Caribbean: a novel Part 13

Some weeks later another bit of news arrived from London to gladden the hearts of Cavalier Barbadians: 'The mob's fury could not be contained. Shouting "The Abbey is contaminated!" the people rushed into Westminster Abbey, uprooted the grave of Oliver Cromwell, dug out his corpse, and dragged it through the streets until they came to a gibbet, where they hanged it for the crimes its former owner had committed.' When the news was confirmed and it was learned that the tale of vengeance was accurate, church bells rang and in certain parishes prayers of deliverance were offered.

It is difficult to explain how this little island, so fraught with differing loyalties, had been able to escape civil war, but a local official did suggest some interesting hints: 'From the start we wanted Barbados to be a refuge for people offering new ideas, whether in religion or business, so we welcomed the Dutch traders, and the Quakers, a contentious lot, and invited Huguenots, an industrious people when France expelled them. Saltonstall before he left us was responsible for the law which admitted even Catholics and Jews, although he did add the warning, "providing they did not commit public scandal on our days of worship." ' Proof of this compatibility occurred at a gala dinner held shortly after the hanging of Cromwell's corpse.

For years the island had faced war and invasion, and its citizens were at each other's throats, with all suffering real privation, yet it was possible, only a short time after hostilities, to hold this dazzling feast. It was best described by a French visitor, who, being neither Cavalier nor Roundhead, submitted a report which can be accepted as accurate: It was fortunate that I had met the newly knighted Sir Thomas Oldmixon, for he told me that tomorrow afternoon a fellow knight, Sir Isaac Tatum, is offering his admirers what he a.s.sured me would be a 'master celebration,' and when I asked what was being celebrated he said: 'The hanging of Oliver Cromwell,' and he explained how the corpse had been removed from Westminster Abbey and desecrated, very un-English I thought.

Last night we rode out to the plantation of Sir Isaac, who had invited some fifty of his friends to a celebration of the honors list. He and his wife had arranged tables at which some thirty slaves in uniform served the guests a variety of dishes that would have made Lucullus twitch with envy. At the end of the ninth or tenth dish, when it became obvious that many more were to come, I asked permission of our host to make a list, and I was afraid this might be resented as an intrusion, but I think he was proud of the variety he was offering.

For the occasion he had killed a young ox and now served its meats in fourteen divers ways: rump boiled, chine roasted, breast roasted, cheeks baked; tongue, tripe and odds minced for pies seasoned with suet, spice and currants; and a dish of marrow bones. Next came a potato pudding, collops of pork, a dish of boiled chickens, a shoulder of young goat, a kid with pudding in his belly, a suckling pig, a shoulder of mutton, a pasty of young goat, a young shoat, a loin of veal with a sauce made of oranges, lemons and limes, three young turkeys, two capons, four ducklings, eight turtle doves, three rabbits.

For cold meats we had two Muscovy ducks, Westphalian bacon, dried tongue, pickled oysters, caviar, anchovies, and the best of fruits: platanos, bananas, guavas, melons, p.r.i.c.kled pear, custard apple and water millions. For drinks we had mobbie, brandy, kill-devil, claret wine, white wine, Rhenish wine, sherry, canary, red sack, wine of Fiall, and other spirits come from England which I did not recognize.

The host gave all as cheerful and as hearty a welcome as any man in these islands can give to his closest friends. What astonished me was that in this case his 'friends' included all his past enemies, including especially those Roundheads who had received knighthoods at the time he did. I am told they call this island Little England, but when you are in the care of Sir Isaac it becomes Big England.

That night, after the guests were gone and the Tatum slaves, including the cook, had more or less put the remainders of the food away, Sir Isaac and Lady Clarissa sat in their handsome front garden and looked down upon the roofs of Bridgetown as they glistened in the moonlight. Several ships rode easily in the bay, two showing lights which made silvery paths across the water, and a sense of ease came over the master and mistress of this fine plantation. At one point Clarissa did say reflectively: 'I sometimes wonder what Will's doing on a night like this,' and had she been told that he was at that moment in a Spanish prison waiting to be burned alive, she would have had no comprehension of how he could have reached such a conclusion to his life or what it signified.

Sir Isaac did not care to speculate on the whereabouts of his f.e.c.kless brother: 'Forget him. He was worthless when we knew him, and he's sure to be worthless now. Besides, just before the dinner I received excellent news.' His wife leaned forward, for she enjoyed her husband's triumphs and often felt that she had been of some help in achieving them: 'The clerks who tracked down Henry Saltonstall to alert him to his knighthood and the fact that the agreement ending our war ent.i.tled him to reclaim his old plantation were told by him: "To h.e.l.l with Barbados. Boston's better, even with snow." '

The two sat in silence for some time, reflecting on the turbulent storms their island had experienced in recent years, and finally, as Sir Isaac led his wife to bed, he said with justifiable pride: 'With the price of sugar so high, and our slaves multiplying as they do, these lands for which we paid not over ninety pounds are now worth more than ninety thousand, thanks to our husbandry,' and when his wife clasped his arm to show her approval, he added: 'No matter what the turmoil, we kept our balance, preserving the old virtues and proving to all witnesses that we truly are Little England.'

