Tim Severin - Buccaneer

'No wonder their rate of fire was so dismal,' commented Jacques. 'It must have taken ages to reload. How could anyone ever think that they were capable of defending this place?'

'Perhaps it was not worth defending,' said Hector. He had seen the disappointed expressions on the faces of buccaneers returning from investigating the settlement. They had with them a frightened Spaniard dressed in the clothes of a clerk.

'What a dump!' exclaimed one of the buccaneers. 'Nothing of value. Just miserable houses and wretched people.

'Didn't you find any gold?' asked Jacques hopefully.

The man laughed bitterly. 'There's a town treasury all right. We kicked in the door. But it was empty. This fellow was hiding nearby. He's some sort of a bookkeeper.'

'Perhaps you'll let me question him,' Hector suggested.

'Go ahead. He's in a complete funk. Thinks we'll hand him over to the Kuna.'

The Spaniard was more than eager to answer any question that Hector put to him. The townsfolk of Santa Maria had known for days that the buccaneers were approaching, so the governor had arranged a fleet of boats to evacuate as many of the women and children as possible. The treasury had been emptied out, three hundred weight of gold put aboard a small sloop and sent by river to the capital in Panama. Finally the governor, his deputy, the local dignitaries and the priests had also left. All that remained in Santa Maria were townsfolk who were too poor or insignificant to get away.

'So that's it then,' exclaimed Jacques. 'We've come all this way, done all the marching and wading through rivers and lying on hard ground and eating vile food, only to find that the cupboard is bare.' He gave a snort of disgust.

At this point Captain Sawkins walked up to them. His yellow sash was speckled with flecks of gunpowder, and there was a sword cut in the shoulder of his buff coat. 'What have you managed to find out from this Spaniard?' he asked.

Hector told him about the Spanish withdrawal, and immediately Sawkins was eager to set off in pursuit. 'If we hurry we might catch up with that boat carrying the gold dust. There's a pirogue the Spaniards left behind which we can use.'

He crooked a finger at Hector. 'You come along, and bring that Spaniard with you. He'll be able to identify the boat for us.'

'I am assistant to Surgeon Smeeton. He's waiting for me at the camp,' Hector reminded him. 'I'll need to inform him where I'm going.'

'Then do so, and while you're about it, bring some more medicines with you. We may have some fighting to do.' Sawkins glanced at Jezreel and Jacques. 'You two are still members of the forlorn. You also come with me. Be ready to set off downriver in an hour.'

Hector ran back to where he had left his knapsack, stopping to pick up the abandoned spear and put on his shirt. When he got back to the camp, it was to find the bald quartermaster from Harris's ship seated on a log, his head bowed. Smeeton was standing over him and sewing a flap of skin back onto the quartermaster's scalp.

'Hector, there you are,' said the surgeon as casually as if he was in his consulting rooms in Port Royal. 'A minor head wound, and you see the advantages of hair loss. No need to shave the hair away before deploying needle and thread.'

His stitching finished, the surgeon wrapped a bandage around the wound, and the quartermaster got up and walked away.

'Captain Sawkins has asked me to accompany him downriver, in pursuit of the Spanish treasure,' said Hector.

'Then by all means go,' answered Smeeton. 'There's precious little medical work for you here. We lost just two dead in the entire action, and half a dozen wounded, so there's hardly enough work to go around. The other companies have brought along at least a couple of surgeons apiece. In fact we seem to have so many medical men on this expedition that I'm thinking of returning to the ships, accompanying the walking wounded. Now that we've crossed the isthmus I don't expect to add much to my pharmacopoeia.'

'Is it all right if I take some medicines with me?' Hector asked. 'Captain Sawkins requested I do so.'

Smeeton smiled indulgently. 'But of course. It'll be a chance to use those notes you made while sorting through the medicine chest.'

Hector opened the chest and looked inside. The salves and ointments used up during the march across the isthmus had been replaced by Smeeton's collection of items he thought might possess curative powers - dead snakes, odd-shaped roots, dried leaves, strips of bark, seeds, coloured earth, monkey dung, even the skull of a creature like a dwarf elephant that Dan and other Miskito strikers had found feeding beside the river. The animal's flesh had provided fresh meat for three dozen hungry buccaneers. The surgeon had kept the cranium.

Then his eye fell on the packet that the Kuna medicine man had given him. It was the ointment made for the children of the moon as a poultice for their skin sores. He took the packet from the chest, consulted his notes and found a jar labelled 'Cantharides'. Turning his back so Smeeton could not see what he was doing, the young man carefully untied the leaf wrapper of the Kuna medication. Inside was a blob of pale waxy ointment about the size of his fist. Spreading the leaf on the ground, Hector carefully tipped out several spoonfuls of yellowish-brown powder from Smeeton's medicine jar and, using a twig, stirred the powder into the Kuna salve. Then he wrapped up the packet once again, and returned both it and the jar to the chest.

He finished loading his knapsack with medicines, and said goodbye to Smeeton. As he turned to leave, he said casually, 'Have you had a chance to try out the Kuna skin ointment yet?'

'No,' replied the surgeon. 'It would be interesting to do so.'

'Captain Coxon was asking if you had anything to relieve the rash on his skin. The past few days in the jungle have made the itching much worse.'

'So I noticed,' said Smeeton. 'I shall suggest that he tries the ointment. It can do no harm.'

As he headed off to where Jezreel and Jacques would be waiting, Hector was smiling to himself. It was the quartermaster's bald head which had reminded him of Smeeton's store of cantharides powder. Smeeton had cited it as another example — like snake venom — of a poison that could have beneficial properties. Cantharides powder was made from the powdered wings of a beetle and very popular with the buccaneers as an aphrodisiac. More prosaically, Smeeton had said, the powder applied very sparingly to the skin would encourage hair to grow. However, if used in quantity, it brought on violent itching, caused a burning rash, and raised a mass of painful blisters.

NINE

A hundred miles away in the city of New Panama, the governor,

his Excellency Don Alonso Mercado de Villacorta, was shocked by the fall of Santa Maria. The news was brought to the city by stunned refugees who described how the Kuna, given the chance, had massacred the Spanish settlers once they had been disarmed by the buccaneers.

'This has all the potential to turn into a disaster,' he said in his characteristically despondent tone to the emergency meeting he had called in his office. 'A gang of pirates is now on the loose in the South Sea. It is exactly what I and others have been warning the authorities about for years. But no one took a scrap of notice. What are we to do?'

He looked round the conference table. His glance swept past the city councillors and church dignitaries, barely paused on the two colonels who commanded his cavalry and infantry, and came to rest on Don Jacinto de Barahona, the officer in charge of the Pacific naval squadron.

Barahona was thinking to himself that the governor was being unduly negative.

'We go on the offensive,' he said firmly. 'Stamp out the threat immediately. If we don't, other pirates will follow the route they have found over the isthmus. We risk being overwhelmed.'