Damn it, damn it, too bloody late, Marlowe fretted as his men hauled away on the tackle and the yard rose up, up, wavering and tilting in the air.
Marlowe’s eyes moved between the yard rising up overhead and Press’s boat flying toward them. A pistol banged out, the ball thudded into the mainmast-Press giving the men of the Elizabeth Galley a taste of things to come if they did not comply-and the message struck like the bullet.
The lower end of the yard was resting on the Galley’s rail, pointing down at the water, and the upper end was twenty-five feet above him, pointing at the sky, the whole thing nearly vertical.
Ten feet away Marlowe saw the longboat, a dim shadow in the mist. He could make out the crew giving one last pull, the men unshipping their oars again and snatching up weapons, poised, ready to board. There was the bowman again, a dark shape, once more reaching out with the boat hook. There was Press, in the stern sheets, unmistakable. Marlowe could see him run his eyes along the Galley’s rail, looking, no doubt, for Malachias Barrett.
Marlowe grabbed the low end of the yard, shoved it along the rail until it was hanging directly over the place where Press’s boat would strike the Elizabeth Galley’s side. He was astounded that Press had not yet smoked his intentions.
And in that instant, Press did. The longboat hit the Galley’s side with a shudder, the men poised to board, and Press shouted, “Shove off! Shove off, damn it!” and over Press’s voice Marlowe shouted, “Honeyman! Let go!”
The yard jerked from Marlowe’s hand as Honeyman let go of the end of the stay tackle. The huge spar plunged down, down over the side, down like a great lance aimed at Press’s boat. Marlowe watched the long wooden shaft rush past, heard the sound of thin planks shattering as the lower end of the three-hundred-pound yard smashed right through the bottom of the boat and kept going.
Overhead he could just make out the end of the quivering spar as it stopped, sinking itself into the mud of the Thames.
He heard shouts of surprise, screams of outrage, saw the panicked boat crew shrinking away from the water that flooded in through the shattered bottom of the boat.
The line from the stay tackle spun through the blocks and then fell into the water. Already astern, the spare topsail yard was sticking straight up from the river like a giant pin, and skewered on that pin was the longboat that held Roger Press and his stunned, shouting men.
And then the mist enveloped them, and they were lost from sight, and only the shouting remained. In a minute that, too, was gone.
The Elizabeth Galley drifted on a mythic river, her own black and forlorn River Styx, alone.
Marlowe looked around the deck. The men were smiling, talking in low voices, laughing. There was no remorse for what they had done, no fear of reprisal. It had been too good a trick for any second thoughts.
Peleg Dinwiddie stepped up to him, grinning as broadly as the others. “I guess you done for them, sir,” he said.
“I reckon they’ll stay put, for the time being,” Marlowe agreed.
“You’d said we was to drop downriver a mile or so. It’ll be dead reckoning for that, sir, and not so accurate on such a night, I fear.”
“Oh.” Marlowe had already forgotten that plan of dropping down-river. “As to that, I reckon you may as well steer for the open sea. Our business here is done, like it or not.”
Chapter 8
THE ISLAND of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, three hundred miles off the southeast coast of Africa. As if half of Mozambique had cracked off and drifted away, fetching up at last in that place. On a chart one can see where the island would still fit clean against the African coast, snapping into place like a puzzle piece or the perfectly tooled part of some machine.
But for all that kinship to the Dark Continent, the Madagascar of 1706 was a world unto itself, supporting a culture almost entirely unique in the world. It was the advance base, the dockyard, the chandlery, the marketplace, and in many cases the home of the men who sailed the Pirate Round.
Madagascar had not been the first choice of the Roundsmen, ideal though it was in so many ways. They had first set up on Bab’s Key, the little island marked Perim on the charts, at the entrance to the Red Sea. It was a perfect spot, insofar as it was at the very crossroads of the great wealth of shipping in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea-treasure ships bringing tribute to the Great Mogul; shiploads of wealthy pilgrims bound for Mecca; the lumbering, lightly manned ships of the British, French, and Dutch East India companies.
But Perim had no water, and that was the most precious jewel of all aboard ships that were at the mercy of wind and tide. A miscalculation in that area, especially in the arid and brutally hot Red Sea countries, could result in a death more horrible than anything the pirates could inflict on their most hated enemy.
So the Roundsmen had moved their operations to Madagascar. It was over two thousand miles from their hunting grounds, but piracy was a movable profession, and what Madagascar lacked in proximity it more than made up for in other ways.
The island was lush, fruitful, with an abundance of fresh water. The climate was perfect-not sweltering, not frigid-a place where a man could pass out drunk on the ground with no fear of the weather’s killing him. The natives were cowed by the power of firearms, and even if they had not been, they were far too involved with fighting among themselves ever to coordinate any real resistance to the Europeans’ encroachment. Any band of pirates had only to help the local tribe in a raid against its neighbor to find themselves welcome on the island.
The native girls had much to recommend them as well. Mostly local Malagasies, they had a well-earned reputation for comeliness, with none of the Christian women’s aversion to fornication nor the mercenary attitude of the whores.
So perfect a place was Madagascar, such the pirates’ Eden, that many never left. They took local girls for wife, set up in trade with other Roundsmen, idled away their days in ease and drunkenness. In the entire history of piracy, only Tortuga, Port Royal in Jamaica, and Nassau would come close to rivaling Madagascar as the pirates’ utopia, a place where they alone ruled.
And of all the pirate communities that developed along Madagascar’s extensive coastline, at Fort Dauphin and the Bay of St. Augustin and Diego-Suarez and Ranter Bay and lesser places, the jewel of them all was the tiny island of St. Mary’s, twenty-six miles long and one mile wide, less than ten miles off the northeast coast.
It was at St. Mary’s that the progenitor of the Roundsmen, Thomas Tew, first landed his massive take and divided it among his men. But Tew was not the first white man on St. Mary’s. By the time the Amity’s anchor splashed into the bay, St. Mary’s had already been settled by an Englishman named Adam Baldridge.
Baldridge recognized the island’s potential as a defensible outpost- its shallow harbor with an island like a fortress at its mouth, the vicious reefs that prevented ships from landing anywhere else but under his guns. He recognized Madagascar’s ideal location as a byway from Europe and America to the Red Sea and India. He saw in the island a fine place to hide from the murder charge for which he had fled Jamaica. St. Mary’s suited his every need.
Business exploded for him. Manufactured goods, rum, and naval stores poured in from England and America, plundered goods and gold and jewels from the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, with Baldridge standing right in the confluence of all that wealth.
From his tiny outpost, carved from the jungle, Baldridge established an empire that any of those men living along Pall Mall or St. James might have envied. He built warehouses, a stockade fortress, a mansion crafted in the English style from local materials, high on a hill that gave him a grand view of all he had created. He had a harem as big as any found in the East. He ruled his island kingdom without challenge.
By 1697 Baldridge was the undisputed “King of the Pirates,” even holding a personal court and adjudicating disputes from all over Madagascar.
In the end the king pushed his luck too far, sold a few too many of the local citizens into slavery, and his once- loyal people rose against him, driving him out.
He settled at last in New York and lived a long life there. He was content, but he was no longer king.
Now I am king. The thought drifted through Elephiant Yancy’s mind. I am king now.
