Kage Baker - Dark Mondays

It was only of an evening he might be taken for a pirate, drinking in the tavern on Cannon Street or the one over on Thames Street, carousing into the late hours. He could drink any other man under the table, and remain upright and coherent a surprising while after too.

Sometimes, though, late at night, when the lamps had burned low and the other drinkers had fallen silent, he’d get a puzzled look in his black eyes. He could be seen putting out his hand cautiously, touching a glass or an onion bottle as though he expected it to vanish at his touch, like a soap bubble. Once he was seen to put his hand into the flame of a candle, as though to learn whether it would burn him.

On the day the bad news came about Old Providence, he went into the Cannon Street tavern at sundown and remained there till dawn, taking on board enough rum to make any other man paralytic drunk; but all he did was stare into a pool of spilled drink for hours, and answer in few words or not at all when approached.

Still, Harry was stone-cold sober when Governor Modyford called him in for advice. He walked out of the governor’s mansion Admiral Morgan, and sent word through the taverns of Port Royal that any member of the Brethren with a ship and a crew might want to get himself to the South Cays, where he would undoubtedly learn something to his advantage.

They came from all the winds’ quarters, did the Brethren of the Coast, to rendezvous with Harry Morgan. It was understood that the object was to strike where it might do the most harm, to prevent an attack on Jamaica, even as Sir Francis Drake had struck the shipyards of Cadiz. It was further understood that no man in the fleet would lift a finger, even to save Jamaica, unless there was plunder to be had. But there was always loot when you sailed with Harry Morgan!

They raided Camaguey first; then Portobelo, with its Iron Fort and Castillo de San Gerónimo and the battlements of Triana. Here there was rare butchery, and no wonder; for here Morgan found eleven Englishmen, chained together in a tiny space, covered with sores, blinking up at the torchlight from their own shite and piss to a foot’s depth. They were from the Old Providence colony.

When they could be made to understand they were free, Morgan heard again the tale of Spanish betrayal, with new particulars he had not heard before. He looked into their faces keenly and saw not one he knew, though never so changed. He inquired whether there were any other survivors. No, he was told, none at all.

He held the place for a month, and what he did there you may well imagine.

The viceroy of Panama ransomed Portobelo at last, for a sum that would take your breath away and one gold ring set with an emerald. Morgan sailed home with more loot than any privateer since Drake. He dipped his ensign as he passed over Drake’s grave, sailing back to Jamaica in triumph.

His luck held, and mad luck it was. Even when his own flagship was blown to hell—some fool with a lighted candle in the powder magazine—Morgan and all who drank with him on his side of the table were thrown clear, whilst all the men who’d sat across the table were killed.

Now, it was claimed afterward that Morgan’s men tortured prisoners to get information from them, and that may well be so; for in every Spanish town they found racks, brands and thumbscrews, thoughtfully provided by the Holy Inquisition for their New World outposts. And what would you expect of filthy English heretics, but that they should use these sacred instruments for profane purposes?

Treasure was taken; treasure was spent in Port Royal brothels, or used to engross estates with yet more acreage of sugar cane. Treasure was pissed against the wall in week-long drinking bouts, or carefully invested with prudent firms. But when it was all spent—why, to sea they’d go again, to get more.

There was once a young fool, and his name was John. He was big and he was strong and reasonably good-looking. His people weren’t rich—he was one of eleven children—but he was apprenticed to a bricklayer in Hackney, and his future was assured.

Then he went and killed a man.

Mind you, the man had been trying to kill him, and both of them in a low tavern, and he’d been drunk and the other man sober. The dead man had been a right bastard, himself up before the magistrate many a time for one kind of viciousness or other. And John’s mother had wept and wrung her hands so piteous at the trial, that the magistrate let her boy off with a sentence of transportation to the West Indies.

So Farewell Mother Dear and away went John, to sweat in the sun as a redleg bond-slave on a plantation in Barbados. It didn’t kill him. When he’d been there two years he escaped, in a dugout canoe he’d made with two other men. They thought they could paddle their way to some other island and shift for themselves there.

It didn’t fall out so. The canoe capsized the first day, and though they righted her again they’d lost their victuals and drink in the sea. They were in a bad way by the time they sighted a passing ship and got taken aboard. The captain was a sometime merchant, a pirate without even the least pretensions to being a privateer, and half his crew had been lost to yellow fever. He put a mug of water in John’s hand and made him take an oath to serve on board his ship. John gulped and reckoned he may as well take it, if it was a question of him living or getting tossed back overboard, which it seemed to be.

He learned the ropes, he learned how to reef a sail without getting himself or anyone else killed. But he did learn to kill when required.

He’d been raised to be polite to ladies and respectful to his superiors, and to sit in a pew of a Sunday and keep his mouth shut except when it was time to sing a hymn; that was morality. Still, the first time somebody came at John with a pike, he reacted just as he had in the tavern in Hackney, only faster.

He reasoned it out that a man may be forgiven for murder; why, if his country is at war it isn’t even murder, but duty. On the other hand, if a man stands like a stock and lets himself be slain, that amounts to suicide, which will send him straight to eternal damnation. Why take a chance with the eternal part of himself, when he was adrift in a land where it was so easy to lose the earthly part?

So John was a pirate, and a good one, and followed his luck from ship to ship. Now and then he heard his mother’s ghost telling him he could get work as a bricklayer, if only he’d try; and he assured her he would try, next time the opportunity presented itself.

He liked looting, if he was taking loot from foreigners. He liked lying on a beach of white sand by night, watching the stars slide down toward the mangrove trees. He liked fiery rum, though not so much after the first time he woke up naked in an alley in Tortuga. He only wanted luck, he thought, to make enough to buy a plantation somewhere and live like a gentleman.

That was why he listened avidly to the stories, whether they were told beside a driftwood fire or on deck under a tropic moon, or beside a guttering candle at a filthy table. The stories were all about Harry Morgan, king of privateers, luckiest man in the West Indies. His luck rubbed off on any man so happy as to set sail with him, or so they said.

They said at the lake of Maracaibo, Morgan took a fortune, and then found his way back to the sea blocked by a Spanish fleet. He sent a dummy fleet among them, loaded with powderkegs, with logs of wood dressed as men on the decks, and the Spanish never realized the trick until the fireships blew up in their faces.

They said he’d got past the high castle guarding the harbor by seeming to land five hundred men in the mangroves, and the Spanish garrison grew fearful and trained their great guns on the trees, expecting an attack from that side; and all the while it was only the same ten men going back and forth in one longboat, sitting up on the way out and lying flat in the bottom of the boat on the way back. Night fell and the Spaniards kept watch on the land, while Morgan’s fleet sailed out under their noses, and they never realized they’d missed him until he was well out to sea. There was no predicament so dire Morgan’s luck couldn’t get him out of it.