FOR more than a century Britain had watched with impatience while Spain and Portugal, with the permission of the Pope, divided the New World and patrolled their property to keep out interlopers. It was a bitter thing to England there imprisoned by the sea. But finally Drake had burst the barrier and sailed the forbidden oceans in his little Golden Hind. The great red ships of Spain considered Drake only a tiny, stinging fly, an annoying thing to be killed for its buzzing; but when the fly had gutted their floating castles, burned a town or two, and even set a trap for the sacred treasure train across the Isthmus, they were forced to alter their conception. The fly was a hornet, a scorpion, a viper, a dragon. They named him El Draque, and a fear of the English grew up in the New World.
When the Armada fell before the English and the angry sea, Spain was terrified at this new force which emanated from such a very little island. It was sad to think of these bright carven ships lying on the bottom or torn to fragments on the Irish coast.
And Britain thrust her hand into the Caribbean; a few islands came under her power—Jamaica, Barbados. Now the products of the home island could be sold in colonies. It added prestige to a little country to have colonies, provided they were strongly populated; and England began to populate her new possessions.
Younger sons, spendthrifts, ruined gentlemen sailed out for the Indies. It was a fine way to be rid of a dangerous man. The king had only to grant him land in the Indies and then express the desire that he live on his property and cultivate the rich soil there for the good of the English crown.
The out-sailing ships were crowded with colonists; gamblers, touts, pimps, dissenters, papists— all to own the land, and none to work it. The slave ships of Portugal and the Netherlands could not move black flesh from Africa fast enough to supply the increasing demands of those who clamored for workers.
Then felons were gathered out of the prisons, and vagrants from the streets of London; beggars who stood all day before the church doors; those suspected of witchcraft or treason or leprosy or papism; and all these were sent to work the plantations under orders of indenture. It was a brilliant plan; the labor needed was supplied, and the crown actually received money for the worthless bodies of those it once fed and clothed and hanged. More could be made of this. Whole sheaves of orders of indenture, ready sealed by the government, with blank spaces for names, were sold to certain captains of ships. They were given instructions to act with extreme discretion about the names they filled in.
And rows of coffee and oranges and cane and cocoa grew and ever spread out on the islands. There was some little trouble, of course, when the terms of indenture ran out. But the slums of London bred new slaves quickly enough, God knew! and the king was never without a fine supply of enemies.
England was becoming a sea power with her governors and palaces and clerks in the New World, and ships of manufactured things were sailing out of Liverpool and Bristol in ever increasing numbers.
I
With breaking day, Henry was in the outskirts of Cardiff, all his terror gone and a new blossoming wonder in him. For it was an unbelievable thing, this city of houses, rank on rank—no two of them exactly alike—the lines of them stretching out endlessly like an army in the mud. He had never considered such magnitude when people spoke of cities.
The shops were opening their shutters, putting their goods on display, and Henry stared wide-eyed into every one as he passed. Down a long street he went until he came at last to the docks with their fields of masts like growing wheat, and their clouds and cobwebs of brown rigging in an apparent frenzy of disorder. There was loading of bundles and barrels and slaughtered animals into some of the ships, and others were sending out of their curved bellies goods in queer foreign boxes and sacks of braided straw. A tremendous bustle of excitement lived about the docks. The boy felt that holiday tingle which had come to him when men were putting up pavilions for a fair at home.
A loud song burst out of a ship just getting under weigh, and the words were clear, beautiful foreign words. The water slapping smooth hulls was a joy to him to the point of pain. He felt that he had come home again to a known, loved place, after days and nights of mad delirium. Now a great song of many voices came from the moving barque, and its brown anchor rose from the water; its sails dropped from the yards and caught the morning wind. The barque slid from its berth and moved softly down the channel.
Onward he walked to where the ships were careened, showing weeds and barnacles, gathered in many oceans, hanging to their shining sides. Here was the short, quick hammering of the calkers and the rasp of iron on wood, and brusque commands built up to roars by the speaking trumpets.
When the sun was well up, Henry began to feel hungry. He wandered slowly back to the town to find his breakfast, reluctant to leave the docks even for food. Now the crimps were coming out of their holes, and the sniffling gamblers who preyed on sailors. Here and there a disheveled, sleepy-eyed woman scurried homeward as though fearing to be caught by the sun. Seamen on shore leave rubbed their puffed eyes and looked into the sky for weather signs as they lounged against the walls. Henry wondered what these men had seen in the sailing days of their lives. He stepped aside for a line of carts and tumbrils loaded with boxes and bales for the ships, and immediately had to dodge another line coming away, loaded with goods from across the sea.
He came at last to a busy inn. “The Three Dogs” it was called, and there they were on the sign looking very like three startled dromedaries. Henry entered and found a large apartment crowded with people. Of a fat man in an apron he asked whether he could get breakfast.
“Have you money?” the host asked suspiciously. Henry let the light fall on a gold piece in his hand, and, as he had made the sign of power, the apron was bowing and gently pulling him by the arm. Henry ordered his breakfast and stood looking around the inn.
There were a great many people in the room sitting at the long tables or leaning against the walls; some, even, were seated on the floor. A little serving girl went among them with a tray of liquors. Some were Italians from the ships of Genoa and Venice, come with rare woods and spices that had been carried overland on camel back from the Indian Ocean to Byzantium. Frenchmen were there from the wine boats of Bordeaux and Calais, with an occasional square-faced, blue-eyed Basque among them. Swedes and Danes and Finns were in from the whalers of the north ocean, dirty men who smelled of decaying blubber; and at some of the tables were cruel Dutchmen who made a business of carrying black slaves from Guinea to Brazil. Scattered among these foreign men were a few Cambrian farmers, looking frightened and self-conscious and alone. They had brought pigs and sheep from the country for victualing the ships, and now were bolting their food so that they might get home again before nightfall. These looked for security to three man o’ war's men wearing the King’s uniform who talked together by the door.
Young Henry lost himself in the lovely clamor of the room. He was hearing new speech and seeing new sights: the ear-rings of the Genoese; the short knife-like swords of the Dutch; the colors of faces from beef red to wind-bitten brown. All day he might have stood there with no knowledge in him of the passing of time.
A big hand took his elbow, a hand gloved in callouses; and Henry looked down into the broad, guileless face of an Irish seaman.
“Will you be sitting here, young man, along side of an honest sailor out of Cork named Tim?” As he spoke he squeezed violently against his neighbor, flinging him sideways and leaving a narrow space on the bench end for the boy. There are no men like the Irish for being brutally gentle. And Henry, as he took the seat, did not know that the sailor out of Cork had seen his gold piece.
“Thank you,” he said. “And where is it that you go sailing?”
“Ah! any place that ships go I do be sailing,” replied Tim. “I’m an honest sailor out of Cork with no fault on me save never having the shine of a coin to my pocket. And I wonder, now, how I'm to be paying for the fine breakfast, and me with never a shine,” he said slowly and emphatically.
“Why, if you have no money, I'll buy your breakfast—so you will be telling me of the sea and ships.”
“I knew it was a gentleman you were,” Tim cried. “I knew it the minute my eyes landed on you soft like— And a small drink to be starting with?” He shouted for his drink without waiting for Henry's consent, and when it came, raised the brown liquor to his eyes.
“Uisquebaugh, the Irish call it. That means water of life; and the English call it ‘Whiskey’—only water. Why! if water had the fine body and honest glow of this, it’s sailing I would give up and take to swimming!” He laughed uproariously and tipped the glass up.
“I'm going to the Indies,” Henry observed, with thought to bring him back to talking of the sea.
“The Indies? Why, so am I, to-morrow in the morning; out for Barbados with knives and sickles and dress goods for the plantations. It's a good ship—a Bristol ship—but the master’s a hard man all stiff with religion out of the colony at Plymouth. Hell-fire he roars at you and calls it prayer and repentance, but I'm thinking there’s joy in all the burning to him. We'll all burn a good time if he has his way. I do not understand the religion of him; there's never an Ave Mary about it, and so how can it be religion at all?”
“Do you think—do you think, perhaps—I could go in your ship with you?" Henry asked chokingly.
The lids drew down over the ingenuous eyes of Tim.
"If it was ten pound you had," he said slowly, and then, seeing the sorrow on the boy's face, "five, I mean-"
"I have something over four, now," Henry broke in with sadness.
"Well, and four might do it, too. You give me your four pound, and I'll be talking with the master. It's not a bad man when you get to be knowing him, only queer and religious. No, don't be looking at me like that. You come along with me. I wouldn't run off with the four pound of a boy that bought my breakfast at all." His face bloomed with a great smile.
"Come," he said; "let's be drinking that you go with us in the Bristol Girl. Uisquebaugh for me and wine of Oporto for you!" Then breakfast arrived and they fell to eating. After a few mouthfuls Henry said:
"My name is Henry Morgan. What is your other name besides Tim?"
And the sailor laughed heartily.
"Why, if there was ever a name to me but Tim you might find it kicking around in a wheel rut at Cork. The father and mother of me did not wait to be telling me my name. But Tim was on me without giving. Tim is a kind of free name that you can just the and no one to mention it, like the little papers the Dissenters be leaving in the streets, and the scuttling off not to be seen with them. You can breathe Tim like the air, and no one to put hand on you.”
