James Nelson - The Pirate Round

“More than a day, I should think. We’ve a power of work to do before we can sail again.”

Sail again. What an odd thought. Fetching Madagascar after so long a voyage, after all that had happened in London, seemed like an end, the closure of a voyage. The time to pay off the crew, retire to one’s home, relive the adventure in tales told to one’s neighbors.

It was hard to recall that the landfall in Madagascar was not that, not that at all. It was, in fact, just the beginning.

THEY STOOD on the quarterdeck -Thomas, Elizabeth, Francis, Peleg, and Duncan. The others stood along the gangways and fore-deck-the young black men from Marlowe House, the sailors they had recruited in the colonies and Bermuda, and the men they had saved from the wreck of the Indiaman. Disparate groups now molded as well as sailors could be molded into a cohesive unit, into the crew of the Elizabeth Galley.

They stood together, a band of men and one woman, who had already been through a great deal in each other’s company. They stood and watched as the steep, jungle-covered shore of Madagascar moved slowly down the larboard side. But their attention was focused forward, where the island of St. Mary’s, now distinct from the bigger island, waited, fifty miles away and right under the bowsprit.

None of them knew, of course, that two thousand miles astern of them, plunging along almost in the track through which the Elizabeth Galley had plowed her wake, the Queen’s Venture and her tender were just encountering the first of the Cape of Good Hope’s ferocity.

When last they had seen Roger Press, he had been shouting orders and curses from his longboat, which was skewered by the Galley’s spare main topsail yard and pinned to the bottom of the Thames. For all they knew, he was there still.

They did not know that he and his men had remained in that awkward position for two hours until Lieutenant Tasker, growing worried by their absence, sent the ship’s cutter in search of them.

Press returned to the Queen’s Venture, disappeared into his great cabin. He did not say a word to anyone, and no one said a word to him. To a man, they knew better than that. He flung off his wet clothes, dressed in his silk banyan, poured a glass of rum, straight.

He stared out the big windows aft, into the blackness, and by the time he had finished his rum, Malachias Barrett was behind him.

Press was a practical man; it was what had led to his having command of such a big, well-found and well-funded vessel, a commission giving him all but carte blanche in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. He could fixate on vengeance with the tenacity of a bulldog, but he would not waste his life seeking it. He had no notion of where Barrett was bound, and he had no thought of flailing around the oceans of the world looking for him.

No, Barrett could wait. Barrett would not distract him from his well-planned mission. There was one other man that Press hated even more than Barrett.

He considered that, wondered if that was still true, in light of the outrages he had just suffered by Barrett’s hand. He looked at his gnarled fingers, which had been systematically broken in the Grand Inquisitor’s religious zeal, felt the mutilated skin on his back where the silk banyan touched it, and he knew that, yes, he hated that other man more.

Press felt his resolve strengthened again. He knew where that other fellow was. The story of his conquest of St. Mary’s had finally filtered back to the London waterfront. No fruitless searching of the oceans for him; Press could proceed directly to St. Mary’s, take him, kill him slowly, make himself master of all that his enemy had accumulated in terms of wealth and power. The most influential men in England had given him license to hunt Yancy down and the means to do so, and they did not even know it.

As the Elizabeth Galley was standing out of the harbor at Penzance, Press had watched the last of the stores lightered out to the Queen’s Venture and her tender, the Speedwell, a twenty-gun, ship-rigged sloopof-war and a formidable vessel in her own right. As Marlowe was working his way down the hawser to the stricken Indiaman and cursing himself for his idiocy, Press was pacing the quarterdeck of the Venture, the rain beating on his oilskin, cursing the storm that kept them bottled up in the Thames.

They had sailed at last, the Queen’s Venture and the Speedwell, bound away on a course almost identical to that of the Elizabeth Galley. It was a course familiar to many English seamen, given all the traffic that moved from London to the Indian Ocean in search of the tremendous wealth to be had in those lands, through legitimate means or not.

The Queen’s Venture crossed the line of thirty-eight degrees south latitude two weeks to the day after the Elizabeth Galley. Like Marlowe, Roger Press was not overly concerned with the weather they might encounter in that stormy corner of the world. His ships were newly refitted, strong and tight, their rigs well set up, their crews large and well trained. They were not flimsy trading sloops but substantial men-ofwar. They could endure the Cape of Good Hope. They had been fitted out to conquer empires, and that was the thing that was on Press’s mind, not the rising wind and building seas.

Marlowe had no way of knowing that Press was there, two thousand miles astern, two and a half weeks of sailing, if one had any slant of luck with the weather.

Likewise he could not know that a mere forty miles ahead, on the peak of a steep hill behind the town of St. Mary’s, Elephiant Yancy was staring breathless through a powerful telescope, taking in every detail of the Elizabeth Galley that could be distinguished through those imperfect optics. Nagel stood respectfully behind him and, even farther behind, the lookout who had first spotted the approaching ship.

There were lookouts stationed all over the island, with runners to convey word of any approaching vessel. They were natives, men who could run as if they were flying down the steep jungle paths, who would bring word as fast as was humanly possible. It was a system that Yancy had set in place soon after assuming sovereignty over his kingdom. It was good to avoid surprise of any kind.

When a ship was spotted from such a high perch, there were a good twelve hours at least before it might hope to enter the harbor. And now that Roger Press was coming, Lord Yancy needed every minute he could gain.

He had explained it to his elite, his Terrors. He would not allow them to fall victim to that murdering bastard. He would not let Press rob him of his final weeks on earth.

That morning he had been crouching on his veranda, a fire burning in a small fire pit, his hands and arms and leather apron soaked in blood, when he spotted the runner.

Yancy had developed a distrust of his food taster and had executed the man. Water was not a problem. They had on St. Mary’s a unique white gourd called a mabibo, which when cut open was filled with fresh, unadulterated water. But food was another matter. He had concluded that the only way to assure the purity of his food was to kill and cook it himself.

Every day a young pig was brought to him, and he slit its throat and watched it die and then gutted it and took what meat he fancied and cooked it over the fire pit. He had come to enjoy the onerous task, liked the spray of blood from the neck of the thrashing, dying animal, the feel of his hands in the warm, wet guts.

He stood, a hock bloody and dripping in his hand, and he saw the man, way off, running down the mountain path, just a small dark spot moving along the narrow scar in the jungle. He felt his senses sharpen up, could see and hear everything clearer. He stuck the meat on the spit, hung it over the fire, stared into the flames as he waited for the man to report to Nagel, for Nagel to report to him.