image [https://i.imgur.com/15eGPa6.jpg]
sloop-of-war – A sixty- to seventy-foot vessel with a single gun deck, and four sakers (medium cannons), and swivel-mounted guns pointed fore and aft. She can sail closer to the wind than larger ships, and maneuver shoals and narrow channels far better. Three men can crew her in a pinch, ten is preferable, and more crew is needed if your intent is to fire cannons and board enemy ships. The more men you add to any ship, however, the more it affects her displacement (weight), and thus her handling.
HAZARD LISTED UNHAPPILY as she cleared the next coral head. Dobbs both felt and heard the scraping, and reached up to a rafter to hold on as he and the Frenchman tilted to port, and all the black bilgewater splashed up against the portside wall and came back at them and consumed them up to the neck. Dobbs experienced a bout of lurching horror. Like most sailors, he could not swim, and was terrified of drowning. His mother had once had a nightmare he would drown at sea. Upon his leaving for the Caribbean, she had wept and begged him not to leave. Her wails had followed him out to sea.
“Steady on,” said LaCroix, sensing the boy’s fear. Else he had heard the unmanly whimper Dobbs let out just before the water reached his throat. It was so cold, and underneath the black water things bumped into him, random debris, and childish fears gave cause to manifest all sorts of inimical creatures swimming around him, as impossible as that seemed. He envisioned Holcomb, the man they had lost three months back to the waves, rising up from the water and grabbing him by the hair and dragging him down—down into Davy Jones’s—
“Steady on, Dobbs!” The Frenchman had learned that English phrase only weeks ago, Dobbs knew, and he used it incessantly.
The scraping continued, and the ship swayed back the other way. The water sloshed back down to waist level, having settled a bit, and they got back to working the pump. Dobbs had long ago gotten used to the stench of dozens of unwashed men all living in close proximity to one another, but the bilge…it was his least favourite task aboard any ship, and the last stench he had to face. It smelled of piss and shit and decay and stagnation.
“You work it alone a moment,” said the Frenchman. He walked over to a floating toolbox.
“Where—are you—going?” panted Dobbs. His arms burned from the sustained effort of working the lever.
LaCroix opened the toolbox and pulled out a hammer with a wide head and a short handle, then waded through the water until he reached a crate fastened to the wall. He tore off its lid and reached inside and pulled out a metal jar that was familiar to Dobbs. LaCroix waded over to where the new leaks had sprung and used a floating stool beside him to hold the jar above water, and took gobs of oakum out of the jar and drove them into the leaks with wooden wedges, then hammered the wedges to stave off the leaks.
Someone poked their head down the stairs and shouted, “Cap’n says we’re readying fer boarding action! Says get this water outta our bellies an’ get us lighter! Kepler says our handlin’ is fucked!” Sounded like Walker, another ship’s carpenter they picked up in Port Royal.
“We’re going—as fast—as we can!” Dobbs shouted back.
“Who is that?” Walker came farther down the stairs and brought his lantern with him, and flashed it in first LaCroix’s direction, then Dobbs’s.
“Dobbs? I was jes lookin’ fer you! Who the bloody hell put you down here?”
“Abner.”
“Abner? For fuck’s sakes, sometimes I wonder about his—get out! I’ll take over!” He splashed through the water and handed Dobbs his lantern.
“Abner said—”
“That was before we was takin’ on more water’n a Spanish whore in the drink! ’Sides, Cap’n says he’s got somethin’ else planned fer yeh!”
LaCroix looked affronted. “The boy is helping me!”
“I said I’ll take over!”
“You are old! And you talk too much! I’ve told Abner I don’t like working with—”
“Shut up, LaCroix!”
“Ça me fait chier!”
“Talk English!”
Dobbs stepped back from the pump, blisters bleeding across his hands. “What does the captain want with—?”
“God’s blood, son! When you get an order, yeh follow it, ’specially when it comes from the Ladyman. Now go! He’s waitin’ at the helm fer yeh!”
Dobbs said nothing else. As he ascended the stairs, he was secretly grateful to be out of the cold, stinking water, and extremely thankful to be away from the two men arguing below. Even when he closed the trapdoor behind, Dobbs could still hear Walker and LaCroix shouting abuse at one another. He worried about that. Walker might think Abner made a poor quartermaster, but Dobbs thought the exact opposite. For were it not for Abner, Walker might have stabbed LaCroix to death a month ago during a late-night game of dice. Both men’s bellies had been brimming over with rum, having taken more than their allowed share, and there had been a previous accusation of the Frenchman cheating at such games. The old rumour resurfaced when LaCroix won at dice, and then again at fanorona, and Dobbs had been there to see them at each other’s throats, and to watch Abner barely reach them in time.
