These sailors found themselves in a hazardous setting that offered no civilized refuge. The first few months saw wild beasts, starvation and poisoning cull their numbers until desperation turned them upon each other and then to cannibalism.
At first, this dreaded ritual was only practiced upon the dead, very weak or sick among their own crew, but as those survivors grew stronger on such grisly fare they turned their hungry eyes to the relatively peaceful tribes of native Africans that they discovered eking out tenuous lives in the jungle.
Those groups of natives were often already much depleted in number and morale, having suffered for generations under both the African and foreign slave trades. These faded cultures were outfought by the buccaneers’ European technology and so the Africans to survive the exchange were forcibly brought into the ranks.
Any that were not eaten outright were kept as wives or slaves, only to be eaten if they became more useful as food.
The original pirate crew had been a mixed bag of mongrels to begin with, being of European, Asian, Arabic and East Indian descent. Most had been career seamen without families and still others had been pressed aboard.
As their process of survival by absorption continued for many decades, a motley collection of humans was the result as the surviving pirates and their offspring interbred with their slaves to form a hybrid group of caramel-skinned, mixed-race buccaneer and indigenous peoples who were better prepared for surviving in the jungle, but who were by that time ingrained physically and culturally with a grisly craving for human flesh.
The invaders became notorious—rumored and whispered about—and always feared. But so terrible was their reputation that few who had not seen their gruesome work believed it possible—and so in the early days their bloody raids shocked the indigenous tribes they overran. The few survivors could never relay the true horror they had witnessed.
So most tribes in that tangled corner of jungle were decimated and enslaved before heroes could be chosen; and any chieftain who attempted appeasement or collusion was the first upon the fire.
Bawkee, Bokanu, and Bakweena! They were called by those who are no more.
Those peoples they dominated met them with screams of terror, and word of their invasion passed between tribes and languages, and so finally their initial appellation of “buccaneers” was shaped by manifold dialects into the referent “Bakwaniri” as the news spread from mouth to ear.
With successive generations the Bakwaniri became more African and their language more of a polyglot, yet vestiges of their roving lives remained at the core of their culture.
The “crew” called their chief the “capan” who was supported by a secondary chief the “fust” and “sir-jon,” the Bakwaniri wizard, witch doctor and priest.
Singly each crewman could be referred to as a “Johnnie,” and the women “Hearties,” though the names like the genders were interchangeable in time of need or grog.
Such quaint anachronisms were most evident in regard to the extraordinary village in which the Bakwaniri crew lived.
“The ship,” as they called it, was not any simple thatched and walled jungle homestead, but was originally intended as a monument to the brave and foolhardy men who as first fathers had crossed the seas and then the jungle; in fact, it was the early framers of this outpost who had tried to capture their own spirits in the very lines and layout of the town.
It was also safe to say that all involved with its building were better acquainted with the construction and layout of sailing vessels than they were the living habits and abodes of landlubbers.
And so seen from a distance, the village resembled a three-masted sailing ship afloat in a jade ocean of jungle. Its “hull” was a palisade of stout, sharpened posts set upright tight together and sweeping upward in height fore and aft to make a fortified structure that framed the space within.
The long, narrow oval formed by these poles was marked in three places by tall rounded timbers called “fore,” “aft” and “main” masts that had been raised in a line where the keel would lie in an actual vessel.
From each of these hung a spider web of rope rigging used by the crew to access the heights, and for applying patchwork leather coverings to deflect the rains. The greatest of these devices was stowed to the port side of the “bow” and could be swung into place in foul weather.
The smaller masts fore and aft were used by the crew as a center brace or fulcrum for building projects or any chore, like skinning game animals, that required the elevation of a weight; while the center mainmast had to hold the “crow’s nest” high over the jungle green, just shy of the canopy that variably by season could close the forest in over the ship.
The ship’s location had been chosen for its access to the fresh water that ran close to the starboard side, but also for its proximity to ancient stone basements or foundations built and left there long ago by Roman explorers far from home.
These subterranean block structures ran the length of the ship, forming small stone rooms that came off to the left or right of a center hall and were used by the Bakwaniri for food storage and to house what treasures they had. In times of necessity they were also used as prison cells or as defensible retreats.
The first fathers had used these as refuge from the unseen jungle terrors that pressed them on all sides, shelters in which they lived while they planned and built their ship on land and from where they launched their many raids upon neighboring tribes.
In time a double row of small thatched-roofed wooden huts was built atop these stone rooms and ran in a line from fore to aft. Parts of the ancient Roman arches and walls protruded from the ground
