The Guardship

“I ain’t gonna fight you, and my hand half cut off!” the boatswain answered, holding up his bandaged left hand. Unfortunately for that argument the man was right-handed, and everyone aboard the ship knew it, and there was not a thing wrong with his right hand, so with muttered curses he leaned back against the bulwark and dropped his protest.

“This is what we do, eh, what I say we do, and you vote on it now,” LeRois said, keeping up the momentum. “We go back to the Chesapeake Bay. That ship we fought, she is gone now, with the convoy, and if she come back she will not fool us again. There is no man-of-war on the bay now and there are many fat prizes anchored there, and many fine maisons ashore, no? We teach the fucking cochon there a lesson about firing on the Vengeance?”

He squinted and looked down at the faces in the waist. Heads were nodding, comments exchanged back and forth.

“Anyone got any other suggestions?” Darnall asked, and that question was followed by a prolonged silence. LeRois knew that that tribe would grumble as sailors always do, but there were few of them who wanted to take the responsibility of making an original suggestion. The boatswain, perhaps, but LeRois had just castrated him.

“I reckon we do like LeRois says,” one of the men spoke up, and that was followed by a chorus of “aye”s.

“Anyone here opposed?” Darnall asked, but no one said anything, not even the boatswain, who just glared at the deck.

“Then it’s decided,” Darnall announced. “The Chesapeake.”

“Oui, oui, bien,” LeRois grunted, and then called out, “Let us set the sail, then, eh? Prez et plein, full and by.”

The wind and current had set them north, and it took them nearly two days to recover the distance, two anxious days on a long board out to sea, before coming about and standing in to shore and finally raising Cape Charles and Smith Island fine on the starboard bow.

They hove to that night, not caring to negotiate the passage between Middle Ground Shoals and Cape Charles in the dark.

When the sun came up LeRois hoped to see some unwitting merchantman bound in or out of the bay, but there was nothing save for water and the distant, low-lying capes, so he ordered the yards braced round and turned the Vengeance’s bow west.

They weathered Cape Charles by late morning and skirted around Middle Ground and stood for Hampton Roads, where he hoped the prey would be abundant. The pumps had been manned an hour per watch, but now as the wind built beyond ten knots and the tired old Vengeance worked more in the seaway they were going all but nonstop. What was worse, the men had to work them themselves, having no prisoners or slaves aboard to do it for them.

There was as well a gaping hole in the fore topsail and LeRois expected the sail to blow out at any moment. As the ship heeled and the slop in the bilge was washed around, a most foul odor rose up from the hatches, disgusting even by the pirate’s standards. The Vengeance would never be able to stand up to a manof-war. She was just about worn out.

There was no shipping visible as they crossed the mouth of the bay, nothing to the north by the York River and Mock-sack Bay, nothing to the southwest by Norfolk. That was not what LeRois had hoped to find, but there was still Hampton Roads, now blocked from their sight by Point Comfort.

LeRois paced back and forth on the quarterdeck, and when his frustration got the better of him he would pull a pistol out of his sash and blow a seagull out of the air, watch it explode in a cloud of blood and feathers, and then resume his pacing.

An hour later they had Point Comfort broad on the starboard bow. “There’s a ship in there, up in Hampton Roads!” the man aloft sang out. “Looks like a merchantman, big bastard! Riding to a single anchor!”

LeRois said nothing. He stopped his pacing and waited until the Vengeance had drawn abeam of the Point, allowing him to see the wide Roads beyond. It was indeed a ship, a big one, and most likely a merchantman, but he had learned something about appearances as of late.

“We go to quarters, eh!” he called out. “Load the great guns and run them out, we will blow this son of a bitch out of the water if he fire on us!”

There were no arguments from the crew regarding this precaution, and they quickly fell to loading the guns, pulling away the coils of rope and empty butts and personal effects piled on top of them, and tossing it all in a great heap on the main hatch. LeRois brought the bow around until the Vengeance was closing with the lone vessel. He swept her deck with a glass. He was close enough to see a few figures moving about, but that was all. It seemed impossible that this could be a trap, but he could not shake that concern.

Merde, he thought. Let it be a trap. I am ready.

They closed to a cable length and still he could see no more than a few men on the deck. He took a long pull of rum, braced himself, and felt his muscles tense as he waited for the image of Malachias Barrett to appear in the lens of his glass. But he could see only a few seamen aboard her, and a stout man who looked like the master, and none of them looked like Barrett. The stout man pointed at the Vengeance, turned and spoke a few words to the others, and then they all disappeared from sight.

A moment later they reappeared, this time in a small boat that pulled around the ship’s counter and made for the shore and the small town of Hampton. Every man in the boat pulled an oar, including the master, and they quickly left their ship behind.

They have guessed who we are, LeRois thought, and they leave their ship to us.

It was too good to believe.

The Vengeance closed to half a cable length and then rounded up with her mainsails aback, heaving to abeam of their victim. LeRois studied the ship, waiting for the hundreds of men to spring up, to run out their guns, but there did not seem to be anyone aboard.

For a long moment there was silence aboard the pirate ship, silence from the enemy, silence in Hampton Roads, as if the whole world was holding its breath.

“The flag, raise the flag! Run out the guns!” LeRois shouted, and the tension broke like a thunderstorm as the hideous black flag was hoisted up the ensign staff, the great guns were trundled out, and the pirate tribe cheered and shrieked like the host of hell.

And still nothing from the merchantman.

“Give them a gun, one gun!” LeRois ordered, and a single gun went off amidships. Bits of the victim’s rail flew into the air, but little damage was done beyond that, for the gun had been loaded with case shot and langrage, meant to kill people, not sink ships.

The blast of the gun echoed around the roads, but still no reaction, no sign of life aboard the other ship one hundred yards away. “Let go and haul on the mainsails! Fall off, there!” LeRois shouted, and the Vengeance was under way again, turning toward their prey, running bow-on to them. The men in the waist climbed tentatively up on the rails and into the shrouds. There was no vaporing now. That confidence had been blasted out of them. Now they tensed and waited.

“Round up! Round up!” LeRois shouted to the helmsmen. They spun the wheel, and the Vengeance turned into the wind a moment before her spritsail topsail yard would have fouled the other’s headrig. The two ships came together with a shuddering crash, and then, and only then, did the pirates begin to scream.

They shouted with all the pent-up fury and tension of the past hour, of the past week, as they poured onto the deck of this most unfortunate ship. They brandished pistols and cutlasses and daggers as they ran fore and aft, and in their blind rage it took them some moments to realize that there was not one person aboard that ship, besides themselves.

They tore open hatches and scuttles and raced below, kicking in cabin doors and searching the ’tween decks and the hold, but there was not one person left aboard. The master and the three men with him had been the last, and they were

already to Hampton. The ship was theirs with not the least resist

ance.

LeRois felt his fortunes changing.

He stepped up onto the merchantman’s quarterdeck and from there surveyed all he could see. She was a big