Dobbs felt afraid even as he headed back up. No one had spoken about the incident between Walker and the Frenchman since it happened. He prayed it did not come up again with them two alone, in the dark, in the water…
Walker’s wrong, Abner’s no fool. He knows to keep them apart, that’s why he sent me down here instead.
Hazard heeled to port heavily and there came another loud scraping against the hull, signaling another impact with a coral head. And he thought he heard Holcomb out there, screaming to get in through the hull…
The scraping sound carried on. Dobbs felt it beneath his feet, heard it travel from bow to stern. But it was not as bad as the others, and Hazard recovered nicely. In the hands of Alexander Kepler, Hazard always felt like she had a mind of her own, like she knew exactly what she was about. Knowing Kepler was at the helm made Dobbs feel like he was being carried on the shoulders of a trusted uncle.
When he reached the main deck, all appeared to be in chaos, yet he knew it was not so. Seawater and drizzle sprayed his face as the ship righted herself again. The motion threw him into Isaacson. The leery-eyed man scowled down at Dobbs through his patchy blond beard, but he continued on. Isaacson had come to Dobbs’s hammock two months ago, drunk, and tried to get the boy’s trousers down. Presumably to bugger him. Luckily, Dobbs’s cries had summoned Tomlinson and Jenkins in time. They beat Isaacson a bit, and swore both him and Dobbs to secrecy. “We’ll never speak of this again, understood?” Jenkins had insisted.
Dobbs had agreed, thankful he had heeded his father’s advice from all those years ago to make friends with at least one of the new crewmen, and one of the senior crewmen, as soon as he got on a ship. Befriend a new crewman so he’ll be fresh as you, and willing to look after one like himself, and make friends with a senior crewman, because he’ll have the experience you need to advance. It’ll come in handy, my boy, to have friends, when you’re stuck out at sea.
The boy found the Ladyman at the helm, arguing some point about their course with Kepler and Abner. Captain Laurier had a musket in his hand. When Dobbs approached, Abner pointed at him, and the captain turned to aim that rakish grin at Dobbs. While the rouge around the Ladyman’s cheeks was leaking in the rain, the lipstick held cleanly to his lips, with no smearing or leaking at all. Dobbs had always wondered how he managed that, and chalked it up to one more of the Ladyman’s secrets.
And those mysteries were close to the boy’s heart. Dobbs minced no words when he spoke of his love for the captain to others. The Ladyman was mythical in his mind, a creature of both shadow and substance, with the bold heart of a lion and the cunning grace of an eel, and he managed his ship with an eye to every detail, like the ravens back home in Stirling, assiduously arranging their nests and aware of all who approached them. Dobbs’s admiration of Captain Laurier was known amongst the men—Dobbs had been sailing with Laurier for two years now, which was more than some of these men had been in the Caribbean.
He loved Laurier for his courage, he loved him for his cleverness, he loved him for his loyalty, but most of all Dobbs loved him because he treated neither the boy’s youth nor his missing eye as a detriment. Indeed, men that had made light of Dobbs’s missing eye, or tried to give him a demeaning nickname because of it, had been set straight by the Ladyman. One such individual, named Hobgood, had mocked Dobbs openly, and then had gone missing one night after the captain had words with him about it. Everyone knew what became of him, but none spoke of it.
On this ship, aboard the feared Hazard, there existed a place for folk like Dobbs. He could never again return to Scotland or England, or else he would face judgment for his father’s crimes. The Ladyman cared for none of that. All that he cared for was Dobbs’s capacity to tie stopper’s knots, shroud knots, and square knots, and his ability to learn quickly those abilities for which he had never had previous training. The Ladyman only cared about one’s willingness to drive Hazard towards another cay or island. All his thoughts were marshalled around that, the never-ending search for prize and treasure.
“Mr. Dobbs,” said Captain Laurier, handing him the musket. “I trust you know what to do with this.”
As soon as the musket was in his hands, Dobbs looked up to the netting that hung from a damaged yardarm, and the crow’s nest beyond it. He looked back to the Ladyman. “In this weather, Captain?”
“I’ve heard Scottish soldiers learn quickly how to compensate for wind before shooting. You get lots of wind up there, don’t you, son?”
“But I’m not Scottish, sir. Nor a soldier.”
“No, but your father was both before he became a sailor. Unless I’m misremembering?”
“No, sir. I mean, yes, sir, he was from Scotland.”
“And he taught you to shoot like God’s judgment, unless all the examples I’ve seen of you were conjured in some fever dream.”
“No, sir,” Dobbs answered, but a crack of thunder stole his words, and so he had to repeat louder. “No, sir!”
