Pistoleer: Pirates Page 5

  "And I told you the truth. Any escaped slave who reaches Florida is given their freedom so long as they become Catholics and swear allegiance to King Philip." Ignacio saw a signal flag being run up at the fort. "Do you have a signal flag to tell the fort that you come in peace?"

  With a hop and a skip, Robert was beside the signal flag trunk behind the wheel. He pulled out the orange and gold Portuguese pennant he had been given in Cape Verde, and ran it up underneath their English colors. Then they all waited, nervously, but the cannons of the fort remained silent. There was no salute but more important, there were no warning shots. All was good.

  * * * * *

  Robert and Daniel waited patiently while Weston was chewing the inner green bark of some tree that Ignacio had called a Cinchona. The building they were in was typical of what they had seen in San Agustin. It was like a number of long houses laid out to surround a courtyard, but long houses built of timber and brick and plaster, and with tile roofs that extended beyond the walls far enough to give shady places to sit around the edge of the courtyard

  Ignacio noticed their interest in the design of the building and told them that it was typical of Spanish buildings of the new world. The long narrow rooms with small windows and heavy doors were for sleeping in and for locking things up. Most of the daytime living was done in the shaded indoor-outdoor places around the courtyard. It was a comfortable building during hot weather because the stout walls stayed cool. Since stout walls faced out on all sides, and because the tile roof would not burn, it was a defendable building in case of attack.

  "Such tile roofs are not advisable,” Ignacio told them, "in places near to volcanoes. Some of my brethren found this out the hard way in Guatemala. There are many live volcanoes in Guatemala. When one of them erupted, our native converts left the safety of their thatched huts and fled into their new church to pray to God to protect them from the burning cinders of the volcano. Unfortunately, the volcano shook the earth and the tile roof of the church fell down and killed them all."

  Weston was making faces at how bitter the medicine bark was. Unfortunately for him, and for any others in this town who suffered from the bad-air fever, the bark came from a Jesuit house far away in Peru, so it was always in short supply in this tiny hospital run by Ignacio. A small tawny cat sauntered up to Weston and sniffed at his feet and then stretched.

  "Malaria is the curse of the Floridas," Ignacio told them as he chased the cat out of the room by swishing the folds of his robe while he stamped his feet. "It is because most of Florida is a swamp and the bad air from the swamp is what causes it. Most of my patients suffer from the malaria. Not that they die of it. It does not kill you, but it weakens you so that you die of pneumonia, you know, the bubbling-lung fever. My brothers in Peru have discovered that this bark can cure malaria if it is taken right away, but once the fever takes hold, then the bark can only ease it, not cure it. "

  "Why shoo the cat?" Daniel asked. "He'll keep the rats and mice away."

  "He was hunting the little lizards that climb the walls and eat insects, for in Florida the rats are so fierce that they chase the cats." Ignacio laughed at his own jest. "I like having the lizards in my hospital because they eat the biting flies. If I allow the cats inside, they eat the lizards and then my patients spend the night swatting mosquitoes instead of sleeping. Some of my brethren in Peru believe that cats may spread malaria, because in villages with many cats the fever is more common. It could be true, for we have many cats in San Agustin, and much malaria."

  Weston put the piece of bark down. "That is all I can stand for now. It is so bitter." The monk wrapped the left over bark in a large leaf and handed it to him with the instructions to chew a bit each day until it is all gone. Weston went to lie down, and the other men watched him in silence for a short while.

  "Are you enjoying San Agustin?" Ignacio asked them.

  "Very much" Robert replied politely. "It is like being back in England. It is well built and organized and respectable, not like the English colonies."

  "That is to be expected. The English colonies are just getting started, whereas San Agustin has been a town for eighty years now. You can build a lot of walls and lay a lot of cobblestone in eighty years. In truth, it should be larger by now, for when it was first settled the folk had high hopes for its future. They saw it as the gateway to the continent, and even built forts along the main rivers going inland.

  It has remained a dream unfulfilled, for Spain no longer has the manpower to build more colonies to the north and the west of here. Seventy years of war with the Netherlands has robbed us of our young adventurous men. So stupid, so shameful, what a waste."

  "You'll get no arguement from me about that,” Daniel replied. "So you say there are no Spanish colonies north of here, and none planned?"

  "None. Even the French have given up." Ignacio told them. "There was an English one, on the island of Rawnocke, and some small camps of English fishers, but they are all gone now too. Disappeared. The English and French blame us, but it was not our doing, well not all of it. My governor's official position is that the natives slaughtered them. Personally, I believe they died of some plague. Swamp fever perhaps. Why should European settlements be spared when so many native towns and cities have been wiped out."

  "Cities? There are cities north of here?"

  "No, I meant elsewhere in New Spain,” Ignacio replied. "If you could read Spanish I would lend you my copy of 'History of the Conquest of New Spain'. It was written by Bernal Diaz, who was a soldier with Cortes, and not a priest so I believe what he wrote. He tells that there were large and crowded cities all over Mexico before the conquest."

  "I was taught that Cortes slaughtered the natives,” Robert said. He had read History at Oxford in his youth.