BY THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY the mountain-girt inland city of Potos in eastern Peru was one of the most opulent settlements in the Americas, North or South. Its fabled wealth derived from the lucky chance that one of the nearby mountains was practically solid silver; there was nothing comparable in the world, and the city's coat of arms justly boasted: 'The king of all mountains, and the envy of all kings.'

On the morning of 6 October 1661 overseer Alonso Esquivel, in charge at the largest of the silver refining mills, directed his Inca slaves to break away the sides of the mold in which he had formed his final silver ingot. When the ironwood sides were removed, the precious ingot, a cone some nine inches high, stood in the sun.

It did not glisten, for the silver was not totally pure, and the wooden mold in which it had been formed did not have smooth sides, but in the bright sunlight its handsome roughened surface bore the unquestioned appearance of wealth. When purified in the smelters of Spain or the Netherlands, the ingots would be highly polished to form objects of great value or silver coinage to pay for the king's adventures on the battlefields of Europe.

Proud of his accomplishment in meeting the strict requirements of the viceroy of Peru, with each ingot of his quota filled, all hundred and nineteen of them at verified weight, Esquivel took a brush charged with heavy black ink and marked this last ingot P-663, a code number which would identify it as completion of the total Potos contractual obligation for 1661.

When the fifty mules were loaded, muleteers stood ready at the heads of their beasts and thirty armed soldiers, helmets shining, awaited the commands of the captain-in-charge. Esquivel saluted, a bugle sounded, and the precious cargo started on its long mountainous journey down the slopes to the important Pacific Ocean seaport of Arica more than 340 miles distant.

At first, the ancient roadway, wide enough for two such caravans, pa.s.sed through fairly open fields where the danger of a.s.sault by robbers was minimal and the military guards could relax and carry their heavy guns in any fashion, but for the last thirty miles the terrain roughened and a heavy growth of trees impeded progress. Now the caravan pa.s.sed through tunnels of matted branches of trees, and the file became so strung out that one mule could scarcely see the tail of another. Here the danger of attack by robbers was great, so each soldier diligently guarded two mules, the one beside him and the one ahead.

On 10 November 1661 the captain-in-charge sighed with relief as his fifty mules brought their treasure safely to the dockside at the port of Arica, where it was quickly loaded onto the exquisite little Spanish galleon La Giralda de Sevilla, which set sail immediately for Callao, the seaport serving Peru's nearby capital of Lima. This 750-mile stage of the journey was an uneventful run to the north, but at Callao many important things happened: the viceroy came down to inspect the galleon, the number and quality of the silver ingots were certified, officials headed home to Spain embarked, gold bars from the mines of northern Peru were added to the cargo, and a contingent of soldiers marched aboard to guard the increasingly precious cargo and the equally important official pa.s.sengers.

Seven days were wasted at Callao, but on 2 December 1661 the Giralda set sail for the great Pacific Ocean city of Panama. This 1,600-mile leg of the voyage was very dangerous, because in these waters French or English pirates sometimes struck, knowing that galleons from Lima were apt to be heavily laden. To capture one northbound galleon would justify ten years of fruitless prowling, so the Spanish soldiers remained alert, even t.i.tled pa.s.sengers served as volunteer lookouts, and the captain reminded each watch: 'It was in these waters that Francis Drake captured the great Cacafuego in 1578.'

Again, the pa.s.sage was uneventful, and after fifty-six days at sea, Ingot P-663 rested safely off the crucial port of Panama, where the vast wealth of Spanish America became concentrated. Panama was a city to enflame the imagination, where entire warehouses were crammed with gold and silver bars, where every household could acc.u.mulate its share of coins, and where rich goods imported from Spain, France and the Netherlands were stored before onward pa.s.sage to the towns and cities of Peru. It should not, in those rich days, have been called an entrept-a port city into which goods came and out of which they quickly went-because Panama was more a kingdom of its own, center of an incredibly wealthy empire, feeding goods east and west, north and south, as deemed best. It was also one of the largest cities in the New World, and one of the best defended, for as the governor boasted: 'If Drake was unable to capture it in 1572 when it had only meager fortifications, what chance could an invader have today?'

