Henry Archbould, summoned in haste, was there at dinner, and found nothing alarming about the young man. Indeed, Tom Modyford was said to think very highly of him, and to have plans to use him in the development of the colony. At which Anna Petronilla took heart.
And Henry, on his next visit to Kingshouse, delighted the Governor by inquiring, in a detached and academic way of course, about the method of taking up land in Jamaica.
And since an expedition against a rival colony, more especially against a colony held by those stubborn fighters the Dutch, was a matter of long and careful preparation, there was time for all the members of the Fortune’s crew to indulge in personal and private business according to their taste.
There was time for Henry to ride about this fertile island with which the Spaniards had done so little, to explore the virgin valleys and the sun-drenched savanna; time to know the planters a little and the Morgan family very well.
There was time for Bernard Speirdyck to send to Curacao for his wife and to find a house in Port Royal. Mary Speirdyck arrived with two large chests, a cupboard, and a hundred bulbs; half of them lilies and half of them onions. The cupboard was painted all over with little flowers and had come out from Holland with her mother, and Mary would as soon have travelled without her petticoats as have left the cupboard behind. Mary was blond and self-contained and there was a bloom on her like a grape. She went in and out of the little dark rooms of the port, stirring the dirt with a plump, contemptuous hand and shaking the sandy grit from her shoes. She was not very happy about leaving Dutch territory, but if Bernard said it was a good thing to do, then it was without doubt a good thing. And there was no doubt that Jamaica was green and lovely and kind after Curacao, and perhaps now she would have a child to take the place of the two who had died on that bleak and distant island. She would also see to it that Cornelius got himself married to a respectable girl with presentable antecedents and if possible a bit of dowry. She did not know which she disapproved of more: the exorbitant rents in Port Royal or the extent of Cornelius’s following.
For there was time for the maidens of Port Royal to be beglamoured by that ripe-corn hair of Cornelius’s, that looked so strange against his sunburnt face. More mammas became acquainted with the waterside during the Fortune’s weeks in port than in all the previous history of Port Royal, and the usual walk to Fort Charles and back was quite deserted.
There was time, too, for Manuel to sample every brothel from Fort Charles to Fort Rupert, and because of his childlike charm and his eyelashes to be awarded cut rates in every one of them.
There was time for Jack Morris to take over the second of the two prizes and fit her out to his heart’s liking. The Seville was too slow and cumbersome for his taste, so he let it go in favour of the Felipe, which had some of the Fortune’s handiness but greater gun-power, and which he renamed the Dolphin.
Henry was glad to have another Dolphin in the family, and spent a large part of his time teasing stores out of Authority for her. He took Jack Morris out to the Morgan place, where Jack sat with his knees pressed together and made polite conversation with Anna Petronilla, and was very bored. The land had no attractions for Jack; it was an alien element, and he was ill at ease in domestic surroundings. He did not, it is true, follow Manuel in his progress through the upper stories of the port. It was his habit to find a girl who suited him and live with her as long as he was ashore. But he had forgotten her before the anchor had come dripping out of the water and been made fast. The sea was his home.
The expedition being recruited against Curacao was composed of as motley a crew as ever sailed the Caribbean: French, Genoese, Greeks, Levantines, Portuguese, Indians, Englishmen and negroes. Everything in fact but Dutch. But when neighbours said, in that ageless neighbourly way, to Mary Speirdyck that it was odd that her husband should be prepared to war against his countrymen, Mary merely looked placid and friendly and assured them that Bernard without doubt knew what he was about. Joe Bradley brought his May Flower in with a prize in tow while they were in harbour, and was invited to join, but refused when he heard where they were bound.
‘My crowd would mutiny if I asked them to fight the Dutch,’ he said. ‘They fight too well and there is practically no plunder.’
But at the word mutiny both Morgan and Jack Morris had dissolved into fits of insane laughter, and had taken Bradley aside and talked with him. And after that Bradley was an enthusiast for the project.