  "That is true, but most of the city folk had been ravages by plagues before there were ever any battles. The plagues conquered New Spain for Cortes. They collapsed the governance of the cities so Cortes had no organized forces against him. That is why we Spanish, with so few men, won such a vast empire and so quickly. That and our having metal weaponry."

  Robert interrupted him. "Wait. You say that the natives of the New World have no metal weapons?"

  "Copper, silver, and gold only,” Ignacio replied, "No bronze, no iron. Our armour defeated their points. Our horses defeated their strategies. They had none, horses I mean. No husbanded animals at all. No horses, no donkeys, no cattle, no pigs, no sheep or goats, not even chickens."

  "So what did they eat?"

  "What they lacked in meat they made up for in the bounty of their sown fields." Ignacio told them. "Better food crops than any in Spain. You will see, that is, taste when we eat our evening meal. Did I mention they had no wheels? They were learned and skilled and worldly and yet everything was carried on the backs of men."

  Weston was trying to ask some questions of the learned Jesuit, but Daniel spoke louder to drown him out because his own questions were more critical to this voyage. "So is the coast north of here heavily populated by natives, and are they fierce?"

  "It used to be heavily populated,” Ignacio replied. "But not any more. Just as malaria strikes us down, so does the pox strike them down. I have been here for over twenty years, and every year there are fewer native villages along this coast. It is the same further north of here. Our ships rarely report seeing any occupied villages or sown fields any more. There used to be fishing villages beside every river mouth but now even they seem to be deserted. Every year more pigs and fewer people."

  "What's that? More pigs?"

  "Yes, the pigs are doing well. Oh of course, you would not know. Whenever we explore a new area we leave a mating pair of pigs behind. It means that the next time someone goes there they will have a ready source of meat. We've tried the same thing with goats and cattle, but the pigs are always the most successful."

  With a sly look, Weston stared up at Robert. "If you'll allow me to sail with you, captain, I will show you on the charts where the settlemen
ts and villages were. It would be much easier to set up a colony if there are already palisades and roofs."

  Ignacio swung around and gave Robert a hard stare. "You told me that your passengers were bound for New England. Did you lie to me?"

  "I did not lie. My passengers chartered the Swift to take them to Massachusetts, but Daniel is searching for a likely place for other settlers to make a home." He smiled. "He had his heart set on a coconut island, but so do the Caribbean privateers. Are there other trees as useful as the coco north of here."

  "You will have to find that out for yourself,” Ignacio told him, and then made his excuses to go and see to other matters.

  "Hmm," Daniel muttered softly, "We seem to have upset the good brother. I hope his offer of a meal is still good."

  * * * * *

  The coast north from San Agustin was one long barrier sand island that stretched for a half a day's sailing. At the north end of the island was the River San Juan, with the remains of an old fort at its mouth.. The river's estuary had many sea going channels and many low islands, and thus had the look and feel of the Fens. That is, if you ignored the sticky breathless heat and the biting flies. The flies swarmed so heavily that they did not linger.

  It was a shame that they were still too close to San Agustin to bother exploring for possible places for settling, because to the north of this estuary they sailed past a series of pleasant islands that were more than just high sandbars, and there was a good river that Weston told them was the Santa Maria. They spent the night anchored in the middle of the river and lit lanterns which burned all night while the crew fished with jig lines.

  In the morning they were hailed from the shore of the island to the north of them by some Spanish missionaries. Weston called the island San Pedro, and he offered to row alone through the shallows to speak with the monks, but mainly to ask them if they could spare him some of the Cinchona bark from Peru. He was allowed to go, but when he could not answer the monks' questions in Spanish, they walked away and disappeared behind some bushes and were replaced by some natives carrying fishing spears. Weston quickly rowed back to the Swift.

  For the next few days they sailed passed a procession of islands separated by rivers, but they did not step ashore at any of them because from the ship they could clearly see that none of them had a hill, and therefore any fresh water would be suspect. Besides, without a hill there would be no place for a lookout, nor any place to escape storm tides and surges. Having no hill was a failing of his village in the Fens that Daniel's new colony would not share.

  Each of the larger islands seemed to have a native village surrounded by a palisade wall built on the south end, but as Ignacio had warned, they all seemed to be deserted. The crew spent a lot of time fishing as they drifted along the coast on light winds, but they caught almost nothing. It was Daniel's suggestion that perhaps the fish were seasonal, and that these villages were only used during fishing season.

  Weston agreed, "Or are not used during storm season, or the dry season when the drinking water would putrefy, or when the biting flies were too thick." He looked at Daniel. "If that is true, then perhaps we shouldn't be here either." The observation caused them to hurry their pace. There were still no hills to be seen anywhere either on the barrier islands or behind them on the mainland, and therefore no reason to put ashore and explore.

  Out of interest more than exploration they did drop anchor off the island of Santa Elena which Weston had told them had once been the Spanish capital on this coast. Supposedly at that time it had been the size of San Agustin. He was wrong, for the ruins were of a town nowhere near that size. There were no signs that Santa Elena was still in use, even by natives. Since they assumed that it had failed due to plague, either from bad water or bad air, they did not linger.