Breakfast over, they went into the street, busy with the trade of carters and orange boys and peddling old women. The town was crying its thousand wares, and it seemed that delicate things from the far, unearthly corners of the world had been brought by the ships and dumped like clods on the dusty counters of Cardiff: lemons; cases of coffee and tea and cocoa; bright Eastern rugs; and the weird medicines of India to make you see things that are not, and to feel pleasures that fly away again. Standing in the streets were barrels and earthen jugs of wine from the banks of the Loire and the Peruvian slopes.
They came again to the docks and the beautiful ships. The smell of tar and sunburned hemp and she sweetness of the sea breathed in to them from off the water. At last, far down the row, Henry saw a great black ship, and Bristol Girl painted in letters of gold on her prow. And the town and all the flat hulks became ugly and squalid beside this beauty of the sea. The curved running lines of her and the sensuous sureness of her were tonic things to make you gasp in your breath with pleasure. New white sails clung to her yards like long, slender cocoons of silk worms, and there was fresh yellow paint on her decks. She lay there, lifting slightly on a slow swell, champing, impatient to be flying off to any land of your imagination. A black Sheban queen she was, among the dull brown boats of the harbor.
“Oh, it’s a grand ship—a fine ship,” cried Henry, wonder-struck.
Tim was proud. “But only come aboard of her, and see the fittings—all new. I'll be talking with the master about you.”
Henry stood in the waist while the big seaman walked aft and pulled his cap before a lean skeleton of a man in a worn uniform.
“I have a boy,” he said, though Henry could not hear; “a boy that’s set his heart in the Indies, and I'm thinking you might be liking to take him, sir.”
The hungry master scowled at him.
“Is he a strong boy who might be some good in the islands, Bo’s’n? So many of them die within the month, and there you have trouble the next trip.”
“He is there, behind me, sir. You can see him yourself, standing there-—and very well made and close knit he is, too.”
The hungry master appraised Henry, running his eyes from the sturdy legs to the full chest. His approval grew.
“He is a strong boy, all right; and good work for you, Tim. You shall have drink money of it and a little extra ration of rum at sea. But does he know anything about the arrangement?”
“Never a bit.”
“Well, then, don’t tell him. Put him to working in the galley. He'll think he’s working out his passage. No use of caterwauling and disturbing the men off watch. Let him find out when he gets there.” The master smiled and paced away from Tim.
“You can be going with us in the ship,” the sailor cried, and Henry could not move for his pleasure. “But,” Tim continued seriously, ‘the four pound is not enough for passage. You'll be working a bit in the galley and we sailing.”
“Anything,” Henry said, “anything I'll do, so only I can go with you.”
“Then let's ourselves go ashore and have a toast to a fine, free voyage; uisquebaugh for me, and that same grand wine for you.”
They sat in a dusty shop whose walls were lined with bottles of all shapes and volumes, little pudgy flasks to giant demijohns. After a time they sang together, beating out the measures with their hands and smiling foolishly at each other. But at length the warm wine of Oporto filled the boy with a pleasant sadness. He felt that there were tears coming to his eyes, and he was rather glad of it. It would show Tim that he had his sorrows—that he was not just a feather-head boy with a craving to go to the Indies. He would reveal his depths.
“Do you know, Tim,” he said, “there was a girl I came away from, and she was named Elizabeth. Her hair was gold—gold like the morning. And on the night before I came away, I called to her and she came to me in the dark: the dark was all about us like a tent, and cold. She cried and cried for me to stay, even when I told her of the fine things and the trinkets and the silks I would bring back to her in a little time. She would not be comforted at all, and j¢’s a sad thing on me to be thinking of her crying there for my leaving.” The fulltears came into his eyes.
“I know,” said Tim softly. “I know it's a sad thing to a man to be leaving a girl and running off to sea. Haven't I left hundreds of them—and all beautiful? But here’s another cup to you, boy. Wine is better to 4 woman than all the sweet pastes of France, and a man drinking it. Wine makes every woman lovely. Ah! if the homely ones would only put out a little font of wine in the doors of their houses like the holy water to a church, there would be more marriage in the towns. A man would never know the lack they had for looks. But have another cup of the grand wine, sad boy, and it may be a princess, and you leaving her behind you."
II
They were starting for the Indies—the fine, far Indies where boys’ dreams lived, The great sun of the morning lay struggling in gray mist, and on the deck the Seamen swarmed like the angry populace of a broken hive. There were short orders and sailors leaping up the shrouds to edge along the yards. Circling men were singing the song of the capstan while the anchors rose out of the sea and clung to the sides like brown, dripping moths.
Off for the Indies—the white sails knew it as they flung out and filled delicately as silken things; the black ship knew it and rode proudly on the fleeing tide before a fresh little morning wind. Carefully the Bristol Girl crept out of the shipping and down the long channel.
The mist was slowly mixing with the sky. Now the coast of Cambria became blue and paler blue until it faded into the straight horizon like a mad vision of the desert. The black mountains were a cloud, and then a trifle of pale smoke; then Cambria was gone, as though it had never been.
Porlock they passed on the port side, and Illfracombe, and many vague villages tucked in the folds of Devon. The fair, sweet wind carried them by Stratton and Camelford. Cornwall was slipping off behind them, league on blue league. Then Land’s End, the pointed tip of Britains chin; and, as they rounded to the southward, Winter came in at last.
The sea rose up and snarled at them, while the ship ran before the crying dogs of the wind like a strong, confident stag; ran bravely under courses and spritsail. The wind howled out of Winter's home in the north, and the Bristol Girl mocked it across its face to the southwest. It was cold; the freezing shrouds twanged in the wind like great harp strings plucked by a demented giant, and the yards groaned their complaint to the tugging sails.
Four wild days the persistent storm chased them out to sea with the ship in joy at the struggle. The seamen gathered in the forecastle to boast of her fleetness and the tight shape of her. And in this time Henry exulted like a young god. The wind’s frenzy was his frenzy. He would stand on the deck, braced against a mast, face into the wind, cutting it with his chin as the prow cut the water, and a chanting exultation filled his chest to bursting- joy like a pain. The could wiped off the lenses of his eyes so that he saw more clearly into the drawn distance lying in a circle around him. Here was the old desire surfeited with a new; for the winds brought longing to have sweeping wings and the whole, endless sky for scope. The ship was a rocking, quaking prison for him who would fly ahead and up. Ah! to be a god and ride on the storm! not under it. Here was the intoxication of the winds, a desire which satisfied desire while it led his yearning onward. He cried for the shoulders of omnipotence, and the elements blew into his muscles a new strength.
Then, as quickly as the devil servants of the year had rushed at them, they slunk away, leaving a clear, clean sea. The ship rode under full sail before the eternal trade wind. It is a fresh, fair wind out of heaven, breathed by the God of Navigation for the tall ships with sails. All the tension was gone from them; the sailors played about the deck like wild, strong children—for there is young happiness in the trade wind.
Sunday came, a day of sullen fear and foreboding on the Bristol Girl. Henry finished his work in the galley and went on deck. An aged seaman was sitting on a hatch plaiting a long splice. His fingers seemed each a nimble intelligence as they worked, for their master never looked at them. Instead, his small blue eyes, after the manner of sailors' eyes, looked out beyond the end of things.
“So you would know the secrets of the lines?” he said, without moving his gaze from the horizon. “Well, you must just watch. It’s so long I've been doing it that my old head has forgotten how; only my fingers remember. If I think what I'm doing I get muddled up. Will you be a sailor and go aloft one day?”
“Why, I'd like to, if I could learn the workings,” Henry said.
“It's not so hard to learn the workings. You must learn first to bear things that landsmen never heard of. That's the first thing. It's very cruel, but you may never leave it once you start. Here I've been trying to take my old hulk ashore and berth it in front of a fire for a dozen years. I want to think awhile and die. But it’s no use. Every time I find myself running my legs off to get aboard some ship or other.”
He was interrupted by a vicious ringing of the ship’s bell.
“Come,” he said; “the master will be telling us the hot tales now.”
The skull-faced master stood before his crew, armed with his God. The men looked fearfully at him, as small birds gaze at an approaching snake, for his faith was in his eyes and words of fury fell from his thin lips.
“God has struck you with only the tittle of His shattering might,” he shouted. “He has shown you the strength of His little finger that you may repent before you go screaming in hell-fire. Hear the name of the Lord in the frightful wind and repent you of your whorings and your blasphemies! Ah! He will punish you even for the wicked thoughts in your heads.
“There is a parable in the sea that should close about your throats like a freezing hand and choke you with the terror. But now the storm is done you have forgotten it. You are happy, and contrition is not in you. But take warning of the lesson of the Lord. Repent! Repent! or the wrath destroys you.”
He swung his arms wildly and spoke of the poor lonely dead, suffering and burning for dear human faults; and at last he sent his men terrified away.
“That is not so,” said the old sailor fiercely to Henry. “Do not be taking stock in his crazy talk. Who made the storm—God or devil—made it for itself and took joy of it. What being could hurl the wind so would not be bothering himself about a chip of a boat floating in immensity. I know I would not, if I were that god or devil.”
The Bo’s’n, Tim, had come up with his last words, and now he took Henry’s arm protectingly.
“True for you,” he said; “but do not let it get back to him that you say such things or even hear them with your ears, or he will be demonstrating the might of God to you with a rope’s end. He and his God are a hard pair to be getting down on you, and you a boy scrubbing pots in the galley.”
