CHAPTER IX
THE PICAROON
"Guert," said Vine Avery, as they stood together, with their backs against the main boom of the Noank, "what do you think of this?"
"Think?" said Guert. "Well! It's the first time I ever saw summer in winter."
"They're having good sleighing in New London," said Vine. "Skating, too."
"Guess so," said Guert. "I wish my mother were here, and Rachel Tarns with her. They'd enjoy this."
"My mother's made two West India trips," replied Vine. "She knows all about it. Likes it, too."
"It's the laziest kind of cruising, though," said Guert. "We've dodged away from some sails, and we've run after some, but we haven't taken anything."
"Our chances'll come, boys," put in Captain Avery himself, as he came strolling along the deck. "Not just 'bout here, maybe. Yonder on the easterly Bahamas. Not many British traders are likely to be met hereaway."
"What are we here for, then, father?" asked Vine. "What's your notions?"
"We had to," said the captain. "The Frenchman we spoke, told me the Florida Channel's alive with British cruisers. We sighted two of 'em, you know, and had to run for it."
"Where next?" asked Vine.
"We'll take a course toward Porto Rico," said his father; "then up the coast of Cuba. We'll try the Bahama Channel, and the Santaren, and the Nicholas. I want to send home some prizes, pretty soon, on British account."
Day after day, the Noank had been hunting, hunting, farther and farther into the southern sea, through good weather and bad. All the while Guert Ten Eyck had been at school. Up-na-tan had laboriously tried to teach him whatever he himself knew about guns, large and small. The other sailors had done their duty by him, concerning ropes and sails and points of seamanship. Captain Avery had driven him hard at his books on navigation. Therefore, if the cruising had been more or less lazy business for others, it had contained a good deal of hard work for the young sea apprentice. He was in a fair way to be made a good sailor of, and to be ready in due season to handle a ship.
"What you want most," Captain Avery had said, "is a long v'y'ge on a square-rigged vessel, under a hard captain. I'll find a chance for you one o' these days. You can't learn everything on board a schooner."
That idea was growing steadily in Guert's mind, and he now and then found himself dreaming of all sorts of perilous cruises in great American three-masters. By these splendid ships of his imagination, all of which were as yet unlaunched from any shipyard, the best keels of England were to be met and beaten. He was to command one of them, and was to become a captain first, and then a commodore. It was all an entirely natural young sailor's ambition, but it was looking far away into the future of his country. All it was good for now was the help it gave him in his pretty severe schooling.
Just at this present hour, leaning against the boom and gazing at the low coast line of the islands, he was calling to mind the many yarns he had heard concerning them. He had read about them, a little. He knew how they had been discovered by the Spaniards, and then taken from them, part of them, by the English and the French. He knew how the Carib natives had been slaughtered, and he had heard, from Coco in particular, of the horrible manner in which the tobacco and sugar plantations had been provided with African slaves.
Vine, too, was thinking, but of a very different matter.
"Guert," he said, "away out yonder, easterly, there's the queerest patch in all the Atlantic. It's where all the loose seaweed and driftwood and wreckage float together. There are currents that whirl in there and make a centre of it. More and more seaweed and other plants grow on that stuff year after year, and it's all a kind of swamp on the surface, with deep water under it. They call it the Sargasso Sea. We were swept into the edges of it, once, and it took a fresh breeze to pull us out. I don't just know if a craft like this could plow her way across it."
"I guess she could," said Guert, "but I don't want to try. What I want to see is Cuba and Porto Rico."
Away beyond them, hardly visible in the distance, was a tree-covered point of land. Captain Avery was studying it through his telescope, and they heard him mutter to himself: —
"I don't know whether or not that is Watling's Island. If it is, we've made a better run on this tack than I thought we had. One good, long reach beyond that and we'll begin to be in the track of the traders."
"Whoo-oop!" suddenly rang out the war-cry of Up-na-tan, from somewhere up the mainmast.
"Where away?" shouted the captain. "What do you see?"
"No see!" came down from the redskin. "Hark! Hear gun! Hark ahead! See point! More gun!"
His ears had been better than theirs, but, after a moment of intense listening, the entire ship's company of the Noank felt sure that they heard the dull boom of far-away cannon.
Every sail was already set to take so fair and fresh a wind, and the swift schooner was eating up the distance rapidly.
"All hands make ready for action!" shouted the captain. "Risk or no risk, I'm goin' to see what it is."
His orders went out fast, but they went to the ears of men who had sprung away without them. All the guns had been manned instantly.
Coco and Guert and half a dozen more were at the pivot-gun, but Up-na-tan did not come down at once. The captain's order kept him aloft as the best lookout and listener he had. Louder, now, at intervals, came the ominous sound of the distant guns.
"No big gun yet," called down the keen-eared Indian. "No big war-ship. Noank run right along."
