James Nelson - The Pirate Round

IT TOOK them four weeks to raise England, once the Elizabeth Galley cleared out of Hamilton Harbor and Marlowe set her great sweeping northerly arc of a course to cross the Atlantic.

It was with some sadness that they left that beautiful island. Their stay had lasted five days, taking on stores and giving the hands a run ashore, enough time for them all to feel some attachment to the place. Thomas and Elizabeth were daily guests of the governor’s, a skilled host, and Richier invited Bickerstaff and Dinwiddie on two other occasions.

Dinwiddie, of all of them, seemed most heartbroken to leave. For the five days that they had remained at anchor, his usual active, hardworking and hard-driving spirit abandoned him. He strolled the decks like a gentleman aboard his yacht, retold bits of his memories of dining with the governor, described the mansion to the sailors, recalled snippets of droll conversation. He left the bulk of the work to the stolid William Flanders, second officer, and Honeyman, the bosun.

Honeyman, for his part, did not seem to mind, did not seem to view Dinwiddie’s strange behavior as any more of an imposition than he viewed most of life.

Duncan Honeyman was an odd one; Marlowe could not seem to peg him. He had all the attributes of a whiner, a malingerer, a sullen troublemaker, except that he worked like a horse and made all those in his charge do the same.

There was no genuine fault to be found in his performance as bosun.

Nor in his recruiting efforts. He went ashore and did not return for a day and a half, and Marlowe was ready to make his displeasure known, emphatically, when Honeyman appeared on the quay with five prime seamen in tow. Marlowe did not question his techniques after that.

Five days on that lovely island, and then they rigged the capstan and heaved the anchor up from the bottom and stood out into the open sea, hearts yearning for Bermuda, heads pounding from the excesses in which they had there indulged.

With each mile made good, Dinwiddie the governor’s guest settled back into Dinwiddie the first officer, the man whom Marlowe had so actively recruited. A man whose conversation with the crew consisted not of descriptions of dinner but terse orders to haul the bloody main-sheet, you damned buggers, I’ll thank you to mind your work, the mainsail looks like bloody washing hung out to dry.

Their first Sunday since leaving Bermuda, and Thomas Marlowe had the pleasure of watching his crew-a contented crew, a crew of tolerable size and expertise-sprawled out along the warm deck, taking their ease on their day off.

They were almost evenly divided between black men and white, odd proportions, even among the pirates. Marlowe kept a weather eye out, waited for a spark, an angry word, a shove, waited for someone to pull a knife, growl, “I’ll show you, nigger, playing the man!”

But it didn’t happen, because the one thing that was most offensive to a sailor, the one thing that overshadowed race or religion or political leanings, was a refusal to do one’s share of work, and in that the black men could not be faulted. They worked hard and learned fast, and the more experienced white hands had no complaints.

Still… as Marlowe looked across the deck he saw a divided crew.

There was no animosity that he could see, no forced racial divides, but all the black men were clustered together to larboard, near the bow, and the white men, off watch, were sitting amidships. When the trouble came, in whatever form it would, they would have to act as one clan. They would have to be the Elizabeth Galleys, not white men and black.

The next day he surprised them all. “Mr. Dinwiddie,” he called the mate aft, “some of the men, I perceive, are still in their shore clothes, and that won’t do. I think today we will have a ‘make and mend’ day.”

The “some” whom he meant were the black men; the white hands were all sailors and had come aboard in their wide slop trousers and work shirts, sheath knives and neckerchiefs. The black men still wore the clothes in which they had labored in the fields at Marlowe House.

“Make and mend, aye, sir, and they’ll be glad of it.” A make and mend day was almost as much a holiday as was a Sunday.

“Issue out cloth and needles and thread to those that need it. Have the hands that know how to run up clothes help their watchmates who don’t.”

“Make and mend?” Francis Bickerstaff asked an hour later as he stepped onto the quarterdeck and joined Marlowe in observing the work going on forward. All over the deck men were paired up, the sailors helping the new men make their wide-legged slops, their work shirts cut in the seaman’s way.

Marlowe knew that the former field hands would not know how to sew clothes. The deep-water sailors, however, the men who sailed ocean voyages and were used to being long out of the company of women, all were adept at the necessary chores that landsmen left to wives and daughters. Now the white sailors were patiently instructing the young black men in the tailor’s arts.

“Clothes make the man, Francis, be he a gentleman or a sailor man.”

And while the clothes might not, in fact, make the man, they did much to help the men make themselves. The newly minted sailors laughed at their new rigs, pretended to be unimpressed with them, felt a certain degree of embarrassment in wearing them, like they were dressing up in costumes. Hesiod, on the foredeck, his black skin sharp against his new white clothes, doing a wild parody of a sailor’s hornpipe to the delight of the other black men.

But that embarrassment faded with just a few days, and soon Marlowe could see them strutting the deck with the air of old salts. Neckerchiefs appeared around their necks, sheath knives worn with casual grace behind.

By the end of the week Marlowe noticed that the men were starting to congregate more by watch than by race. They were becoming a crew now, a single unit that would work to his command.

And all for the price of a little cloth and thread.

For four weeks they plowed the North Atlantic, with never a sail sighted and nothing worse than two days of fierce rain and an uncomfortable, lumpy sea to slow their progress. The Elizabeth Galley reeled off an easy six and seven knots, running her easting down.

Four weeks, and Francis Bickerstaff, who had developed considerable skill in celestial navigation, worked out an evening sight and announced that, if the wind held, they would raise the Lizard the following day.

Halfway through the next day’s dinner, the masthead lookout called down that he had sighted land, fine on the larboard bow. By nightfall the Lizard, the headland that formed the southwesternmost point of England, that familiar landfall to sailors inbound and outbound from the southern coast, was plainly seen from the deck.

They were in among shipping now, all manner of vessels from coasters and fishing vessels to deep-sea merchantmen, Indiamen, and menof-war. It took them four days to skirt the coast, run through the Strait of Dover, and weather Foreness Point, where they turned west and worked their way toward the wide mouth of the Thames River.

Marlowe stood on the quarterdeck with Elizabeth at his side and pointed out the various landmarks as they passed, related tales of his life at sea as one or another place sparked a memory. He had spent enough time in those waters to be familiar with them, but not intimately so. He did not know the Thames the way he knew Jamaica or New Providence or Tortuga. It was on the Thames, however, that he had done his legitimate seafaring, and the stories were ones that he could tell without embarrassment.

“Here is Gravesend,” he said, pointing over the larboard rail. “That is where I was born.”

Elizabeth looked at the small cluster of buildings huddled on the grimy shore, then turned and put her arm around her husband. “I did not know that,” she said softly. “How could I have not known that?”