In the midst of it I heard, “Run up the colors! Man the canoe!” I had no idea what the canoe was, but I knew the colors would either strike terror or a challenge in the souls of our prey. They would either surrender or begin a terrible battle in which we prisoners could die more easily than the sailors. If they sank this crock we were doomed.
What followed was eerie calm, a chorus of cheering, then more silence. The English had taken another ship by means of that wrenching maneuver that tossed us off our feet. I lost my fear as soon as I had heard the cheers, since the battle was won. I stood upon the wale and got my eye as close to the little hole as I could, wishing I were on deck to watch. We floated beside a great ship, as large as the one that had first taken us. The name on her aft was Castellón. I saw “our” longboat coming alongside the Castellón and men climbing aboard with no shouting nor fighting at all. Sailors from this vessel threw ropes between the two, stitching them together. I heard a drum playing and a whistle blew.
I peered right to left trying to see anything more, and was about to step away from the hole when I heard a pistol shot. Someone on our ship shouted, “Trap! It’s a trap!” and the air filled with the sounds of swords and axes clashing, men commanding orders, men groaning, dying, things and people falling overboard. Cannons roared from both ships. After many long minutes, the firing of cannons ceased, but pistol fire continued as long as the first battle. What had seemed a peaceful surrender turned to a bloody slaughter.
The air belowdecks filled with smoke and the women began a chorus of wailing that we were all to perish. From overhead a short silence broke with a weary-sounding round of cheer. For several hours the English sailors boarded and returned, taking goods from the Castellón to the Falls Greenway. Now and then a call echoed above but I grew tired of watching. Patience was not curious and cared not at all to do it. She took off her petticoat again and rolled it for something to put her head upon. She lay there at my feet, staring at the beams overhead whilst I stared out the hole. I wondered if all this fighting and plundering would take the place of our morning goat soup, and I pressed against my middle, wishing I had another of those precious stolen oranges.
The day waned and the sailors talked more loudly. Some moaned in pain. Others shouted and called to each other. Hour after hour, the sounds did not change. Then, a surprise came such as I had never imagined. Music! I heard a fiddle and drums, and some kind of high-pitched flute. The fiddler played and played, and stamping feet joined in the beat of the drum. The sounds became more drunken and loud, the music less easy to follow. The hatch above us opened. Rafe MacAlister came down the ladder steps followed by a sailor and stomped straight to the cage that held Patience and me. He motioned the man to open the lock, and took Patience by the arm. She went with him. He stepped through the gate as the sailor looked through the women and chose an African slave. “Know ye English words?” he asked her. “I favor singing and dancin’.”
“I come by some,” she answered.
“Up top wid ye.”
Later, I heard music again. Patience did not come down. I thought about the Irish girl with the long red hair. How she had been taken to the banquet. Maybe Patience was dancing and eating. I thought about the splashes late in the night and I tried not to think about Patience eating until she burst, or of her falling overboard. I tried not to think about the sounds of the laughter and dancing. Foreign, delicious smells wafted through the wooden floor. I imagined them having all my favorite sweets. I vowed to try not to think of them eating but the more I tried the worse my hunger grew, so I closed my eyes. I hummed to the tunes amidst the perfume of turtle soup and roast pork haunch.
I thought about the rules of pudding instead. I do not know who made rules about pudding, but there are rules. Pudding should always be larger than the smallest child’s head, was one rule. And if it had fruits it should not have hard sauce, but without fruit it should always have sauce. Sauce, I decided, was better when it was warm. And if it had rum in it and Pa lit it at the table that was always nice. I liked the way it glowed around the edges of the flames, kind of blue-green, as the color of the bay most days. I liked the way it was sweet and hot and left a hot place in the back of my throat after I swallowed it. If Patience was having a banquet with pudding I should like to know what kind of pudding was made by pirates, who might not follow the rules. If they had no pudding, I supposed after a difficult day as this when they had been tricked and fought for their lives, one should understand. A roast leg of pork or mutton would do. Perhaps chicken. A string of drool slipped from my lip and drizzled onto my chin. I wiped it away, angry because I had no pudding.
