'A carpenter. I know you've got one. Let's see him.'
He came forward, I think just because he knew the rest would make him if he did not.
'Carpenter's mate! Let's see him, too.'
Three or four sailors said he was dead and offered to show me his body. I made the carpenter pick him out for me, and he was dead all right.
'One more, and you can go. Sailmaker! Come forward.'
They had to shove him, but he came.
We launched their longboat and got the rest of them into it. There was bottled wine in the hold. Giving each wounded pirate a drink, with one for Novia and one for the doctor, emptied two bottles. We filled them with water, and gave the men in the longboat those with two loaves of ship's bread. A few minutes after they put out, I saw the little boat-mast go up and a gaff sail run up and trimmed. There were some pretty good sailors there.
I told the three men I had kept that nobody was going to make them turn pirate. 'We're heading for Cow Island,' I said. 'Do your work and keep your mouths shut and I'll put you ashore there safe and sound, with my thanks. There are three of you, so each of you will have two others to swear that you were forced. Make trouble, and you're dead. We won't fool around with you. We'll kill you, capeesh? For now, you two are doctor's helpers. Do what he tells you.'
There is a lot more I could say, how we threw the dead Spanish overboard and buried our own at sea, and who they were, and so forth. But time is getting tight.
Back on the Castillo Blanco, I did what I had been planning to do before we sighted the Vincente. I had some of our wounded stand guard on our food and water. Back there I said we had a lot of men, but after leaving Bouton on the Vincente with enough men to work her, we barely had enough sound men to handle the Castillo Blanco. So you could say it was a waste, if you wanted to. The thing was that those wounded men would not be much help at making sail or taking it in, but they could handle sitting in front of a door with pistols in their laps. It gave them something to do, and I thought it might save a few lives before long.
23
J aime
I was wrong about that. I have been trying to make myself skip this part, but that would be a kind of lie. The day before we sighted the Magdelena, we found one of my wounded sentries dead. Searching the ship got us nowhere, so after that I had two watch at a time.
And when we met up with the Magdelena at Ile a Vache, I did one of the dumbest things I have done in my whole life. Being honest means I have to write about it, but it is not fun and I am going to keep it just as short as I can.
I had Rombeau send Don Jose over. His hands and feet were tied, and I could have tortured him then and there, but I did not. Maybe I had the guts to do it and maybe I did not, but what was for sure was that I did not want to. I told him I had found one secret compartment on his ship, and I knew maledizione well there was another. I wanted to know where it was, and if he did not tell me, we were going to burn him with hot irons-his face, the soles of his feet, and anyplace else we thought might get him to talk.
He said, 'You may burn me, Senor. You may tear my arms off as you threaten. I cannot prevent you, but I cannot produce a second hiding place where none is.'
So what did I do? I roughed him up a little, tied him to a timber down in the hold without food or water, and told him he was going to have the rest of the day and all night to think about what we would do in the morning. And I left him there.
In the morning he was dead, strangled just like Ben and the others. That is all I mean to write about this. WE DID A heck of a lot of work on Cow Island, and I am going to skip over just about all of it. First we shook up the crews, me getting more and Rombeau fewer. After that we really got to work, and ended up careening all three ships. The Castillo Blanco was first because I was worried about the scrape. After that we did the same thing with the Vincente. She was too good a ship to give up, and I knew-though most of the men still did not-that we would be going around the Horn with Capt. Burt. For a voyage as long as that, you want to start with everything in tip-top shape.
And after both of those, we did Magdelena all over again, mostly because we had gotten good at it. She was smaller than the Vincente, but carried more and bigger guns, and I have got to say she was the hardest of the whole bunch.
We got a few men on Cow Island, but not a lot. Four, I think it was. The thing was, there were not a lot there. And those who were wanted to sign on after we had careened our ships, not before. I did not want men like that, and I told them so. If they were not willing to work, I did not give a rat's rear end whether they would fight or not. I had more men now (and Azuka, who had come back with Willy when we shook up the crews), so I told Rombeau that if he wanted those guys he could have them. I do not believe he took even one of them.
There is another thing I should say. Okay, maybe a couple. One is that he had taken no prizes. The other is that I turned loose the doctor and the others as soon as we dropped anchor, exactly like I had promised. About the time we had the Castillo Blanco up on the beach, they came back, all three in a group. For one thing they had found out that Spaniards were not really popular on that island. For another, they had not been able to find any way to get over to the Spanish side of Hispaniola. They wanted me to take them there, which of course I would not do. A day or so after that, they decided to sail to Jamaica with us. It meant we had the carpenter, which turned out to be a lucky break.
It is not a long trip, but we ran into a calm that made it longer than it should have been. We had been going pretty much nowhere for two or three days, I think it was, when one of the wounded men came running to report that his partner had been strangled. He had left his post to use the head, and when he came back he found the body. I went down and had a look at him, and it was Pete the Hangman. I searched the ship all over again, and had Novia, Bouton, and some others search with me. No dice.
Red Jack came early next morning with a round robin and a committee. The ship was cursed, they said. They liked me and all that. They knew how hard it was to be a good captain, and I had been a good one. But either we sold the Castillo Blanco in Port Royal or they would vote me out and put in somebody who would.
I told them I had been thinking pretty much the same way, but I was not going to sell our problem to somebody else and get more people killed. If I was going to stay captain, we would shift everything worth moving to the Vincente and abandon the Castillo Blanco and its curse. (I said curse because they had. I knew by then that it was a stowaway, and I had a pretty good idea who it was. But if I had told them then, there would have been all sorts of trouble.)
As it was, they just wanted to know whether I meant right now. I said bloody right, istantaneamente.
'Today?' They wanted to be sure.
I said, 'Let's start loading the longboat. While we stand around here talking, we're just wasting time.'
They were scared, and by that time so was I, a little. If we took the Castillo Blanco to Port Royal, they were going to be on board her for another three or four days, and it could have been a week. I was offering to get them off right away, so I won.
'What if we bring the curse in the things we are taking, Crisoforo?' Novia looked like she thought we really might.
'There's another secret compartment on this ship,' I told her. 'I can't find it, but I know there is one, and that's where he is this minute. He may or may not figure out what we're doing, but he'll have to stay there just the same. He can't hide in one of the boats in broad daylight, and he's not small enough to hide in a cannon barrel or a water cask. We're going, and we're leaving him behind.'
Which is what we did. The cannon were the hardest part, as they always are. But we used the sweeps to come alongside and were able to hoist them onto the Vincente with ropes running from the mainmast of the Castillo Blanco and main yard of the Vincente. The Caribbean was as calm as glass just then, which helped a lot.
I was the last to go, in the evening after a little breeze had sprung up. Before I left I went through the whole