The trade wind blew on unceasingly, and, when his scouring and peeling were done, Henry talked with the men while he laid hand to the ropes and went aloft and learned the names and workings of the ship's gear. The sailors found him a quiet, courteous boy with a way of looking at them as though their speech were a great gift and they wise, kind men to be giving it to him; and so they taught him what they could, for very plainly this boy was born to the sea. He learned the short and long haul chanteys, the one quick and nervous and the other a slow, swinging rhythm. He sang with them the songs of death and mutiny and blood in the sea. To his lips came the peculiar, clean swearing of sailors; phrases of filth and blasphemy and horror, washed white by their utter lack of meaning in his mouth.
And in the nights he lay back quietly while the men talked of wonders seen and imagined; of mile-long serpents which coiled about ships and crushed and swallowed them, and of turtles so huge that they had trees and streams and whole villages on their backs and only sank once in five hundred years. Under the swinging lamps they told how Finns could whistle up a deadly storm for their revenge; how there were sea-rats that swam to the ships and gnawed holes through the planking until the ships sank. They spoke shudderingly of how one, sighting the dread, slimy kraken, might never see land again for the curse that was on him. Water spouts were in their speech, and mooing cows that lived in the sea and suckled their calves like land cows; and ghost ships sailing endlessly about the ocean looking for a lost port, their gear worked by seamen who were bleached skeletons. And Henry, lying there, reached breathless for their words with his avidity.
On such a night, Tim stretched himself and said, “I know nothing of your big snakes at all, nor have I seen the kraken, God save me! But I've a bit of a tale myself if you'll be listening.
“’Twas when I was a boy like this one here, and I sailing in a free ship that tucked about the ocean picking up here and there—sometimes a few black slaves and now and then a gold ring from a Spanish craft that couldn’t help itself—whatever we could get. We had a master by election and no papers at all, but there were different kinds of flags, and they on the bridge. If we did be picking out a man o’ war in the glass, then we ran for it.
“Well, anyway, as I'm telling you, one morning there was a little barque to the starboard, and we wetting sail to run her down; and so we did, too. Spanish, she was, and little enough in her but salt and green hides. But when we turned out the cabin there was a tall, straight woman with black hair to her, and a long white forehead, and the slenderest fingers I ever looked on with my eyes. So we took her aboard of us and didn’t take the rest. The captain was for leading the woman to the quarter deck along side of him, when the bo’s'n stepped up.
“‘We're a free crew,” he says, ‘and you the master by election. We want the woman, too,” he says, ‘and if we don’t be getting her there'll be a bit mutiny in a minute.” The captain scowled around, but there was the crew scowling back at him; so he pulled up his shoulders and laughed—a nasty kind of laugh.
“How will you be deciding? he asks, thinking there would be a grand fight over the woman. But the bo’s’'n slipped some dice out of his pocket and threw them on the deck.
“'We'll use these!' he says, and in a minute every man of the crew was on his knees and reaching for the dice. But I was taking a long sight of the woman there alone. I says to myself, 'That do be a hard kind of woman, and one that might be doing cruel things to hurt the man she hated. No, my boy,’ I says, ‘you'd best not be coming in on this game.’
“But just then the dark woman ran to the rail and picked a round shot out of the racks and jumped overside, hugging it in her arms. That was all! We ran to the rail and looked—but only a few bubbles there were to show.
“Well, it was two nights later, the afterwatch was for running into the fo’c’sle and the hair bristling up on his head. ‘There’s a white thing, and it swimming after us,’ he says, ‘and the looks on it like the woman that went overboard.’
“Of course we ran and looked over the taffrail, and I could see nothing at all; but the others said there was a thing with long white hands reaching out for our stern post, not swimming but just dragging after us like the ship was lodestone and it a bit of iron. You can know there was little enough sleeping that night. Those that did dust off cried and moaned in their sleep; and I need not tell you what that same thing signifies.
“The next night, up comes the bo’s’n out of the hold screaming like a mad one, and the hair all turned gray on his head. We did be holding him and petting him awhile, and finally he managed to whisper, “‘I seen it! Oh, my God, I seen it! There was two long, white, soft-looking hands with slender fingers—and they came through the side and started to ripping the planks off like they were paper. Oh, my God! Save me!"
“Then we felt the ship give a list and start to settling down.
“Well, three of us came floating ashore on an extra spar, and two of them crazed—poor souls— and wild like cats. I never did be hearing whether any others were saved or not, but I'm thinking not. And that’s the nearest I've ever seen with my eyes the things you do be talking of. But they say on clear nights in the Indian Ocean you can be seeing the poor murdered Hindu ghosts chasing the dead da Gama about in the sky. And I have heard that these same Hindus are a very unfruitful people to pick out, and you going in for murder.”
From the first day, the cook had taken it upon himself to instruct young Henry. The man seemed to crave to give information. It was a wistful instruction, as though he feared every minute to be contradicted. He was a gray man, the cook, with sad brown eyes like a dog’s eyes. There was something of a priest about him, and something of a dull lecturer, and something of a thug. His speech had the university in it, and his unclean habits the black, bitter alleys of London. He was gentle and kind and stealthily insincere. No one would ever give him a chance to prove himself trustworthy, because the whisper seemed to come from him that if it were in the least worthwhile he would be treacherous.
Now they had sailed into a warm sea, and a warm wind drove them on. Henry and the cook would stand at the rail, watching the triangle fins of sharks cut back and forth across their wake waiting for refuse. They saw little brown clusters of weed go floating by, and the leisurely, straight-swimming pilot fish on the point of the prow. Once the cook pointed to the brown birds with long, slender wings following them; hanging, hovering, dipping, swaying, always flying, never resting.
“See these restless ones,” the man said. “Like questing souls they are, indeed; and some say they are the souls of sailors drowned, souls so thick with sins that they may never rest from one year to another. Others swear that these birds lay their eggs in floating nests built on the planks of lost ships; and others, still, that they have no nests at all but are born full grown of the white lip of a wave and instantly start their life-long flight. Ay! the restless ones.”
The ship started a school of fliers that skipped along the wave tops like shining silver coins.
“These are the ghosts of treasures lost at sea,” the cook went on, “the murder things, emeralds and diamonds and gold; the sins of men, committed for them, stick to them and make them haunt the ocean. Ah! it’s a poor thing if a sailor will not make a grand tale about it.”
Henry pointed to a great tortoise asleep on the surface. “And what is the tale of the turtles?” he asked.
“Nothing; only food. It is not likely that a man will be making romances about the thing he eats. Such things are too close to him, and the romance contaminated out of them, But these same beasts have been the saving of a number of ships, and the means of making flesh on some that might otherwise be white bones on the deck of a derelict. The meat of turtles is sweet and good. Sometimes when the buccaneers are not in the way of getting wild beef, they stock their ships with these and so sail.”
The sun had rushed below the water as they spoke. Far off, one black cloud whipped out tongue after tongue of dazzling lightning, but all the sky save that one spot was silken blue-black, littered with swarms of stars.
“You promised to speak with me of those same buccaneers,” Henry begged; “they whom you call the Brethren of the Coast. Tell me, did you ever sail with them?”
The cook shifted uneasily. “There’s peace between Spain and England,” he said. “I would not be breaking the King’s peace. No, I never sailed with them; no. But I have heard things which may be true. I have heard that the buccaneers are great fools. They plunder rich prizes and then throw their gains to the tavern hosts and brothel keepers of Tortuga and Goaves, like children throwing sand from them when they are tired of playing. Oh! great fools, I think."
"But did none of them ever take a town?" Henry asked.
"A village or so has fallen to them, but they have no leaders for such a thing."
"But a great town with a treasury?" Henry persisted.
"No, they have never done it. They are children, I tell you- strong, brave children."
"Could not a man who thought and planned carefully take a Spanish town?"
"Ho!" the cook laughed; "and are you going to be a buccaneer?"
"But if a man planned carefully?"
"Why, if there was a buccaneer who could plan at all, carefully or otherwise, it might be done; but there are no such buccaneers. They are little children who can fight like hell and die very nicely- but fools. They will sink a ship for a cup of wine, when they might sell the ship."
"If a man considered carefully and weighed his chances and the men he had, he might-"
"Yes, I suppose he might."
"There was one called Pierre le Grand who was no fool."
"Ah, but Pierre took one rich ship and then ran home to France! He was a fearful gambler, not a wise man. And he may yet come back to the Coast and lose it all and his head too.”
“Still,” said Henry with a grown finality, “still, I think it could be done, so only a man thought about it and considered it.”
In a few days they were coming close to land. One morning the pale ghost of a mountain was sitting on the edge of the circle. Logs and branches of trees went floating by now and again, and land birds flew out to them and rested in the rigging.
They were come to the home of Summer, whence it goes yearly to the northern places. In the day the sun was a glaring brass cymbal, the sky washed out and livid around it, and at night the big fishes swam about the ship with curving rivers of pale fire flowing behind them. From off the forepeak were hurled millions of flying diamonds by the raging prow. The sea was a round lake of quiet undulation, spread with a silken skin. Slowly, slowly, passing to rearward, the water set up a pleasant hypnosis in the brain. It was like looking into a fire. One saw nothing, yet only with infinite struggle could he move his eyes; and finally his brain dreamed off, though he was not sleeping.
There is a peace in the tropic oceans which passes a desire for understanding. Destination is no longer an end, but only to be sailing, sailing, out of the kingdom of time. For months and years they seemed to slip onward, but there was no impatience in the crew. They did their work, and lay about the deck all in a strange, happy lethargy.