Without food, the other thing I longed for was sleep. That night it did not come, so empty was the place where Patience should have slept. All the other women around me were asleep when the sound of the jail door opening and shutting cut through the rhythmic breathing of midnight.
Patience tiptoed over sleeping women to what had become our place, again carrying a parcel, and again she laid herself down, curled tight as a snail, away from me. She spoke not a word but soon in her sleep she moaned and whimpered. I lay beside her but did not sleep. After a while, she began to whisper, “No. Please not again. No, no.”
I did not touch her, but I wondered if her feet had blistered from too much dancing. Familiar sounds awoke me, the watch changing, the clanking of chains, thumping of hard boots on the deck above, men calling orders. Light came in the hole above the wale. Most of the sailors above slept, their raucous snores a constant hum. Women in my cell sat up and stirred.
When Patience sat up, I looked on her with horror. Her face was blue and one eye swollen, her top lip had blood matted in the corner and it was as round as if she had hidden an egg in it. She put the parcel in my lap and lay back, covering her eyes with her arms. Her gown was nearly gone, worn out and torn; it was all but indecent.
“What you got there, missy girl?” a woman asked.
I peeked into the parcel. It was a cake or loaf of some kind. It smelled fruity and tangy. “It is Patey’s,” I said. “From the dancing.”
Patience laid her hand on my arm. Fresh scabs covered her knuckles. I looked from her hand to the loaf to the woman. The women around us shushed and gathered close. Wretched hunger painted all their faces gray as a tombstone. My eyes rested on Patey’s, and she nodded to me.
“It is—to share,” I said, too softly. I repeated it louder, feeling my heart sink as I said the words. I could have gobbled the whole thing. I had just been thinking that I did not want to share it, even with Patey, rather steal it for myself and eat the entire cake. And here stood twenty-one other people to take a bite. I stuck my thumb into the loaf and pulled off a chunk about an inch wide. I held it to the closest person. For a moment I wondered if they would come for it and beat me and take the thing, but each one waited, silently. Because they were gentlewoman-like about it, I did my best at making the same-sized pieces. When each person had had a token amount there were about enough crumbs left for three more. I pressed a hunk into Patey’s hand.
“I do not want it,” she said.
“You eat dat, girl,” came a voice. Others chimed in. “Don’t spare you’self. You take some!”
I took a bite of my piece. It tasted sweet but strange. “It is not bad,” I said. “’Twould be much helped by rum and hard sauce.” Some of them thought that was wondrously funny, and many women laughed.
Then one came to Patience and put her hands comfortingly on Patey’s head. “We know, girl, what dat cake cost. You keep t’inking how you save all our lives with it.”
I said, “There’s one extra piece. Who shall have it?”
The woman who held Patience’s head said, “Give it to dis girl, here. Keep her heart strong. When you eat dat, girl, you takes all our hearts in with it. Dat keep you.”
I looked at the African woman more closely as Patience dutifully sat up and chewed on the morsel of cake. She was the woman who had gone up the ladder with Patience, but she had not c
ome down with cake, or with bruises. She must not have dared to steal some, too.
After that time, the system of feeding and airing prisoners changed. There were so few sailors left whole from the surprise attack that to man the Castellón had left the Falls Greenway shorthanded. Both ships moved slowly under half sails. Often they brought us abovedecks and left us for hours at a time. I heard one of the English tell a lady that she would get a larger share of food by some mopping. I think it was not a question but an order, for they put us all to cleaning and scouring. They sent me around with a raveled rag to polish the brightwork.
