“Thanks,” Hunter gasped.
“Don’t thank me,” Enders said, nodding to the Moor. “The black bastard pushed me.”
Bassa, tongueless, grinned.
High above them, they saw El Trinidad begin to turn, and tack back to retrieve them.
“You know,” Enders said, as the three men treaded water, “when we return to Royal, no one will believe this.”
Then lines were thrown down to them, and they were hauled, dripping and coughing and exhausted, onto the deck.
Part VI
Port Royal
Chapter 34
IN THE EARLY afternoon hours of October 20, 1665, the Spanish galleon El Trinidad reached the east channel to Port Royal, outside the scrubby outcropping of South Cay, and Captain Hunter gave orders to drop anchor.
They were two miles from Port Royal itself, and Hunter and his crew stood at the railing of the ship, looking across the channel toward the town. The port was quiet; their arrival had not yet been sighted, but they knew that within moments there would be gunshots and that extraordinary frenzy of celebration that always accompanied the arrival of an enemy prize. The celebration, they knew, often lasted two days or more.
Yet the hours passed, and there was no celebration. On the contrary, the town seemed to grow quieter with each passing minute. There were no gunshots, no bonfires, no shouts of greeting across the still waters.
Enders frowned. “Has the Don attacked?”
Hunter shook his head. “Impossible.” Port Royal was the strongest English settlement in the New World. The Spanish might attack St. Kitts, or one of the other outposts. But not Port Royal.
“Something’s amiss, sure enough.”
“We’ll soon know,” Hunter said, for as they watched, a longboat put out from Fort Charles, under whose guns they were now anchored.
The longboat tied up alongside El Trinidad, and a captain of the king’s militia stepped aboard. Hunter knew him; he was Emerson, a rising young officer. Emerson was tense; he spoke too loudly as he said, “Who is the avowed captain of this vessel?”
“I am,” Hunter said, coming forward. He smiled. “How are you, Peter?”
Emerson stood stiffly. He gave no sign of recognition. “Identify yourself, sir, if you please.”
“Peter, you know full well who I am. What does it mean-”
“Identify yourself, sir, on pain of penalty.”
Hunter frowned. “What charade is this?”
Emerson, at rigid attention, said: “Are you Charles Hunter, a citizen of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and late of His Majesty’s Colony in Jamaica?”
Hunter said, “I am.” He noticed that despite the cool evening breeze, Emerson was sweating.
“Identify your vessel if you please.”
“She is the Spanish galleon known as El Trinidad.”
“A Spanish vessel?”
Hunter grew impatient. “She is, plain as your nose.”
“Then,” Emerson said, taking a breath, “it is my sworn duty, Charles Hunter, to place you under arrest on a charge of piracy-”
“Piracy!”
“-and so, too, all your crew. You will please accompany me in the longboat.”
Hunter was astounded. “By whose order?”
“By the order of Mr. Robert Hacklett, Acting Governor of Jamaica.”
“But Sir James-”
“Even as we speak, Sir James is dying,” Emerson said. “Now please come with me.”
Benumbed, moving in a kind of trance, Hunter went over the side, into the longboat. The soldiers rowed ashore. Hunter looked back at the receding silhouette of his ship. He knew that his crew was as stunned as he.
He turned to Emerson. “What the devil is happening?”
Emerson was more relaxed, now that he was in the longboat. “There have been many changes,” he said. “A fortnight past, Sir James took ill with the fever-”
“What fever?”
“I tell you what I know,” Emerson said. “He has been confined to bed, in the Governor’s Mansion, these many days. In his absence, Mr. Hacklett has assumed direction of the colony. He is assisted by Commander Scott.”
“Is he?”
Hunter knew he was reacting slowly. He could not believe that the outcome of his many adventures, these past six weeks, was to be clapped in jail - and no doubt hanged - as a common pirate.
“Yes,” Emerson said. “Mr. Hacklett has been stern with the town. Many are already in jail, or hanged. Pitts was hanged last week-”
“Pitts!”
“-and Morely only yesterday. And there is a standing warrant for your arrest.”
A thousand arguments sprang to Hunter’s mind, and a thousand questions. But he said nothing. Emerson was a functionary, a man charged with carrying out the orders of his commander, the foppish dandy Scott. Emerson would do his duty as he was ordered.
“Which jail shall I be sent to?”
“The Marshallsea.”
Hunter laughed at the ludicrousness of it. “I know the jailer of the Marshallsea.”
“Not anymore, you don’t. There is a new man. Hacklett’s man.”
“I see. “
Hunter said nothing further. He listened to the stroke of the oars in the water, and he watched Fort Charles loom closer.
Once inside the fort, he was impressed by the readiness and alertness of the troops. In the past, one could find a dozen drunken lookouts on the battlements of Fort Charles, singing dirty songs. This evening there were none, and the men were neatly dressed in full uniform.
Hunter was marched by a company of armed and alert soldiers into the town, through Lime Street, now unusually quiet, and then north along York Street, past darkened taverns, which normally glowed warmly at this hour. The silence in the town, the desertion of the muddy streets, was striking.
Marshallsea, the men’s prison, was located at the end of York Street. It was a large stone building with fifty cells on two floors. The interior stank of urine and feces; rats scuttled through the rushes on the floor; the men in the cells stared at Hunter with hollow eyes as he was marched, by torchlight, to a cell and locked inside.
He looked around his cell. There was nothing inside; no bed, no cot, just straw on the floor, and a high window with bars. Through the window he could see a cloud drifting across the face of a waning moon.
As the door clanged closed behind him, he turned to look at Emerson. “When shall I be tried for piracy?”
“Tomorrow,” Emerson said, and then turned away.
…
