He picked one up in his hand, hefting it, feeling the weight. It was iron, slippery with slime and bilge water.
“Five pounds or so,” Sanson said. “We have nothing on board to fire a five-pound shot.”
Still grinning, he led Hunter aft. By the light of a flickering lantern, Hunter saw another shape in the hold, half-submerged by water. He recognized it immediately - it was a saker, a small cannon no longer much used on ships. Sakers had fallen out of popularity thirty years earlier, replaced either by small swivel guns or by very large cannon.
He bent over the gun, running his hands along it, underwater. “Will she fire?”
“She’s bronze,” Sanson said. “The Jew says she will be serviceable.”
Hunter felt the metal. Because it was bronze, it had not corroded much. He looked back at Sanson. “Then we will give the Don a taste of his own delights,” he said.
The saker, small though it was, still comprised seven feet of solid bronze weighing sixteen hundred pounds. It took the better part of the morning to wrestle the gun onto El Trinidad ’s deck. Then the gun had to be lowered over the side, to a waiting longboat.
In the hot sun, the work was excruciating and had to be done with consummate delicacy. Enders shrieked orders and curses until he was hoarse, but finally the saker settled into the longboat as gently as if it were a feather. The longboat sank alarmingly under the weight. Her gunnels clearing the water by no more than inches. Yet she was stable, as she was towed to the far shore.
Hunter intended to set the saker on top of the hill that curved out from Monkey Bay. That would place it within range of the Spanish warship, and allow it to fire on the offshore vessel. The gun emplacement would be safe; the Spaniards could not get enough elevation from their own cannon to make any reply, and Hunter’s men could shell them until they ran out of balls.
The real question was when to open fire. Hunter had no illusions about the strength of this cannon. A five- pound shot was hardly formidable; it would take many rounds to cause significant damage. But if he opened fire at night, the Spanish warship might, in confusion, cast off and try to move out of range. And in shoal water at night, she could easily run aground or even sink.
That was what he hoped for.
The saker, lying in the wallowing longboat, reached the shore, and thirty seamen groaned to haul it onto the beach. There it was placed on rollers, and laboriously dragged, foot by foot, to the edge of the underbrush.
From there, the saker had to be pulled a hundred feet up to the top of the hill, through dense clusters of mangrove and palm trees. Without winches or tackles to help with the weight, it was a forbidding job, yet his crew bent to the task with alacrity.
Other men worked equally hard. The Jew supervised five men who scrubbed the rust from the iron shot, and filled shot-bags with gunpowder. The Moor, a skilled carpenter, built a gun carriage with trunnion notches.
By dusk, the gun was in position, overlooking the warship. Hunter waited until a few minutes before darkness closed in, and then he gave the order to fire. The first round was long, splashing on the seaward side of the Spanish vessel. The second round hit its mark, and so did the third. And then it became almost too dark to see anything.
For the next hour, the saker slammed shot into the Spanish warship and in the gloom they saw white sails unfurl.
“He’s going to run for it!” Enders shouted hoarsely.
There were cheers from the gun crew. More volleys were fired as the warship backed and filled, easing away from the mooring. Hunter’s men kept up a steady pattern of shots, and even when the warship was no longer visible in the darkness, he gave orders to carry on firing. The crack of the saker continued through the night.
By the first light of dawn, they strained to see the fruits of their labors. The warship was again anchored, perhaps a quarter-mile farther offshore, but the sun rose behind the vessel, making her a black silhouette. They could see no evidence of damage. They knew they had caused some, but it was impossible to judge the extent.
Even in the first moments of light, Hunter was depressed. He could tell from the way the ship rode at anchor that she had not been seriously injured. With great good fortune, she had maneuvered the night waters outside the bay without striking coral or running aground.
One of her topsail spars hung cracked and dangling. Some of her rigging was ragged, and her bowline was chipped and splintered. But these were minor details: Bosquet’s warship was safe, riding smoothly in the sunlit waters offshore. Hunter felt enormous fatigue and enormous depression. He watched the ship some moments longer, noticing her motion.
“God’s blood,” he said softly.
Enders, by his side, had noticed it, too. “Longish chop,” he said.
“The wind is fair,” Hunter said.
“Aye. For another day or so.”
Hunter stared at the long, slow sea swell that rocked the Spanish warship back and forth at anchor. He swore. “Where is it from?”
“I’d guess,” Enders said, “that it’s straight up from the south, this time of year.”
In the late summer months, they all knew to expect hurricanes. And as consummate sailors, they were able to predict the arrival of these frightful storms as much as two days in advance. The early warnings were always found in the ocean surface: the waves, pressed forward by storm winds of a hundred miles an hour, were altered in places far distant.
Hunter looked at the still-cloudless sky. “How much time, do you reckon?”
Enders shook his head. “It will be tomorrow night at the latest.”
“Damn!” Hunter said. He turned and looked back at the galleon in Monkey Bay. She rode easily at anchor. The tide was in, and it was abnormally high. “Damn!” he said again, and returned to his ship.
He was in a foul mood, pacing the decks of his ship under the hot midday sun, pacing like a man trapped in a dungeon cell. He was not inclined to polite conversation, and it was unfortunate that Lady Sarah Almont chose this moment to speak with him. She requested a longboat and crew to take her ashore.
“To what end?” he said curtly. In the back of his mind, he wondered that she had made no mention whether he had visited her cabin the night previous.
“What end? Why to gather fruits and vegetables for my diet. You have nothing adequate on board.”
“Your request is quite impossible,” he said, and turned away from her.
“Captain,” she said, stamping her foot, “I shall have you know that this is no mean matter to me. I am a vegetarian, and eat no meat.”
He turned back. “Madam,” he said, “I care not a whit for your eccentric fancies, and have neither the time nor the patience to oblige them.”
“Eccentric fancies?” she said, coloring. “I shall have you know that the greatest minds of history were vegetarian, from Ptolemy to Leonardo da Vinci, and I shall have you know further, sir, that you are a common drip- knuckle and a boor.”
Hunter exploded in an anger matching hers. “Madam,” he said, pointing to the ocean, “are you aware in your monumental ignorance that the sea has changed?”
She was silent, perplexed, unable to connect the slight chop offshore to Hunter’s obvious concern over it. “It seems trivial enough for so large a ship as yours.”
“It is. For the moment.”
“And the sky is clear.”
“For the moment.”
“I am no sailor, Captain,” she said.
“Madam,” Hunter said, “the swells are running long and deep. They can mean only one thing. In less than two days’ time, we shall be in the midst of a hurricane. Can you understand that?”
“A hurricane is a fierce storm,” she said, as if reciting a lesson.
“A fierce storm,” he said. “If we are still in this damnable harbor when the hurricane strikes, we shall be smashed to nothing. Can you understand that?”
Very angry, he looked at her, and saw the truth - that she did not understand. Her face was innocent. She had never witnessed a hurricane, and so she could only imagine that it was somehow greater than other storms at