Much as I rubbed, not much changed, but I cared not the least. What mattered was that I was above and fed and could feel the air on my face. In short order I grew to love the sea spray and the sight of dolphins running alongside us, even the rocking of the ship as she moved through the water. There was a certain front-to-back, side-to-side sway that felt as comforting as a hammock on a summer day. Our friend the African slave woman had told us her name. Her slave name was Cora, but she said her real name was Cantok. She said to call her Cora until she died, to pray for Cantok so the spirits in heaven would know who I meant. She calls me “Miss Resolute” and Patience is “Miss Talbot,” instead of “Missy,” which is proper. It was convention that made that rule, rather like not scratching yourself in public, for I think she is not as old as Patey, and could be our friend and playmate if we were all back at Two Crowns. Cora can read as well as Patience and she has sworn us not to reveal that, too. It is quite a responsibility keeping someone’s life inside my heart and not letting any of it slip out my mouth, so I must think about things I say. Captivity was closing my lips.
CHAPTER 4
October 29, 1729
I had almost forgotten we were sailing north, until one day August approached me again. It had been a fortnight since I had seen him last, and he had changed. His face appeared gaunt and hollows had sunken his eyes. The eyes themselves held no sparkle but were dull and lifeless, withered as if the spirit in him had fled and naught was left but the skin. I turned away from him and worked my rag around the knob on the captain’s door.
“You’re alive?” he asked.
“I am,” I said. “Are you? You look as if the duppies have taken your soul to hell and left it there.” I said that because I wanted to hurt him for being a traitor. He had seemed so robust while boasting about signing articles.
“Maybe they did. So many was—butchered. Like swine.”
“I heard one of the English say the ship was trapped.”
“Bloody—I have never seen so much blood.”
“And did you fight?”
He gulped, trying not to gag. “Spaniards.”
“With pistol and cutlass? You fought?” I could not imagine August, slight and gangling, brandishing a cutlass and flying from a yard.
“They made me clean up the deck. Sharks, you know, circling for days. Hark, though, I have my share of rum, now. As good quantity as any sailor,” he said, nodding and forcing himself to smile.
“La, August. Are you really my brother? Maybe a good quantity of rum is the difference between what’s called ‘fierce’ and plain ‘fear.’” He turned and made away, but his steps lacked levity. I called after him, “Someone has beaten Patience and blackened her eye. You tell them to leave her be, Seaman Coxswain Second Class.”
A few days later I was still scrubbing brass as the sun began to sink; I filled a bucket with seawater from a tackle apparatus, off the port side. I had grown nimble at the task. While dropping a bucket was simple, hauling one up without spilling its contents was no small thing. So long as I pulled slowly I kept most of the water in. I was after my task as the setting sun turned the moisty air to green and then gold. Through the mist where sea and sky became one brassy cloud, I spied a ribbon of black laid on like a mark from a tarman. Not long after I saw it, a fellow rushed past me, put his dirty paw on that brass doorknob I had just shined, and called out, “Captain? Cay off the port amidships. We’re in sight of the outer reef.”
“Halloo, good man,” I called to the sailor as he returned. “What coast is that?”
The man sneered at me but he said, “Cay Largo.”
Panic took me. Where was Cay Largo? Was this the northland we had come to? The end of our travels and the beginning of some new villainy? Although shipboard life was not comfortable, Patience had endured no further beatings, and our food rations had neither been shortened nor improved. I took my bucket of water and returned to the deck as if to mop with it. Looking in before I poured it, I saw a tiny fish had come up in the bucket, a wee striped fellow. I chased him through the water and caught him against the side, lifting him from the water. His fine gills strained for air and his mouth opened and closed as if he were wishing water to flow through him as usual. The working of him was as exquisite as any clockwork toy in my bedroom, and infinitely more delicate.
I put the fish back into the bucket and carried him to the side. “It is not for us, to be in familiar waters, wee fish,” I said. “Go to my mother at the big house of Two Crowns on the lee side of Meager Bay, Jamaica. Tell her I am coming. Tell her to pray for us.” I lowered the bucket over the side, and said to the fish, “It is a long way. I will pray for you, too.”
