Tim Severin - Buccaneer

He ignored the recoil of the butt against his shoulder as he watched, never taking his eye off the figure of the helmsman. The man spun round and dropped.

'Thought you said you were out of practice! My turn now,' crowed Watling who had observed his shot. Within moments another man had appeared at the helm of the Spanish vessel, a replacement steersman, and he was taking control. Watling hunched over his own weapon and took aim. He fired, and there was a brief moment when it seemed that he had missed his mark. The new helmsman was still upright, unharmed. Then, slowly and inexplicably, the warship began to turn sideways, losing speed.

'Christ, what luck!' exclaimed the wounded buccaneer from behind Hector. The man must have had keen eyesight for he added, 'The main brace is shot through. The mainsail is loose.'

Sure enough, with canvas flapping, the warship was losing all forward motion and veering to one side. The deck guns could no longer be brought to bear on the canoes. The Spanish vessel was crippled.

'There's her commander now!' shouted Watling gleefully. A tall, thin man had climbed up on the rail. He wore a plumed hat and a broad red sash, and there was the glint of gold brocade on the sleeves of his coat. Regardless of his personal safety, he was holding on to the rigging with one hand and with the other frantically waving a white handkerchief over his head. For a moment Hector thought it was a flag of truce and the Spanish officer wanted to parlay or even surrender. But then the young man realised that the Spaniard was not facing the canoes, but looking towards the first barca longa which had led the attack. That vessel was still a quarter of a mile downwind and trying clumsily to work back to return to the fray. The Spanish commander was urgently beckoning to his escort to come to the rescue.

'Too good a chance to miss. Here, give me that spare musket,' gloated Watling. Hector handed him the gun from the wounded sailor, and once again Watling took slow, deliberate aim and fired. The impact of the bullet knocked the Spanish officer backwards off the rail on which he was standing. The white handkerchief fell from his hand and fluttered down into the sea.

'Now we've got 'em!' exulted Watling. 'Come on lads, close the gap.' He picked up his paddle and began to drive the canoe through the water.

The loss of their commander had utterly demoralised the Spanish crew. Dismayed by the accuracy of the buccaneer's musketry, they abandoned their deck cannon, knowing they were dangerously exposed when they stood to load their big guns. Now, instead of standing at the rail or climbing into the rigging to shoot at their attackers, the crew of the warship ducked down and hid out of sight behind the bulwarks, and only occasionally raised their heads to take aim and fire. They had lost the will to fight.

A rousing cheer to his left told Hector that one of the piraguas had at last arrived in support. With sixteen men on board, the piragua rowed straight towards the disabled Spanish warship and, closing to within point blank range, opened up a deadly fusillade of musketry on their victims. One by one the hapless Spanish crewmen were picked off if they showed themselves.

Watling was pointing back towards the first Spanish warship. 'Seems he's seen enough,' he said. That vessel was altering course, withdrawing from the battle and abandoning her consort.

Above the noise of the cheering from the musketeers in the piragua came anxious shouts from the stricken warship. The crew was appealing for quarter. A hand holding a scrap of white cloth appeared above the bulwarks and began to wave the symbol to and fro in surrender. The musket fire from the piragua gradually lessened and finally ceased altogether.

'Sawkins well deserves his victory,' said Hector. He could scarcely believe that a handful of buccaneers had managed to overcome the larger, more powerful vessel so swiftly.

'Our captain's already shifted aboard the other piragua,' Watling told him, nodding towards the south. A quarter of a mile away the second piragua lay alongside the third of the Spanish warships. There was fierce hand-to-hand fighting on deck and, as he watched, Hector saw that the boarding party of buccaneers was being driven back to their own vessel. Only then did he realise that Dan, Jacques and Jezreel must now be fighting alongside Sawkins in his latest suicidal endeavour.

TEN

Capitan Francisco de Peralta had willingly followed his squadron commander in setting sail to intercept and engage the enemy's motley flotilla as soon as it was sighted. He watched Diego de Carabaxal's barca longa make for the gap between the two canoes farthest to the left of the pirate's ragged line, and had entirely approved of this bold response to the pirate threat. Carabaxal's cannon should make short work of the lightly built canoes and piraguas. But when Capitan Barahona chose to follow in exactly the same track, Don Francisco hesitated. It was a mistake, he thought, for two warships to deal with a pair of canoes while ignoring the rest of the pirate flotilla. So Peralta had decided to seek out his own target: he would engage the largest of their vessels, a piragua that had fallen behind and, under oars, was struggling to keep up.

The Spanish captain looked up at the cloudless sky. He would have welcomed a change in the weather, but there was no sign of it. The breeze was so gentle that it raised barely a ripple on the indigo-blue sea. The calm conditions would suit the pirate musketeers. They would be firing from a more stable platform than if there was a choppy seaway to contend with. Peralta held a profound respect for the enemy musketry. He recalled the shock of Morgan's raid when its victims discovered

that the invaders carried firearms of the very latest model. With their modern guns the pirates had outranged the defenders of Panama, firing two or three shots for every one their opponents had been able to return from their obsolete firelocks and arquebuses. The defenders' superiority in numbers had counted for little.

So now Don Peralta decided to get as close as possible to the piragua and fire into her with light swivel guns loaded with small shot. Once he had decimated her musketeers, he would despatch a boarding party to over-run the survivors.

'Mount our patareros,' he told Estevan Madriga, his negro contremaestre. 'And make sure that the gun crews have all they need. Ammunition and plenty of powder charges close to hand . . . and a tub of water for them to slake their thirst. This could prove to be hot work.'

Peralta had total confidence in his contremaestre. Madriga had served with him for more than fifteen years, and there was a bond of mutual trust between them. The Spanish captain only wished that his crew had done more practice with the swivel guns. The penny pinching of the colonial administration meant that any gun drill had been rare. The contadores, the bookkeepers, condemned it as a waste of expensive gunpowder.

Peralta chewed his lip in frustration. His ship, Santa Catalina, was lagging behind her consorts, easing along at less than walking pace. That too was partly the fault of the bureaucracy. The barca longa's bottom was foul with weeds because the ship had been kept lying at anchor off Panama for more than a month while he waited for permission to take her out of service and careen.

Estevan returned to report that the ship's four patareros had been brought up from the hold. The guns were being checked and loaded and placed on their bronze swivel mounts. With a patarero on each quarter and two in the bows, they gave a field of fire all round the vessel. Unfortunately a shortage of muskets meant that less than half the crew could be issued with firearms. The others would have to make do with pikes and cutlasses. It was all part of the same pattern, thought Don Francisco sourly. He had asked the royal stores for an additional four patareros and, though the guns had been promised, they had never been delivered. Insufficient gunpowder, too few weapons, bad pay - his barca longa was a miniature of the entire viceroyalty of Peru. Brave men were trying to operate a structure that was falling to bits through neglect and parsimony.