"The chief is worth his weight in gold!" exclaimed the captain. "That's jest what I wanted to know, before roundin' that there p'int. I don't care to run under the guns of a British cruiser."
Ships which are running toward each other under full sail cut every mile in two in the middle. For instance, they need to run only two miles instead of four to get together. There was a dense forest growth on the point of Watling's Island, if that were indeed the land to windward, for the breeze was westerly. Everything beyond was hidden from view until the Noank passed the outer reef and tacked seaward, running almost wing and wing.
"Whoo-oop!" came fiercely down from the red man's perch. "'Panish flag. Three-master. Trader. Not many gun. Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Kidd! Kidd! Black flag schooner! Pirate! Not so big as Noank. Small gun! Take her quick! Kill 'em all! Whoo-oop!"
"Hurrah!" arose in a general roar from the crew of the Noank, more than one voice adding, vociferously, the desire that was felt to smash the picaroon.
"Ready, all, now!" sang out Captain Avery. "The American flag is against the black flag, the world over. We'll fight it, every time!"
Fierce shouts of eagerness replied to him, and the men were stripping themselves for a hard fight. The very most of clothing that was actually needed under that hot sun, by men who were to handle cannon, was a shirt and trousers, and many of the brawny backs were even bare. Muskets, pikes, pistols, cutlasses, were bringing up from below. Ammunition, plenty of it, was serving out to all the guns, and now, as the point of land was left to starboard, all eyes could see what kind of work had been cut out for the privateer.
The Spaniard, as her flag declared her, was a three-master of, probably, not more than six hundred tons. She was crowding all sail, but she was evidently heavily laden.
"She has too much cargo for good runnin'," growled Sam Prentice. "That buccaneer has the heels of her."
"What's worse'n that," said the captain, "she has nothin' but popguns to fight him with. He won't sink her, though. What he wants is to run along side and board her."
"Then it'll be good-by to every livin' soul that's in her," said the mate. "We'll jest put a stopper on all that!"
"Up-na-tan," shouted the captain, "come down to your gun! We shall be in fair range in three minutes. Then give it to 'em as fast as you can load and fire."
"Ugh!" was all the response they heard, and the Manhattan warrior came down so swiftly that he was at his gun almost before they knew it.
There was a pitiful scene, just then, on board the unlucky Spaniard. She had many passengers as well as much cargo. Women and children were crouching in terror upon her deck, or hiding hopelessly away in her cabins. Fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, were gazing in awful despair at the horrible black flag of murder and ruin, which was so evidently nearing them, minute after minute.
"The Santa Teresa is doomed!" groaned the Spanish captain, and then he raised his voice to shout courageously: "Men! we will fight to the last! We'd better go to the bottom, than to let those devils get on board!"
"We'd better die fighting, than stand still to have our throats cut, or to walk the plank!" came back to him from among the men.
Even the women begged for weapons. There were boys and girls who were fiercely handling firearms, and swords, and pikes. Numerous as might be the buccaneers, they were likely to win a costly victory upon the deck of the Santa Teresa.
"There goes our mizzenmast," called out her mate to the captain. "We've no chance left, now!"
"We never had any, Roderigo," replied the captain. "O God! Here they come!"
"Ho! Captain Velasquez!" came from the man at the wheel. "A sail to larboard! A schooner!"
"A Yankee flag!" said Mate Roderigo. "Captain! She's heading this way!"
"Alas!" mourned the captain. "What can a Yankee sugar-boat do for us?"
A mournful wail went up from his women passengers as they heard him, but a tall gentleman near him touched his elbow.
"Captain!" he said, "look again. That American does not seem to fear the black flag. See! She is coming on full sail. What can it mean?"
"Perhaps she does not yet know what they are, Señor Alvarez," sadly responded the captain. "She will be as hopelessly lost as we are."
So thought the buccaneer captain himself, at that moment, for he and his hideous crew were already rejoicing over two triumphs to come instead of one, and a second feast of bloodshed after taking the Spaniard.
The black flag commander was a short, thin, tiger-faced man. He was gaudily dressed, as were also some who seemed to be his lieutenants. As for his crew, they were of all sorts. They were the offscourings of several nations, including Englishmen, French, Dutch, and Africans. They were at this moment yelling savagely, as they loaded and fired their guns. Not one of these was larger than a short six-pounder, although there was an absurd number of them, considering the size of the vessel. She was schooner-rigged, but she was much more lightly constructed than the Noank. Her breadth of beam was somewhat greater, and she might be speedy. Precisely such craft were sometimes built for the slave trade. They were expected to carry only human cargoes, as a rule, and to make swift runs from African slave barracoons to American markets. Delays in such voyages implied heavy losses of black captives who would surely die in the hold.