“Then climb up to the nest and make ready yourself. Jenkins is already up there, and I’ve told him who your targets are to be.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good lad. And Dobbs?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Like God’s judgment. You understand?”
“God’s judgment. Yes, sir.”
“There’s a lad. Make us proud.”
It was, Dobbs thought, about the most appreciated and loved he had felt since his father died. A man was prized here, if he could sail, even a young man.
He smiled. “I will, sir.”
Fire leapt to his chest. As soon as he was down the stairs, Dobbs hung the musket around his shoulder by the strap and pushed past the men all coming up from belowdecks. They were being given sabres and cutlasses. The cutlasses were the first to get snatched up; though they were single-edged, the short, straight blade was designed to be used in close-quarters fighting, whereas the sabres were meant for infantryman on horseback to scythe at large swathes of enemies. But the men of Hazard were not privateers, they had no access to England’s armory. The weapons they had on board were either purchased secondhand at port or gathered piecemeal from raids.
Owens, the long-legged navigator, came running up from below with a box full of pistols and started handing them out. Every man shoved his way forward to get one and tucked it in his waist. Every man, and Anne Bonny. The only female crewman aboard the Hazard swaggered up from the deck, wearing only a blouse, pants, and a tarpaulin for a cloak. No shoes. Her long red hair whipped around her neck like a serpent trying to strangle her.
Dobbs feared her, and always gave her a wide berth. She did not seem to notice him. Indeed, Dobbs was not even sure she knew he existed.
The wind picked up as he started up the mainmast netting with a will. He paused along the ratlines whenever Hazard heeled to one side or the other, then continued the climb when she straightened out. At the top, Jenkins let out a howl of laughter as he reached over the side and grabbed the boy by the breeches and hauled him into the bucket.
“Well, lookee what Neptune coughed up!” Long, stringy hair was pasted to Jenkins’s face. Jenkins held three fingers up to the sky, forming the symbol of Neptune’s trident. It was an age-old and nearly forgotten ritual, appeasing the Roman god of the sea. “Reckon the captain has a soft spot for you, Dobbs? He sure trusts you enough for the delicate work. Ready to do some killin’?”
“Where is she?”
“Are you dumb, or did no one tell you? She’s there!”
Dobbs turned around awkwardly in the tiny bucket-shaped nest, and saw naught but darkness. That is, until lightning lanced across the sky, and then he saw the nao about five hundred yards ahead and slightly to port. The Spanish galleon heeled like a drunken sow, and he could only imagine how much water she had taken on, and how many leaks she had sprung from the same corals Hazard had been grazing.
But she won’t be grazing them. She’s been riding too low in the water, smashing into the coral without control. The tactic was a favourite of Captain Laurier’s—Dobbs had seen him use it twice before—and it worked because no one else could pull it off but him, and so the Spaniards had no reason to train their people against it. Either by luck or skill or a combination of both, Laurier alone could made it work.
Dobbs waited for another flash to see her by. God’s blood, but she was huge! The nao was tall, no less than a hundred twenty feet at the waterline, he was sure, and she had five decks total, the top two being gun decks. The lowermost gunports were staying shut, lest they took on water. Word had passed around that Captain Laurier had planned this. Dobbs smiled, knowing it was true. Many of the newer crewmen did not know of the captain’s genius. There were few as devilish as the Ladyman, and few as predatory when it came to a wounded duck.
But the top gunports…Those will be a problem. They were still open, the blunt snouts of each cannon visible in the next two flashes of lightning. The reason he could make them out, even though he faced the nao’s stern, was because she was performing the occasional erratic zigzag. It was the standard defence against a ship attacking from behind—swerve to make the ship’s arse a harder target to hit.
“Who am I shooting?” he shouted above thunder.
“It’s where you’re shooting, son,” Jenkins said, patting him on the back. Jenkins had been one of the men to save him from Isaacson’s assault, and ever since then, Dobbs had caught Jenkins passing by his hammock at night, just before they all got some sleep, as if patrolling the area for the boy’s safety. Dobbs’s father would be proud the boy had made some friends.
“Where am I shooting, then?”
Jenkins held on a moment while Hazard heeled, then steadied. He pointed high. “There.”
Dobbs followed his finger. “The crow’s nest?”
Jenkins shouted above the wind and thunder. “There, or anywhere along the masts. You and I’ll spot men in the rigging. I’ll call out the targets, and you shoot. Since we’ve got her stern facing us, we may get a glimpse o’ the helmsman, ’specially when the nao climbs a wave. If we do, he takes priority.” He held up a bag of shot and another bag of gunpowder. “While I reload for you, you be looking for another target. Savvy, lad?”
“Yes. But this wind…it’ll mess with my shot.”
“You only need to harry them. Scare them. If you happen to kill one, then that’s a lovely little extra! Captain says you come from Scotland. You learned to fire in heavy winds?”
