It was a period of such sustained excitement that yesterday’s prize, Nuestra Señora del Carmen—carried by the armed boats under Mr Brett in a flat calm—was quite forgotten, and it was with some difficulty that the look-outs could keep their minds to the task of searching the horizon for the Gloucester’s topsails; for they were coming now to the rendezvous.
‘You will take sixty men, including the Spanish guides, Mr Brett. They are to be reliable men, who will neither get drunk nor run out of hand—if indeed the ship’s company can possibly provide such a number,’ said the Commodore, not sounding very hopeful about this. ‘And you will land here—’ pointing at the map.
‘Aye-aye, sir.’
‘Now let us go into the question of the men. There is Williams, who is a Nonconformist deacon at home, and …’
‘You can’t go in that rig,’ whispered Peter to Keppel. He whispered in the dark—the whole ship whispered, although they lay fifteen miles from the shore.
‘Yes, I can,’ said Keppel, pulling a villainous little jockey-cap further down on his skull—his bald skull, for he had lost all his hair at Juan Fernandez—‘I promised my Ma. It’s lined with steel, and she made the velvet bows herself.’
‘Silence there. Mr Ransome, have you mustered your men?’
‘Yes, sir. All present and correct.’
‘Lower away. Handsomely, now.’ A volley of sibilant, half-whispered oaths crushed a wretched hand who had tripped and rattled a grating.
‘Shove off. Give way.’
Peter sat back in the stern-sheets: he was trembling with excitement and tension, and he realised that it would be stupid not to try to relax during the long pull for the shore. He sat back and breathed easy: and in another minute he found that he was trembling again so that his larboard pistol made a little chattering sound against the hilt of his dirk.
Behind them the Centurion had already vanished: not a light showed on board. And between them and the ship came the two pinnaces, one from the Tryal’s Prize, pulling very quietly after the barge.
‘Take it easy. Stroke, pull long and easy,’ said Mr Brett. ‘We have plenty of time. This is not a race.’
It was a long pull in the dark. At one time Peter actually found that he had dozed, lulled by the steady and perfectly regular dip and heave of the oars.
‘Oh, sir,’ he said, waking up.
‘Quiet. I have seen them,’ said Mr Brett, not unkindly. Before them, low and twinkling over the water lay a necklace of light, the lights of Paita.
‘Steady, now. Steady,’ whispered the lieutenant. ‘Lie on your oars. Mr Andrews,’ he hailed quietly.
‘Sir?’ came the answer from the Tryal’s pinnace.
‘Mr Ransome?’
‘Here, sir.’ Ransome’s hoarse whisper carried over the water from the darkness a boat’s length away.
‘You both have your bearings? The fort is one point on the larboard bow now, and the church is five. And you follow my wake in any event.’
‘Aye-aye, sir,’ from the pinnaces, low and intense.
‘Give way.’
The lights were spread widely now: growing nearer, they twinkled no more. Nearer. And nearer. On the larboard, the shadowy form of a tall ship: was it the ship designed to carry away the treasure? There was no telling from the pedlar’s ‘the vast swimming castle, with a vast number of trees’. There was no telling: and they were seven hours late. Another ship and this one lit up.
A hail startled the night: it caught Peter’s breath in his throat. The hail repeated, more loudly still; and voices aboard. Lights flashing on the deck of the Spaniard, shouts and splashing of oars. ‘Los Ingleses, los Ingleses, los perros Ingleses,’ bawled at the top of his voice by the captain, and the noise of boats making fast for the shore.
‘Pull now, pull, you sons of bitches,’ roared the lieutenant, standing half-upright in the sheets. ‘Pull. In. Out. In. Out. Pull.’ Behind them came Andrews’ shouting and Ransome’s, lurid and hearty. The long strange shape of a moored galley shot by to starboard. Lights in the fort, lights running along the rampart. ‘Pull,’ cried Mr Brett. A flash, a bang and a deep rumbling whiffle just overhead: another double flash that lit up the fort and showed soldiers, momentarily fixed in movement. Then the crash on the shingle sent Peter nose downwards on the thwarts. Several people walked over him: but he was up and ashore. Already the men were formed, and he darted into his place. Something hit a stone bollard beside him and howled off into the darkness, and again the sky lit up with a crimson flash as the fortress guns went off.
