11
“The pirate stared at the skulking black rat,” Alex Hawke began, and he was off.
“Last meal, Rat!” the ragged old man shouted hoarsely at the creature. “Here’s the totality of me bleeding generosity at last, down your bleeding gullet, I’m afraid.” The pirate eyed a lively morsel of weevil-infested bread and lobbed it at the oily-looking creature. The rat had backed into its favorite dank corner of the prison cell, all eyes and haunches. Man and rodent had grown quite companionable these last few months, and the proffered tidbit was quickly consumed.
The rat’s black eyes glittered as it turned away from its benefactor with nary a trace of gratitude for past favors. There then came a sound from the pirate’s throat that could have passed for a sigh, had it not been so mournful, and he collapsed back upon his pitiful rack. Wrapping a threadbare blanket around his shoulders, he lifted his gaze. One patch of sky was visible in the moldy wall opposite, and he could see the light was fading. With it went the pirate’s chances for a long and happy life.
Unlike his friend Rat, the ailing buccaneer would not be enjoying the hospitality of Newgate Prison when the sun rose next morning. The prisoner coughed and smiled grimly in spite of himself. Six months prior to his arrest and this miserable circumstance, he’d been out on the open seas of the Caribbee, his ship bursting to the gunwales with captured booty he’d relieved from a Spaniard, on a hard reach, flying up the Gulf Stream, finally to home and family after long years afloat.
They’d be coming for him shortly, he knew, for what would be his last journey. King’s men, horses, and soldiers. Coming to load him into a cart, him and a few of his miserable shipmates, and haul them all away, down Holborn Street, through the laughing, taunting crowds. This trip was known poetically as “heading west.” But every lost soul rolling out Newgate’s gilded archway for the last time knew he was eastbound. East, for the muddy banks of the Thames and Executioner’s Dock. Where waited a length of stout rope and the hangman.
“It’s old Blackhawke himself that’s cornered now, ain’t it, Rat?” he said, watching the animal scurry to the corner opposite. The man dipped his quill once more into the inkwell and returned to his unfinished letter. He coughed and shivered in the chill, damp air.
His recent trip across the icy North Atlantic, chained like a dog in the brig, and subsequent few months in this notorious pesthole of a prison had left the famous pirate captain much diminished. Once the mere sight of his flagship masthead appearing on the horizon had struck fear into every man afloat. Now Blackhawke was a figure of mockery and derision, wrongly consigned to the hangman’s noose by high-placed friends now turned lower than dogs, treacherous enemies who had betrayed him to save their own hides.
Blackhawke straightened and turned once more to his letter. Such thoughts of doom weren’t befitting a man of his stature and fame. And, besides, there was still the chance of the king’s pardon, wasn’t there? He dipped his quill, put it to the blue paper, and made a few scratches, trying to sketch in the outline of the island’s coastline. He wasn’t much used to drawing maps and figures, and it taxed him sorely.
“Now, where was that bloody rock?” he said to Rat, scratching his raggedy beard. “I remember a spiky rock standing just above the cave, looked like a ship under sail it did, but where? Here, I think,” he said, and drew it on the map.
He’d been trying to finish the letter to his wife all week, but his mind was clouded with fear, anger, and rum. The rum was courtesy of the Newgate Prison parson, who’d been smuggling it into his cell in ever more copious quantities as his days dwindled.
“See? All smugglers in some ways, ain’t we, Parson?” he’d said between sips of rum to the clergyman that very morning. Both knew it was possibly the pirate’s last drink. “Piracy! There’s a laugh! Who ain’t a pirate? It’s the way of the world they’re hanging me for! And me not even guilty! Why, I had me that letter of marque from his majesty and two French passes for all them East India ships I took, didn’t I?”
He and the parson both knew that wasn’t exactly true. The famous pirate captain had been sentenced to death for the murder of a Mr. Cookson, a former bosun on his ship. The captain, strolling his quarterdeck, had overheard an unflattering remark from the bosun and banged the man smartly on the head with a wooden bucket. Unfortunately, the poor fellow expired two days later.
At his trial for both murder and piracy, Blackhawke had claimed it was manslaughter, a crime of passion. Suppression of mutiny, he’d argued in the dock. But the jury had decided otherwise. In words that tolled like solemn bells in the gloom of the Old Bailey, each prisoner learned his fate that evening.
“You shall be taken from the Place where you are, and be carried to the Place from whence you came, and from thence to the Place of Execution, and there be severally hang’d by your necks until you be dead.
“And may the Lord have mercy on your souls.”
The pirate scratched some more on the scraps of blue paper that Parson had given him. His fever had parched his memory. He was having trouble remembering the outline of the rocky coast on the nor’west side of the island. This was information vitally important to his purposes. It was his last chance to provide sustenance for his soon to be grieving widow and children. As he drew, he tried to call up the night he’d buried the last of his ill-gotten treasure.
On a chilled, moonless night, he and two mates had left the moored English Third-Rater and rowed the skiff toward the island’s rocky coast. Though Blackhawke had paid careful attention as the shoreline hove into view, the exact geography of the place had long receded now from his mind’s eye.
Well, he’d just do the best he could and hope his dear wife would find the location. Surely she’d recognize the twisting river that he roughed in there on that jagged coast jutting into the sea? And the coconut trees here, and the big rock above the cave? His drawings looked something like cocoa trees, didn’t they?
He put a bold black X where he thought the treasure should be. Yes. That was it. Just about that far west of the river.
The captain and two shipmates had done their digging inside the cave right there, two leagues west of the mouth of the river. Boca de Chavon, the Spaniards called it, whatever that meant. And exactly one hundred paces from that big rock jutting into the sea, the one that nearly chewed the bottom out of that skiff all right.
Three men had rowed ashore. There was a hidden cave, the mouth of which was completely underwater all the time save dead low tide. At the very back of that cave was where they did their digging, hacking deep through coral and wet sand.
But after the bags of gold were safely concealed in a deep hole in the deepest part of the cave, only one man had returned to the sloop that night. Blackhawke himself. The two mates remained behind to “guard” the treasure, although they were in a most unhealthy condition. As they held their lanterns, leaning over, peering down into that black hole full of gold, both had their skulls stove in by a mighty swipe of Blackhawke’s spade.
Under the crude illustration, Blackhawke wrote to his wife in his crabbed hand:
Gold! Aye, there’s gold in that cave on the Dog’s Island, dearest wife, verily some hundred odd bags of it that we lifted from the good ship Santa Clara, being the barge of the Spanish corsair Andres Manso de Herreras, which we took as a prize off the Isle of Dogs.
This Manso de Herreras, he was the most bloodthirsty of cutthroats and we lost many a man in a pitched battle on his decks once we’d boarded the Santa Clara. He almost got the better of your beloved husband, advancing on me from behind, but my faithful parrot Bones sung out in time and I sent the cur to his maker and his gold to my hold from whence I stashed it in the cave. I pray you, care for old Bones, since the wily old bird will live a long life and twas mine he saved.
But also in that cave you’ll find two unfortunate souls who I had to dispatch so as to keep my secrets. Prepare yourself for them skeletons before you lift your spade, my Darling. And do your digging as I do mine, on nights when the moon has fled the sky or the clouds abet your endeavours.
A caution, dear Wife! There’s grave danger for a body wanting to go ashore on that rocky coast. Cave Canem! Its teeth are sharp enough to bite you into bits. Many have died trying. But, once past those cruel teeth, I warrant that my poor family’s salvation lies beneath my mark on the old Dog himself.
At least I go to my maker knowing I’ve provided for you and our dear children. I’ve got some fancy this letter