“My father came from there. I traveled there with him for a time. He taught me what he knew. I thought I’d end up soldiering like him—”
“Hold up a moment!” Jenkins looked over the edge and shouted, “Three hundred yards!” He made some signals with his hand in case no one heard him. Back to Dobbs, he said, “What range do you think you need to be at to fire accurately?”
“Normally a hundred yards. In these winds…?” He trailed off, thinking. “Less than fifty. Maybe seventy or eighty if I can gauge the wind fast enough and compensate.”
“Then get ready, boy. We’re closing on her fast. And so is she.”
“Who—” Dobbs looked west where Jenkins was gesturing, and after a few moments, another bolt of lightning revealed a fast-moving brig slicing through the waves, no more than two hundred yards to port. “Who are they? More pirates? Are we racing them for the prize?”
“No, son. That there’s the Lively.”
Dobbs thought he had heard him wrong, and let out a little laugh. “Get on! Who is it, really?”
“I’m telling you, lad, that ship there belongs to the Devil’s Son!”
“Lively? But what’s she doing here?” The fear seized his heart for a moment. Vhingfrith and his cohorts had assisted, in a way, in past raids made by Hazard and her crew, certainly, but the last Dobbs had heard at port, privateers loyal to England had been issued a list of ships and captains labeled as pirates, and that they were to capture or kill them all. In fact, he had heard that Vhingfrith had already turned to this mission, and hunted down numerous pirates already and seen them hanged in Nassau and Port Royal.
Previously, England had been somewhat tolerant of pirate vessels, as long as they only harassed Spanish vessels. It had become common for pirate vessels to simply swim up alongside Spanish merchantmen, dock with them, and cordially ask for half of their stores and other cargo before sending them on their merry way. Some Spanish merchants even carried extra cargo just for this purpose, considering it a kind of expected tax. Publicly, England disavowed these actions, but even if caught, pirates were often given lenient sentences, so long as they did not attack English vessels or colonies.
That all changed three years ago, when Woodes Rogers sailed to Madagascar and began gathering information on pirating activity. Dobbs did not fully understand all the politics, he had only heard Captain Laurier and others speak of it, but Rogers was himself a privateer and claimed, in a written publication somewhere, that he saw the rise in piracy as alarming, and predicted that if it was not got under control, it would produce a people willing to take revolutionary action against England. There was even fear this rebellious mindset could spread to the Colonies.
“Has the captain gone mad?” Dobbs said, not meaning to say it aloud. “Benjamin Vhingfrith is a pirate-hunter now.”
Jenkins heard him and guffawed and slapped him on back.
Dobbs had a moment of doubt. Rare for him with Captain Laurier. But it seemed as though the Ladyman might have finally miscalculated. By allying himself with a pirate-hunter and privateer, he put them all in danger. Perhaps Abner was right when he said the Ladyman may be in league with devils, he thought. Maybe Tomlinson and Edgars was right when they said the Ladyman is the spawn of a siren and a drowned sailor—
“Now, how do you want to position yourself for best aim?” Jenkins asked.
Dobbs shook away the momentary doubt. He took another moment to stare over at the Lively, the brig cutting through the waves with very little heeling, her nose aimed almost perfectly at the stern of the nao. She had found a good course. They were now at the edge of the storm and Dobbs wondered absently if Captain Laurier had planned all of this, too. He wondered again if Laurier was half siren, like the stories said, and if that let him know the mind of the storm…
The captain of the Lively himself was said to be kissed by devils. Though both Lively and Hazard had docked with one another before, Dobbs had never gone aboard the other ship, had never actually seen her captain. The stories of Vhingfrith’s single glittering cat’s-eye had made it back to him, though, through the lips of Kepler and Abner and some of the others, and he wondered if they were only pulling his leg.
“Well?” Jenkins urged. “Speak up, lad! What do you need?”
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He finally tore his gaze away from the Lively and set it on the dark shape materializing just ahead. Dobbs said, “Just give me room.” Dobbs positioned his left leg behind him and set the rifle against his left shoulder. There would be no steadier way to hold the rifle than to set it on the rail of the crow’s nest and kneel slightly to peer down its barrel. He used the thumb and forefinger of his right hand to slightly boost it up and act as a swivel.
“Cap’n says you have a, uh…what did he call it…a preternatural gift for shooting,” Jenkins said. “Says when it comes to pistols and muskets, you are blessed by angels. That true?”
“I’ve shot my fair share,” Dobbs said humbly.
A flash of lightning revealed they were at least within a hundred yards. It would take a bit of luck for more lightning to reveal more targets, so he decided he would aim for any men he saw moving little or none at all amid the sheets and rigging, that way they would likely be close to where he had been pointing during the previous flash.
