Tim Severin - Sea Robber

The Cygnet also appears in the public records. Spelt Signett , she was ‘a ship of 180 tunns and 16 guns, formerly called the Little England’ and on 1 October 1683 sailed from the Downs bound for the South Sea with a cargo worth £5,000. Her captain, as Hector finds, was Charles Swan, who intended to open trade with the Spanish colonists in Peru. They rebuffed him at Valdivia when there was a skirmish and two members of the landing party were killed. Thwarted and aggrieved, Swan and his men eventually turned pirate and looted and pillaged the Spanish colonies and shipping until, in April 1686, the Cygnet headed west across the Pacific. On board was William Dampier, later renowned for his circumnavigations and scientific observations on the winds and ocean currents. The Cygnet visited the Thief Islands and then went on to Mindanao in the Philippines. There her crew mutinied. They deposed Swan and left him behind. The Cygnet spent some time voyaging in South East Asian waters – Dampier left the ship in the Nicobar Islands – and made her final landfall in Madagascar. There she sank on her moorings, her hull eaten through by teredo worm, in St Augustine’s Bay.

The Nicholas , twenty-six guns, was also a real vessel. Commanded by John Eaton, she reached the Pacific in January 1685 and operated with little success until her captain decided to head west and try to intercept the Manila Galleon. When she called at Guam in the Thief Islands, there was a brush with the Chamorro. As in Hector’s fictional adventures, a letter was received in French, Spanish, Dutch and Latin from the Governor of the Ladrones, Damian de Esplana, asking who they were. A brief alliance was formed between the pirates and the Spaniards, with the Nicholas supplying the Spanish garrison with gunpowder (not the other way round, as in Hector’s adventure). The Nicholas sailed on to China, but her poor luck continued. She chased (but failed to catch) a Chinese vessel laden with silver, and the ship’s master deserted in Timor. The Nicholas was last reported near Jakarta, Indonesia. Then she vanishes from history.

Swan, Cook, Dampier, Eaton – all were true-life sea robbers. Damian de Esplana, who governed the Thief Islands from 1683 to 1694, gained a reputation as an excellent soldier, but was less honest than he appeared. He accumulated so much wealth by selling government stores at 500 per cent mark-up, and investing the profits in shady commerce with Manila, that his heirs spent ten years quarrelling over the division of his fortune.

Hector’s adventures on the unnamed island subject to the Satsuma clan and then among the Chamorro are purely fictitious, but with regard to the assistance rendered to the Sultan of Omoro (an imaginary petty kingdom) it is worth noting that several late seventeenth-century sea robbers finished up as professional gunners in the armies of eastern potentates.

The bizarre story of the ice-shrouded vessel entombed on an iceberg is adapted from a later, nineteenth-century tradition. The San Telmo , a seventy-four-gun ship of the line, was purchased from Russia by the Spanish government in 1819 and sent to Peru by way of Cape Horn. Most of her escorting vessels arrived safely, but the San Telmo vanished. Her fate was a complete mystery. Then, according to one report, an Italian vessel negotiating Cape Horn met with a huge iceberg on which was observed the stranded hulk of a great black ship, dismasted. Going on board, the visitors were able to identify the San Telmo , and found the ship’s commander frozen to death in his cabin. Beside him lay the corpse of his dog.