Gene Wolfe - Pirate Freedom

That was a pretty tall order, and I had hardly started prowling through the hot, dark night when I spotted a boat in the harbor with two men rowing and another in the stern who seemed to be looking for something too. I thought they were probably soldiers or night watchmen or something, so I strolled along like I did not have a care in the world when they seemed to be looking my way. Out toward the end of one of the piers, I stepped on a round piece of something-probably a boat pole-that rolled under my foot. I just about went into the water, and I yelled, "Oh, shit!"

As soon as I said that, the man in the back of the boat sang out, "Ahoy there! You speak English?"

He had a British accent and was a little hard for me to understand, but I waved and yelled, "Sure!"

The other two rowed him over and he jumped up on the pier. I am taller than most people-my father told me once he got me engineered that way-and I was taller than he was by quite a bit. It was too dark to see a lot, but it seemed to me that he had more hair on his face, even though he did not seem like he was a whole lot older than I was.

"Say, this's luck! We've been hours tryin' to get our bearin's. None of us speaks the lingo, you see." He held out his hand. "Bram Burt's my name. Midshipman Burt that was, late of His Majesty's Lion and these days skipper of the Macerer."

He had a good handshake. I could tell the name of his ship was French from the way he said it, but I did not know what the word meant. I gave him my name, called him sir, and explained that I was just an ordinary seaman from the Santa Charita.

"Bit of an accent there, eh? You're a Day-You're Spanish?"

I said, "I'm from Jersey, but I speak Spanish."

"That explains it. Have to, on a Dago ship. Parlez-vous francais?"

I told him I did, a little, saying it in French. Then I started trying to tell him about the monastery.

"Belay that. Bit too quick for me, eh? You'd be a handy sort to have 'round, though. Half my bloody crew's French. See here now, the dear old Macerer's markin' time out there, eh? Outside the roadstead. They goin' to get huffy if we make port tonight?"

I explained that some of the guns were up in the fort already, said I would not try it, and showed him where he could find the harbor master in the morning.

"What do you think our chances are of gettin' a cargo here? Sold every-thin' in Port Royal, eh? No cargo for us there, so we're lookin' about. Saint Charity havin' much luck?"

I shrugged. "They say we'll load tomorrow, Captain, but I don't know what it is."

"That's interestin'." It was too dark for me to be sure, but I believe he winked. "Gold doubloons, hid away ever so snug. Put it in kegs marked BEER, eh? They're shippin' gold back to the Spanish king like 'twas sand, we hear."

I shook my head. "I'm sure it's not that, sir."

" 'Cause of that big lad?" He pointed to the galleon.

"Yes, sir, the Santa Lucia there. She'll carry the treasure."

After that he asked me what treasure I meant, and I told him about the treasure house and seeing the mules unloaded there. I offered to take him to see it, and he thanked me.

"Interestin', I'll be bound, but my duty's to my ship, eh? Got to get back to her. I'll go sightseein' tomorrow, it may be."

"In that case, could you run me by the Santa Charita? It won't take you much out of your way, and I'd like to get aboard without being seen."

He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. "Slipped off, did you? I've done the same once or twice. Got a masthead for it once, too."

I jumped from the pier into his boat and sat in the bow, as he directed. When we lay against the hawse of the Santa Charita, he whispered to the rowers to ship oars and join him in the stern. That raised the bow a foot or more, and it was no trick to pull myself into the hawsepipe, or to slip into the forecastle as I had planned. The next day I looked around the harbor for the Macerer without finding her, and I soon forgot Capt. Burt and his ship in the work of stowing cargo.

It was mixed, as they say. There were big bales of leather, box after box of dried fruit, and crates of terra cotta cookware. There were also seven parrots in cages, a private investment of Senor's. They had to be carried out of the hold in fine weather and set on the weather deck, and carried back to the hold at night for fear they would catch cold.

The rest of the crew hated them because of the extra work they made, and their noise and dirt. I thought they were cute and did my best to make friends, talking to them and scratching their necks the way Senor did. After one died, I was assigned to water and feed them, clean their cages, and take care of them generally.

It brought me closer to Senor, and that soon paid off in a big way. He would come out and shoot the sun at noon every day, check the logbook just like the captain did, and calculate our position. Then he and the captain would compare their results, and go over their calculations, too, if the results were too different. About the time we went through the Windward Passage, I started asking him about it.

I had been taking care of his birds and talking to him about them, and we were pretty good friends. He was still Senor to me, and I still touched my forehead and all that. But I had showed him he could relax with me and I would still jump when he gave an order. So he answered my questions when there were not too many, and showed me how to work the astrolabe. Basically what he was doing was measuring the angle of the sun at noon. Once you know that and the date, you know the latitude. The farther north you are, the farther south the sun rises and the lower it is at noon in the winter. If you know the date, the table gives you your latitude. Certain stars can be used the same way.

There are a bunch of problems with this system, as you can see. For one thing, it is hard to get a good measurement unless you happen to be standing on a rock. When the sea is calm, you take three measurements and average them. When it is rough, you can forget the whole thing.

And that is not all. In dirty weather you cannot see the sun, so no measurement. On top of that, your compass is pointing to magnetic north, not true north. There were tables for compass deviation, too, but you had to know your position to use them. So what I used to do (now I am getting ahead of myself again) was check the compass bearing against the North Star. If this is starting to sound complicated, you have no idea. I have just given the high spots.

When you have found out your latitude, you still need your longitude, and for us the only way to know that was to measure our speed with the log, and record it in the logbook, which we did every hour. The log is on a line with knots in it to measure speed. You throw the log off the back of the ship, watch the little sandglass, and count knots.

Of course if you are in sight of land, it is all different. You take bearings from objects on the chart, which gives your position-if the chart is right, and if you have not picked the wrong island or mountaintop or whatever.

By the time I had learned even half this stuff, we were a long, long way out from Veracruz. So good night!

Wecrossed the Atlantic with the galleon, which meant we had to match its speed. In light airs, it would hardly move, so we spent days and days creeping along under reefed topsails. When the wind whistled in the rigging and spray came over the side, the old slowpoke Santa Lucia turned into a racehorse, setting sails in places most ships do not even have and creaming the sea for a mile behind her. We had to do our best to keep up, all plain sail set and the deck so steep you couldn't walk on it without holding on to something. I do not know how close we were to capsizing, but I would not want to come an inch closer than we came a dozen times a day. When we finally split up-us heading north to Coruna and the Santa Lucia east for Cadiz-we were all praising God and blessing the Virgin. It was the only time I ever saw the whole crew smiling.