“Captain says he expects the nao to start pulling in all her sheets soon,” said Jenkins, close to the boy’s ear. “Says she’ll need to bleed off some speed if she wants to navigate what’s ahead. Says the water only gets shallower…so aim for the t’gallant, that’ll likely be reefed first.”
Dobbs gave only a fractional nod, not wanting to move his eye too much, lest he be even a smidgen off when the lightning came.
When it finally made an appearance, he was somewhat alarmed to find they were much closer than the dark shadow ahead of him indicated. The Spanish ship was now less than sixty yards away, and there was no doubt! More, she was heeling badly. There came the first flashes and booms of cannonfire. Dobbs heard wood splintering down below, and thought he felt something cut the air close to his head.
During the flash of lightning, he spied two men amid the rigging, one of them holding fast to the netting near the square-rigged sail above the topsails. He focused on that. And even when the world went dark again and all that was left was the roar of the wind in his ear, Dobbs followed the enemy’s huge shadow. The next volley of cannonfire actually helped him gauge where the ship was, how it was heeling, so he could guess where his first shot was going to be needed. The rear guns of any ship were the fewest and the weakest, not many seasoned sailors would panic from these shots.
The wind was still blowing east, and Hazard was running.
The next bolt of lightning revealed his target near the topgallant sail was still there, had not moved at all, ready to start reefing at a moment’s notice.
Dobbs squeezed the trigger and the musket barked and kicked his shoulder.
The lightning lasted only a second, followed by another brief flash, but Dobbs saw the seaman twitch, fall, and go spiraling down towards the deck.
“God’s blood!” Jenkins cried, taking off his bandanna and waving it in the wind. “Touched by angels, you little fucker!”
Dobbs took a deep breath. The musket went to Jenkins, who immediately went to priming and loading it, while Dobbs’s eye remained trained on the nao. His blood was up, he felt the captain’s words in his heart: God’s judgment. There’s a lad. He remained frozen in position, holding an imaginary rifle in his hands. He looked like a statue. He ignored the rain in his eye while he waited for the next bolt of lightning. When it came, he spotted another man ascending through the rigging. “Got another one headed for the t’gallant. And there’s—”
His words caught in his throat.
A thrill went through him as he realized the sea had heaved the galleon’s nose up, lifting her. The lightning lasted a few seconds. As she rose, the nao revealed her helmsman, hard at work by the wheel. He followed the helmsman with his imaginary musket.
“Ready to fire, m’boy!” Jenkins inserted the musket back into the grip of the Dobbs’s statuesque form, and the boy once more sighted down its barrel.
The galleon fired her rear guns again. It was her undoing. Between his last glimpse of her, and the new barrage of brilliant cannonfire, Dobbs was able to guess the helmsman’s position close enough that when the next bolt of lightning lit the world in brilliant blue light, he need only make the faintest correction before he fired. The world went dark again. He did not see if he hit the helmsman, but he didn’t have to.
“Signal the captain,” Dobbs said proudly. “She’s down a helmsman.”
____
“Looks like Dobbs bagged him one, maties,” said Anne, as if to herself.
The other fellas picked their pistols out of the box, priming and loading them as they gave wary looks to one another. Anne Bonny was the antithesis of the Ladyman. She was clearly made of woman’s clay, yes true, yet her manner of dress, walk, and talk was no different than the men at their worst. She held onto a rope overhead for stability, and with her arm up, her half-unbuttoned blouse exposed her right breast. Men’s eyes were drawn to those breasts the first time they saw them, but sail with the men of Hazard long enough, and you will know how they feel about Anne Bonny’s breasts after spending only a week with her. She wasn’t a woman, or may as well not be.
Some of the men believed she was a freak, that she had a cock between her legs, and some said she had only the balls but not the stem. But that was not why they left her alone. Men at sea were not above buggering anyone when they became lonely enough, even if it was a punishable offence. They left Bonny alone because, to them, it was best to pretend she was not there. Bonny was herself handy in battle, and knowledgeable of the sea and the needs of a ship, but somehow one gained the sense that acknowledging her was like forgetting to bite down on a gold coin before a dangerous ploy, or forgetting to bring a cat on a voyage—it was unlucky. Like the ship’s cat, you wanted her to do her part of the labour, but you did not want to play with her too much or else you disturbed her function.
It helps, she thought, holding on to the rope as water rushed over her ankles, that they believe the old tale that a woman’s bared breasts bring good luck on a ship. She never bared them on purpose, but if they slipped free of her shirt, and if the men averted their eyes whenever those breasts made an appearance, what could it hurt?