One day there was a little island floating in the sea, shaped like a hay-cock and green as the first spears of barley. It was thickly covered with a tangling, fierce growth, vines and creepers and a few dark trees. Henry saw it with eyes that looked out on enchantment. They passed that island, and another and another, until, at last, in the blackness of a tropic early morning, the ship came in to Barbados. Its anchors splashed into the sea and went tugging down with the hawser flying behind them.
On the shores there was lettuce green jungle as on the little islands, and farther back, plantations with straight laid rows and white houses with red roofs; farther still, the red soil showing like wounds through the jungle of the hills; and far behind, mountains that rose sharp and hard with the appearance of strong gray teeth.
Small dug-out boats came to them, bearing rich fruits and piles of trussed up fowls. They came to sell, and to buy or steal that which the ship carried. Shining black men sang rich cadenced chants as they pulled at the oars, and Henry, close against the rail, was overjoyed with the new land. It was more than he had hoped. The sight brought happy, silly tears to his eyes.
Tim was standing near, looking crestfallen and sad. At length he came and stood in front of Henry.
“It’s grieving me to be hurting a fine boy that bought my breakfast,” he said. “It’s grieving me so I can’t sleep.”
“But you have not hurt me,” cried Henry. “You've brought me to the Indies where I wanted to be so badly.”
“Ah!” said Tim sorrowfully, “if only I had a religion to me like the master, I might say, '`Tis God's will,' —and then be forgetting about it. And if I had a business or position I might be talking how a man must live. But I have no religion in me at all, save only an Ave Mary or a miserere dominie in storms; and as to position, why, I’m only a poor sailor out of Cork, and it does be grieving me to hurt a boy that bought my breakfast, and me a stranger.” He was watching a long canoe that drew near to them, six strong Caribs rowing it. In the stern sat a little, nervous Englishman, whose face had not tanned with the years but had grown redder and redder until the tiny veins seemed to be running on the outside of his skin. In the little man’s pale eyes there was the light of perpetual indecision and perplexity. His canoe bumped the ship’s side and he climbed slowly aboard and went directly to the master.
“There it is, now,” cried Tim; “and you will not be thinking too badly about me, will you, Henry— seeing the grief it does me?”
The captain was shouting, “Galley boy! Oh, galley boy! Morgan! Aft!”
Henry went back to where the Englishman and the captain were standing. He was amazed when the little colonist gingerly felt his arms and shoulders.
"I might give ten," he said to the captain.
"Twelve!" the captain snapped.
"But do you really think he is worth it? I'm not a rich man, you see, and I just thought that ten-"
"Well, you may have him for eleven, but, as God sees me, he's worth more. Look at the knit of him and the broad shoulders. He won't die like so many. No, sir, he's worth more, but you may have him for eleven."
"Well, if you really think so," the planter said hesitantly; and he began pulling money out of his pockets, money that was mixed with tangled string, and pieces of chalk, and a bit of quill pen, and a broken key.
The master drew a paper from his pocket and showed it to the boy-an order of indenture for five years, with the name Henry Morgan nicely filled in, and the British seal at the bottom.
"But I don't want to be sold," cried Henry. "I didn't come to be sold. I want to make my fortune and be a sailor."
"So you shall," the master answered kindly, and though he gave permission, "after five years. Now go along with the gentleman and let us have no caterwauling. Do you think I could run this ship just bringing out boys that want to come to the Indies? You do your work and trust in God, and it may be a very good thing for you. Experience is never wasted on the sharp albeit humble soul." He pushed Henry soothingly along the deck in front of him.
At last the boy found his voice. “Tim,” he cried, “Tim. They're selling me, Tim. Oh, Tim, come to me!” But there was no answer. Tim heard, and he was sobbing in his hammock like a small, whipped child.
And Henry, as he climbed over the side ahead of his new master, felt nothing at all. But for a little catching in his throat, there was no sharp feeling in him—only a heavy, sodden dullness.
III
So Henry Morgan came to be living in Barbados by authority of a white paper which forced his life and soul and body to kneel before the pleasure of one James Flower, planter.
James Flower was not a hard man, and certainly he was not a very brilliant man. His whole life had been a hunger for ideas—any ideas—the creation of them. He wanted to conceive ideas, to warm them to throbbing life, then to hurl them on an astonished world. They would go bounding like Stones started down a long hill, awakening an avalanche of admiration. But no ideas came to him.
His father had been a stout English curate who wrote stout sermons which were actually published, though very few ever bought them. His mother wrote poetry which was a kind of summary of the sermons. Her verses were appended to the volume of rugged orthodoxy. And both his father and mother had ideas. Both were creators in a small way.
James Flower had been reared in an atmosphere of—
“I must be walking to my publisher's now, Helen.”
“But, William, a glorious thing burst upon me this morning as I was doing my hair—such a conception! It must surely have come from God. It will be done in couplets, I think. Oh! glorious! And it just fits in with those delightful words of yours on humility.”
“Ah, well; I must be walking to my publisher’s now, to see how the sermons are going. I sent a copy to the Archbishop, and he may have been talking about them. Such a thing would start a great sale, I think.”
Yes, they were people with ideas, and often they shook their heads over their dull son. He had held them in awe, had been frightened at their greatness and ashamed of himself. And so, early in his life, he had made a determination to have ideas. His reading had been tremendous. King James’ “Defense of Witchcraft” came into his hands, and he set about to prove it true. With the aid of ancient incantations and a black lotion which contained a number of filthy ingredients together with a large amount of hasheesh, he attempted to fly from the roof of his house. It was while his two broken legs were healing that he came on Scot’s “Discoverie of Witchcraft.”
The system of Descartes was causing a stir among learned men, and James Flower, too, determined to reduce all philosophy to a basic postulate. He laid out paper and a number of fine pens at his side, but he could never come on his postulate. “I think, therefore I am,” he said; “at least, I think I am.” But this led in a circle and got him nowhere. Then he joined the new-founded school of Bacon. With persistent experiments he burned his fingers, and tried to cross clover with barley, and pulled the legs from numberless insects, striving to discover something—almost anything; but he never did. As he had a moderate income from money left him by an uncle, his experiments were varied and extensive.
A Separatist of fanatic intensity had written a violent book in the best scientific manner—“The Effects of Alcoholic Spirits, Momentary and Perpetual.” This work fell into the hands of James Flower, and he set out one evening to verify some of its more fantastic theories, In the midst of his investigation the spirit of induction left him, and, without cause or warning, he assaulted one of His Majesty's guardsmen with a potted plant. Had he only known it, this was the one spontaneous idea of his life. The matter was hushed up by an archdeacon who was related to his mother. James Flower’s small fortune was invested in a plantation in Barbados, and he was sent to live there. Clearly, he did not fit in with orthodoxy and pentameters.
And so he had grown wistfully old, on the island. His library was the finest in the Indies, and, as far as information went, he was the most learned man anywhere about. But his learning formed no design of the whole. He had learned without absorbing, remembered without assimilating. His mind was a sad mass of unrelated facts and theories. In his brain, as on his shelves, Cesar’s Commentaries stood shoulder to shoulder with Democritus and a treatise on spontaneous generation. James Flower, who had cried to be a creator, became a quiet, kindly little gentleman, somewhat ineffectual and very inefficient. In his later years he had begun to mistake convictions for ideas. If a man stated any belief loudly enough he frightened James Flower, for, he said to himself, “Here is one of those divinely endowed creatures who control the fire I lack altogether.”
IV
There were few white men on the great green plantation, and those who did grub there were sullen, tattered wretches, serving for some forgotten felony against the Crown. Within their bodies the fever lay like a light sleeper who wakes and snarls, then sleeps again with one malicious eye unclosed. They kneaded the soil in the fields with their fingers, and as their years of servitude crawled on their eyes deadened, their shoulders slumped, and a tired, dull imbecility stretched cloying webs in their brains. Their language was a bastard argot of London, with a few words from the Guinea negroes and a few clattering Carib phrases. When these men were loosed from their slavery, they wandered listlessly about for a time, and watched the others go to work with something of longing. Then, after a little, they either signed new papers of indenture, or went marauding like tigers from a broken cage.
The overseer had been one of them, and now that he commanded those who had been his fellows, he inflicted suffering in memory of his own pain.
James Flower brought Henry to the shore, and something in the boy's silent misery touched the planter. He had never been able to think of his slaves as men before. He had blindly followed the injunctions of the shrewd elder Cato in dealing with his slaves. But here was one who was very obviously a human, and possibly a gentleman. This boy had cried that he didn’t want to be a slave. The others always landed knowing their lot, and displaying a sullen rancor which must be beaten out of them on the cross.
“Do not be so hurt, child,” the planter said. “You are very young to be coming to the islands. In a few years you will be a man, and strong.”
“But it was on me to be a buccaneer,” said Henry dully. “I came out to the sea to make my fortune and a name. And how can I do these things if I am a slave toiling in the fields?”
“I do not intend that you shall toil in the fields. I wanted you—I wanted a boy to be about the house now I am growing old. I wanted a—a kind of companion who would talk with me and hear me talk. The other planters come to the house and drink my wine, but when they leave I think they laugh at me and laugh at my books—my lovely books. And so you will sit with me in the evenings, perhaps, and we will talk of the things in books. Your father was a gentleman, I think. You have the look.