A week was required for the Giralda to disgorge its holds, and it should have taken two, but the governor himself came to the dock to urge speed: the mule caravan which would carry the treasure across the isthmus had to depart early in February in order to meet the galleons from Spain that would be arriving at Porto Bello on the Caribbean side. So on 8 February 1661, after a stop far too short to appreciate the wonders of Panama, the officials from Peru supervised the loading of the large caravan and sent it on its way across the isthmus. The trail from the Pacific to the Caribbean was only sixty miles long, but it was still as formidable as when Drake struggled to negotiate it. Rotting trunks of fallen trees still barred the way, wild animals and snakes proliferated, and if a soldier broke the skin on his leg, the wound might never heal, so infected with putrid material would it become.

When the perilous journey ended with beautiful Porto Bello in sight, even more danger was present, for the town itself was as pestilential as ever. Soldiers coming out of the jungle and seeing the place for the first time often stopped on the hillside to gape at the numerous ships cl.u.s.tered in the great harbor, each awaiting its cargo of gold and silver, at the huge warehouses lining the sh.o.r.e, and at the row of protective cannon jutting out from the surrounding heights. Often they would rea.s.sure one another: 'No d.a.m.ned English pirates would come near this port,' and they would feel great security.

But the captain of the mule train, who had made this journey three times before, uttered more sensible words: 'Dear G.o.d in whom we find our salvation, let me be among those who will survive,' for he knew that of the ninety men in his mule train, not less than forty could be expected to die from the fevers lurking in the charnel house below. Crossing himself, he muttered to his lieutenant: 'Sometimes the Spanish cannot be understood except by fellow idiots. They left famous old Nombre de Dios because it was unhealthy, moved a few miles west to this h.e.l.lhole, which is five times worse.' When his aide, who had never crossed the isthmus before, asked: 'What's wrong with Porto Bello?' he snapped: 'I'll show you!'

As he led the mules down into the seaport, he pointed out the tragic weaknesses of the place: 'This stream should be covered. Left open, it becomes a sewer, spreading disease everywhere. That rotting shed should have been burned years ago, only rats infest it now. That house seems fine, but look at its well. Stands right beside the latrine. The people who live there will drink themselves to death, and not on Spanish wine. Look at those carca.s.ses rotting in the sun. They'll account for a dozen deaths. And the shacks, crowded so close that what causes a death in one immediately migrates to all the others. And the air is heavy, the jungle so close.'

He concluded his indoctrination with sage advice: 'I'll tell you how to be one of the lucky few who stay alive in Porto Bello. Don't eat the meat, it's putrefying. Don't eat the fish, they're poisoned. Don't breathe the air, it's filled with jungle fever. And don't fool with the Porto Bello girls, for their lovers will cut your throat.'

'You said you've been here three times before. How did you survive?'

'By following my rules.'

But even this observant visitor to Porto Bello failed to identify the mystery of the place. The chameleon town took its lethal coloring from whoever was the last to visit it. If an armada of ships lay in the harbor to collect silver, whatever diseases the sailors brought with them flourished. If no ships were in, the town caught such diseases as the latest mule train carried from the Pacific side of the isthmus. And when the streets lay empty, local diseases festered in the nearby swamps and gathered strength so as to strike whoever ventured within their reach.

The reason for this deadliness was complex: nearness to the rotting vegetation of the jungle, lack of movement in the air because the town lay in a pocket into which breezes did not come, and a water supply that simply could not be purified. A Catholic priest who served the town throughout the year and who witnessed one plague after another said: 'Porto Bello is like a beautiful woman who carries a deadly disease, fatal not to herself but to any who comes in contact. And, my friend, she is beautiful-the endless flowers, the wonder of that flawless anchorage, the surrounding hills burdened with great trees, the little streets with their inviting houses ... and the n.o.ble forts to protect the charm. When people visit our town on the edge of the jungle they leave remembering two things: beauty and death.'

It was the custom for the townfolk to cl.u.s.ter about the dock when the mule trains arrived to unload their burden of silver, and although the precious metal could not actually be seen, the crates in which the heavy ingots were packed intensified the mystery of wealth. They looked like gifts intended for a distant king, and not until the silver was safely aboard and under the protection of the armed guards did the celebrations begin.

It was like a village play in some remote German hamlet in the year 900 when death stalked the celebrations, picking off this one and that while scrannel pipes played and dances continued on the green. This year the captain's prayer was not answered; despite three earlier successful journeys and his studious care not to drink contaminated water, the fever caught him and a thousand others, and when the galleons hoisted anchor for the return trip to Cartagena, the ranks of their sailors and soldiers were also depleted by about half. For six frantic weeks Porto Bello had been the richest little town in the world, but also the most dangerous.

In these years, Our n.o.ble and Powerful City of Cartagena, as it was often called in official doc.u.ments, was still a majestically located settlement on the southwestern coast of the Spanish Main. The famous hook protecting the inner bay still functioned, but the scores of little islands were now fortified with castles and gun emplacements and batteries of cannon. Drake had once subdued it and some daring French pirates had held it for ransom, but no more. It was una.s.sailable, and in its broad outer and inner harbors the great ships of Spain collected to wait for the gold and silver of Peru.

