James Nelson - The Pirate Round

Oh, Lord, what a shame, to die thus… Visions of his wife and daughters moved like dreams through his head, the sumptuous dinners at Governor Fletcher’s, the pride in his wife’s face as she looked on him, the weight of his two girls on his knees-how he wished he would see all that again.

But he would not. He could feel the blood pooling under him, could taste it in his mouth, feel it slick on his hands and his cheek where they were pressed to the deck. His vision was growing dark around the edges, the sounds in his ears dull and otherworldly. The pain in his abdomen was all-consuming-it devoured him whole- and he would have writhed with the agony if he had been able to move, but he could not. For the first time he saw death as a relief, and he welcomed it and wished it would come fast.

He closed his eyes, whispered his daughters’ names.

It was September 1695, when Thomas Tew died on the quarterdeck of his sloop, holding in his guts with his own hands, his stomach torn open by the freak glancing blow of a cannonball. Their famous leader dead, the men of the Amity panicked and surrendered with no further resistance. Their fate at the hands of the Great Mogul of India is not known.

When word of Tew’s grisly death reached Newport, it might have caused some introspection, but it did not slow in the least the great wave of fortune hunters that were arming vessels and sailing the “Pirate Wind” for Madagascar and the Red Sea and then back to the colonies in America.

Thomas Tew made himself a fortune when he took the Great Mogul’s ship in 1692 and secured his place in that pantheon of sea rovers long remembered, men such as Long Ben Avery and Bartholomew Roberts and Blackbeard.

But in terms of the history of seafaring and raiding, Thomas Tew did something far more important than establishing his own fame, something that would resonate for decades to follow, that would become the concern of the most powerful nations on earth.

With his one bold attack, Thomas Tew created the Pirate Round.

THOMAS MARLOWE was not studying a chart of the Indian Ocean.

True, it was laid out in front of him, along with dividers and parallel rule and all those tools that a mariner might use to study a chart. A dagger, formerly the property of a lieutenant in the Spanish navy, held down the lower right corner of the rolled vellum. Holding the left corner were the sailing directions for that area, a volume he had picked up in Port Royal over ten years before, when he had first considered a jaunt against the Moors.

But he was not considering it again. It was foolhardy, unethical. It was piracy, and that was not what he did. He was not studying the chart. He assured himself of that.

He sighed, tossed the dividers aside, leaned back in the chair. August, hot and sultry in Virginia, a steamy heat after two days of rain. The windows to the library were flung open, and the lightest of breezes found its way in, rustling the papers on Marlowe’s desk. Accounts that needed settling, mostly. Unencouraging reports from his merchant in England.

Marlowe ran his fingers through his shoulder-length hair, scratched his scalp. Until just the past few months he had worn it close-cropped to accommodate one of the many elaborate periwigs that his station in Virginia society had dictated he wear. Finally, a combination of creeping age (he was nearing forty), a secure position in Tidewater society, and a general disgust with the expense and discomfort of the things had led him to abandon the fashion and allow his own hair to grow back, as he had worn it in his days at sea.

With periwig gone and coat tossed over the seat of a straight-backed caned chair, Marlowe was about as comfortable as he was going to get on such a day. He stared out the window, across the wide expanse of lawn to the lush, green line of trees in the distance. It was his, all his. He felt the weight of it pushing him down.

Today was a day for packing tobacco for shipment to England. Through the open window he could hear the squeak of the lever arm used to prize the air-cured hands of tobacco into the hogsheads.

Marlowe smiled as he thought of it. When he arrived in Williams-burg in 1700, determined to give up a former life of piracy, he understood none of that. He did not know that tobacco had to be left suspended in a curing house to dry in the air after it was cut, did not know that it was bound up into little bundles called hands and then forced, or “prized” into hogsheads.

He knew only that he wanted a plantation, wanted to be lord of the manor. Money procured that. Once he owned the plantation, he set free the slaves that had come with the bargain and hired them to take care of the cultivation. That part of plantation owning, the agriculture part, did not interest him. Besides, the former slaves had forgotten more about it than he would ever know.

The squeaking stopped, followed a moment later by the peevish voice of Francis Bickerstaff saying, “No, no more. There is a finite amount these hogsheads will hold, you know. We shall blow it apart if we put one more hand in there. Affix the head now, cooper, and let us have another.” He sounded like a schoolmaster lecturing a recalcitrant student.

That was hardly surprising. Bickerstaff had been a tutor to a wealthy man’s children up until the moment his ship had been captured by the pirate vessel aboard which Marlowe was sailing. Marlowe had forced Bickerstaff to sail with him, to teach him to read, to speak properly, to pass as a gentleman. The two had become friends, the closest of friends, and remained so.

Bickerstaff had a curious mind, as befitted a scholar. While Marlowe was happy to ride around the plantation and enjoy his lordship over it, Bickerstaff felt the need to learn all he could about raising, curing, and selling tobacco. After five years of living at Marlowe House, he knew as much as any planter in the Tidewater. Between Bickerstaff and the freed slaves, Marlowe’s plantation produced as much and as good tobacco as any plantation in Virginia or Maryland.

Thomas drew a deep breath. Along with the sounds of prizing, the breeze carried the scent of the air-dried tobacco being readied for shipment. It was the smell of money in the Tidewater. Or had been, until now, the Year of Our Lord 1706.

Now it was hard times for the once-prosperous colony. Queen Anne’s War had dragged on for four years, with not the least indication that it would let up. The markets of Europe were closed to English tobacco, just when the planters in Virginia and Maryland were enjoying record yields.

Marlowe stared and pondered and idly massaged his right forearm. It had been broken four years before in an ill-advised attack on a French East Indiaman, and it still bothered him on occasion.

He had forsworn piracy, but on a few occasions since beginning his new life he had wandered close to the sweet trade-and had made a fair amount of money in doing so. That booty had carried him through the hard times, had allowed him to keep out of debt and to pay his former slaves, as he had promised them he would. But his cache of loot was nearly exhausted now, and there was little money to be made from tobacco, and he did not know what he would do.

He sighed again, glanced down at the tempting chart and its promise of fat Moorish treasure ships running down the Red Sea and through the straits of Bab el Mandeb. Somewhere off in Europe, armies were beating each other bloody to determine who would sit on the decadent throne of Spain, and it was ruining his life, like some black-magic spell cast from far off. He was accustomed to simpler problems, enemies that he could face with sword and pistol.

He realized that he was looking for just that, a way to attack his problems with steel and powder, searching for some action he could take to fight his way back to solvency. I am still quite an unsubtle creature, he thought.