The Moors lacked nearly all of the Europeans’ traditional naval skills. They were not practiced gunners or skilled seamen. Their ships were not nimble or well handled. What they were was big. The Great Mogul and those who sent tribute to him and those who carried pilgrims to Mecca tried to compensate for a lack of naval tradition with overwhelming size-in their ships, in their guns, in their crews.
Generally it did not work. Marlowe’s thoughts naturally turned to Thomas Tew, who had first stood on the deck of an English privateer and watched one of those fat ships roll down on him, just as he, Marlowe, was doing now. The ship Tew had attacked was even bigger than this one, over one hundred guns, if Marlowe remembered correctly. Three hundred soldiers.
Tew had told his men that despite all her guns and men, the Moors were wanting two things: skill and courage. They took her in fifteen minutes of fighting, with never a one of the Amity’s men even injured.
Marlowe imagined that the Moors were wanting a third thing, and that was motivation. It was not easy to conjure much enthusiasm for dying in defense of a tyrant’s treasure, not a sou of which you would ever see. Put up against the highly motivated Roundsmen, the Moors were at a great disadvantage indeed, despite their numbers.
Another broadside exploded silently from the big ship’s side, and again the jets of water, shooting up over a great span of sea, were accompanied by the rumble of the guns.
How long between those ragged and ill-coordinated broadsides? Marlowe wished he had timed it. It was a few minutes at least. He did not need to time their rate of fire to gauge their ineptitude.
He thought of Tew again. He had not been so lucky the second time around, his belly shot away by a cannonball, his men surrendering with no further resistance. What a hell the rest of their short lives must have been, enslaved by the Moors. Marlowe wondered to what brutal work the Great Mogul would have put his Christian slaves. Christian slaves who had tried to rob him of his tribute, no less.
Tew got off easy. Marlowe wondered what it was like to hold in your guts with your hand. He realized that his palm was pressing against his midriff, as if he were practicing the stance.
“On deck! Sail, ho! One point abaft the starboard beam! Reckon she’s the Bloody Revenge!”
Damn. Marlowe frowned, looked to the northward. This bloody complicates things, he thought.
If they had taken the Mogul’s ship with no help from Billy Bird, then the matter was clear: the Bloody Revenges had no claim to the treasure. If they had taken her with Billy’s help, then it was equally clear: the treasure would be divided between the two ships.
But now what? What if they took her in sight of the Bloody Revenge but without their help? Would Billy Bird and his men expect their part? Would the Elizabeth Galleys agree? Would the two pirate crews go at one another?
“Listen here, you men!” Marlowe shouted, taking his place at the rail at the forward edge of the quarterdeck. “Looks like yonder comes the Bloody Revenge. If they’re in sight, they got a claim to the booty, but that doesn’t mean we have to do all the work for them. We’ll drive this bastard north, get him between us. I don’t reckon the Moors’ll give us much fight, but what they do give, we’ll let them other fellows share!”
This met with a cheer, the men shouting and banging, and then, like a counterpoint, the rumble of the Moors’ guns. Marlowe had not even noticed them fire, did not bother watching where the shot fell.
The Moor was sailing full and bye with larboard tacks aboard. The Elizabeth Galley was on a dead run, riding those late-winter winds that flowed from the Indian Ocean and channeled northwest through Bab el Mandeb and the Red Sea. Twenty minutes on their generally converging courses, and they had closed to within half a mile of one another. The Bloody Revenge’s topgallants were visible from the Galley’s deck, and the man aloft was certain of the brig’s identity.
“We’ll give them a cannonading! It’s a long shot, but give it to ’em as best as you can!” Marlowe called down his encouragement to the gunners, then stood back and fixed the Moor with his glass. He heard Flanders in the waist shouting “On the up-roll!” and felt the Elizabeth Galley heel with the swells, and then the cry, “Fire!” and the starboard battery went off, eight six-pounders, deafening in their proximity.
The weight of iron was pathetic compared to what the Moor could hurl with a single broadside, but Marlowe could see through his glass that more than half his gunners had hit their mark, and he knew that a six-pound ball that hits is worth more than any size ball plunging into the sea.