Bonny walked barefoot along the planks, watching the black monolith ahead grow into the form of a Spanish warship. With each flash of lightning, she could sense more of the ship’s distress, and noted her ragged sails and limp rigging and her bogged-down keel. Her arse is heavy. She’s drinking seawater. No bilge pump can handle that. Least, not with her being hounded like she is, smashed in the shoals. The Ladyman knows his business.
Anne had been at the helm when Captain Laurier made the decision to give chase. It had been done by stealth. Laurier had seen the squall building but had predicted it would become worse. The galleon could have normally survived such a storm.
Normally.
But there was a technique of parking a ship just beyond the horizon of another ship’s view. The masts on most ships were high enough that they peeked just over the horizon, allowing someone in the crow’s nest to spot a ship in the distance. Keeping the ship at bare poles—that is, all her sails reefed—made the stealthy ship almost impossible to spot. And a man with a good eye and a good long glass could spy the distant ship without being spotted himself. It required careful sailing, good lookouts, and reefing and unreefing sails at regular intervals. Hazard had done this for hours, peeking over the horizon, following the nao like a lone wolf stalking an unsuspecting elk.
Captain Laurier had done this with countless naos before, and usually it did not pay off, but every so often the storm would move in just such a way as to would drive the mighty ship into treacherous shoals, making it difficult for her to turn around when a pair of fast-moving enemy ships made themselves visible behind her. At first, the nao fired warning shots, but as long as the crew kept their courage, and remained bold, they could stalk the nao and force its captain into the shoals and coral heads. Again, this was only possible if the nao’s captain and his crew were new to these waters, and did not have accurate charts (most charts of the Caribbean were less than accurate) and did not know they were being corralled into treacherous territory.
The ship then became battered and busted. The advantage she gained by size and superior guns was lessened. Spaniards made awful sailors, they did not have suitable training, and they suffered for mistakes such as these.
Anne had seen this technique attempted by many, but only Laurier ever succeeded at it, and even then only occasionally.
More cannonfire erupted, and, as before, most of the shots either sailed clearly over the bow or did nominal damage. One shot ripped through the bowsprit, though, and sent splinters into poor Godfried’s face. The carpenter gripped his face while blood seeped through his fingers.
“Get him up!” Bonny shouted. “Get something to press against his face and see if he can still stand! If so, put a pistol in his hand!”
It sounded like a command. Perhaps it was. Perhaps they were obeying her when they moved to grab Godfried. It was hard to say for sure because they never showed any recognition of her authority, nor had she been granted any rank by Captain Laurier, but there were times when it seemed Anne Bonny, though rarely acknowledged by the crew, was no less obeyed than the Ladyman whenever she spoke. She strode around the deck, shouting orders here and there, and sometimes joined in the work of other men without being invited to do so. In every instance, the crewmen allowed it. No one was clear on why this was, or what Anne’s actual job was, least of all Anne.
When she claimed her own flintlock pistol and cutlass, Bonny began moving to the portside railing. She looked to three men standing beside her—Rupert, Tomlinson, and Jaime—and said to them, “Ready the ropes and hooks.” And they did. They likely would have done so anyway—in fact, Anne was sure the quartermaster Abner Crane had already commanded them to do so—but they moved a bit livelier when she reminded them presently to do it.
Anne Bonny was one of the leaders of the fighting teams. She did not know how this came to be, for Captain Laurier had never asked her to do it, but when Fitzsimmons, the last man to have the position, had died of a bleeding-gum disease, Anne had started telling men what to do just when the fighting was about to start. And they did it. She passed amongst them like a wraith, seen and yet unseen, never acknowledged but still obeyed, never thanked, never berated, left alone.
Rupert, Tomlinson, and Jaime all appeared at the railing with ropes and grappling hooks. Ahead, the Spanish galleon was just off their port, most of her gunports were now closed, she had taken on enough water that even her top gun decks were threatened by the sea. She was dragging, scraping the seafloor, and it was almost too easy to catch up to her now.
We need to be careful. She’ll fight like a cornered boar now.
The water surged between both ships, creating a new turbulent force that wanted to separate them, but Hazard just kept ploughing ahead.
Anne saw Spanish sailors trying to climb to the nao’s rigging, perhaps to let loose the rest of her sheets. But one of them suddenly twitched like he’d been stung, and fell from up high and bounced off the starboard railing and plunged into the sea. She heard the report of Dobbs’s rifle at the same time. The boy was good. The Ladyman knew how to pick them.
Anne used a pocketknife to cut her palm, and drew a bloody pentagram across her left breast and muttered an incantation. A Frenchwoman in Nassau had taught her this ritual, apparently it had been popular with some of the people in the Court of Louis XIV, and they believed it brought favour from certain spirits. Anne did not know which spirits, exactly, but so far the ritual had never failed her. Even still, she had to do it in secret, lest the Ladyman catch her.