“Now, to-day,” James Flower went on mildly, “we have a hanging, and you and I must hurry to be there. I don’t just know what the fellow did, but it was enough. And what says—oh! what's his name? I have read it, anyway—'The chief value of violent punishment lies with those on whom the same might fall.” Yes, I think it is well to have some one hanged every now and then. It is expensive, but very conducive to good behavior among the rest. But my overseer attends to all that. Do you know, I think he really enjoys it.”
He led the boy to a square of thatched mud huts, built close together, each with its door opening out into a kind of plaza. And in the center of the square, like a horrible fetish, rose a tall gallows made of black wood and polished with oil until it shone dully in the sunlight. It was so placed that no slave could look out of his hovel without seeing the black horror that might be his end. This was the overseer’s work. With his own hands he had rubbed the dark wood until it glowed. He was accustomed to stand and gaze at it, head cocked to one side, as an artist might look at his new finished work.
The planter and the boy seated themselves. The slaves were herded into the square. And Henry saw a naked black figure squirm and writhe at the end of a rope while the negroes rocked themselves back and forth on the ground and moaned; while the white slaves gritted their teeth and cursed harshly to keep from shrieking. The Caribs squatted on their hams and watched with no particular interest and no fear. Thus they might squat and watch the fire which cooked their food.
When it was all over, and the black victim hung limply by his crooked neck, the planter looked down and saw that Henry was crying nervously.
“I know it is bad the first time,” he said gently. "When I first saw it, I did not sleep for a good while. But after a little, when you have seen five—ten—a dozen—go out in this way, you will come to have no feeling about it, and no more thought of it than of a chicken flopping about with a wrung neck.”
Henry's breath still came in little miserable chokes.
“I can show you in the works of Holmaron on the practices of the Inquisition, a dissertation on this very thing you feel. ‘The first time one sees human suffering,’ he says, ‘it is an unnatural thing, because, within one’s experience, placid, comfortable people are the rule. But, after a number of such experiences, the sight of torture becomes a normal thing, and normal humans come to relish it to various extents.” Remind me to show you the passage sometime; though I must say I have never come to relish the matter.”
In the evenings of the months that came, the two of them sat in the black depths of the veranda, and James Flower poured his unrelated facts into the ears of young Henry Morgan. The boy listened eagerly, for often the planter spoke of ancient wars and their conduct.
“And are these things in the books that line the walls?” Henry asked one night.
“All of these things, and, oh! many thousands of things more.”
After a time Henry begged, “Would you be teaching me the languages of the books, sir? There must be things there I should like to read for myself.”
James Flower was delighted. In teaching this boy the things he had read, he had come nearer to satisfaction than ever before. His heart was warm toward the young slave.
“The Latin and the Greek!” he cried with enthusiasm. “You shall learn them from me; and the Hebrew, too, if you wish.”
“I want to read the books of war and sailing,” young Henry said. “I want to read of those old wars you speak of, for one day I shall be a buccaneer and take a Spanish town.”
And in the months that followed, he learned the languages very rapidly because of his wish to read the books. James Flower plunged more deeply into his volumes than ever, for his new role of teacher was very dear experience to him.
After a little while, he would say,
“Henry, will you tell the overseer to gather the molasses on the beach? A ship is in to buy it.” And later still,
“Henry, is there anything I should be doing to- day?”
“Well, sir, there's a great ship down there, in from the Netherlands. We are in strong need of sickles. The Caribs have stolen nearly all the old ones to make swords with. We shall have trouble with those Caribs one day, sir.”
“Well, see to the sickles, will you, Henry. I hate to be moving in this sun. And have the Indians punished if they steal things. Attend to that, too, will you?”
Little by little, Henry was absorbing the management of the plantation.
One evening, after Henry had been there a year, he gained the paramount respect of James Flower; rather a wistful respect, though he lost no love by it.
“Have you considered these ancient wars?” Henry asked. “I have been reading of Alexander and Xenophon and Caesar in their wars. And the thought is on me that battle and tactics—that is, successful tactics—are nothing more than a glorified trickery. The force is necessary, and the arms, of course; but the war is really won by the man who sits back, like one cheating at cards, and confounds the enemy with his trickery. Have you considered that, sir? Any one who can guess the minds of ordinary generals, as I can guess the minds of the slaves, can win battles. Such a man would have only to shun what was expected of him. Isn't that the secret of tactics, sir?”
“I had not thought of it,” said James Flower just a trifle jealously. And that awe he felt for people of ideas went out to Henry. But the planter took great comfort in telling himself that, after all, he was the teacher who had awakened these ideas.
Two years after Henry had come, the overseer was released by the years from his bondage. He found his freedom too strong a drug for the mind that had been used to outside control. That mind snapped, and fury flooded in on him, so that he went shouting along the roads, striking at every passer-by. And in the night his mania became a terrible, frantic thing. He rolled on the ground under his gallows, and bloody foam frothed from his mouth while the slaves looked on in terror. At length he arose, with ragged hair and maniac, flaming eyes. He seized a torch and rushed into the fields. And Henry Morgan shot him dead as he entered the close growing rows of cane.
“Who knows the work as well as I do, and whom can you trust more, sir?” young Henry asked the planter. “I have learned things in the books and from my watching that will make this plantation a hundred times more productive.”
Thus he became much more than the overseer.
Henry removed the gallows from the square, and after that the hanging was done secretly, in the night. This was not kindness. He knew, out of his own reasoning, that the unknown thing can never become the normal thing; that unseen punishments could be far more horrible to the remaining slaves than those seen under the light of the sun.
Henry had learned many things in dealing with the slaves. He knew that he must never let them see what he was thinking, for then, in some ineffable way, they had a hold on him which would be difficult to shake off. He must be cold and distant and insulting to those below him. With few exceptions, they would take insult as the sign of his superiority. Men always believed him what he seemed to be, and he could seem to be almost anything.
If one were brilliantly dressed, all men presumed him rich and powerful, and treated him accordingly. When he said things as though he meant them, nearly all acted as though he meant them. And, most important of his lessons—if he were perfectly honest and gave a strict accounting in nine consecutive dealings, then the tenth time he might steal as much as he wished, and no one would dream of suspecting him, so only he had brought the nine times forcibly enough to the attention of all men.
A growing pile of golden coins in a box under his bed gave ample proof of the validity of this last lesson. And he followed all his teachings. He never gave any man the least hold on him, nor insight into his motives and means and abilities and shortcomings. Since most men did not believe in themselves, they could not believe in one they understood to be like themselves.
These rules he gleaned gradually from his life, until he was master of the plantation, until James Flower pitifully leaned on his advice and his convictions, and until the Caribs and blacks and felon white men hated and feared him, and yet could make no dent in his being—could get no hold to hurt him.
James Flower was deliciously happy-—happier than he had ever been—for this boy had lifted the hideous weight of the plantation from his shoulders. He need think no more of the matters of tilling the soil. More and more he lay drowned in his books. And, now he was coming to be an old man, he read the same books over and over again without knowing it. Often he felt a slight irritation at the careless person who had made notes in his margins and dog-eared the pages.
And Henry Morgan had got himself a great plantation and a great power. Under his captaincy the earth flowered and increased. He was making the land give four times as much as it had before. The slaves worked deliriously under the whips which followed them to the fields, but there was nothing personal in the whips. The old overseer had delighted in punishment, but Henry Morgan was not cruel. He was merciless. He merely speeded the wheels of his factory. One could not think of being kind to a sprocket or a fly-wheel, and no more could this boy think of pampering his slaves.
Henry was forcing money out of the ground, and from it was adding to his hoard in the box under his bed—a little from the season’s sale of cane and a trifle in the buying of new cattle. It was not stealing, but only a kind of commission for his success. The little pile of golden coins grew and grew for the time when Henry Morgan should go a-buccaneering and take a Spanish town.
V
Henry had served three years, and, though he was only eighteen, he was grown and strong. His crisp black hair seemed to curl more tightly to his head, and his mouth, from dealing with the slaves, was more firm than ever. He gazed about him and knew that he should be satisfied, but his eyes had never lost the trick of looking out beyond distance and over the edge of the present. A little hectoring wish ran through his waking and dreaming like a thin red line. He must get back to the sea and ships. The sea was his mother and his mistress, and the goddess who might command and find him ready and alert for service. Why, his very name, in the ancient Briton tongue, signified one who lived by the sea. Yes, the ships were calling to him cruelly now. His heart sailed out, away from him with every passing merchantman.
In the big house he had studied and considered what navigation there was in books, and in the plantation’s little sloop he had gone cruising in the near waters. But this was the play of a child, he thought, and it was not preparing him to be an expert sailor. It was necessary for him to learn avidly, for in the near future he must go a-buccaneering and take a Spanish town. This was the silver throne of all his desire.
And so, one evening-
"There is a thing I should like to be speaking of, sir."
James Flower raised his eyes from his book and laid his head back in the chair.
"If we had a ship to carry our product to Jamaica," Henry continued, "we should be saving a large deal in freightage. The cost of such a ship would soon enough be eaten away by the profits. Too, we might carry the produce of the other plantations at a smaller fee than the merchantmen ask."
"But where might one come on such a ship?" James Flower inquired.
"There is one in the harbor now, one of two masts and-"
"Then buy her; buy her, and see to it. You know more about these things than I do. By the way, here is an interesting conjecture on the inhabitants of the moon. 'They may not be totally unlike human beings,' he read. 'Their necks could easily be-'"
"It will be seven hundred pounds, sir."