On 6 April 1662 the silver-laden galleons from Porto Bello sailed into Cartagena, and after provisioning from the copious stores a.s.sembled there, were ready for the 1,300-mile run north to Havana. As soon as Governor Alfonso Ledesma, lineal descendant of that notable second governor of Cartagena, Roque Ledesma y Ledesma, stepped aboard, the fleet headed out.

On 7 May, Ledesma anch.o.r.ed his treasure ships in Havana's ample harbor, where the local governor rushed out in a small boat to deliver exciting news: 'Don Alfonso! The king, in honor of your past braveries and your undoubted courage this time, has invested you with the position of Admiral of the Combined Fleets on their Atlantic voyage to Spain. Admiral Ledesma, I salute you.'

The other half of this great armada-hundreds of ships of all sizes- would arrive from the port of Vera Cruz bringing vast stores of silver from the mines at the Mexican city of San Luis Potos, named after the more famous site in Peru, and when these huge galleons started coming into the harbor, Ledesma appreciated what a responsibility had been given him: 'The wealth of Spain for the next ten years rides out there.'

When all ships were accounted for, the governor of Cuba gave a dinner for the departing captain, at which he asked: 'Don Alfonso, you may be absent from Cartagena for several years, perhaps five ... six. What arrangements have you made for your government, your family?' and Ledesma raised his gla.s.s: 'To Don Victorio Orvantes, son of my cousin, who will guard Cartagena for me. And to my wife, Doa Ana, who is at this moment on her way with our child Ines to stay with her sister in Panama till I return ... with glory, I pray.'

They drank to his health, asked that prayers be said for him and his fleet, and in the morning fired many salutes as the magnificent a.s.sembly of great galleons and little fighting ships sailed forth. It took all day for the tail-end members of the armada to catch enough wind and get under way, but when they were properly formed up outside the Havana harbor, the governor cried to those standing with him on the turrets of the fort: 'No English pirates will dare attack that mighty flotilla!'

It was a vain boast, for in November 1662, just as the armada was approaching the coast of Spain, 'Right in the king's featherbed,' an Englishman later boasted, 'seven of our swiftest raiders swept down upon the Spaniards, and would have cut out a galleon had not their admiral executed a sudden maneuver which left us bewildered. We accomplished nothing and instead lost one of our own ships, the Pride of Devon, with all hands.'

Flushed with the victory caused by his quick thinking, Admiral Ledesma led his fleet to the mouth of the Guadalquivir River and to the customs port of Sanlcar de Barrameda, where officials properly registered the fact that on this day, 20 December 1662, the galleons from Cartagena and Vera Cruz arrived without the loss of even one of the small protecting ships, thanks to the courage and skill of the admiral, Don Alfonso Ledesma Amadr y Espial.'

The treasure which he had delivered so expeditiously despite all dangers did not remain in Spain; it was forwarded swiftly to foreign battlefronts where Spanish troops were fighting insurgency in their empire.

Potos silver bar P-663 and many like it were rushed a thousand miles farther north to the Netherlands, where a last-minute, futile attempt was being made to regain control of that rebellious colony. There the silver was minted, and the new coins were distributed as wages to soldiers, as profit to the agents of foreign countries, and as interest to the powerful Fugger banking firm which seemed at times to hold half of Spain in fee because of past royal borrowings. So this tremendous fortune which required such effort to move-more than 11,000 miles in 526 days-accomplished nothing. But even as this was being conceded by the Spanish captains still struggling to hold on to the Netherlands, new ingots of silver were being cast in Potos, and new galleons were gathering at Cartagena like a flock of hungry sea birds to collect the bullion at Porto Bello after it had crossed the deadly isthmus.

Erroneously the king and his advisers believed that the prosperity of a nation rested in its control of bullion; the more gold and silver the galleons brought to Sevilla, the richer the nation would be. This philosophy overlooked one timeless truth: the wealth of a nation derives from the hard work of its citizens at home, the farmers, the leather workers, the carpenters, the shipbuilders and the weavers at their looms; they create the usable goods which measure whether a nation is prospering or not.

In Spain in these critical years, when its entire future hung in the balance, her galleons continued to bring in untold wealth while her artisans and shopkeepers languished. Up the Channel, English ships brought little or no gold, but did bring the produce of the new lands and took back to them the surplus goods produced by England's shrewd and industrious citizens. Year by year Spain imported only bullion while the English exported and imported the goods by which men and nations live, and although that year English watchers must have envied the enormous fortune which Don Alfonso delivered to Madrid, had they been all-wise they would have realized that their small trading ships were bringing to England the more important treasure.

On a bright January day in 1665 in the Spanish city of Cadiz, a grisly event occurred which, some years later, would have violent repercussions in the Caribbean.