"We will take the Yankee schooner first," was the decision of the pirate captain. "We must cripple the Spaniard, so she cannot get away. Two prizes are better than one. We need that schooner yonder, for our own trade."
Loud laughs and jeers replied to him from many scores of throats, for the buccaneer Leon was positively over-thronged with sea-wolves.
"Steady with the helm there!" rang out on board the Noank, as she arose like a duck upon the crest of a long sea.
"Ugh!" said Up-na-tan, as the sheet of flame sprang from the brazen lips of his long eighteen. "Whoop!"
"Struck her!" exclaimed Captain Avery. "That was a good shot!"
"Between wind and water!" shouted Sam Prentice, studying the pirate through his glass. "It took her as she heeled, and it knocked a hole in her you could roll a barrel through."
Whether or not any bodily harm had been done to any pirate, a chorus of astonished yells and imprecations went up from her crowded deck. All the ears there could hear and understand the crash of timbers under them, which had followed close upon the good shot of Up-na-tan.
"Praise God!" gasped the captain of the Santa Teresa. "Oh! Señor Alvarez! I never thought of that. It is one of the new American colonial cruisers. They carry heavy guns. Their men are as brave as lions. All the saints be merciful and help them to shoot straight!"
"Amen!" groaned the señor. "Laura! My dear wife! The Americans are armed! We have some hope!"
Down upon their knees, as if with one accord, dropped all the despairing women and not a few of the men, the children grouping frantically around their mothers. Loud and earnest were the hurried supplications and bitter was the wailing.
Up-na-tan had not the least idea that he or his gunnery were being prayed for, but he sent his next shot as truly as the first. He aimed at her hull, as near amidships as might be. It was no fault of his that a slight roll of the Noank lifted his line of fire so that his flying iron struck the mainmast of the Leon instead of her ribs. The tall spar was shattered and went over the lee rail with all its top hamper, carrying with it several of the pirate crew who were aloft.
That stunning success of the old warrior was greeted with a storm of wild cheering from the crews of the Noank and the Santa Teresa, while more than one woman's voice declared: "Praise God and all the saints! Our prayers are heard!"
The remark of Captain Velasquez was more seamanlike than religious.
"Santo Domingo!" he exclaimed. "That cripples them! The villains can come no nearer. They are at the mercy of that American. God bless her! Why does she not use her broadside guns?"
She was not quite ready yet. It was better to ply her long eighteen and keep well away from any harm to her hull or rigging by the short-range pieces of the Leon.
"Give it to 'em!" said Captain Avery to Up-na-tan. "Make every shot tell. Now for it, men! Ready with the port broadside! A minute more! Don't miss, for your lives!"
The swift rush onward of the schooner brought her near enough, even while he was giving his orders, and her six-pounders were worked by very good marine marksmen. The pirates were helpless, and the broadside of the Noank ploughed among them with deadly effect. A second quickly followed, and still she was drawing nearer.
"No surrender!" shouted the pirate captain. "We'll put the Spaniard between us and the American. We must board her! That'll stop their firing. Give it to her!"
There was something like good seamanship in his proposition if he could have carried it out, but Sam Prentice was at the helm of the Noank, and he instantly detected the intended manoeuvre.
"Sam!" shouted Captain Avery, as his schooner began to change her course. "Port your helm! Keep her well away! Carry her out o' range! Don't let 'em knock a splinter out of us!"
"All right, Lyme," responded Sam. "But let's rake 'em. They're losin' steerage way with all that wreckage draggin'. The redskin has hulled 'em ag'in. Let's cross their bows."
"Go ahead! I'm agreed!" called back the captain. "Not too near, though."
His careful keeping away was to have an important consequence that he did not think of. All was confusion on board the Leon, after those broadsides came. Her crew were frantically striving to cut loose the towing wreckage and bring their craft once more to the wind, while, as fast as Up-na-tan and his fellow-gunners could load and fire, the destruction was increasing.
"What's that?" screeched the pirate captain, in reply to one of his crew. "We are sinking, are we? Boats! To the boats! They shall never take us alive. Boats, and board the Spaniard!"
Capture meant only death without mercy, as all of them knew, and some of the cooler miscreants had already begun to get ready the boats. Of these there were four, and the largest of them had been hanging at the davits, ready for lowering.
"Sam," said Captain Avery, soberly, "not one of those fellows must git away. Mercy to them is cruelty to everybody else. If I spare a pirate, I'll feel as if I was murderin' the next man or woman he puts a knife into."
"That's about the way I feel," said Sam; "but I ain't an executioner."
The Spaniards themselves had been doing something with the guns of the Santa Teresa, such as they were, old-fashioned, clumsily mounted, short-range, light pieces. Only a few of her crew and none of her passengers had been killed or wounded. There had been no report of them made in the general excitement and despondency.