He looked down into the waist. Half the guns were run out again. Thirty seconds later, and they were all of them loaded and ready.
“On the up-roll! Fire!” and once more the Elizabeth Galley blasted her iron into the great barn of a vessel that carried the Mogul’s treasure.
The Moorish captain clearly understood as well as Marlowe the relative worth of round shot that hit compared with round shot that fell into the ocean. Likewise he seemed to understand the limitations of his own ship, and clearly he knew better than to try to tack that behemoth, despite the decent wind and miles of sea room.
Marlowe watched with some amusement as the great gilded beast began her ponderous turn, the bow pointing more and more toward the Elizabeth Galley, the masts coming into line, the huge, ornate poop lost from view behind the courses as the Moor laboriously wore around.
The heavy yards swung in short, jerky stages as the stern passed through the wind. At last the treasure ship came up on a starboard tack with her yards braced round and bowlines hauled taut. The entire evolution had taken over ten minutes, but finally they settled on their more northerly course, away from the Elizabeth Galley and toward the Bloody Revenge, which Marlowe guessed they had not yet discovered.
“Hands to braces!” Marlowe cried, and the sail trimmers left their guns and went to the pinrails, and a moment later the Galley came up on a starboard tack as well, like the Moorish ship and half a mile astern. But the Galley sailed half again as fast as the Moor; Marlowe could pretty much choose the moment they would board her.
They chased on for another hour, the Galley sailing a somewhat higher course than the Moor so that they could continue to pepper her broad transom with round shot.
The Elizabeth Galley was a quarter mile astern when the Moors spotted the Bloody Revenge, a mile north of them, and turned more easterly again, sailing as close-hauled as she could, which was not very. She was a big, clumsy cow set upon by two nimble wolves, and the more she tried to flee, the more pathetic and vulnerable she appeared.
“Very well, Honeyman,” Marlowe said to the quartermaster, who was standing beside him on the quarterdeck. Before St. Mary’s he would have chased the man away, but now he was happy to have him there.
There was no question, of course, of a divided command. They were in a fight now. Marlowe was absolute ruler of the ship.
“Very well,” he said again, “enough of this nonsense. We’ll lay her alongside and board her. By the time we come right up with her, the Bloody Revenge should not be far behind.
“Aye, Captain,” Honeyman said. He hurried forward, relaying Marlowe’s words in a loud voice, in a tone untainted by excitement or fear or emotion of any kind. The boarders saw to their cutlasses and pikes and pistols; the gun captains took pains to load with the roundest of shot, and grape on top of that. The men massed in the waist and on the quarterdeck, waiting.
The Elizabeth Galley closed fast, with the Moor caught between the pincers of the two Red Sea Rovers. Marlowe climbed up the main shrouds halfway to the main top, shifted his glass between the Moor and the Bloody Revenge and back. Billy Bird was making no extraordinary effort to get into the fight. The Revenge would come up with them a good fifteen minutes after the Galley had laid alongside the Moor.
“Damn you, you bloody…” Marlowe muttered. The word “coward” was floating just below the surface, but he could not bring himself to voice it. It was too heinous an accusation, even to be made in private, without greater evidence than he had.
After all, the Revenge might have sprung a plank, or her bottom might be covered with weeds, or the men might have decided to become insensibly drunk. Any number of things might have happened that were beyond Billy Bird’s control.
Marlowe climbed down, regained the quarterdeck. “Elizabeth, my dear,” he called to his wife, who had been all the while standing aft, keeping out of the way. “We will be at them directly. I think it would be best were you to retire to the cable tier.”
“Of course, my love.” Elizabeth stepped over, kissed him. Bold as she was, they both knew that the decks would not be the place for her when the fighting got hot.
Marlowe glanced down at the two pistols thrust in her sash. “You are all loaded, then?” he asked, trying to make his voice sound as cheery as possible. He had insisted that Elizabeth take two loaded guns with her. He had