The most unexpected recruit was picked up by Henry one evening as he was leaving the harbour on his way to dinner at Kingshouse. Someone came running after him and a voice said: ‘Harry! Harry Morgan!’
And there was Bluey.
Bluey’s stockings hung in folds from his tattered breeches, and showed through the holes large areas of dirty calf. His toes twiddled self-consciously in the gaps of his shoes.
‘Captain Morgan, sir,’ he said, amending his instinctive form of address. And then, reading Morgan’s glance at his clothes, he fumbled in a pocket and produced something which he exhibited on his palm. ‘I still got my jew’s-harp,’ he said with a grin.
‘Bluey!’ said Henry. ‘What became of that fine fortune of yours?’
‘Oh, I had a wonderful time with it, but I woke up one morning and found it wasn’t there any more. Money’s like that, ain’t it? Here one day, gone tomorrow. You want men, Captain? You want a man?’
Henry did not particularly want Bluey, and he did not need a man. But to turn away anyone who helped him take the Gloria was unthinkable. He handed out money for clothes, the amount being deftly calculated to provide margin for only a couple of drinks, and told him to report to Bernard Speirdyck. Bernard would not be over-pleased, but Bluey was a good enough seaman to get by.
The only other recruit who was not altogether welcome was Exmeling, who was coming as surgeon; and he was unwelcome only in the eyes of one member of the outfit: Bartholomew Kindness. The others accepted little Henrik with the usual indifference, but to Bart he was anathema. He scowled at the very mention of his name, he avoided his shadow, and he would not sit in the same room with him.
‘His eyes are far too close together,’ he would say when someone took him to task for his unreasonableness. ‘A bad lot that, mark my words. A bad lot.’ And then: ‘Bile!’ he would mutter darkly. ‘Bile!’
Bart’s share of prize-money had been more than enough to buy that cottage in the Mendips, but there was no word about his going back to England, and once more Henry forbore to remark. Bart was for ever in and out of the gambling-dens on the water-front, and it was to be supposed that his luck was no better than it normally was.
Certainly he made no secret of his pleasure at the thought of going back to sea, but he was not unique in that. There was hardly a man of the four ships and the two French sloops which were going with them who was not either penniless or weary of the land. When on a blue April morning they said good-bye to Port Royal their mournful capstan song belied the lifting of their hearts. And although they waved with hearty gestures and ribald yells to the little group crowded on the fortifications at the point to watch them pass, their minds were already playing dolphin-like in the open sea.
Henry was one of the few men who looked back when the island was behind them, and this was the first time he had ever looked back at a place he was leaving. For among those green mountains, growing blue now and flat and sinking to the horizon, was a piece of land that was his very own. He had bought one of those virgin valleys. Bernard Speirdyck was not the only one to believe that ‘Yamaica’ was an island with a future.
‘Aah, Jamaica!’ Mansfield had said with scorn when Morgan had expressed his delight in it. ‘I make you a present of it! The earth quakes and the place is full of husbandry. The sea is the place for a man.’
But Henry was no sailor bred. The land he had run away from was in his marrow; something fundamental in him wanted a permanence. He had spent what was left of his prize-money, after the Fortune had had her share, neither on gami
ng, although he was fond of it, nor on women, although he liked them. He had bought land. And moreover Elizabeth had ridden out with him one day to see it; accompanied in the cause of respectability by Barley Sugar, Anna Petronilla being of the opinion that a cousin might come within the prescribed degrees of chaperonage, but a cousin who had proposed marriage did not. Elizabeth had ridden out to the valley with the object of telling him in what way it was entirely the wrong place to buy, but she had ended in helping him choose the place for the ‘big house’, and where the slaves’ quarters should be, and where the sugar-factory when there were canes to supply it. Barley Sugar had gone to sleep under a cottonwood tree, and they had walked to and fro about the quiet valley talking as friends with a common interest, so that when the moment came to awaken Barley Sugar they seemed to have known each other a long time, and they rode home in unspoken companionship. So Henry for once looked back at a place he was leaving.