In that instant, a sound reached her ears unlike the lap of waves or the groan of thunder or the creak of timbers. Guns. All booming.
On the other side of the galleon, the Lively had come slicing through the waves and the brig let out her first salvo from her battery. The Lively did an excellent job of targeting the aft castle, which usually housed all of a ship’s officers, the helmsman, and the rudder. Any damage done to that would benefit them, no matter how small. A minute later, the Lively let loose another salvo, and splinters shot from the galleon’s arse. All three ships crested a large wave and came back down—the timing was perfect for Hazard, as the coming of the wave made it so the galleon’s cannon shots were off target.
Lively fired again, and appeared also to miss.
This was how they did it. Anne had seen the Ladyman’s wicked tactics too many times now, and she knew their ruthless efficiency. Laurier had lived up to his reputation, which was spreading around the Caribbean ports like the plague. This time he had managed to gather a confederate in Captain Vhingfrith, a privateer, and together they harrassed the nao into waters she had no business navigating. And the Ladyman had managed to time it with the coming of the storm—not a hurricane, but not merely a squall now, either. It is a beautiful thing to see. Anne clutched her bloodied breast, and aimed a curse at the nao, muttering the hellish words.
More cannonfire was dumped on them, the nao was still fighting back, and Bonny saw only one of the shot’s impact Hazard’s deck. It struck a man at his waist, ripping him in half, his upper body went winnowing over the railing and his waist and legs fell and dumped bowels onto the planks. It was Clemmons, another fella they had picked up in Port Royal.
“Help me dump him, so he can join his other half!” she shouted, and ran to it. “At least his ghost will have a chance to swim!” Once more, men helped her, but they did not report “aye” nor give any other hint that they were following her orders. Together they grabbed his legs and slung everything overboard. Someone called a prayer out to the winds.
It was, Anne thought, the most religion the Hazard had seen in ages.
They hit a swell and rose until they crested it, and then Hazard slid easily down the other side. Anne turned to find the Ladyman at the helm. Captain Laurier’s skirt made him easy to spot beside Kepler, working the wheel. She saw him shouting his final orders to Kepler, then he accepted his own cutlass and pistol from Owens and stepped down from the quarterdeck. Laurier would join in the boarding action.
How did he do this? she wondered, not for the first time. How did he time everything so perfectly, so that a full fucking galleon is almost at our mercy?
Anne knew the components of this tactic, she knew each step as it was supposed to happen, but how had he made all of it work in harmony? The three ships were now in shallow waters, amid a storm, conditions which favoured the sloop and the brig. A fire of some kind had started on the Spanish ship. Perhaps a lantern had spilled, or a single cannon shot had found a powder keg. Amid flames high and winds of an infant storm, the Spaniards fought to keep their ship in order. But the flames and the lightning illumined more details on the galleon’s top deck; Anne saw some of the rigging sag, and the bowline looked chipped and smashed in places.
Some of the damage was clearly caused by the storm, not by cannon shot.
The Ladyman is whittling the Spaniards down to a fucking nub.
She smiled, and that smile caused the men around her to give her an even wider berth. Men didn’t like it when Anne Bonny smiled.
The men hunkered down at the railing, waiting for action, some of them shivering like kittens left out in the cold. One of them vomited. Someone passed down a gold coin for each of them to bite down on, for luck.
Hazard came alongside the nao. The Spanish ship rose like a titan’s chariot over them, at least thirty feet taller. The very presence of both ships in the raging sea created only more turbulence, and they bent towards one another and then away, towards and away, towards and away. The nao fired her guns, but it was a badly-timed firing line and she was mostly heeled to port, which meant her cannons’ barrels were aimed skyward. Only three or four shots ripped through Hazard’s masts and rigging.
A forepeak halyard snapped, the line went sailing past Anne and slapped another sailor in the face. He screamed as he fell and Anne reached out to grab his hand and hauled him back over the railing. When Anne looked up, she saw the highest t’gallant spar get carried away by the wind. The Ladyman ordered three men below to bring out another sail from below to replace it. It took almost twenty minutes to achieve, meanwhile the nao pulled ahead of them and the Lively maintained her chase.
Hazard heaved to starboard, then rolled slowly back to port. One of the men attaching the new spar slipped and fell and landed on the deck, unconscious, maybe dead.
Bonny spotted Reginald, the cook, dashing to the side and spilling over a cask of rum into the ocean. An old seaman’s superstition, she knew, left over from a time when sailors believed propitiating the god of the oceans in such a way was the best means to guarantee safe passage in a storm. It was Reginald’s usual ritual whenever seas were not gentle. Again, he made certain to do it when Captain Laurier wasn’t looking.