‘Follow the lantern,’ shouted Mr Brett. ‘Double up, now.’
They ploughed over fifty yards of beach, and a salvo from the fort hurled itself into the sand they had just left.
Now they were in a street, sheltered from the cross-fire, and Mr Brett was ranging his forces. ‘Mr Andrews, carry on according to plan. Mr Ransome, form the same line as us,’ he said, shoving Hairy Amos and Sean back into the rank. ‘Any man who breaks the line will be flogged. Sing out as much as you like, but keep your stations. Light the torches—bear a hand, now. Williams and Tyson, bang on those drums. Carry on. Three cheers for the King.’
The earth-shaking cheer that followed this and the tremendous tattoo on the drums, the flaring torches, the uninterrupted bellowing of the sailors gave the impression of a multitude of enemies surging straight out of Hell. A straggling volley met them in the square, but the appalling yell of the Centurions, their instant and accurate return, cleared the Governor’s house from in front while the shrieking Tryals hurled themselves into it from the back.
‘Mr Ransome, stay here,’ said Mr Brett in the square, silent except for the distant noise of the townsmen’s flight. ‘Keep this Spaniard. Secure the Governor if he is to be found—the guide will know him. Mr Andrews, we will proceed to the fort.’
A single shot came from the roof of the Governor’s house. There was a loud and musical ping, and Peter saw Keppel sitting on the ground, holding his head.
‘Clear that roof,’ cried Ransome in a voice of thunder through the furious roar of the Centurions; and as Peter’s file marched off he saw Keppel stagger to his feet.
‘That is the main gate, sir,’ said the wretched guide, fast to the coxswain by a line round his middle. They were crouched under the shelter of a tumble-down wall, and over their heads the gun-embrasures stood ominous and clear, with a drift of smoke still wafting from them. The moment they left the wall they would be in point-blank range.
‘Mr Andrews, I am going to attempt the gun-ports to larboard. You will open fire and howl and create a diversion to starboard: if you can gain a footing, well and good. If not, keep up a fire at the slits and embrasures until you hear my whistle. Rogers, come here. You see that hole? You run for it when I give the word, and—who’s the next strongest?—Walton, you unship that Spaniard. Here, make him fast to this ring, and attend to what I say. Rogers will make you a back: you will clap on to the edge of that hole, that gun-port. We will come up over your shoulders. Understood? Mr Palafox, you and your party will do the same the next hole down. Now understand this: Centurions are silent, Tryals howl like the devil. Centurions to port, Tryals to starboard. Wait for my signal. One, two, three, go.’
With a roaring and bellowing behind him and the flash and crackle of musket-fire, Peter raced across the open ground, with Sean slowing to let him keep up. He had time to think, ‘If they don’t fire this minute they won’t be able to fire at all,’ and then he was swarming up Thomson’s back while Sean’s war-shriek rang from the battlement above him. He could not reach, his nails scraped on the stone. Sean’s hand grasped his, heaved him up. Sean was fleeting over the gun-platform in the light of a single lantern: he was hurtling straight for an advancing body of men with his cutlass up and with the rest of Peter’s party behind him. Sean sprang on his man with a terrible cry, missed his head, gripped his throat, dashed the hilt of his cutlass into his face, bore him down and hissed into his ear would he have his throat cut now or su
rrender?
The man, black in the face and unable to speak, kicked Sean in the stomach and Sean shortened his cutlass to put him to rest.
‘Stop teasing the man,’ said Peter peevishly, pulling Sean by the arm. ‘Let him alone, can’t you?’ Another kick from the infuriated bo’sun’s mate dislodged Sean: but this was the only angry blow struck in the action, for the fort was deserted and its defenders were still just to be seen hurrying urgently away.
Mr Brett blew his whistle. ‘Strike their colours,’ he said, passing the coxswain the Union flag to be hoisted.
‘No offence, joy?’ asked Sean, tenderly dusting the bo’sun’s mate’s collar.
‘Not the least in the world, cock,’ said the bo’sun’s mate, spitting blood.