Cornelius, too, looked back now and then as the land sank astern, for Mary had done her duty, and Cornelius was betrothed. Properly, with exchange of rings and exchange of meals, and dowry settlement, and all. He was going to marry the daughter of Charles Hadsell, who had been master of the Prosperous of London until she was taken by a Spanish man-of-war. Captain Hadsell had spent nearly two years in Spanish prisons before he had escaped from the last one in Havana, and he had seen his friends’ heads carried in triumph through the streets by their murderers. But he had hopes of five thousand pounds from the Court of Admiralty as compensation for the loss of his ship. His daughter Jane was pretty and sweet and had a wonderful hand with pastry, and Cornelius was very happy.
His future father-in-law was acting as mate to Jack Morris for the trip, and Jack was not quite so happy about that. It is never very comfortable to have in one’s crew a man who has owned and commanded his own ship, and Hadsell was not the man to make such a position easy. But in the first flush of satisfaction at being free of the land they were all brothers together, fo’c’sle or quarter-deck. They sang continually, they quarrelled not at all, even in the cramped quarters forward, and even those whose friends had been rich enough to send them aboard drunk permitted themselves to be soused by their mates with resigned good-humour.
They bore south-east for Curacao, and the seas were kind and the winds accommodating, and the new sails looked very fine in the sun, and no one ever remembered that they had been cold, and wet, and tired, and sick, and maimed at sea. They were happy.
They were still happy and singing when, at four bells precisely in the forenoon watch some days later, all six captains received a polite deputation from their crews. The deputations, with remarkable accord and strangely identical phrasing, announced that they were unanimously against any attack on a Dutch colony and refused point-blank to go on with the expedition. They had no quarrel with the Dutch, and the Dutch had nothing worth plundering anyhow. They held that it would be more sensible and more to their liking to attempt the island of Santa Catalina, which was English by right and was moreover very handily at a point due W.SW. from where they were at the moment, so that the ‘trade’ would blow them there without any undue effort on their part.
The captains, on their several quarter-decks but united in sentiment, pointed out that Santa Catalina could provide no plunder at all, and it would be much wiser to obey the instructions of their commission and go on to Curacao. Whereat the crews professed themselves indifferent to plunder while the honour of their country was at stake, and retired to the fo’c’sle to laugh themselves silly while the watch on deck changed course for Santa Catalina, a lonely little island four hundred miles away.
The island was more than lonely, it was forbidding, and they watched it rise from the ocean with proprietary criticism.
‘Why do we want this place back?’ they said. ‘Let the Dons have it!’
‘I’ve seen better spots in Iceland,’ they said.
‘A damned dreary lump of rock,’ they said. ‘Let’s sink it.’
But they were amused and eager about it all. To slap Spain’s face was worth the lack of some plunder.
‘She’s calved!’ said Bluey suddenly from his place in the rigging, and they laughed.
There was indeed a ‘calf’ by her side. Another ‘damned dreary lump of rock’ stood alongside the main island on the north side.
One of the French sloops circled the place and came back to report that there were no ships there nor anywhere in sight. The excitement on land was tremendous, they said. Much galloping backwards and forwards and letting off of alarm signals and what not. But no craft in the harbours.
Whereupon Mansfield led the English ships through the reefs that separated them from the island.
‘I hope the old man knows what he is doing,’ Jack Morris said, bringing the Dolphin in Mansfield’s wake.
‘I am the only Englishman alive who knows the channel through the reefs of Santa Catalina,’ Mansfield had boasted when they had discussed their plan of campaign in Port Royal. And they knew that it was probably true: Mansfield was famous as a coaster. It was said that he could smell his way through reefs.
But Jack Morris, with a good new ship under him and that crazy wake in front of him, had his heart in his mouth. Blind faith was not a quality of Jack’s at any time.