The cries of seabirds, the freshening smell of tidewaters, and the greening of the sky swelled some longing inside me as I had never known before. I held the rope as long as I dared. I imagined that I could see the fish leaving the wooden coffin in which I had caught him and making for a southerly current. The orange of the horizon deepened. A rush of gold light painted the wood of the ship and a thickening fog softened the world to my eyes. The only thing before me with sharp edges was the bucket in my hands. Across the water I saw not merely the small cay of land but in the distance a heavy cloud perched on the surface of the sea. A foul odor came in whiffs, but the pissdale was not far from where I stood and some sailor stood before it, so I returned with my bucket to my task.
One of the captive men motioned to me. He gestured with the hob of kindling he carried. “See here, girl,” he said. “Don’t suppose you caught any tatties in that?”
Ach. He was Irish. I decided to pretend I could not tell. “No, good man,” I replied. “I am made to clean brass knobbings from morn till dark.”
“Well, see ye add some to season the pease, as we got no fresh water left nor any salt other than what crusts the splinter of dried beef at the bottom of the pot.”
“You want to make soup of ocean water?”
“Just a nogginful. It helps the taste.”
A small iron cauldron hung from a trammel over a brazier in the center of the deck. Patience and Cora knelt beside it. Under the watch of an English sailor, Cora was holding a dagger, cutting calabash in chunks and slipping them in it. A whole pineapple roasted in the coals, giving off a delicious fragrance. I hoped Patience would fare more kindly now, and cooking was a good chore for her, for perhaps she would get a little squash rind or dried beef suet that fell into a folded sleeve. I meant to ask them if they had seen the cay afloat in the mist on the water, but for a moment, I stared at the world in this strange golden light.
The sun was reaching the horizon and had painted the entire ship in shades of amber. The brass fittings appeared to be solid gold. Light flashed off the captain’s glass window like liquid fire.
At once from overhead a voice called, “Dogwatch to the deck! Mast on the windward!” He sang the last word, lengthening it long as all the other words he had said.
We girls shrank against a hogshead and a bale of something wrapped in rough cloth and tarred, as we were surrounded by sailors, all peering this way and that. Finally came the ship’s captain with his long glass. He climbed halfway up the mainmast to the wide step built there, and hanging by one arm looked through the glass all about the area. When he returned to the deck, he motioned to several of the crew.
I knew them by now. The captain’s name was John Hallcroft. The quartermaster was Percival
Dinmitty, and the boatswain went by Aloysius though I never heard whether that was a given name or surname. They circled right next to where we knelt by the fire brazier. Patey, Cora, and I shrank down and did not move, trying to become but shadows upon the deck.
Captain Hallcroft said, “It’s a ship of the line. Looks French. We’ve no one left to man her even if we take her.”
“We’ll take ’er, Cap’m,” said Aloysius. “Our men are stouthearted to the last.”
I watched the captain as those bragging words made play upon his face. I could see that the man Aloysius had little thought other than fighting and plundering, while Captain Hallcroft held responsibilities in mind. Even a girl young as I knew that for this ship, just as the ships that came to Meager Bay, there was a master someplace back in England who’d paid for the rights to her cargo. It was a risk to what he now carried to take another ship without adequate defenders. I wondered, would the others take us instead? He pursed his lips and tapped the glass with the fingers of both hands as if he were playing it like a flute. “No. We’ll make way. Strike the sails and drop the small anchor.”
I was well away from the men who had argued over tossing me overboard on the Saracen ship; indeed, Hallcroft was not one of those. Hearing that, I believed I was fond of Hallcroft. Perhaps he had been one of many kind and gracious captains who discussed cargoes in my pa’s study. Then I remembered that I was the cargo, and I seethed with hate.
Dinmitty cleared his throat and spat on the deck, narrowly missing Cora’s skirt hem. “There’s no’ a drap o’ clear water left. Rations will go to half tomorrow. If we don’t move along smart, they’ll stay on half for four days, then a quarter.”
Hallcroft nodded. “As you say, then. We will make for land in a few days. For now have the men heave to.”