Apostle
, dreading that we'd stumble on that merchantman and find the same horrors we'd found on the
Meridian Passage
, we turned toward the south, aiming straight for Trinidad across the wide Caribbean. And we were met by a storm like none I'd imagined.

The fog cleared away and the clouds came behind it, towering up in pillars of black, toppling over, building again. They made spires and walls and great castellated keeps a thousand feet high, like the homes of thunderous giants. And the swells came next, enormous swells with dark and oily faces, so widely spaced that when the
Dragon
balanced on top of one, the next was half a mile away. She labored up them, balanced at the crests, then raced down their backs with her rail in the water.

Captain Butterfield lashed a weather awning over the skylight and covered his windows again. Then he sat below, wedged in his bunk, with his little lamp sizzling and flaring, with everything he owned—his Bible, his pistol, his books—all swaying and tapping in their places. There he stayed all through that day and into the next, as the wind rose and the waves steepened. Then came the rain, the thunder, and the lightning. With the mainsail triple-reefed, a single jib straining at the bowsprit, we rammed our way toward the south.

The waves boomed against the bow. The wind screamed and shrieked. And the little
Dragon
, with no weight in her hull, was blown like a feather from hither to yon. Now upright, now flat on her side, now pitched across to weather, she tumbled south with Horn at the helm. Only Horn could hold her.

The day turned black as night, the night as black as black can be. When Butterfield came up to the deck in only his nightshirt, he looked like a fluttering ghost that appeared and disappeared in the flashes of the lightning. He staggered down the deck and wrapped his arms around the binnacle, screaming at Horn, “We have to turn back!”

“We can't,” shouted Horn.

I was surprised that the captain would even
think
of turning the ship in those tremendous seas. She could lose her masts or founder in an instant, and if she somehow
did
get her bow to the north, she would surely be dashed to pieces on the shore of Hispaniola.

But he screamed again at Horn. “Turn, I tell you!”

I saw the look of panic on his face and knew that Horn had been right. The captain
was
afraid of the sea. For more than a month he had kept his fear at bay with the curtains of his cabin, but now he could no longer control it.

There was a flash of lightning, a crack of thunder. Butterfield's eyes rolled like those of a horse about to bolt. “Damn you!” he shouted at Horn. He threw himself at the wheel.

Horn was caught by surprise. The spokes whirled through his hands, and the
Dragon
leaned as she turned. The waves rolled over the side and over the deck. They filled the waist until that was all I could see, just a seething of water and masts poking from it, a small group of men who seemed to be swimming.

Butterfield's terror was all that saved us. As the
Dragon
staggered off her course, the blackness on our wind-ward side exploded in flashes of orange and yellow, the sea hurled up spouts of-water, and out of the storm—out of the lightning itself—came the
Apostle.

Before I could move, her black hull plowed through the crest we had crossed an instant before. Flinging spray, toothed with white water, she came hurtling down the wave and passed close to our stern in a long, black streak and a waft of gunsmoke. Then she climbed from the trough and rolled down to the next, and in an instant she was gone, as though she had never passed at all.

Horn had seen her. He glanced at the sea where the spouts had erupted from the falls of her shot, right where the
Dragon
would have been if it weren't for the sudden turn
of the wheel. But for the captain, the flash from her muzzles and the sound of her guns must have seemed like only lightning and thunder, for he kept turning the wheel as the
Dragon
staggered in the seas.

Horn pulled him away. “Take the helm,” the sailor shouted to me.