‘Mr Palafox,’ said the lieutenant, ‘you know where you are?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Peter, taking his bearings from the main gate of the fort.
‘Then go at once to the Customs House. Kill anyone there at the least resistance. If the treasure is still there fire this rocket. If not, this one. Cox’n, give Mr Palafox the rockets. Take four men. I shall follow when the fort is secured. Understood?’
‘Aye-aye, sir. Sean, Davis, Brown, Thomson.’
He raced from the fort, across the side of the square, down the long, empty street, turned right towards the place they had landed, and there along the wall of the broad building that he knew was the Customs House he saw a small group of men staggering with a chest. ‘Ahoo,’ he roared, banging his pistol in the air.
‘Ahoo,’ roared Sean, and, ‘Ahoo,’ bellowed the remaining three. The men dropped their burden and fled madly.
‘This is it,’ cried Peter. ‘Kick in that door.’
The men hurled themselves against it. It was open, however, and they shot furiously into the Customs House. The solitary Negro in it turned grey, dropped his lantern and plunged out of a window.
Peter stared round in the light of the guttering candle. Row upon row of chests lined the walls, stood piled on the floor.
‘Here,’ he said, grabbing Sean’s cutlass and prising open a lid. ‘It’s all right,’ he cried, as the glint of the steel flashed back from the silver and gold. ‘Now come on,’ he said, ‘get that other chest in from the road. Brown, drop that,’ he snapped. ‘Jump to it. Heave. Heave-ho.’ he cried, straining at the handle of the chest in the street. ‘Dear Lord, but it’s heavy.’
‘’Tis heavy, Peter a cuishle,’ said Sean, picking it up, ‘but sure it’ll go hard if I don’t have Tim Colman’s field and a bull. You have not forgot the rocket, sir, dear, I am sure?’
‘I have not,’ said Peter. ‘Where’s the flint and the steel? Oh your soul to the devil,’ he cried as the flint refused its office again. ‘Now,’ he said, priming his empty pistol with powder. There was an instant flash, a glow, and a second later the rocket soared up to burst, in a red star that illuminated the five upturned faces, eager and tense, and told the fort and the squadron that the treasure of Paita was taken.
Chapter Eleven
PATTA LAY SEVEN HUNDRED MILES AWAY, FAR DOWN UNDER THE equator, far south of the great bay of Panama: seven hundred miles and three weeks of sailing to the south. The inhabitants of that arid and slatey town were building up their smoke-blackened walls of mud, dredging inefficiently for the sunk merchant-ships and galleys, rejecting, with ill-concealed contempt, the Governor’s explanation of the powerful reasons that had led him to stand outside the town with a numerous body of cavalry while the British sailors, fantastically dressed up in looted periwigs, laced coats and mantillas, joyously toiled day after day, carrying the heavy chests of silver to the boats that plied incessantly from ship to shore.
The said tars, now no more than a vivid and evil memory (and yet not such an evil memory either, for there had been no shadow of personal outrage or brutality; and the released prisoners from the prizes spread far and wide their account of the Commodore’s humanity—one ecclesiastic, a Jesuit who had messed with Mr Walter, even going so far as to state that the salvation of heretics was not wholly inconceivable)—no more than a memory in Paita, were now variously disposed about the island of Quibo. It had been a trying passage, with contrary winds, tremendous, suffocating heat and appalling downpours of equatorial rain that had rushed through the Centurion’s sun-dried decks to render every single thing within her wet, warm and, within twelve hours or so, resolutely mouldy. A tedious, long and uncomfortable voyage, and even at the end, when they had at last found Quibo—madly out of position on the charts—a foul wind had kept them standing off and on, and had forced the Gloucester, always an unfortunate ship, away to the leeward and over the horizon. But the men’s leaping high spirits had never flagged: there was not a man aboard who did not know to within a hundredweight or so the amount of the treasure that lay behind new bulkheads far below the waterline; there was not one of them who had not become an ardent calculator, a finished arithmetician; and even the lowest rating knew himself to be worth fifty pounds or more—an exhilarating sum for a sailorman.
