Carmen Boullosa - They're Cows, We're Pigs

When all the prisoners were dead we went toward San Pedro Sula. Only three leagues had we gone when we found ourselves in an ambush that, although it caused us many mortal casualties and wounded, was yet unable to resist the fury of our response. L’Olonnais had the injured Spaniards who remained on the path finished off after he asked them for what he wanted.

Three more ambuscades we beat off, since there was no other road where we could avoid them, until at the very entrance of the town the Spaniards found themselves forced to raise the white flag as a signal of truce. The conditions for surrender would allow the inhabitants two hours to pick up everything they were able to and flee.

We entered the place and spent two hours standing around while the whole town of San Pedro Sula was hiding itself and the citizens carting off everything they thought they could carry.

When the time was up, L’Olonnais had them followed and whatever they were carrying taken from them, and then he turned San Pedro on its head. But there was no way to find everything they had hidden, so after staying there for some time, celebrating after our fashion, we reduced the place to ashes.

In the midst of our whooping it up, which was much wilder than when we returned to Tortuga from Maracaibo, I discovered a woman lying at the foot of a wall and moaning feebly, her request for water the only sign of her need for help. I turned her face and body toward me, pulling her by her long hair because I did not want to place my hands anywhere that might hurt her. What I had in my hands had once been a head and a body but now was a mass of flesh mutilated along its full length: cut and burned, whipped and beaten. I wanted to give her something to drink but found no lips on which to rest the vessel, and so with my knife blade I let some drops fall on her bloodied tongue. How was she able to utter it, water, water ? And who had done this to her? Had someone of ours put her to torture to get her to confess something, I asked her. And she told me, No. But I have something to tell you. Soon a ship loaded with treasure will pass along the coast . All this she said, I know not how; nor what lips, tongue, or mouth she used, for of those she had none. After which she died.

The same news was received from other bodies found by me or others here and there in San Pedro, bodies that had once been children, men, women, though whoever had taken them to this hideous extreme seemed to enjoy making them all alike, without distinction of rank, sex, or age.

For three months we waited for the arrival of the ship, living together with the wild Indians of Puerto Caballos, hunting turtles with a certain bark craft called macoa , and driven to despair. When we finally captured the ship, we did not find what we were waiting for, as it had already been unloaded of whatever it carried of value, the great treasure advertised consisting only of fifty iron bars, a little paper, some containers of wine, and things of that sort, hardly important at all. Those bodies, tortured by some of our men, had lied to us.

After that attack, we gathered for a vote. L’Olonnais proposed that we make our way to Guatemala; the most disappointed of us, new to such exercises, had believed that pieces of eight could be plucked from the trees like pears, and now they left the company. Others, headed by Moses Van Wijn, returned to Tortuga, to continue under the orders of Pierre le Picard.

A few of us decided to follow L’Olonnais without knowing that we were voting to watch his ship run aground in the Gulf of Honduras, too big to slip through the ocean tides or up the river; and shortly afterward, in the islands called Las Perlas, it foundered on a sandbank, where we took it apart to rebuild it in the form of a longboat with which we thought our luck would change.

While we were tearing it down and reassembling it, concluding that here was labor enough for some time, we cultivated some fields, planting beans, Spanish wheat, bananas. And thus, during the five or six months we were in Las Perlas we ceased bearing any resemblance to pirates, so much so that we even kneaded bread and baked it in portable ovens.

Eventually half of those of us who were left embarked in the longboat. In a few days we reached the estuary of Nicaragua, where, to our misfortune, Indians and Spaniards together attacked us, killing many of our men and forcing us to flee toward the coast of Cartagena, where L’Olonnais fell into the hands of the Indians of Darien; and what happened to him there will here be set in the mouth of Nau himself, L’Olonnais, the son of a small merchant of Sables d’Olonne, who let himself be signed up by a colonist from Martinique passing through Flanders, on a three-year contract for the West Indies, and whom he left, slavery seeming unbearable to him, by escaping with some buccaneers by whom he was beaten and mistreated and picked up by yet others who enlisted him into the Brethren of the Coast; and he led the glorious expedition to Maracaibo, only to undertake the unsuccessful story in which he lost his life, in this fashion:

We took the boat in toward shore, toward the jungle, to try hunting, since in this land there is little more to be had than what can be found in the jungle. We would attempt to discover game; and while the others were preparing for this, I left them and went on ahead for a short reconnaissance unarmed, thinking the place deserted. As I pushed along through the brush, suddenly on both sides of my path I heard a great shouting, as the savages are in the habit of doing, and they sprang toward me. I saw then that they had me surrounded, pointing their arrows at me and shooting. I exclaimed, “God help me!” and scarcely had I pronounced those words when they had me down on the ground, throwing themselves on me and poking at me with their spears. But they only wounded me in the leg, and I thought, “Thank God!” expecting that at any moment my own brave boys would be coming for me. My assailants removed all my clothing. One of them took my shirt, another my hat, a third my boots, and so on. They began to fight over me, one of them claiming he had been the first to reach me, and in this way they pushed me through the jungle down to the ocean where they had their canoes; and where I counted myself lost, as my men had not arrived. When those who had attended the canoes caught sight of me pushed along by the others, they ran to meet us, adorned with feathers as is their custom, biting their arms and forcing me to realize that they wanted to eat me. Before me stood a king with a club that is used to kill their prisoners. He made a speech and told how they had made me their slave, wanting to avenge on me the death of their friends. And when they took me toward the canoes some of them kept slapping me. They hastened then to drag their canoes out into the water, fearful that my men might be alarmed by this time, as was true enough, while others bound me hand and foot; since they were not all from the same place, each village was annoyed that they would have to return with nothing, and they argued with the ones who were keeping me. Some said they had been just as close to me as the others, and they also being eager to have a part of me, proposed to kill me immediately .

I waited for the blow, but the king who wanted to possess me said that he wished to take me home alive so that the women might look me over and have some fun at my expense, after which they would kill me, they would make their special liquor, and everyone would get together for a feast and they would dine on me conjointly. So they left it, binding me at the neck with four ropes, and forcing me to get into a canoe, which was still beached. They tied the ends of the ropes to the canoe and then dragged it into the water for the return to where their huts were. Suddenly, I realized that I was understanding the words of their savage language as if they had spoken them in my own tongue. And consequently that there would no longer be any deliverance .