Gene Wolfe - Pirate Freedom

"That leaves Panama. Sure, it's farther-strike one-but look at all the good stuff. It's what my orders call for-one base. Nobody's goin' to talk about cowardice or stealing-two bases. They won't expect it-I'm rounding third. It's downwind- home run! 'Well, Admiral Valdes, sir, God and all His saints were with me, and Captain Burt hung his curve.' "

I told everybody to get ready. We had drawn the long straw, and they were ours.

Which they almost were. We caught up with them about noon, Princess scooted off to tell Capt. Burt as ordered, and Rombeau and I got out in front and turned broadside-on. The idea was to keep them dodging and tacking until Weald and our other ships showed up. It worked twice, and then they caught on.

I had expected them to scatter, but they came at us in a line ahead, the San Felipo in the lead. It meant she was heading into our broadsides, and as long as she was bow-on we really pounded her.

She pounded us a little bit, too. She had six bow chasers, and they looked like four twelve-pounders and two twenties to me. We had the upper hand and did some real damage, but it was no picnic.

We wore ship as she came on, turning so as to keep our broadsides toward her. I kept hoping she would veer off. But hit or missed, or maybe replaced, her skipper had guts.

And big guns on the lower deck, probably thirty-two-pounders. She got it from both sides as she passed between us, but she gave as good as she got, and better. Socorro and Zumaya followed her. All I can say about them was that they pounded us some more. Maybe we pounded them a little, too. I know we tried, and tried hard.

This gets painful. Fr. Wahl keeps a bottle of Scotch in his bedroom, or so he says, and has invited me to join him whenever. Tonight I am going to knock on his door and take him up on it. If things go as I hope, I will get a drink or two-no more than two-and an hour's good talk.

Then go to bed. More tomorrow.

A lot of men were dead, and a lot more were hurt so badly that they died in the next couple of hours. When a wooden ship is hit by a cast-iron cannonball, it throws splinters every which way. It throws them hard, and some are big. We did the best we could for our wounded, but our best was not much.

I am not going to list all the men who died here. I will list the one woman-otherwise you will feel sure it was Novia. It was Azuka. As for the rest… Well, a lot of the names I have mentioned over and over in telling my story will not be mentioned anymore.

Novia and I were not hurt, or at least not badly. I would say that there were about thirty of us who were not. Why God ruled that we were to be spared, I cannot say.

His mysteries lie beyond our comprehension.

The Spanish might have turned around and sunk both our ships. Or maybe Magdelena could have gotten away. What I know for sure is that we could not have. Anyone's guess is as good as mine as to why they did not. Mine is that their assignment was to carry the gold to Panama, not to fight pirates. They may also have seen Princess run off to fetch Weald and the rest of our ships.

Magdelena chased them, and we did our best to keep up. After six hours or more of that, Novia came up from the hold and said, "She sinks tonight, Crisoforo. It is best, perhaps, if we go before the sun. No?"

It was, and we did. I signaled Rombeau, and he hauled wind. Our longboat was stove, but we got a few men into the jolly and the piragua. Magdelena's longboat took the rest, the sound and the wounded.

The dead we left on board.

No. I did not go down with my ship, but I was the last to leave. That night, when we were alone in the cabin Rombeau gave up for us, Novia and I held each other and she cried. I did not, but I wanted to. I would have felt better, I know, if I had. I could not. I WOULD NOT want to go back to the three or four days that followed, but I must write about them here for the record to be complete.

For you to understand, and for me to understand, too.

The Spanish ships reached Panama. We thought of raiding the harbor, but by the time Weald, Snow Lady, Rescue, Fancy, and Princess joined us, a lot of the gold had been unloaded. Capt. Burt knew the route the mule train would follow if it headed north to Mexico or Veracruz and we decided to cut them off. I say we. Even though I did not get to vote, Capt. Burt let me sit in on the captains' meeting. Having no ship, I did not count.

How would I have voted if I could? To tell the truth, I am not sure. But probably as they did.

We sailed west along the coast to a village of eight or ten houses called Rio Hato, where the road turns inland. Half of each crew was to stay on each ship, as before. I got Novia alone and said, "Now listen to me. I'm not going to lose you. I've already lost a lot of people I liked, and I'm not about to lose the one person I love. I want you to swear to God Almighty, right here and right now, that you'll stay on this ship."

She raised her hand and said, "I, Sabina Maria de Vega Aranda Guzman, do swear as I live that I will remain behind until this good man who is my husband before you, O Lord, returns for me. I shall not follow him, save he permits me."

I knew she meant it. I could hear that in her voice and see it in her face. I did not ask her any questions, but she knew me better than anyone else ever has, and she knew. Almost whispering she said, "I have in me a child, Crisoforo."

Half the crews were supposed to stay behind. That was not how it was, although I did not realize it until that evening, when we had laid out our ambush and camped. Novia had not followed, but a lot of men who were supposed to stay with the ships had. Some of them were probably afraid that we would never come back to the ships. (Most of us never did.) Some just felt that this was going to be the biggest thing in their lives and wanted to be in on it, saying, "I was with Burt at Rio Hato," the way people said, "I was with Morgan when he burned Panama." Later I found out that there had been only five men with Novia on the Magdelena.

For most of the morning we tramped up the road until we found a good place, with some big trees back from the road and a lot of brush alongside it. We set up our ambush a hundred paces or so after that. Men were stationed every yard or so on both sides, with twenty good musket men to block the end once the soldiers and mules had gotten between the rest. I was in charge of that group; and Mahu came with me, although he did not have a musket. Nobody was to fire until we did.

It seemed like a good plan and would probably have worked. The trouble was that when the mule train ambled into it late that afternoon, somebody got spotted. A soldier shot at him, his friends shot back, and in less than a minute every barrel was hot. We moved out into the road and started shooting the way we were supposed to, but the nearest soldiers were still forty or fifty paces away.

They were shot to rags just the same, but half the mules and mule drivers ran hell-for-leather back toward Panama. We were running after them, yelling for all we were worth, when something happened that just then seemed like a miracle. There was more shooting off to the east, and a terrible pileup when the men and mules who had been at the back of the column turned around and tried to bug out toward us. We shot, and the guys who had been east of us shot, and the soldiers who were left did not stand a chance.

The new pirates-the ones who had been east of us blocking the way back to the coast-turned out to be Lesage and the crew of the Bretagne. We were happy to see them, and they pretended to be happy to see us. I hugged Lesage and got to talk to him a little bit. He said he had missed us at Portobello, but he had known what Capt. Burt planned to do so he had gone after us as fast as he could, and had finally found our ships at Rio Hato.