During Admiral Ledesma's resolute defense of his armada in the battle off the coast of Spain, nineteen English sailors from the Pride of Devon were captured. It had been the intention of the captain of the galleon under attack to hang the lot, but Admiral Ledesma was a political opportunist as well as a brave seaman, and he saw in these prisoners an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the religious authorities who played such an important role in Spanish life. Accordingly, he delivered these orders: 'These men are heretics. Take them to Cadiz and turn them over to the Inquisition. But be sure to tell the authorities that it was I who sent them.' And this was done.

For more than two long years, from November 1662 to January 1665, the Englishmen wasted away in the dungeons of Cadiz without light or exercise or adequate food, for if the creaking wheels of the Inquisition ground with inexorable force, they did so with aggravating slowness. During spells of activity the Englishmen might be interrogated five days in a row by their austere black-robbed judges and then ignored in silence for five months.

During their questioning the sailors were reminded that many years ago the headquarters of the Inquisition in Toledo had handed down an extraordinary three-part edict: in the early days of King Henry VIII all Englishmen had been loyal Catholics; but following his lead in 1536, in a final act of dissolution, they were forced to become Protestants; which meant that they turned their backs on Catholicism and the one and only true church of Christ. Thus, any sailors from England who were shipwrecked on Spanish sh.o.r.es or captured from English ships at sea were ipso facto guilty of heresy, for which the inevitable sentence was to be burned alive at the stake.

Of course, the Inquisition itself did not carry out this cruel sentence. It merely judged the men guilty, then turned them over to the secular government for the burning, so on this January day, with no members of the inquisitorial board present, soldiers herded out three Englishmen in black robes and with shaven heads, and led them to the stakes, where the other sixteen prisoners would be lined up to watch the punishment that would be repeated on them in the weeks ahead.

As they marched to their doom, the three unfortunates cried out to their brethren: 'Resist! Cromwell and a free religion!'

They could have chosen no other words so guaranteed to infuriate the Spanish officials, who looked upon Oliver Cromwell, long dead, as an archfiend and the murderer of England's King Charles I, a splendid ruler then on his way to leading England back to the pope. Cromwell had installed what they saw as a fierce atheistical Protestantism, and anyone who invoked his name in Spain deserved to die. So the fires were lit, and through the smoke and the screams came the defiant voice of one victim who would not be stifled: 'England and freedom!'

When the fires died down and the ashes were scattered along the open road, the officials in charge pa.s.sed among the surviving sailors, marking the men to be burned at the next auto-da-fe: 'You and you and you,' the last designation falling upon a stocky sailor with a deep scar showing the letter B on his left cheek. Thirty years old, he came from the remote island of Barbados in the Caribbean. He had reached Europe on a Dutch trading ship, the Stadhouder, and after it had discharged its cargo of brown sugar called muscovado and casks of rich golden rum, he had transferred to an English ship, the Pride of Devon, which had joined a group of other English vessels attacking a Spanish bullion fleet, and been sunk off the Spanish coast.

His name was Will Tatum, and the news that he was soon to be burned at the stake aroused in him such a fury that when he was returned to his cell he beat upon the walls in blind rage at prolonged intervals for two whole days. But on the third his frenzy subsided, and he looked at his bloodied hands in disgust: Fool! Fool! You have a few days to live. Think of something! Spurred thus by a fierce desire to remain alive, he considered even the most improbable opportunities for escape. The walls were too thick to be breached. The ceiling was too high. The door to his cell was never opened. But his feverish mind continued to leap from one impossibility to another, leading him always closer to the fiery stake.

Three days before he was to be executed, the door did open, and two armed guards entered, their guns pointed at his head, while behind them came an official of the Inquisition to plead with him to recant his Protestantism so that he could be mercifully hanged and thus escape the horror of the flames. Tatum, restraining his desire to leap at the man and kill him bare-handed, explained for the tenth time: 'You have it wrong. Oliver Cromwell is long dead and his son fled. England has a king again and Catholics do not suffer.'

The austere official would not listen. Working so far from the capital, his knowledge was decades old, and all he knew was that Englishmen had expelled Catholic priests and denied the true religion. Heretics they were and as heretics they must die. Making one last appeal, he begged: 'Sailor, will you admit error and rejoin the Mother Church so that you may die the easy way?'

With a look of hatred that could never be extinguished, Tatum cried: 'No!' The two guards, their guns still pointed at his head, withdrew and the door to his cell clanged shut, to be opened again only when he would go to his death.

Then, the next day, when he could hear carpenters adding seats to the platform from which the officials would watch him die, the miracle for which he had hoped occurred. One of the other condemned men caught a guard by the throat as the man appeared with the evening meal of bread and gruel, strangled him, and grabbed from his dead body the keys to the cells. Realizing that with others to help he would have a better chance, he rushed to the nearest cells, opened them, and whispered: 'No turning back. It's sure torture if they take us.' Thus, the five men, Will Tatum among them, moved stealthily down the stone corridor, surprised the two Spaniards guarding it, and broke their way to freedom.

