reward for his capture, dead or alive. Whereupon Captain Wolfe decided to distance himself from that part of the world. Three of the crew’s Englishmen chose not to go with him and he put them ashore near Lisbon with enough money to make their way home. The first mate said he understood their feelings. He said it was a hard thing to say goodbye forever to one’s home country. Captain Wolfe laughed at that and said it wasn’t so hard when one’s home country wanted to hang one. And set sail across the Atlantic.
Fifteen leagues shy of Nantucket the ship was struck by a ferocious storm and foundered. Only Roger and two of his crew survived the sinking, clutching to a spar in that plunging frigid sea. The storm at last abated during the night but one of the crewman succumbed to the cold and slipped off into the darkness. Shortly afterward the spar suddenly shook in a phosphorescent agitation and the other crewman vanished, his scream lost to the depths. Roger did not see the shark that took him. Through the rest of the night he expected to be attacked too but was not. The following day broke clear and sun-bright on a calm sea, and by wondrous chance he was spotted by an American whaler bound for home. His fingers had to be pried from the spar and it was hours more before his shivering began to ease under a heavy cover of blankets and sizable doses of rum. He was landed in New Bedford and his adventure condensed to a newspaper item in which he claimed to be Morgan Blake and described the lost ship as a Dutch cargo carrier.
It is anyone’s guess how he occupied himself during the next year or what took him to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where in October of 1827 and under his true name he married Mary Margaret Parham, who at the time believed he was a merchant ship master. Six weeks later he sailed away to southward and she never heard from him again. Six months after his departure she bore his twin sons. The boys were a year old when she received notice of their father’s execution in Mexico.
Archives in Veracruz contain a variety of documents pertaining to Roger Blake Wolfe’s arrest in a waterfront cantina on Christmas Eve of 1828 and his ensuing trial and conviction on charges of piracy and murder in Mexican waters. In keeping with protocol, the British Consulate provided a Mexican attorney for his defense and afterward concurred with the court’s verdict. For reasons unrecorded he was sentenced to be shot rather than hanged, the usual and more ignominious fate of condemned pirates.
The morning of his execution on the first day of February, 1829, was reported to be clear and mild. The central plaza raucous with parrots and marimba bands, with vendors hawking melon slices and coconut milk. The air tanged with the smell of the gulf. The large crowd was composed of every social class and in a mood even more festive than usual for an execution—perhaps, as one newspaper surmised, because of the novelty of the condemned man’s Anglo nationality. When Roger was trundled to the plaza in a donkey cart amid the tolling of steeple bells and made to stand against the church wall in front of the firing squad, there were catcalls and whistles but also much comment on his undaunted demeanor and striking figure. His clothes were fresh-laundered, his beard in neat trim, his hatless black locks tied in a horse tail at his nape.
A diversion occurred when a pair of young women at the fore of the crowd, each claiming to be Captain Roger’s true sweetheart, got into a skirt-hiking scuffle to the delight of the nearest male witnesses. It was said that the pirate himself seemed amused by this contest over his affections. In a valediction rendered through an interpreter, he assured the two girls that he loved them both to equal degree, a sentiment that stirred the crowd to murmurs of both grudging approbation and high skepticism. He gave one of the girls his gold earring and the other a finger ring set with a pearl in the shape of a skull. When he bequeathed his remaining credit at a cantina called Las Sirenas toward as many drinks as it would buy for the regular patrons of that establishment, there were loud cheers of “Viva el capitan!” from the corner of the plaza where that disreputable bunch was assembled.
He declined a blindfold and stood smoking a cigar, an insouciant thumb hooked in his belt, as the fusiliers took aim. At the muskets’ discharge, a squall of birds burst from the trees and a slow blue cloud of powdersmoke ascended after them. The officer in charge of the execution—a young lieutenant named Montenegro—delivered the customary coup de grace pistolshot to the head. Then unsheathed his saber and with an expert slash decapitated the corpse.
The head was taken at once to the yellow-rock fortress of San Juan de Ulua at the mouth of the harbor and placed on a tower pike in warning to all the city and every passing ship. The body was borne off in the donkey cart, and onlookers made the sign of the cross as it passed them on its way to the graveyard. And the two women who had fought over him were not the only ones to dip their skirt hems in the blood puddled in the cobbles.
He was buried in the low-lying cemetery at the south end of the city. He had arranged for a marble headstone engraved with his name and
On its high vantage over the harbor, the head blackened and was fed upon by birds and over time reduced to bare yellow bone with a .54-caliber hole in the parietal and an unremitting grin. The skull disappeared in the next hurricane, and the floodwaters forced open his grave and carried his bones to the sea.
PART ONE
HENRY MORGAN WOLFE 
MARY MARGARET
AND THE GEMINI
The twin sons of Roger Blake Wolfe were born in late May under the apt sign of Gemini. Mary Margaret named them Samuel Thomas—the elder by three minutes—and John Roger. She and the boys lived with her widower father, John Thomas Parham, in a flat above his Portsmouth tavern, where she tended tables every night. It was a waterfront pub catering to a seaman trade, Mr Parham himself having been thirteen years a merchant officer before a shipboard mishap left him crippled of foot and permanently dependent on a crutch. Except for the first six weeks of her marriage, during which she and Captain Wolfe lived in a rented cottage, the tavern was the only home Mary Margaret had ever known or would. Only nineteen years old when widowed, she would afterward not lack for suitors but she would not marry again. As in the case of Roger Blake Wolfe, no picture of her would pass down through the generations, but her sons would describe her to their children as blue-eyed and slender, with pale brown hair she liked to wear in a braid down her back.
From the time of their early childhood the twins were curious about their father and now and again questioned Mary Margaret about him. Beyond telling them he had been a merchant ship captain and was lost at