"What will be seven hundred pounds? You seem not to pay attention as you used, Henry. Do listen to this paragraph; it is bot entertaining and instructive-"
Henry careened the ship, and when he had scraped and painted her, he named her Elizabeth and put to sea. He had what is known as “hands” to a horseman, a warm feeling of the personality of his boat. He must learn the rules of navigation, of course; but even before that something of the spirit of the ship crept into his soul, and part of him went back to her. It was a steadfast love, a steady understanding of the sea. By the thrill of her deck and the smooth touch of the wheel, he knew instinctively how close he could bring her into the wind. He was like a man who, laying his head on his mistress' breast, reads the flux of her passions in her breathing.
Now he could have run away from Barbados and gone to plundering in the staunch Elizabeth, but there was no need. His hoard was not great enough and he was too young; and in addition, he felt a curious, shame-faced love for James Flower.
Henry was content for a little while. The lust that all men have in varying degrees—some for the flash of cards, and some for wine, and some for the bodies of women—was, in Henry Morgan, satisfied with the deck's lunge and pitch and the crack of canvas. The wind, blowing out of a black, dreadful sky, was a cup of wine to him, and a challenge, and a passionate caress.
He sailed to Jamaica with the crops and beat about among the islands. The returns from the plantation mounted, and Henry's box of coins was growing heavy.
But after a few months, a dull, torturing desire came to him. It was the yearning of the little boy, revivified and strong. The Elizabeth had sated his old lust and left a new one. He thought it was plunder that called him: the beautiful things of silk and gold and the admiration of men, and on these his heart set more zealously than ever.
Henry went to the brown women and the black in the slave huts, striving to dull his hungering if he could not satisfy it; and they received him, cow-eyed and passive, anxious to please. They hoped that of his favor they might receive more food or a jug of rum as a gift. Each time, he came away with disgust and a little pity for their poor, hopeful prostitution.
Once, in the slave dock at Port Royal, he found Paulette and bought her for a servant in the house. She was lithe, yet rounded; fierce and gentle in a moment. Poor little slave of the jumbled bloods, she was Spanish and Carib and Negro and French. The heritage of this rag-bag ancestry was hair like a cataract of black water, eyes as blue as the sea, set in oriental slits, and a golden, golden skin. Hers was a sensuous, passionate beauty—limbs that twinkled like golden flames. Her lips could writhe like slender, twisting serpents or bloom like red flowers. She was a little child, yet old in life. She was a Christian, but she worshiped wood spirits and sang low chants in honor of the Great Snake.
Henry thought of her as a delicate machine perfectly made for pleasure, a sexual contraption. She was like those tall, cool women of the night who ride with the wings of sleep—soulless bodies—bodies of passionate dreams. He built for her a tiny, vine-clad house roofed with banana leaves, and there he played at love.
At first Paulette was only grateful to him for bringing her to a lazy, easy life, with comfort and days of little toil, but later she fell frenziedly in love with him. She watched his face like a quick terrier, waiting to jump with wild pleasure at one word or fall fawning in the dust at another.
When Henry was serious or distraught, she was afraid; then she would kneel before her little ebony figure of a jungle god and pray to the Virgin for his love. Sometimes she put out cups of milk for the winged Jun-Jo-Bee which keeps men true. With the frantic, tender arts of her mixed bloods, she strove to hold him surely in her sight. From her body and her hair there came a rich orient odor, for she rubbed herself with sandalwood and myrrh,
When he was gloomy—
“Do you love Paulette?” she would ask. “Do you love Paulette? Are you sure you love Paulette?”
“Why, certainly, I love Paulette. How could a man see Paulette, little, dear Paulette—how touch the lips of sweet Paulette—and not be loving her?” And his eyes would go wandering to the sea below, seeking and seeking along the curved shore.
“But do you surely, surely love Paulette? Come, kiss the little breasts of your own Paulette.”
“Yes, surely I love Paulette. There! I have kissed them and the charm is made. Now do be still a little. Hear the pounding of the frogs. I wonder what startled the old bearded monkey in the tree there; some slave, perhaps, out stealing fruit.” And his eyes would go wandering restlessly to sea.
As the year went on, the soil of her love thrust up strong vines of choking fear. She knew that when he finally deserted her she would be far more than just alone. She might be forced to kneel in the field rows and dig about the plants with her fingers as the other women did. And then, one day, she would be led to the hut of a great negro with powerful muscles, and he would bruise her little golden body in his beast's clutch and make her pregnant of a black child—a strong, black child that could toil and strain in the sun when it was grown. This happened to all the other slave women of the island. The half of her mind that was very old shuddered at this thought, and that same old mind knew well that Henry would leave her one day,
Then, to her child's mind, appeared the doorway for the passage of her fright. If only he would marry her—impossible it seemed, yet stranger things had been—if only he would marry her, then she need never fear. For those strange beings, wives, were, in some curious way, by some divine intent, shielded from ugly and uncomfortable things. Ah! she had seen them in Port Royal, surrounded by their men to keep foul contact off, breathing through scented cloths to deaden the vile smells, and sometimes with little pellets of cotton in their ears to stop the cursing of the streets from entering. And Paulette knew—had she not been told?—that in their homes they lay in great, soft beds, and languidly gave orders to their slaves.
This was the blessed state she dared to hope for. And her body was not enough, she knew. Often it failed in its soft potency. If she fed him full of love, he did not come again to her bower for a time; and when she refused him to make his passion mount, either he went sullenly away or laughed and flung her roughly on the low, palm couch. She must cast about for some compelling force, some very powerful means to make him marry her.
When Henry went away with cocoa for Port Royal, she was scarcely sane. She knew his love for the ship, his passion for the sea, and she was furiously jealous of them. In her mind she saw him fondle the wheel with the strong, dear touch of lover's fingers. Ah! she could scratch and tear that wheel which robbed her.
She must make him love Paulette more than the ships, more than the sea, or anything on earth, so that he would marry her. Then she could walk haughtily among the huts and spit at the slaves; then she need never think of grubbing in the earth or bearing strong black children; then she would have red cloth to wear, and a silver chain to go about her neck. It was even possible that once in a long while her dinner might be brought to her while she lay in bed, pretending to be ill. She wriggled her toes in delight at such a thought, and made up the insulting things she would say to one fat negress with a spiteful tongue, when only she should be a wife. That old, fat wretch had called Paulette a slut before a gathering. Paulette had pulled out lots of hair before she could be held with her arms to her sides—but still, that black one should see, one day. Paulette would have her whipped on the cross.
While Henry was away a trading ship came into port, and Paulette went to the beach to see the things she brought and to watch the wind-brown sailors come ashore. And one of them, a great, broad Irishman, laden with black rum, pursued and captured her against a pile of boxes. Strong and quick, she struggled to elude him, but he held her tightly, swaying though he was.
“I've caught a fairy to mend my shoes,” he laughed, and peered into her face. “Sure enough, ’tis a fairy.” And then he saw that she was small and very beautiful, and he spoke tenderly and low.
“You're a lovely fairy—lovelier than the eyes of me have ever seen. Could a slim little body like you be thinking anything about a great, ugly hulk like me, I wonder? Come off and marry me, and you shall have anything ’tis in the power of a sailor to give you.”
“No!” she cried. “No!” and slipped under his arm and away. The sailor sat in the sand staring dully before him,
“’Twas a dream,” he whispered; “’twas only a dream from the spirits. There's no such thing to be happening to a poor sailor. No; for sailors there be pretty hags with sharp, hard eyes to say, `Come! money first, sweetheart mine.’ ”
But now Paulette had found the way to make Henry marry her. She would contrive to get drunkenness on him, would trap him with wine, and there would be a priest nearby to come at her hushed call. Oh, surely, stranger things had been!
She laid her snare for him on his first night back from sea—a large stone flagon filled with Peruvian wine, and a priest, bribed with a stolen coin, waiting in the shadow of a tree. Henry was very tired. He had gone out short-handed and helped to work the ship himself. The little vine-clothed hut was a pleasant, restful place to him. A full white moon cast silver splashes in the sea below and strewed the ground with scarves of purple light. Sweetly there sang a little jungle breeze among the palms:
She brought the wine and filled a cup for him.
“Do you love Paulette?”
“Ah, yes! as God sees me, I love Paulette; dear, sweet Paulette.” Another cup, and still, persistently—
“Are you so sure you love Paulette?”
“Paulette is a little star hanging to my breast by a silver chain.”
Another cup.
“Do you love none other save only your Paulette?”
“I came longingly to find Paulette: the thought of her sailed on the sea with me.” And his arms locked tightly around her little golden waist.
Another and another and another; then his arms fell away from her and his hands clenched. The girl cried fearfully,
“Oh! do you love Paulette?” for Henry had grown morose and strange and cold.
“I shall tell you of an old time,” he said hoarsely. “I was a little boy, a joyous little boy, yet old enough to love. There was a girl—and she was named Elizabeth—the daughter of a wealthy squire. Ah! she was lovely as this night about us, quiet and lovely as that slender palm tree under the moon. I loved her with that love a man may exercise but once. Even our hearts seemed to go hand in hand. How I remember the brave plans we told—she and I, there, sitting on a hillside in the night. We were to live in a great house and have dear children growing up about us. You can never know such love, Paulette.
