James Nelson - The Pirate Round

“No, I am sailing to England, with a load of tobacco. Sod the damned convoy, I say. The Pirate Round? No, it is just something I am toying with, not so much chance I’ll do it.”

“Not so much… but there is a chance?”

“Yes, there is a chance.”

Five minutes later, Peleg Dinwiddie agreed to report aboard the Elizabeth Galley in two days’ time.

Marlowe felt no guilt about lying to him. What he felt was the oddest sort of confusion. He did not actually know to whom he was lying. Peleg? Elizabeth? Himself?

He had made no real decisions, save for the one that would take them to London. What might happen after that, he did not know. He was acting now, not thinking.

With the scarcity of seamen in the colonies, he needed Peleg Dinwiddie’s experience. He had to tell the man what he wanted to hear.

The next morning Marlowe and Elizabeth and Bickerstaff rode south to Jamestown. It was time to inspect the Elizabeth Galley.

They left their horses at a stable by the landing and climbed into the boat that Marlowe kept there. Thomas took up the oars-a means of transport much more familiar to him than horses-and rowed them across the slow-moving river to where the Elizabeth Galley was moored.

She did not look so very seaworthy then, sitting motionless in the brown water of the river. The little bit of paint that adorned her sides was peeling off, and some of the fancy carvings were dry and cracked. She had only her lower masts-fore, main, and mizzen-in place, and the shrouds that supported those masts were slack, giving the ship an overall sagging appearance.

But those things belied her true condition. When Marlowe had moored her, he had no notion of when she might sail again. But he loved her too much, and was too much of a seaman, to let her rot away.

He had had the shrouds slackened off to keep from putting unnecessary strain on mast or rigging. He sent hands aboard her every month or so to apply fresh tar and check their condition, and he knew they were as sound as when they had first been set up.

The rest of the rigging and spars had been carefully stored away, out of the weather, and he inspected them once a month. The sails were folded carefully and stored as well, and every few months they were brought out to air to prevent them from rotting. At least twice a year he had personally crawled through the lowest parts of the hull and checked for creeping rot or signs of an infestation of the teredo worm that bored itself into ships’ fabric, but he found neither.

The Elizabeth Galley was in disuse, but she was not neglected.

And so Marlowe was not surprised to find her in fine shape when he stepped aboard. Her decks had been swept fore and aft, and what little gear she still had aboard was in good order. He could smell fresh tar on her shrouds and linseed oil on her rails and sides. He looked around and nodded his approval.

“She is spacious as a ballroom with the great guns gone,” Francis observed. They had all come in through the entry port and stood in the waist, taking the ship in.

“She is that,” Thomas agreed. “And that relieves us of the need to carry powder or shot, which leaves plenty of room below for all our hogsheads and our neighbors’ as well. It is a good thing, really, the governor has taken our guns.”

“I could almost believe you are sincere,” said Francis.

Marlowe took a step inboard, letting his eye roam over the familiar deck. So many ghosts floating around that space, too. He could see the big Spaniard looming alongside as he prepared to lead the Elizabeth Galleys over the rail. He could see again the men struggling along that deck as they were blasted by the heavy guns of the French Indiaman. He could recall the sight of Whydah slipping below the horizon as he looked over that taffrail at the place where they had buried King James.

Ghosts everywhere. His entire life was haunted.

“Yes, well…” he said to no one in particular. “Let us inspect belowdecks. I’ll wager you will be pleasantly surprised by what you find.”

He would have won the wager, had any taken him up on it. The lower decks were musty and hot, having been shut up and uninhabited for so long. But they were clean and maintained, with no sign of mold or rot or vermin. That was because Marlowe had his people wash her out with vinegar on a regular basis and fumigate her with brimstone once a year.

They made their way through the hold, inspecting that lower part of the ship by lantern light. Nothing amiss. She was tight and seaworthy.

They returned to the quarterdeck, blinking in the brilliant sun, blinded after the gloom of the hold. “She is in fine shape,” Marlowe announced. “And I’ll warrant the rest of her gear is just as well preserved. Give me a decent crew and I will have her ready for sea in a month.”

The first part of the crew was easy enough to find. Upon returning to Marlowe House, he summoned all the former slaves together and told them that he was going to sail the Elizabeth Galley to England and he needed men and would any of them like to sign on?

There were no takers among the older men, those for whom ships meant the middle passage, the six weeks of hell stuffed into the festering hold of a slaver.

But among the younger men that association was not so strong. Hesiod was the first of them to step forward. He, like several others, had been young enough then that the memory had faded. Still others had been born in the colonies and had no firsthand knowledge of that horror. They were the young, strong, adventurous types that Marlowe wanted, and twelve of them stepped forward and eagerly volunteered.

“You do not think this might be a problem?” Bickerstaff asked Thomas in a private moment. “Sure, these fellows are as capable as any landsmen, but you will have to hire genuine seamen as well. Do you think others might object to being shipmates with black men?”

“Your sailor is an altogether more liberal fellow than your landsman,” Marlowe said. “I don’t think they will object to any man who pulls his weight. It is not unprecedented, you know, white men and black working together on shipboard.”

“Indeed? I have never seen it.”

“You don’t too often aboard honest ships, but aboard pirates it is common enough.”

“Humph,” said Bickerstaff. “That is not a precedent I might wish to follow.”

Smart, able, and willing as those young black men were, they were not sailors. Marlowe set them to work transferring all of the gear in storage back to the ship-work that needed no special expertise.

At the appointed hour Peleg Dinwiddie reported aboard. With an experienced first officer to oversee the setting up of the rig, Marlowe was free to begin his campaign for the recruitment of experienced mariners, a scarce commodity in the Tidewater. He took his own sloop, the Northumberland, down the James River and across Hampton Roads to the small, rough port town of Norfolk, where he hoped to find sailors in a region that did not see a fraction of the shipping that the northern colonies did.

He went immediately to the taverns, the likeliest place to find not just sailors but sailors in a compliant mood. In the second loud, dark, smoke-filled, stinking tavern he entered, he found one.

The man was sitting alone at a small table. He was dressed in a linen shirt and well-worn broadcloth coat. His face was a sailor’s face, lined and tanned, his hair was long and worn clubbed, sailor fashion. He might have been an ordinary seaman at one point in his career, but he looked now like a bosun or mate of a small merchantman. Perhaps a bit of privateering, perhaps a bit of piracy.

There was a quality that drew Marlowe’s eye, an air of self-assurance. A certain attitude. There was nothing soft about the man; he was all sharp edges. If Peleg was something of a tame bear, this man looked like a wolf, and a hungry one. But those qualities were good, too, if they could be channeled the right way.