Outside the jail, they kept close to the walls so that night shadows protected them, and in this manner covered some distance before a wild alarm was sounded and guards began fanning out in pursuit. In the first melee three of the men were caught and clubbed to death, but Tatum and the man who had made the flight possible, a fiery Welshman named Burton, managed to find their way to an impoverished part of town and spent the night hiding between two shacks.

Shortly before dawn they broke into a house, smothered the occupants in their beds, and stole new clothing and food to sustain them in the perilous days ahead. They felt no compunction over the murders, because, as Burton said when they were headed out of Cadiz: 'It was them or us.'

They now set themselves a hazardous task, for their only chance of escape lay in reaching Portugal, which was well to the west, and many obstacles impeded that path. They would have to cross first the Guadalquivir River, where the treasure ships entered on their way from Mexico to Sevilla. Then the great empty Marismas plain blocked their way to Huelva, from where Columbus had left to find the New World. At Huelva, there would be another river, and then a short, dangerous run into Portugal. It was dangerous because in these troubled years Spain and Portugal were engaged in what amounted to an undeclared war, so the border was well guarded. But in another sense that would be helpful, for certainly no Portuguese would send them back to Spain.

They survived through days of terror and nights of starvation, and at Sanlcar they crossed the Guadalquivir in a stolen rowboat that pa.s.sed almost under the creaking prow of a caravel coming home from Havana laden with silver and gold, and when light from the ship's lantern fell across Tatum's face, Burton whispered: 'Where'd you get that scar?' and Will replied: 'Protestant clergyman burned me in Barbados. Catholic priests going to burn me here in Spain. Who wins in this game?'

Transit of the Marismas, that vast semidesert fronting on the Golfo de Cadiz, proved more difficult, for during the first half of their journey they had no food; then, after Burton, a most resourceful man, stopped two exit holes from a burrow and dug out a pair of rabbits which the fugitives chewed raw, they spent the second half with no water. Near Huelva they came upon a small stream, of which they drank to near-explosion, and again feeling no compunction, they robbed two houses in succession, murdered the occupants of one, crossed the river north of the town, and made their way into Portugal.

The deprivations of their trip intensified in each man his consuming hatred of all things Spanish, so that when the Portuguese authorities welcomed them and wanted to place them on a ship running a Spanish blockade, they leaped at the opportunity, and spurred their fellow sailors whenever a chance presented itself to board and capture a Spanish ship. Where fighting ensued, for Spanish sailors had grown accustomed to warding off English, French and Dutch ships trying to steal their treasures, Tatum and Burton were remorseless. They killed when there was no necessity, when the outcome of battle had already been decided, and they did so with glee. For as they warned their fellow sailors: 'If the Spaniards capture you, they burn you alive.'

In this fearful l.u.s.ting for revenge, the two iron-hard sailors spent most of 1665 on Portuguese ships prowling the Spanish coast, intercepting Spanish vessels, and spreading terror. Once when they put into Lisbon they learned that their homeland was again on the way to becoming Catholic and they wondered if it would be safe for them to head back to London.

One spring morning in 1666 they sailed out of Lisbon on one of the many English ships that slipped in to trade at that port, and during the run north, as they neared the English coast, the sailors informed Will and Burton of the tragedy that had afflicted London during the past year: 'It's over now, mostly. But while it lasted, it was terrifying. The Black Plague they called it, and death was so common they couldn't even bury the victims proper. Threw them in ditches at the edge of town and had horses drag earth over them.'

'What is this plague, as you call it?' Tatum asked, and one of the men explained: 'Nothin' you can see. Nothin' that causes it. You get up in the mornin', feel dizzy, feel tight in your lungs, so you lie down and never get back up. End of three days, always three, they cart you off.'

Another sailor added: 'When we was last in port, fierce, ragin' sweep. Thousands died. We fled without a full cargo. Captain shouted one afternoon: "We leave this h.e.l.l port!" and off we went, untouched.'

'But we're going back,' Tatum protested, and the sailors a.s.sured him: 'Safe now. The plague ran its course, a ship told us in Lisbon.'

It had, but not quite, for when Tatum and Burton went ash.o.r.e, deeply moved to be in England again, they used some of their pirate gains for lodgings in the mean quarter close to the wharfs, and there the brave Welshman Burton woke one morning with a racking fever. Unable to leave his bed, he told Tatum: 'It's the plague. See I have a proper grave,' and in the foreordained three days, he was dead.

At some danger to himself, Tatum buried the man who had saved him from burning, and at the lonely graveside, attended only by himself, the clergyman and the gravedigger, Burton, whose first name Will had never known, was laid to rest. The gravedigger, a man whose occupation kept him apart from people, wanted to talk as he started to shovel in the echoing earth: 'We couldn't dig enough graves last week; same, two weeks before. This may be the last of the lot. Plague's over, they keep tellin' us, but it wasn't over for him, was it?'