“Ah, well! It could not last. The gods slay happiness in jealousy. Nothing good can last. A gang of bastard sailors roved through the land and carried me off—a little boy to be sold for a slave in the Indies. It was a bitter thing to lose Elizabeth—a bitter thing the years cannot forget.” And he was weeping softly by her side.
Paulette was bewildered by the change in him. She stroked his hair and his eyes, until his breath came more calmly. Then she began again, with almost hopeless patience, like a teacher questioning a dull child.
“But—do you love Paulette?”
He leaped up and glared at her.
“You? Love you? Why, you are just a little animal! a pretty little golden animal, for sure, but a form of flesh—no more. May one worship a god merely because he is big, or cherish a land which has no virtue save its breadth, or love a woman whose whole realm is her flesh? Ah, Paulette! you have no soul at all! Elizabeth had a white winged soul. I love you—yes—with what you have to be loved—the body. But Elizabeth—I loved Elizabeth with my soul.”
Paulette was puzzled.
“What is this soul?” she asked. “And how may I get one if I have not one already? And where is this soul of yours that I have never seen it or heard it at all? And if they cannot be seen, or heard, or touched, how do you know she had this soul?”
“Hush!” he cried furiously. “Hush! or I box your mouth and have you whipped on the cross. You speak of things beyond you. What can you know of love that lies without your fleshly juggling?”
VI
Christmas came to the Hot Tropics, the fourth Christmas of Henry's servitude. And James Flower brought him a small box done up with colored string.
“It is a gift of the season,” he said, and his eyes sparkled with delight while Henry untied the package. There was a little teakwood box, and in it, lying on the scarlet silk of its lining, the torn frag- ments of his slavery. Henry took the shreds of paper from the box and stared at them, and then he laughed unsteadily and put his head down on his hands.
“Now you are no longer a servant, but my son,” the planter said. “Now you are my son, whom I have taught strange knowledges—and I shall teach you more, far more. We will live here always and talk together in the evenings.”
Henry raised his head.
“Oh! but I cannot, cannot stay. I must be off a-buccaneering.”
“You—you cannot stay? But, Henry, I have planned our life. You would not leave me here alone.”
“Sir,” said Henry, “I must be off a-buccaneering. Why, in all my years it has been the one aim. I must go, sir.”
“But, Henry, dear Henry, you shall have half my plantation, and all of it when I am dead—if only you will stay with me.”
“That may not be,” young Henry cried. “I must be off to make me a name. It is not given that I live a planter. Sir, there are plannings in my head that have grown perfect with pondering. And nothing may be allowed to interfere with them.”
James Flower slumped forward in his chair.
“It will be very lonely here without you. I don't quite know what I shall do without you.”
Henry's mind carried him back to that old time, with Robert smiling into the fire and saying these same words—“It will be so lonely here without you, son.” He wondered if his mother still sat coldly upright and silent. Surely she would have got over it. People always got over the things they feared so much. And then he thought of small Paulette who would be crying with terror in her hut when he told her.
“There is a little servant girl,” he said; “little Paulette. I have protected her. And if I have ever pleased you, will you do these things for me? Always, always keep her in the house and never let her be sent to the fields, nor whipped, nor bred with any of the blacks. Will you do these things for me surely?”
“Of course I will,” James Flower said. “Ah, but it has been good to have you here, Henry—good to hear your voice in the evening. What will I do in the evening now? There is none to take your place, for you have very truly been my son. It will be lonely here without you, boy.”
Said Henry, “The toiling I have done in your service has been more than repaid with the knowledge you have poured into my ears these same evenings. And I shall miss you, sir, more than I can say. But can't you understand? I must go a-buccaneering and take a Spanish town, for the thought is on me that if a man planned carefully, and considered his chances and the men he had, the thing might well be done. I have studied the ancient wars, and I must be making a name for myself and a fortune. Then, when I have the admiration of men, perhaps I shall come back to you, sir, and we may sit and talk again in the evenings. You will remember my wish about Paulette?”
“Who is Paulette?” the planter asked.
“Why, the servant girl I mentioned. Never let her go with the slaves, because I am fond of her.”
“Ah, yes! I remember. And where do you go now, Henry?”
“To Jamaica. My uncle, Sir Edward, has long been Lieutenant-Governor there in Port Royal. But I have never seen him—well, because I was a bond-servant, and he is a gentleman, I have a letter to him that my father gave me years past. Perhaps he will help me to buy a ship for my plundering.”
“I would help you buy a ship. You have been very good to me,” the planter said hopefully.
Now Henry was dipped in a kind of shame, for in the box under his bed there glistened a pile of golden coins—over a thousand pounds.
“No,” he said, “no; I have more payment in your teaching and in the father you have been to me than money could ever equal.” Now he was going, Henry knew that he had grown to love this red-faced, wistful man.
Strong, glistening blacks pulled at the oars of the canoe, and it went skimming toward an anchored ship, a ship commissioned by the States-General to carry black slaves from Guinea to the islands. James Flower, sitting in the canoe's stern, was very red and very silent. But as they neared the ship's side, he lifted up his head and spoke pleadingly to Henry.
“There are books on the shelves that you have never read.”
“I shall come back, one day, and read them.”
“There are things in my mind I have never told you, boy.”
“When I have the admiration of men, I shall come to you and you shall tell them to me.”
“You swear it?”
“Well—yes, I swear.”
“And how long will it take you to do these things, Henry?”
“I cannot tell; one year—or ten—or twenty. I must make a very admirable name.” Henry was climbing over the ship's side.
“I shall be lonely in the evenings, son.”
“And I, too, sir. Look! we cast off! Good-by, sir, You will remember Paulette?”
“Paulette —Paulette>—Ah, yes; I remember.”
vii
Henry Morgan came to the English town of Port Royal and left his baggage on the beach while he went looking for his uncle.
“Do you know where I may find the Lieutenant-Governor?” he asked in the streets.
“His palace is yonder, young man, and who knows he may be in it.”
His palace—it was like a British gentleman become an official far from home. It was like the man Robert Morgan had described. His letters dated from the Palace of the Lieutenant-Governor. Henry found the Palace, a low, grubby house with walls of whitewashed mud and a roof of red tiles badly molded. There was a gaudy halberdier standing at the door, holding his great, ineffectual weapon rigidly before him, the while he maintained a tortured decorum in the face of a swarm of enemy flies.
The halberd lowered across the pathway as Henry approached.
“I am looking for Sir Edward Morgan.”
“What do you wish with His Excellency?”
“Why, you see, sir, he is my uncle, and I wish to speak with him.”
The soldier scowled suspiciously and stiffened his hold on the halberd. Then Henry remembered his lessons of the plantation. Perhaps this man, for all his red coat, might be something of a slave.
“Get out of my way, you damned pup,” he cried. “Get out of my way or I'll see you hanged.”
The man cowered and almost dropped his weapon. “Yes, sir. I'll send your word, sir.” He blew a little silver call, and when a servant in green lace came to the door, he said:
“A young gentleman to see His Excellency.”
Henry was led into a little room made dark with thick, gray hangings edged with dull gold. There were three dim portraits on the walls, in black frames; two cavaliers in plumed hats, holding their swords horizontally so they looked like stiff, slender tails, and a pretty lady with powdered hair and a silken gown which left her shoulders and half her breasts uncovered.
From some place beyond the curtained doorway there came the thin twanging of a harp slow struck. The servant took Henry's letter and left him alone.
And he felt very much alone. It was a house of cold, precise hair-splitting. One was aware of a polite contempt even in the pictured faces on the wall. The British arms were embroidered on the curtains of the door, the lion on one side, holding half the shield, and the unicorn, with his half, on the other. When the curtains hung straight the design was complete. In this room, Henry began to fear his uncle.
But all these thoughts of his were shocked from his brain when Sir Edward appeared. It was his father as he remembered him, and yet never his father. Old Robert would never have had a mustache like an eyelash, and nothing in Robert’s life could have made him pinch his lips together until they were as thin as the mustache. These two might have been born alike as beans, but each had created his own mouth.
Robert had spoken truth; this man was his strutting counterpart. But Sir Edward was like an actor, who, though cast in a ridiculous rôle, yet makes his part seem the correct thing and all others absurd. His purple coat with lace at the neck and wrists, the long rapier, lean as a pencil in a scabbard of gray silk, the gray silk stockings and soft gray shoes with bowed ribbons on them, seemed to Henry the highest type of proper wear. His own good clothing was shabby by comparison.
His uncle had been looking at him steadily, waiting for Henry to speak first.
“I am Henry Morgan, sir—Robert’s son,” he began simply.
“I see you are. There is a resemblance—a faint likeness. And what may I do for you?”
“Why, I—I don’t know. I came to call on you and inform you of my existence.”
“That was kind of you—ah—very kind.”
It was difficult to broach speech into this field of almost sneering courtesy. Henry asked,
“Have you heard any single thing of my parents in the long five years I have been out?”
“Five years! What have you been doing, pray?”
“I was a bond-servant, sir. But of my parents?”
“Your mother is dead.”
“My mother is dead,” Henry repeated in a whisper. He wondered if she had died soon after he had gone. He did not feel very badly about it, and yet the words sounded such tremendous things, such final things. This was the end of something that might never be again. “My mother is dead,” he murmured. “And my father?”