The exceedingly important business of filling the ship’s watercasks was nearly finished—a doubly urgent task, for Paita had yielded barely a hogshead, there being never a spring in the town—and it had been done easily with a sweet stream running directly at hand. Now there was some time for liberty ashore, and the end of the island resounded with the sailors’ holiday. Sean, unmindful of his future as turtle-herd in chief, was passionately hurrying up and down in the blinding glare of the sun, turning the creatures as they hauled up on the sand. In another part of the island the assembled carpenter’s mates stood on tiptoe around an enormous alligator while Mr de Courcy Bourke, a Negro from Paita who, by a very remarkable coincidence, had known Mr Saumarez on the Jamaica station, and who had escaped with several other slaves from the Spaniards during the attack, skipped to and fro in front of the alligator’s nose. With a sudden terrifying rapidity the alligator charged for the twentieth time, snapping with a force that would have severed a topsail yard: Mr de Courcy Bourke leapt over the alligator’s upper jaw and stood poised on its scaly back. The carpenter’s mates scattered, shrieking with laughter: one fell, touched by the alligator’s lashing tail, and he would have ended his days at Quibo if Mr de Courcy Bourke, knowing in the ways of alligators, had not slid forward, with his gleaming black arms in a muzzle that prevented the huge jaws from opening.
Off shore a large and pertinacious group of seamen groped perpetually among the oyster-beds for the pearls they never managed to find, possibly because they opened the wrong sort of shell. Solitary, on a black rock in a gloomy shadow, Hairy Amos slowly extracted a sea-urchin’s spines from his horny foot. Amos, alone among the liberty men, did not sing: behind his beard he did not even smile. Hairy Amos was sad. He was the one Centurion who had got drunk ashore—blind drunk, drunk to such an extent that only the heat of the burning town had aroused him. This had been publicly, and unfavourably, mentioned by the Commodore himself during an address to the men, designed at once to commend the good conduct of the landing-party and to allay the frightful outbreak of wrangling between the men ordered ashore and the unfortunate who, left behind, had been deprived of their chance of making a booty. The Commodore had appeased the really dangerous tumult by insisting on fair shares all round: he had thrown in his own on the heap on the deck as a token. But he had also publicly rebuked hairy Amos, and this weighed on Amos’s soul. Even Dog-faced Joe, that walking sponge, had refrained; but not Amos, the squadron’s hairy shame.
A manta the size of a billiard-table planed out of the sea and fell with a slap like a mainsail taken aback. ‘Overgrown flatfish,’ said Amos, ‘I hope you stove in your stomach.’
A dazzling flight of brilliant macaws passed over his head to join the parrots and parakeets in the Carmel’s rigging. ‘Nasty dirty birds,’ observed Amos. ‘Always fouling the deck for poor sailormen. Yelling and bawling like—bo’suns.’
‘Well, if you insist,’ said Mr Walter, accepting a cake, ‘perhaps I co
uld manage another.’ Peter had sacked a pastry-cook’s shop in Paita for the chaplain, but already the mound was very much less—almost gone.
‘This is the kind I like best,’ said Mr Walter, holding up a spherical blob of marzipan about the size of an egg, with nine kernels stuck all over it and a piece of crystallised melon concealed within. ‘It has just a little more unction than the square sort, I believe. But, as I was saying, the Acapulco galleon is not to be considered as a merchant vessel. It belongs to the King of Spain and wears the royal colours at the main: its officers are King’s officers, and the merchants are only permitted to ship their bales by grace. It is a privilege that the merchants prize very highly, for this is the only way they can trade with the Orient—no other ships but the annual galleon are allowed, and they keep the secret of their navigation so close that there are no interlopers.’
‘So in this one ship they carry all their commerce, sir?’ said Peter, thoughtfully.
‘Just so. Gold and silver from Mexico to the Orient: then from Manilla in the Spanish Philippines, where the Oriental merchants gather, all the spices and silk that the silver has bought, come back to Acapulco. And I have heard it said, by trustworthy men’—sinking his voice—‘that the Acapulco ship carried a million pieces of eight.’
‘A million, sir?’ cried Peter.
‘A million,’ repeated Mr Walter.
‘A million, Sean,’ said Peter.