Thomas Hoover: Caribbee

"Aye, word has it he put in this morning at first light." Edward Bayes, a black-hatted Council member with ruddy jowls, was squinting against the sun. "What're you thinking we'd best do?"

Briggs seemed to ignore the question as he began pushing his way through the crowd. The newcomer was fully half a head taller than most of the planters, and unlike everyone else he wore no hat, leaving his rust-colored hair to blow in the wind. He was dressed in a worn leather jerkin, dark canvas breeches, and sea boots weathered from long use. He might have passed for an ordinary seaman had it not been for the two Spanish flintlock pistols, freshly polished and gleaming, that protruded from his wide belt.

"Your servant, Captain." Briggs' greeting was correct and formal, but the man returned it with only a slight, distracted nod. "Back to see what the Hollanders've brought?"

"I'm afraid I already know what they're shipping. I picked a hell of a day to come back." The stranger rubbed absently at a long scar across one cheek, then continued, as though to himself, "Damn me, I should have guessed all along this would be the way.''

The crowd had fallen silent to listen, and Katherine could make out that his accent was that of a gentleman, even if his dress clearly was not. His easy stride suggested he was little more than thirty, but the squint that framed his brown eyes made his face years older. By his looks and the uneasy shuffle of the Council members gathered around them, she suddenly began to suspect who he might be.

"Katy, who the devil?" Jeremy had lowered his voice to a whisper.

"I'm not sure, but if I had to guess, I'd say that's probably the smuggler you claim robbed you once." Scarce wonder Briggs is nervous, she thought. Every planter on the shore knows exactly why he's come back.

"Hugh Winston? Is that him?" Jeremy glared at the newcomer, his eyes hardening. "You can't mean it. He'd not have the brass to show his face on English soil."

"He's been here before. I've just never actually seen him. You always seem to keep forgetting, Jeremy, Barbados isn't part of England." She glanced back. "Surely you heard what he did. It happened just before you came out." She gestured toward the green hillsides. "He's the one we have to thank for all this. I fancy he's made Briggs and the rest of them rich, for all the good it'll ever do him."

"What he's done, if you must know, is make a profession of stealing from honest men. Damned to their cane. He's scarcely better than a thief. Do you know exactly what he did?"

"You mean that business about your frigate?"

"The eighty-tonner of ours that grounded on the reefs up by Nevis Island. He's the one who set our men ashore-then announced he was taking the cargo in payment. Rolls of wool broadcloth worth almost three thousand pounds sterling. And several crates of new flintlock muskets. He smuggled the cloth into Virginia, sold it for nothing, and ruined the market for months. He'd be hanged if he tried walking the streets of London, I swear it. Doesn't anybody here know that?"

She tried to recall what she did know. The story heard most often was that he'd begun his career at sea on a Dutch merchantman. Then, so word had it, he'd gone out on his own. According to tales that went around the Caribbees, he'd pulled together a band of some dozen runaway indentures and one night somehow managed to sail a small shallop into the harbor at Santo Domingo. He sailed out before dawn at the helm of a two- hundred-ton Spanish square-rigger. After some heavy refitting, it became the Defiance.

"They probably know he robbed you, Jeremy, but I truly doubt whether they care all that much."

"What do you mean?"

"He's the one Benjamin Briggs and the others hired to take them down to Brazil and back."

That voyage had later become a legend in the English Caribbees. Its objective was a plantation just outside the city of Pemambuco-capital of the new territory in Brazil the Dutch had just seized from the Portuguese. There the Barbados' Council had deciphered the closely guarded process Brazilian plantations used to refine sugar from cane sap. Thanks to the friendly Dutch, and Hugh Winston, Englishmen had finally cracked the centuries-old sugar monopoly of Portugal and Spain.

"You mean he's the same one who helped them get that load of cane for planting, and the plans for Briggs' sugar mill?" Jeremy examined the stranger again.

"Exactly. He also brought back something else for Briggs." She smiled. "Can you guess?"

Jeremy flushed and carefully smoothed his new moustache. "I suppose you're referring to that Portuguese mulatto wench he bought to be his bed warmer.''

Yes, she thought, Hugh Winston's dangerous voyage, outsailing several Spanish patrols, had been an all-round success. And everybody on the island knew the terms he had demanded. Sight bills from the Council, all co-signed at his insistence by Benjamin Briggs, in the sum of two thousand pounds sterling, payable in twenty-four months.

"Well, sir"-Briggs smiled at Winston as he thumbed toward the approaching ship-"this is the cargo we'll be wanting now, if we're to finish converting this place to sugar. You could be of help to us again if you'd choose. This is where the future'll be, depend on it."

"I made one mistake, helping this island." Winston glanced at the ship and his eyes were momentarily pained. "I don't plan to make another." Then he turned and stared past the crowd, toward the green fields patch-worked against the hillsides inland. "But I see your cane prospered well enough. When do we talk?"

"Why any time you will, sir. We've not forgotten our debts." Briggs forced another smile. "We'll have a tankard on it, right after the auction." He turned and motioned toward a red-faced Irishman standing behind him, wearing straw shoes and a long gray shirt. "Farrell, a moment of your valuable time."

"Yor Worship." Timothy Farrell, one of Briggs' many indentured servants, bowed sullenly as he came forward, then doffed his straw hat, squinting against the sun. His voice still carried the musical lilt of his native Kinsale, where he had been offered the choice, not necessarily easy, between prison for debt and indentured labor in sweltering Barbados. He had finally elected Barbados when informed, falsely, that he would receive a grant of five acres of land after his term of servitude expired- a practice long since abandoned.

Katherine watched as Briggs flipped him a small brass coin. "Fetch a flask of kill-devil from the tavern up by the bridge. And have it here when I get back."

Kill-devil was bought from Dutch shippers, who procured it from Brazilian plantations, where it was brewed using wastes from their sugar-works. The Portuguese there employed it as a cheap tonic to rout the "devil" thought to possess African slaves at the end of a long day and render them sluggish. It retailed handily as a beverage in the English settlements of the Americas, however, sometimes being marketed under the more dignified name of "rumbullion," or "rum."

Briggs watched as Farrell sauntered off down the shore. “That's what we'll soon hear the last of. A lazy Papist, like half the lot that's being sent out nowadays." He turned to study the weathered Dutch frigate as it eased into the sandy shallows and the anchor chain began to rattle down the side. "But we've got good workers at last. By Jesus, we've found the answer."

Katherine watched the planters secure their hats against a sudden breeze and begin pushing toward the shore. Even Anthony and Jeremy went with them. The only man who held back was Hugh Winston, still standing there in his worn-out leather jerkin. He seemed reluctant to budge.

Maybe, she thought, he doesn't want to confront it.

As well he shouldn't. We've got him to thank for this.

After a moment he glanced back and began to examine her with open curiosity, his eyes playing over her face, then her tight bodice. Finally he shifted one of the pistols in his belt, turned, and began strolling down the sloping sand toward the bay.