“I have heard that your father does peculiar things in his rose garden. Squire Rhys wrote me of it. He plucks the full flowers and casts them into the air like one mazed. The ground is covered with petals and the neighbors stand about and laugh at him. Robert was never normal; indeed, he was never quite sane, or he might have gone far with James I. I, for one, always thought he would come to some disgrace or other. He revered nothing worthy of reverence. Why must he do this thing in the open, with the people jeering? It brings ridicule on his—ah—relatives.”
“And do you think he is really insane, Uncle?”
“I do not know,” Sir Edward said, and added with a touch of impatience, “I merely quoted Squire Rhys’ letter. My position does not allow me time for vain conjecture—nor much time for idle conversation,” he said pointedly.
The methodic twanging of the harp had ceased, and now the curtain of the door was thrust aside and a slender girl entered the room. It was difficult to see her in this dark place. It was plain she was not beautiful, but rather proudly pretty. She was softly dressed and her face was pale. Even her hair was pale fragile gold. Altogether she seemed a wan, tired echo of Sir Edward.
The girl was startled at seeing Henry there, and he found that he was a little afraid of her in the same manner that he was growing to fear Sir Edward. She looked at Henry as though he were some distasteful food which only the strict rules of courtesy prevented her from pushing away from her place.
“Your cousin Henry,” Sir Edward said shortly; and, “My motherless daughter, Elizabeth.” Then, nervously, as though no good could possibly come of this contact, “Hadn't you better practice your music a little longer, my dear?”
She dropped a suggestion of a curtsey to Henry, and in a voice like her father’s, greeted him.
“How d’ye do. Yes, sir, I think I had better practice. That last piece is difficult but beautiful.” And she disappeared behind the curtain whence came again the slow, accurate striking of the harp.
Henry gripped his resolve, though he was afraid of this man.
“There is a thing I wish to speak of, sir. I want to go a-buccaneering, Uncle—on the sea, in a great ship with guns. And when I have taken prizes, and a cloud of men gather to my reputation, then I would be capturing a Spanish town for plunder and ransom. I am a good sailor, my uncle. I can navigate in any sea, I think; and I have it in me to plan carefully my campaign. I have read a great lot on the ancient wars. The buccaneers have never been the force I mean to make them. Why, I could form armies and navies of them, my dear uncle. In time I would lead the whole Free Brotherhood of the Coast, and it would be an armed power to reckon with.
“These things I have considered in the long years of my slavery. There is a crying in my heart to do these things. I think the end of all my dreaming is a great name and a great fortune. I know my powers. I am twenty years old; I have had several years at sea; and I have a thousand pounds. The man who helps me now—who goes with me as partner—I will make rich. I am so very sure I can do these things—so very sure.
“I ask you, my uncle, to add to my thousand pounds enough so that I may buy a fitted ship and gather the free, brave spirits about me to do my will. If you will place another thousand pounds in my hands, I swear to make you richer than you are.”
The harp was no longer sounding. At the beginning of the boy’s outburst, Sir Edward had held up his hand as though to stop him, but the words plunged on. And when the harp had been silenced, Sir Edward looked uneasily toward the door. Now he seemed to bring his interest back to Henry.
“I have no money to risk on unsure ventures,” he said sharply. “And I have no more time for talk. The Governor is coming to consult with me in a moment. But I would say that you are a wild, careless boy who is like to come to hanging of your ventures. Your father is like you, only his is a wildness of the mind.
“And I must inform you that there is peace between Spain and England; not very good feeling, it is true, but still, peace. If you go marauding it will be my duty to see you punished, sorry for it though I may be. The Round-heads are no longer in power, and those wild things that Cromwell overlooked are carefully watched now. Remember what I say, for I would not like to hang my nephew. Now I must really bid you good day.”
Tears of resentment stood in Henry's eyes.
“Thank you for coming to see me,” his uncle said. “Good-by.” And he went through the curtained doorway.
In the street, Henry walked moodily along. He saw his cousin a short distance ahead of him, a tall negro attendant upon her. He continued slowly that she might leave him behind, but the girl lagged on her way.
“Perhaps she wishes to speak with me,” Henry thought, and quickened his steps to come up with her. He saw, incredulously, what the darkened room had hidden. She was only a little girl, not more than fourteen at the most. Elizabeth looked up as he came beside her.
“Do you find interesting things to be doing here in the Indies?” Henry asked.
“As many as one might expect,” she replied. “We have been here a good while, you know.” And touching her slave’s arm with her little parasol, she turned into a crossing street, and left young Henry looking after her.
He was bitter against these proud relatives who seemed to edge away from him as though he were foul. He could not call them silly, for they had impressed him too deeply. They had succeeded in making him feel alone and helpless and very young.
The narrow ways of Port Royal were deep with muddy filth, ground to thick liquid by the carts and the numberless bare feet. Port Royal bore the same resemblance to a city as the Palace of the Lieutenant-Governor did to Whitehall. The streets were only narrow alleys lined with dirty wooden houses. And each house had a balcony above the street where people sat and stared at Henry as he passed; stared not with interest, but wearily, as men in sickness watch flies crawling on the ceiling.
One street seemed to have no inhabitants save only women—black women, and white, and gray women, with fever written on their hollow cheeks. They leaned from their balconies like unclean sirens and softly called as he went by. Then, when he paid no attention to them, they shrieked like angry parrots and screamed curses and spat after him.
Near the waterfront he came to a kind of tavern with a great crowd gathered in front of it. Standing in the center of the way was a cask of wine with its head staved in, and a big, drunken man in crazy laces and a plumed hat strutted beside it. He passed out cups and basins and even hats full of wine to the reaching men. Now and then he called for a toast and a cheer, and his crowd screamed its acclaim.
Young Henry sought to pass them in his misery.
“Come drink my health, young man.”
“I do not wish to drink,” said Henry.
“You do not wish to drink?” The big man was overwhelmed with this new situation. Then he recovered his wrath.
“By God! you will so drink when Captain Dawes that took the supply ship ‘Sangre de Cristo’ this day week asks you.” The lowering man came close, then suddenly drew a great pistol from his belt and pointed it waveringly at Henry's breast.
The boy eyed the pistol.
“I will drink your health,” he said. And while he drank, an idea came to him, “Let me speak to you alone, Captain Dawes, sir,” and he tugged the pirate into the tavern door. “About your next trip—” he began.
“My next trip and hell!” the captain roared. “I’ve just taken a good prize, haven’t I? I’ve got money, haven’t I? Then what is this you are squalling about a next trip? Wait till the prize is spent and the wounds healed. Wait till I’ve drained Port Royal dry of wine, and then come talking about the next trip.” He rushed back into the street crowd. “Boys!” he yelled. “Boys, you have not drunk my health for hours. Come, shout together now, and then we will sing!”
Henry walked onward in despair. In the harbor a number of ships were lying at anchor. He approached a sailor sitting in the sand.
“That one’s fast,” he said, to open the acquaintance.
“Aye, good enough.”
“Are there any buccaneers of note in this town?” Henry asked.
“None but that Dawes, and he’s only a roaring mouse. He takes a little boat loaded with supplies for Campeche, and you’d think it was Panama he brought home for the noise he makes about it.”
“But are there none others?”
“Well, there’s one they call Grippo, but he takes no prizes unless they go unarmed. Afraid of his shadow, Grippo. Yes, he’s in port with no prize, and drinking black rum on tick, I guess.”
“Which is his ship?” Henry asked.
“Why, there she is. They call her Ganymede. They tell that Grippo stole her in Saint Malo when her crew was drunk. He and nine others tumbled the poor stiff wretches overside and made off with the ship for the Indies. Yes, she’s a good craft, but Grippo is no master. A wonder it is that he’s not wrecked her before now. Take Mansveldt; there’s a master for you—a real master. But Mansveldt is in Tortuga.”
“A good, swift sailer,” Henry observed; “though she could carry more canvas without hurt. How about her guns?”
“They say she’s over armed if anything.”
And on that night, Henry found the buccaneer drinking in a hovel on the beach. The man was nearly black; two fat wrinkles cut each cheek as though a silken cord were pulled tight against the flesh until it disappeared. His eyes darted here and there like sentries before a camp of little fears.
“Are you one they call Grippo?” Henry asked.
“I took no prize,” the man cried, starting back. “I take no prizes. You have nothing to fasten on me for.” Once in Saint Malo he had been accosted thus, and afterwards they had whipped him on the cross until a hundred sagging mouths opened on his body and every one laughed blood. Grippo had feared all semblance of authority since then.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I think I am going to make your fortune, Grippo,” Henry said with assurance. He knew how to handle this man, for he was a counterpart of the many slaves of the plantation—fearful, and perhaps greedy. “What would you do with five hundred English pounds, Grippo?”
The black man licked his lips and glanced at the empty cup before him. “What must I do for this money?” he whispered.
“You will sell me the captaincy of the Ganymede.”
Now Grippo was wary.
“The Ganymede is worth much more,” he said firmly.
“But I do not want to buy the ship—only the captaincy. Look, Grippo! I'll make this compact with you. I will give you five hundred pounds for a half interest in the Ganymede, and all of her command. Then we will put to sea. I think I know how to win plunder if there be no interference in my company. Grippo, I will give you a writing to this effect. If I fail in one single undertaking in the Ganymede, then you shall have the whole ship back, and you shall keep the five hundred pounds.”
Grippo still looked into his empty cup, but suddenly he was filled with excitement.
“Give me money,” he cried out. “Quick! give me the money.” Then—“Oloto! Oloto! bring white wine—white wine—for the love of Christ.”
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