  The coastline had turned and was no longer running due north, but east of north. They passed an endless line of islands and barrier islands, some wooded with oak but mostly wooded with pine. They had a choice of sailing the open sea or sailing the protected waterways behind a barrier islands. Whichever they chose they made sure that each day by late afternoon they were in the waterways so they would have the option of sailing slowly through the night, or anchoring. There were so many islands, hill-less islands, but there was an eerie emptiness to these long waterways, for they saw no villages, or people, or boats.

  Since the Swift was lateen rigged, it was the diagonal yards that gave height to the sails, rather than the masts. The masts were short and stout, and each had a crow’s-nest platform on the top for use by the riggers. While in these shallow, sheltered waterways, the crew took turns sitting in the crow’s-nest watching for sand bars and channels and schools of fish. From the height of the crow’s-nest the men could gauge the width of the islands, and the width of any waterways. They could see far enough ahead to chose the best of the channels and they could spot any hills that may be worthy of exploration.

  Daniel was no longer searching for an island to settle on, but for any hill close to the sea coast. Hills seemed to be as rare as people and boats, and perhaps the lack of hills explained the lack of people, for a large storm would put most of this shoreline under water.

  Poor Thomas Weston had now used up the small amount of magic bark that Ignacio had spared him, but it had not been enough to cure him so again he was feverish. When the fever turned to delirium they made a bed for him in the command cabin and Anna and Edward took turns tending him, feeding him salty broth, and trying to keep him cool, or warm, depending on the stages of the fever. The bad-air fevers seemed to go from sweat to chills in a pattern that repeated every two days.

  After days of quiet sailing on calm waters in light winds, the coastline turned from stretching northeast, to due east, and then surprisingly to the southeast. The watchers in the crow’s-nest reported what seemed to be a great point of land in the distance. After about ten miles more one of the men called down to Daniel that the next island must form the point, but that it had a wide waterway behind it.

  As large points of land tended to be places of wind and current, Daniel decided to steer north into the waterway to check its depth. Once in the channel the watch called down that not only did the southern end of this island form a point, but that most of the island ran north, and so did the waterway behind it. He decided to short cut the point by sailing north up the waterway behind the island and thus not need to brave going around the point.

  After sailing most of the day up the waterway, the watch called down that the waterway was looking more and more like a river and that the river was bending inland. With much cursing at their luck and at their delirious would-be pilot Weston, they turned and made their way slowly back along the same waterway searching for any channel to the sea that was deep enough for them. Eventually they gave up and sailed all the way back towards the point. Despite having sailed so far inland on a river estuary, there were still no occupied villages, no tilled fields, no people, no boats, and more importantly, no hills.

  The sun was dropping when they asked Weston about this point but the man was still delirious and all they could make out from his chattering lips was that this point must be called Cape Fear. The name was ominous so they made an early stop to wait for the morning before rounding the point.

  The next morning on a slack tide and with the help of the early morning's offshore breeze, they went out into a calm sea and rounded the point without incident. Once around, they were swept north along the shore by a strong current which helped them to make a quick passage away from the point. Cape Fear had not been so fearful after all.

  The next length of coastline first stretched northward but then it slowly turned in a long sweep towards the northeast and eventually directly east. They sailed along a string of islands that were definitely barrier islands, for they were long and thin, and had a wide waterway behind them. Still there were no people or hills.

  The next morning the coastline surprised them by bending southeast towards the sunrise which had them expectin
g another great point of land. This time Daniel refused to turn into the waterway behind the point for fear that again they would loose another day to an island that was actually a peninsula, and to a waterway that became a river . Instead he chose to keep offshore and round the point on the sea side of the barrier island.

  To round the point formed by the end of the sand island, they had to sail almost southeast, but once they were around the point they would be heading north east. Daniel expected there to be strong currents because the tide was running out from behind the island, and he expected there to be a string of sand bars off the point. He therefore chose caution over speed and made a wide turn to keep the Swift far away from the shore and in deep water with lots of space to tack.

  Also out of caution, every passenger was cleared from the deck, and were replaced by the entire crew, all standing by to be useful. All this time, Robert had been in the cabin cooling Weston's neck and forehead with damp cloths, trying to break him out of his delirium long enough to tell him about this point. It was only when Robert stepped up onto the aft castle that Daniel told him that he had decided to round the point rather than explore the waterway.

  "Well, sail her wide of the point then,” Robert told him the obvious, which earned him 'that look' from his friend.

  As they swung further south to make a wide arc around the point, they had to adjust to a freshening wind coming from the north rather than from the shore. That would mean that once they had made the turn, they would need to tack their way north. They reached deep water much sooner than they expected, and much deeper than they expected. Although that removed the risk of sandbars, it meant that the swells were building in height and breadth. The Swift wallowed and pitched and created many green faces.

  "Something is wrong,” Daniel called out to Robert. "The wheel don't feel right." He wrenched on the wheel and then held it. "And them whitecaps don't look right,” he said nodding towards the wind. The waves seemed to be going in two directions at the same time and were forming foaming peaks all around them but without breaking.