Tatum spent the next five months trying in vain to find a cargo ship headed for the Caribbean. Fear of the plague had halted traffic into London, so he was still in his foul quarters on the wharf on the second of September when, as the devout claimed, 'G.o.d sent a fiery furnace to cleanse London of sin and the plague.' It started innocuously, a fire among some old houses so unimportant that on that first day Tatum was not even aware that a conflagration was under way. But on the next day, he and the vagrants living in the mean shacks around his gathered to watch the columns of smoke rising from the center of the city, and that morning soldiers ran through the wharf area, shouting: 'All men report immediately. Bring axes and shovels.' At sunset the sky was lighted by flames, and on the fourth of September it seemed as if the entire city was ablaze. Three-fourths of it was.

Tatum worked without rest for two days and two nights, sometimes rescuing people from houses soon to explode in flames, at other times trying to chop down old structures to form a break in the incessant spread. On the evening of the fourth day of the fire, when the flames had subsided, leaving the once-proud city of London a smoking ruin, Tatum fell asleep at the edge of the roadway, exhausted, but well before dawn he was awakened by a military officer, who said sharply: 'On your feet! Carry these papers,' and he spent that day trudging along behind the officer as the latter compiled his dismal census: 'Every church we've seen, completely destroyed. Put it down as seventy churches.'

The burned-out private residences, the officer calculated, must number in the tens of thousands, for when subalterns ran up to him with their reports, they were identical: 'All houses in my area gone.' The only good news Tatum heard that long day was that the fires were out, because on the day before, scores had still been raging unchecked. Toward three in the afternoon a group of women got together some food within the walls of a warehouse that had been built of stone, and Tatum ate like a glutton. The officer, smiling at his voracious appet.i.te, commended him: 'You've earned the right to be a pig.'

The next week a ship reached the Thames with a cargo of sugar and mola.s.ses from the Caribbean, and after helping unload it into the arms of people who wept to see sugar again after the fire, Tatum found pa.s.sage home on the return trip. Like most ships of that time, this one made its first stop at the lovely island of Barbados, and when Will saw the familiar green fields and the rea.s.suring sight of sugarcane growing, tears came to his eyes. He had left this tender, gracious island on a Dutch ship, in 1659, a disgraced and branded exile in search of adventure, and during his years of wandering had partic.i.p.ated in pirate battles between great ships at sea, had watched his companions burn, had tried to console the Welshman Burton as the plague reached out to make him one of its last victims, and had rubbed smoke from his eyes as London burned. He had come home with no money, no prospects of work at any known job, but he did have what many lesser men would never have: a burning compulsion, more unquenchable than life itself-someday he would wreak vengeance on Spaniards.

In the fall of 1666, when Will came ash.o.r.e at Bridgetown and realized that within minutes he would be back in familiar haunts, he experienced a pressing desire to see four people: the adorable Betsy Bigsby with her golden braids, Nell and Ned and, perversely, his pompous brother, Isaac: I can't wait to see what that one's up to.

Landing at the familiar waterfront with one small bag containing the rewards from five years of adventuring, he almost ran to the Bigsbys' store, only to find that it was now operated by new owners, and when he asked what had become of Betsy, for he was most eager to see her again in hopes that she might still marry him, he received a curt ending to that dream: 'Met a soldier, went to England.'

His luck was a bit better when he crossed the street to his sister's shop. Nell looked painfully worn, but as always she put up a bold front: 'Ned and I live upstairs, as always, and he's a boy a mother can be proud of. Isaac? He's let his knighthood and his plantations go to his head.'

'He got knighted, eh?' Will whistled softly. 'And he's a great plantation owner now?'

'Yes. And judged by some to be an even bigger man than Oldmixon. I can say this. Between the two, they run the island.'

Will took to young Ned the moment he met him, for he was a fine-looking lad of fifteen, with curly red hair, freckles, and the kind of frank, open face that instills confidence in other boys who would want him on their side in games and in girls who would speculate: 'Could he swing me in a dance!'

He had quit the village school at fourteen, having mastered the alphabet, his numbers, the easier theorems of Euclid and a smattering of Greek and Roman history. His early a.s.sociation with Cavaliers at school and church had made him an ardent Royalist, a fact that might have endeared him to his uncle, Sir Isaac, except that the latter wanted little to do with the shopkeeping Pennyfeathers and rarely saw his nephew. Ned spent most of his time helping his mother at the shop, a duty for which he had no inclination, and some in town wondered what the lad would be when he matured, but his lively ways and rambling mind gave no hint that he ever would.

Uncle Will saw at once that the boy was much as he had been at that age, and to Nell's surprise, told him one night at supper: 'Always remember this scar on my face, Ned. I needn't have put it there. Don't pick up scars by accident. Earn them in doing something big!'