It was almost too soon for any enthusiastic rejoicing, for hardly any one felt sure of deliverance. It was almost as if the wonderful Yankee privateer had fallen from the skies. She and her operations were calling forth tremendous admiration, however, and there was plenty of genuine piety in the fervent thanksgivings that were uttered.
"Stop firing!" commanded Captain Avery, less than a quarter of an hour later. "That black flag feller is careenin'! She's fillin'! I declare, she must ha' been a mere shell. The Noank's timbers'd ha' stood a heavier poundin' than that."
"It was pretty heavy pounding, Lyme," replied Sam Prentice. "Our timbers are good, but we don't care to be struck at short range. Not by heavy shot, anyhow. You see, that redskin jest plugged her every time. Some of his hits must ha' gone clean through."
"Used her up, anyhow," said the captain.
"Guert," said Up-na-tan to his pupil in the science of gunnery, "good! Boy aim twice. No miss. Boy make good gunner some day."
It was just so. The Manhattan had indulgently promised Guert to do some actual battle practice, and had made him as proud as a peacock. It was true that he had fired under close supervision and direction, but it had been a valuable teaching, and Guert almost believed that he could have done it all alone – with the right kind of men to handle the pivot-gun for him.
"Boy good eye," said Up-na-tan. "Hold hand steady. Hit mark. Ugh!"
Over, over, over, rapidly leaned the shattered hull of the Leon, the water pouring into her through the gaps in her starboard side. Down from her had dropped boat after boat, to be crowded with her surviving wolves, no effort being made by them to save any of their wounded companions. She had now drifted into pretty close neighborhood with the Santa Teresa, and a wild shout went up as the boats pulled away.
"Board the Spaniard!" cried her captain.
It was the last resource of utter desperation, and they might even now have succeeded in gaining possession of the Santa Teresa if she had been unassisted.
"Stand by your guns, men!" shouted Captain Velasquez. "Let them have it as they come!"
"Steady about," said Captain Avery to the steersman of the Noank, "we must take care o' those boats. Oh! how I wish we were nearer! Give it to 'em!"
"Ay, ay, sir!" came back from his gunners, "but the Spaniard's in the way. As soon as we clear her – "
"Down with the mainsail! Haul on that jib! Port! Here we come!"
It was not round shot this time. The long sixes had been glutted with grape-shot, and so had the pivot-gun. The Spanish cannon, hastily fired by excited men, had done some execution, but not one of the buccaneer boats had been disabled. The foremost of them was within ten fathoms of the Santa Teresa, and the swarm of murderers would have been over her bulwarks in another minute, when past her port quarter swept the Yankee privateer.
Bang, bang, bang, as fast as they were brought to bear, spoke out her three guns of that broadside, and Up-na-tan's eighteen-pounder. Then she seemed to come about like a top, somewhat increasing her distance. Three more successive reports, and then where were the picaroons? Muskets and pistols were hurling lead among them from the deck of the Spanish trader. A shot from one of her guns had knocked out the stern of the largest boat. All that, however, had been of small account compared to the effect of that tempest of grapeshot. The boat crews withered away before it, and two of the boats themselves were upset in the panic that followed, while the fourth was evidently sinking. Black heads dotted the water, and a shriek from one of them brought a sharp, quick exclamation from Coco.
"Shark! Shark!" he yelled. "See back fin! Twenty of 'em! See 'em! Shark take 'em all!"
"Father," exclaimed Vine Avery, "that's awful! Can't we save some of them?"
"Too late!" said the captain. "Not a man, I'm afraid. Jest look how they're goin' down! It's a reg'lar school o' sharks. They're bitin' fast. We'll go about, though, and we'll pick up any that are left."
The Spaniards continued firing while their American friends sped on and came back on the other tack. Every boat had now been upset or shattered and the sharks were having their own way with the picaroons.
"Here comes one of 'em, Captain Avery," said Guert. "I'll try and save him!"
"Throw him a rope," said the captain; and Guert quickly had the help of Vine and another sailor.
"Quick!" said Guert. "Don't let the sharks get him. I'd give anything to save a man from them!"
"He's caught the rope," replied Vine. "Haul him in! We've got him."
Close behind him, or rather under him, as he came dripping over the rail, was a huge pair of snapping jaws that barely missed him. He fell, at first, and then his rescuers themselves were astonished. He did not say a word to them, but dropped at once upon his knees, and began to pour out thanks to the Virgin Mary, like a good Catholic.
"Let him," said Sam Prentice. "Some o' these cutthroats are awful pious."
"Yes," said Guert, "but he is praying in Dutch, and he mixes it up with English. I can't tell what he is."
"There she goes!" shouted a dozen voices at that moment, and all turned to look.
It was only a last lurch and a plunge, and all that was left of the pirate Leon sank forever out of sight. The heads of her crew had also disappeared from the surface of the water, and the career of one of the terrors of the sea was ended.