8
How I Became a Buccaneer
The bugs were bad. That is the first thing I have to tell about Hispaniola, because if I do not say it right up front, Hispaniola is going to sound like paradise. The bugs were terrible. There were stinging gnats so little you could hardly see them. There were red flies that went straight for your face every time. Where they were bad, you had to break off a branch and wave it in front of your face for hours and hours. Worst of all were the mosquitoes. There were a lot of good things about Hispaniola, but there was not one day there when I would not have been glad to go back to the monastery or the Santa Charita.
I did not know about the bugs when Capt. Burt left me on the beach. There was a fresh wind blowing, and when there was a wind the beaches were clear of bugs. What I did know about Hispaniola was that it was not a desert island. There were people who lived there all the time, just like Cuba and Jamaica. I thought the best thing for me to do would be to find some and try to get them to help me. There had been Spanish maps on the New Ark, and I had spent a lot of time looking at them. The big town on Hispaniola had been Santo Domingo, and it had been on the south coast of the island over toward the east end. I did not know whether I was toward the east end or the west end (which is really where I was), but I could tell from the sun that I was on the north coast.
If I had been smarter, I would have walked east, following the coast. What I tried to do instead was cut across to the south coast, walking southeast so as to be near Santo Domingo when I hit it. If I had known more about Hispaniola, I would have known how dumb that was.
When I started out, I was hoping to see some of those wild cattle Capt. Burt had told me about. I thought I would kill one and cook some of the meat. By the time I had been walking an hour or so, I just wanted to get away from the bugs. I finally found a place that was clear of them, up on one of the mountains. It was rocky and wide open except to the west, but there were no bugs and that was where I spent the night. The next morning I found a spring, drank as much water as I could hold, and started walking again. I did not have a clear idea of how big the island was or how far I could walk in a day, and thought I could probably cross it in three days, and maybe in two. Just for the record, Hispaniola is about seventy-five miles across, and a hundred or so the way I was going. Walking the way I was, navigating by the sun and working my way through rough country, ten miles would have been a really good day.
Just for the record, too, I did not just look at maps after that. I studied them. There were maps on the Magdelena, good ones, and by the time I was through with them I could have drawn them myself.
Now it seems to me like it was forever, but I think it was probably the second or third day when I met Valentin. I came out of the rain forest onto a chip of prairie, and I saw a naked man over on the other side. I yelled 'Bon jour!' and he was gone as quick as that. I went over to where I had seen him and started talking all the French I could lay my tongue to. I said that I was lost, that I did not want to hurt anyone, that I would pay somebody to help me and so on.
Pretty soon somebody said, 'You are not French.' He said it in French, of course, and he sounded scared.
'Non,' I yelled. 'I just speak it a little. I'm American.'
'Spanish?'
'American!'
'Not Spanish?'
'Italian! Sicilian!'
'You will shoot me?'
I wanted to say heck no, but I was afraid I would screw it up. So I just said, 'Non, non, non!' and laid my musket down. Then I held up my hands, figuring he could probably see me even though I could not see him.
There was a lot more talking before he finally came out. He was about my age, had not had a shave or a haircut in a long, long time, and wore nothing but a strip of hide in front. There was another strip, pretty thin, around his waist that held up the first one, and his knife hung from that, too, in a sheath he had made himself. I gave him my hand and said, 'Chris.' After a minute, he took it like he had never shaken hands in his life and told me his name. Pretty soon his dog came out. Her name was Francine. She was a pretty good dog, but a one-man dog. She never did trust me a lot.
From the time I had eaten on the Weald until the time I met Valentin, I had eaten nothing but a couple of wild oranges, and by then I was plenty hungry enough to eat Francine. I asked Valentin whether he had anything, and he said I had a gun and he would show me where there would be good shooting.
We walked another three miles or so before Francine flushed a wild pig. I shot at it and missed, but Francine got out in front of it and turned it back toward us. It went past us faster than I would ever have thought a pig could run, but Valentin cut it with his knife as it went by just the same. Francine went after it, yelping now and then to let us know where she was, and we listened for her and tried to follow the blood trail the pig had left.
Pretty soon Valentin stopped me and pointed. 'In there.' It was thick cane, but I listened for a minute and he was right. I could hear Francine growling and a click-click noise I did not understand back then. When I had reloaded, priming the pan and all that, I went in with the safety catch off, trying to keep the muzzle down all the time and reminding myself that if I shot his dog, Valentin would probably go for me with his knife.
Francine was keeping the pig busy, dodging the pig's short rushes and trying to get behind it. When I fired, I was so close I could almost touch the pig with the end of the barrel.
I do not think I have ever been more aware of the delay between the time I pulled the trigger and the shot than I was right then. It is only a little piece of a second, but that was when I began to understand that little piece of time is the key to good shooting. A man who thinks his gun is going to fire when he pulls the trigger is going to miss. Pretty soon I learned to wait for the hammer to fall, for the powder in the pan to flash, and for the gun to fire. It is fast, sure. But it is during that quarter second or so that the man who pulls the trigger has to have his sights right where he wants the bullet to go. When I had trained myself to do that every time I was a good shot.
So I was not, but I was lucky with the pig. I was trying to hit its shoulder. My idea was that if I could break something in there, the pig could not run. I missed the shoulder but I just about hit the heart, and the pig went down. It did not die, but lay there shaking until Valentin stabbed its throat.
We pulled it out of the canebrake then and butchered it. I had my dagger, but I did not know how to butcher. Valentin did and worked five times faster. We gutted it, and gave Francine the heart and the liver, plus whatever else we threw away that she wanted. We cut off the head, too, cut off all four feet and skinned what was left. Then we used strips of pigskin to tie the rest to a sapling we could carry on our shoulders. I got my bullet back, and while we were drying the meat, I held it on a rock and tapped it with the little flintknapping hammer in my pouch until it was round again.
Before I did that, we built a fire. Valentin told me that making fire was the hardest part of living in the rain forest like he did. He had to make a fire by scraping the back of his knife with the right kind of a rock to make sparks. He tried to save fire when he had one, but usually it did not work-it was just ashes and charcoal by the time he needed it again. Since I was there, we made ours by putting a little priming powder on a piece of tinder and snapping the lock of my musket.
We roasted meat and ate, and Valentin showed me how to rub pig fat on the places the mosquitoes like best to keep them off. It was messy and got to smelling bad, but you had to do it or they would eat you alive. Even with a lot of pig fat on I still got bitten, but nowhere near as much.
After that, he taught me how to build a rack of green sticks so we could smoke the rest of the meat. Boucaner is what the French say. After that, we had to keep the fire going without getting it too high. That was pretty tough, because pig fat kept running down and burning, which meant that the hotter the fire was already, the hotter it got. We had to keep pulling it apart with sticks and pushing it back together.
We had time to talk just the same. It was in French and I do not remember Valentin's exact words, but I asked him how he got where we were.
'I was a servant on a big farm in Languedoc. I signed a paper, so the company would take me across the ocean. I was to serve three years, then I would be free. I meant to claim land and farm it for myself.
