them.
When I was looking for Hoodahs-it was the third day we were in Maracaibo, and we were getting ready to sail-I went to the inn where I got him, thinking he might have gone back there because he knew where something would be hidden. I did not find him-or any gold either-but I found the bodies of his old master's sons. One's head had been split with an ax or a hatchet. I think it was the only time I saw a human face divided like that. The other had been dismembered, it seemed while he was still alive-his arms and legs hacked off, and the rest left to bleed to death.
Let me say something here about the Spanish and their king that most people today do not know. Not even most pirates knew it. When a Spaniard got a land grant from the King of Spain, he had to swear that he would protect the Native Americans whose land he was getting and teach them Christianity.
Hardly any of them did it. The Native Americans were taught Christianity, yes. But it was not done by the men who got their land. It was done by priests and brothers, Jesuits, Franciscans, and Dominicans. They protected the Native Americans, too, as much as they could. Mostly that meant protecting them from Spanish laymen.
After reading this, you are bound to judge people like Capt. Burt, Hoodahs, and me pretty harshly, and I am not saying we do not deserve it. No doubt God will judge us with severity. But God will not forget that the times in which we buccaneers plundered the Spanish Main were not like these times, and that the men we tortured for gold would have tortured us for sport.
All of us had known that Maracaibo was rich. It turned out to be richer than any of us had expected. We loaded our ships and two Spanish ships that had been in the harbor, and headed off to Jamaica with so much gold and silver, and so many tons of cacao beans, that I expected Capt. Burt to give up his plan and head home to Surrey.
He did not, but before I get into that, I want to say something more about Maracaibo. The Spanish made two mistakes there (in my judgment) that were characteristic of them, the kinds of things that let us operate as freely as we did.
The first was being too confident of their defenses. They envisioned one kind of attack and defended against it. When somebody does that, his enemy sees he has done it and adjusts his plans. It is not enough to guard against the obvious move and let everything else slide. If the colonel I talked to in the fort had patrolled the shore of Pigeon Island, he and his men would never have been caught like they were.
The other is that the loss of the city was not one man's fault. It was the fault of just about every Spaniard there except the soldiers under General Sanchez. (They were the ones who died, more than any of the rest; but at least they were not tortured.) General Sanchez had eight hundred soldiers left after we took the fort. There had to be at least five thousand men capable of bearing arms in Maracaibo, and a lot of them had muskets, pistols, or swords. I doubt that there was even one who did not have a knife or an ax. If those men had been organized and led against us, we would have had to get out and get out quick. They were not. I doubt that as many as a hundred of the five thousand fought us. They depended on the soldiers to defend them instead, and the soldiers tried to do it when they should have been attacking us. If they had hit us hard when we were drinking and looting, they would have driven us back to our ships in short order.
Was that colonel at the fort stupid? Maybe he was-I fooled him, after all. But I spoke his language at least as well as he did, and he had no reason to suspect me. The north end of the island was the obvious place to land, and that ambush he had planned was well thought out. If we had walked into it the way he expected, we would have been wiped out. He was not stupid, he was careless.
As I write this, it is Christmas Eve, and that is what I plan to preach about at midnight mass. Before I get back to Maracaibo, I should say that my homily seemed to go pretty well. I began by explaining that intelligence in God's service is a great blessing, but that we are not judged by it.
'It is innate. For God to favor you because you're smart would be as unjust as it would be for Him to favor me because I'm tall. We're all born with certain talents-His gold, that the Master has left with us-and without certain others. If we are wise, we use our talents in His service. Every member of our choir was born with a good voice, and has wisely chosen to honor God with it. You can think of many other examples, I know.
'Saint Thomas Aquinas was a genius, and Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us of Jesus more than any other saint. I would not be surprised to learn that Saint Teresa of Avila was the most extraordinary woman since the Holy Mother. Have any of them gone to a better Heaven than Brother Juniper? I promise you, they haven't-and they wouldn't want to. Many saints were just children when they died-Saint Agatha is the one I think of first, but there are a lot of others. Bernadette was a plain village girl, and so was Saint Joan.
'Examples like the ones I just gave could be trotted out all day, but you saw much better ones when you came into church. Wise men from the east were called to witness the Incarnation. So were shepherds. Shepherds and wise men, both called as witnesses.
'So am I called. So are every one of you, or you wouldn't be here. Many of you are smart, I know. I know, too, that I'm not. I'm a plain man and not always a good man, a man who in a rougher age might've been a pig farmer or a pirate. Knowing it, I'm very happy in the knowledge that God does not put me down because I'm not a genius. He asks me to be careful- something every one of us can do. If I'm careful to learn the will of God for me and careful to do it, then I'm one of the witnesses Jesus wants.
'You see, it doesn't matter whether we're captains or just ordinary sailors. The wise men went away and told others that Christ had come into the world. The shepherds did the same, spreading glad tidings of great joy.
'You and I can do it, too. If we know what Christmas means and where true happiness lies, then all we have to do is to wish others a Merry Christmas. And mean it.
'I wish you a Merry Christmas, you good people of Holy Family. A Merry Christmas to us, one and all.' HERE I SIT, tapping my teeth with the end of my pen. I feel sure I have forgotten half the things I wanted to write about Maracaibo. No doubt that is for the best.
In Maracaibo I understood why Capt. Burt had wanted two hundred marines. He could have held them together and kept them from looting until the Spanish had been beaten, not just driven from the city. General Sanchez could have held his Spaniards together, too, and hit us hard that evening. I have already said what would have happened if he had. Was he a bad general? I doubt it. He had known, I think, what he ought to do. But he had worried much too much about what people might say if he left the civilians to escape-or be captured-on their own. Some of those civilians had been men of wealth and position. (I know they were, because we captured some of them.) They would have yowled like cats to the governor in Caracas that Sanchez had not protected them. From his viewpoint, he had been smart.
A plain general, one who thought of his men on the battlefield and not of the governor and what the governor might say and do, would have beaten us. Year in and year out, the Spanish thought too much about governors and about Madrid. In the end it cost Spain an empire that covered a quarter of the world.
31
To the Pacific
This time we went to Port Royal to refit. Now Capt. Burt had a major win for us to talk about, and we were turning men away by the second day. Each ship was to sail when ready. We would meet again at the Pearls.
The Weald was the first to put out. At the time, I thought nothing of it. Somebody had to be first.
We were keeping the Spanish ships we had taken at Maracaibo, and Red Jack was made captain of one of them, which meant I lost him. It also meant the crew got to elect a new quartermaster, and they picked Red Knife, a Zambo Moskito. I thought I was probably going to have to shoot him before the year was out. In a day or two, I found out that he and Hoodahs were great buddies, so I relaxed quite a bit. I never did shoot him, or have a reason to, either. Red Knife was as steady as they come, and as tough as they come, too.
Perhaps I should say here that it takes a while to find out that two Native Americans are friends. It is when one looks at the other and they both understand. If they are friends, they are a team, and you do not hear their signals.
The Pearls are beautiful islands. I have probably said that already. There are Native Americans there, but we never did find out what tribe they belonged to. They hid, and if there were any on an island we landed on, they