Through the clear water overside he could see the reefs, a few feet down, and inside spitting distance, and he remembered Tortuga and the stem of his first ship with the seas breaking over her as she lay submerged on the reef.
But their progress through that twisting channel, a fairway wide enough for only one ship, and that a handy one, went on without incident. Morgan followed Jack Morris, with Bernard standing stocky and placid by his side to do the sailing, and Joe Bradley came after Morgan, with the two French sloops bringing up the rear. Endeavour, Dolphin, Fortune and May Flower, they nosed their way through that seemingly endless passage between the reefs, disaster only a stone’s-throw on either side. Nearly a whole circuit of the island the channel took them before they came at last into the wide, safe waters of the harbour—one of the best harbours in the Caribbean, where a navy could lie at anchor secure from enemy and weather.
‘I’ve crossed myself so much me arm’s paralytic,’ Bluey said, looking at the calm expanse of water as the anchor fell away from the bows and the canvas came off her.
‘You’ll need your other arm to get us out of here,’ they said, unsympathetic.
‘Now Goodbye can go ashore,’ said the mulatto, because that was all it meant to him.
It was early afternoon when they anchored, and for the rest of the day they occupied themselves in getting the boats overside and in smacking their lips over the sensation they were causing ashore.
‘I wager we’re the sweetest sight the Dons have seen in five years,’ they said, mocking. ‘Something to rest their eyes on, after so much sea.’
When the boats were safely in the water they sat about with their muskets and their pistols, cleaning them and swapping lies about their respective merits. Toni, encouraged by the stillness of his galley, gave them a meal that they voted ‘shore food’, which was the highest compliment in their vocabulary. If they had a grumble at all it was about the size of their rum allowance, but they had the sense to know that they would need their wits presently even more than they needed drink just now.
The dusk fell, the ships’ bells sounded lazy and irrelevant in the quiet; and then the desultory sounds ceased and there was the silence of purposeful movement. One by one they slid down the ropes into the boats, dropping with that neatness that sailors share with cats into their places on the thwarts. The boats pushed off and the adventure was begun.
But Mansfield was not with them.
Mansfield was lying on his bunk in the Endeavour with two hot bricks in the small of his back and no words that were any use. He had lumbago. In the final half-hour, during the last keying-up instruction to his officers, he had bent to pick up a chart that had fallen to the deck and had stayed bent. They had put him
to bed still bent, and still bent he lay there with his bricks and his dearth of words.
It was Morgan who took the attacking party ashore.
They had expected to be met with a volley as their boats grounded, but there was no sound. They waited until all were ashore and Morris and Bradley had joined Morgan.
‘There isn’t anything Modyford doesn’t know,’ Morgan said to Jack.
‘What’s Modyford got to do with this?’ asked the surprised Morris.
‘He said once that Spain’s sun is about to desert her.’
‘If you think because we’re ashore whole and safe it’s all over, you’re not the man I took you for. The fort is bristling with guns.’
‘I’m not thinking of the fort. If I were in command at Santa Catalina I would have had those fort guns down here before now and made matchwood of our masts. All the Spaniards can think of is shutting themselves up in the fort. That is no way to keep an empire.’
But the Spaniards had had even better ideas of defence.
When they had felt their way through the night to the fort at the north of the island, they challenged it.
‘Quarter and a free passage to Spain to everyone who surrenders,’ Morgan called.
There was no reply, but the guns on the landward side fired in concert and the air was suddenly thick with whining scraps of metal that struck sparks from rock as they hit and ricocheted away on a new note, or dropped with a soft, sucking sound into the earth.
‘I always did hate bees,’ Bluey said, his cheek on the ground.
‘Anyone hurt?’ asked Morgan; and when the question had been passed to the farther end of the line and back again it seemed that no one had been hurt.
‘Very well. We stay here, Jack, and attack when it is light enough to see. Pass the word along to stand easy. They can sleep in turns if they want to. Let them choose their own sentries.’