Easily, almost without making a conscious decision, Will settled in with his sister, helped with the store, and did odd jobs about the waterfront, where he kept close watch on various ships coming from England or moving westward through the Caribbean to other islands. He told no one what he was looking for, but when the townspeople learned that he had for some years after his earlier departure been a pirate on ships of various nations, they supposed that he might be tending in that direction again: 'We won't be seein' Will for long. Not a solid man like his brother.'

Will speculated on when he might run into Sir Isaac, and when Nell suggested that in decency he ought to walk out to the old Saltonstall plantation and make himself known, Will said: 'He knows I'm back. His move.' Thus, more than a month pa.s.sed without his having seen Isaac or his wife, Lady Clarissa, but he did not care.

If he experienced any disappointment equal to his loss of Betsy Bigsby, it was learning that his Dutch friend, Captain Brongersma, no longer brought the Stadhouder to Barbados. 'And well he shouldn't,' a sailor told him, 'seein' he lost her and his life in a battle with Spaniards at c.u.mana salt flats.'

'What happened?'

'Killed when the Spaniards boarded. Tried to fight them off, but their blades were longer and sharper.'

This knowledge so pained Will that on Sunday he accompanied his sister and Ned to the parish church, where he said prayers for Brongersma's turbulent soul, and when he opened his eyes he saw Sir Isaac and Lady Clarissa across the aisle staring at him, and next he saw that the clergyman who would be conducting the service was the sniveling fellow who had branded him. It was not a happy Sunday morning, nor were his thoughts of a highly religious nature; they concerned imaginative things he would like to do to the clergyman, Sir Isaac and Lady Clarissa.

At close of service he led Nell from the church, and they both hoped to avoid their brother and his unpleasant wife, but unfortunately, they all met at the church door, where Sir Isaac said with proper aloofness: 'Good to see you, Will. Hope things go better this time,' and as he spoke, Lady Clarissa offered the thinnest smile seen in many months. Then they were gone.

At supper that night, after Ned had left the table, Will asked the question which had been bothering him: 'Nell, doesn't Isaac share any of his wealth with you? To help with you and the boy?'

'Never. He's ashamed of us, and he must be mortified to have you back.'

Will, who had given his sister whatever funds he had got hold of for work along the waterfront, was so outraged by his brother's selfishness that he walked out to Saltonstall Manor, as he still called it in hopes that the st.u.r.dy Roundhead would one day return to claim it, entered the now-palatial residence without knocking, and confronted his brother in his office. Isaac, afraid that Will had come to chastise him for the stigmatization, reached for an andiron, but Will laughed: 'Put it down, Isaac. I'm not here to talk about me. It's about Nell.'

'What about her?'

'It's indecent, you living here like this while she struggles in town to keep the store open and her son clothed.'

'He's a big boy now. He can soon find work as an overseer on one of the plantations.' Isaac, who in his prosperity seemed taller than Will remembered, added rather haughtily: 'As a matter of fact, Will, you could too. We need overseers. Have to send to Scotland to get a good one.' Then he smiled coldly and added: 'But of course, I suppose you'd rather go pirating,' and when he showed Will the door it was clear that no money for the Pennyfeathers would be forthcoming from him.

Sir Isaac's reference to the difficulty that plantations were having in finding overseers for their sugar fields alerted Will to the many changes that had overtaken Barbados in recent years. Nell filled him in further: 'Wealthy men like Thomas Oldmixon and Isaac have gobbled up so many plantations that farmers of modest means can find none to purchase. Many of them have moved west to the open lands of Jamaica.'

'What has that to do with Isaac's plantation?'

'With the white men who would normally serve as overseers gone, Oldmixon and Isaac and their like have to import them-just like it was done in our father's time. Indentured servants they still call them, fine lads who work their hearts out for seven years, for board and keep but no wages, with hopes that at the end of their seven years they'll be able to buy themselves a plot of land and become plantation owners themselves.'

'But you say that Isaac and others have grabbed all the available lands. So what do the young Scotsmen do?' Will asked, and his sister said: 'Look up young Mr. McFee, who sailed here to work for your brother. He has the story.'

When Will found Angus McFee, he heard a doleful tale: 'I lived in a Highland hamlet west of Inverness and sailed here under a misunderstanding. In Scotland the agent promised: "Sir Isaac Tatum will pay your pa.s.sage out to Barbados, and in grat.i.tude you're legally bound to give him seven years of honest help. At the end he hands you the wages he's been saving for you plus fifty pounds thank-you money. Then you'll be free to buy your own plantation, and you're on your way ..." '

'I've heard that's how many come.'

'Yes, but when we get here we find it's all work, horrible hut and worse food, no pay acc.u.mulating, no thank-you payment at the end, and no land to buy if you had the money.'