James Nelson - The Blackbirder

Dinner, and an extra dram of rum, and the men were in a fine fighting spirit. They stood by their guns and leered at one another and worked themselves up to a high pitch as the Elizabeth Galley closed with the two ships distant.

King James maintained his heading longer than Marlowe would have thought likely. There was no doubt he would recognize the Elizabeth Galley. Even when she was hull down he would probably know her. No man alive, save for Marlowe, knew that ship as well as James.

They were within cannon shot of the former French merchantman and still James kept on the other ship’s heels. Marlowe ordered the men at the bow chasers to give them a peppering, which they did, with great delight, and that at last convinced the black pirates that this was not their fight. They wore around, awkwardly, slowly, and headed off east with the wind over their beam.

The other ship was on a more northerly course and now she turned her transom to the Elizabeth Galley and made a race out of it, but it was a race she had no hope of winning, or even prolonging for very long.

There was half a mile of water between them when Spanish colors broke out at her masthead.

“Well, thank God for that, at least,” Marlowe muttered to himself. A Don, a legal prize for an English privateer. For the Elizabeth Galley she was close enough.

“Let us have Spanish colors as well,” Marlowe ordered the seaman standing by the flag locker, halyard in hand, and a moment later the Elizabeth Galley was showing the same bunting as her victim. But the real Spaniard was not fooled and did not alter course or take in an inch of canvas.

An hour of hard driving and they were looming up beside her, and there was Griffin on the foredeck, shouting curses and playing the big man, the fearsome pirate, rattling his saber at this pathetic merchantman.

“Here, Griffin, lay aft!” Marlowe shouted, and with a suspicious look Griffin left off his bravado and ambled back to the quarterdeck.

“Now, Griffin, let us plunge into battle together, eh?” Marlowe said, filled with bonhomie. “Comrades in arms? We shall board her side by side!”

“Aye, Captain…” was all that Griffin got out. He looked at Marlowe sideways, trying to puzzle out what he was about, suspicious, but there was nothing for it. He could hardly decline, so he took a position on the quarterdeck behind Marlowe and with the others he waited.

Stick close to me, you bastard, thought Marlowe, and I shall plunge a sword right through you, when things get hot.

They did not wait long. Ten minutes, and the Elizabeth Galley’s spritsail topmast was up with the Spaniard’s stern and overhauling her. The two ships were charging ahead on parallel tracks, like two horses in a race, and separated by a strip of water one hundred feet wide.

The aftermost gun of the Spaniard’s broadside shot off, the ball striking the Elizabeth Galley amidships with a great crash but doing nothing in the way of serious damage.

“Wait for it!” Marlowe shouted to the men hunched over the guns. The atmosphere was explosive, as if the men would blow apart from the internal pressure if they did not have at the Dons that instant. “We’ll give her a full broadside and then board her in the smoke!”

Marlowe looked back at the helmsman, gestured toward the Spaniard, and the tiller was pushed over, the bow inclining toward their victim.

Someone on the foredeck began to pound a belaying pin against the rail, slowly, rhythmically and the pounding was taken up fore and aft. And then another began to chant, “Death, death, death…,” and that built as well, built in a crazy, terrifying, hypnotic rhythm that sent a chill down Marlowe’s spine, though he had heard the like before, though they were his own men chanting.

We are pirates now, he thought, pirates through and through.

He remembered the false colors flying at the masthead. He could not go into a fight under false colors; that was too much, even for him.

The sailor who had run them aloft was fully entranced with the chanting, and the enemy, growing closer, the gunfire, gun after gun blasting into the Elizabeth Galley from the Don’s well-aimed broadside, so Marlowe spun the halyard off the pin himself and let the flag fall to the deck in a big, brightly embroidered pile.

Now, now, now. “In the waist, stand ready…!” So close now, the chanting breaking down into screams, clashing of steel, but the Spaniards ready for them, not giving up, lining the side with weapons drawn, forty, fifty men perhaps.

“Fire!”

The Elizabeth Galley’s broadside went off as if it were one great gun, and the entire ship rocked away from the blast and the iron flew across the few yards of water and tore up the Spaniards’ ship, smashing ornate carvings and strakes and wales, deadeyes, and channels in one great devastating stroke.

Marlowe jerked one of his four pistols from his crossbelt, held it in his left hand, grabbed Griffin by the collar, and pulled him around until they were face-to-face.

“Ready, Griffin?” He leered at the man, wanted him to know that the time of reckoning was at hand. Saw the fear in Griffin’s eyes.

And then they staggered together as the Elizabeth Galley smashed bowfirst into the Spaniard and there was the screaming and the wave of men over the bow and the pop-pop of small arms, the shriek of the first wounded and killed, just like so many times before, and Marlowe wondered that such horror could be so familiar.

Then the stern swung in, ground against the Spaniard, which was higher than the Galley. Marlowe let Griffin go, pointed to the quarterdeck rail, ten feet above their heads where they stood on the Galley’s quarterdeck.

“Let’s go! Go!” Marlowe shouted, leapt up onto the quarterdeck rail, then stepped onto the Spaniard’s mizzen channel and into the mizzen shrouds, up over the level of the rail and over the quarterdeck.

The officers were there, and several of the crew and passengers, all armed, determined to defend their ship or die in the process. Marlowe had his pistol aimed at the captain’s chest, had the lock pulled back before the captain even saw this new threat. He shouted, twisted, aimed his own pistol. Both went off and both missed.

Marlowe swung around inboard of the shrouds and dropped to the deck and pulled another pistol with his left hand, his big straight-blade sword with his right. Felt a pistol ball whiz by his ear, turned a sword aside, thrust, felt the tip bite.

He was alone, and for a second he wondered if he had been abandoned, if Griffin had done for him, but here came more of the Elizabeth Galleys, up the shrouds and down onto the Spaniard’s quarterdeck, and soon the space was crowded with fighting men.

Griffin was the last of them, the craven bastard, coming sheepishly up the shrouds, shouting like he was in the thick of it, looking around for a safe place to jump. Marlowe stepped out of the melee, took two steps over to the mizzen shrouds, grabbed Griffin by the coat, and pulled him to the deck.

Griffin’s knees seemed to buckle under him and Marlowe pulled him to his feet, propelled him forward, shouted, “Get in there, you cowardly bastard!”

Time for you to die.

One of the passengers came at Griffin, and Griffin raised his sword and fended off the attack, pulled a pistol from his belt, and in his panic discharged it into the deck before he could even bring it horizontal.

Marlowe pulled pistol number three from his cross belt and aimed it at the man fighting Griffin, then swung his arm right three inches until the muzzle pointed right at the back of Griffin’s head. He began to squeeze the trigger and then the Spaniard knocked Griffin’s sword aside and Griffin stumbled and the Spaniard skewered him in a shrieking, bloody final thrust.