The Ladyman came up behind Bonny, half running, half sliding across the deck, his lipstick’d mouth forming a snarl. “Ready, Okoa!”
The lanky African was working as the gun captain, since Albany, the last one, had been slain during their beach raid against the colonies in the Cape Verde Islands. “Cast loose your gun!” Okoa shouted to each cannoneer, ordering the crew to free their cannons from the tackles that lashed them fast to their ports. “Level your gun! Out tompion!” They moved with lethal synchronicity, having rehearsed this too many times to fail now. “Run out your gun! Prime!” Lines of powder were poured down the touch hole of each cannon. “Point your gun!”
Anne watched as Okoa hopped on his one leg, up behind each cannon, sighting down the barrel, yelling something in the ear of each cannoneer. The men with their handspikes and side tackles aimed according to his will. Anne helped one cannoneer slide a wedge in to correct the elevation.
It took a minute at least to reload a cannon and fire again. The best teams could do it in under a minute. A hodgepodge pirate crew, many of whom had only come aboard at Port Royal a few months ago, would take a little more time.
Anne watched anxiously as the galleon heeled back to them. Felt the disorienting sensation of gravity chasing her. She had been keeping an internal count. They would be ready to fire again in ten to twelve seconds, if she was any judge.
“Ready, Anne?” said the captain from behind, his lips close to her ears.
She looked back at him. She smiled, even though she knew the scar on her right cheek ruined the effect. That used to bother her. It no longer did. Nothing bothered her since coming aboard the Hazard, where everyone was a heavily-scarred soul without home or harbour. “Ready, Cap’n.”
The nao continued heeling.
Moments like these always frightened Anne, if she was being honest, but they also came to her like a dream. In her dreams, Anne was always aware that she was dreaming, and knew that if she died, she would just wake up. Part of her believed that now. Part of her had to.
The nao’s cannons rose to meet them.
The Ladyman ran to Hazard’s portside railing, one foot on the rail. “Okoa?”
“Ready, Captain!”
“Fire!”
Anne felt the juddering of the ship with each successive boom and Kepler fought with the steering to keep Hazard on course. The men on cannon duty were mostly new, they were not highly coordinated with the firing order, so they had probably upset Hazard’s steering. One did not want to fire all a ship’s cannons at once, else you put enormous pressure on your own timbers. The power of each cannon combined could actually do considerable damage, causing planks and rafters to crack and break. You wanted to do a rolling firing line, one right after the other.
Hazard’s men did not have that discipline quite down yet, and she heeled in the water. Anne looked to the helm and saw Kepler fighting the ship. Anne had been at sea long enough to know what he needed. She turned to the Ladyman and said, “May I, sir?”
“You may.” He never looked at her. His painted lips were pressed in consternation, his hawk-like eyes fastened on the galleon. His prize.
Bonny walked drunkenly over to the main hatch and called down into it, “Move some ballast, lads!” She saw their faces through the grating. And hour ago, Abner had woken the men of first watch, and half of them had been assigned to taking ballast from out of the bilge and rushing up through the ship to store it all forward, where the treasure was. Treasure was usually stored forward, since the stern was the most vulnerable part of the ship, but in this case it and the ballast would combine to help with the ship’s trim. They needed to lower the bow.
It took one or two minutes, but this steadied Hazard, and it allowed her to be so close to the nao that almost all its cannons would fire directly over Hazard. Anne smiled. The maneuver was expertly pulled off by the Ladyman and Kepler. The maneuver also allowed Hazard’s next salvo to find her target. Her four sakers did their dirty work—each cannon shot smashed through the nao at the waterline and Anne grinned as she watched massive splinters explode from the galleon’s hull. Shooting at the galleon’s waterline would cause her to take on even more water, slow her down even more. On the other side of the nao, the Lively’s guns blasted her aft castle again. The sea was alive with booming eruptions that mocked the storm’s own thunder.
Anne stood by the railing with her captain that she admired so, and did not duck as the Spaniards aimed down at them with their own muskets and opened fire. Shots ripped through the wood all around them and someone screamed behind her.
“Volley!” Anne cried.
Hazard’s riflemen fired back at almost the exact same time. Bullets tore through each line of men. Anne saw one sailor’s head snap back and fragments of his skull and brain matter splashed her face. She flung over a grappling hook, which snagged some netting hanging along the nao’s starboard side, and pulled hard to fasten it before the Spaniards could toss it off. The Ladyman did the same, working right beside his crew, as hard as any of them. His skirt whipped violently in the wind, and he was still snarling.
Tomlinson shouted, “Primed and loaded!” and all the others agreed.
“Volley!” she cried.
Once again, they fired muskets at almost the same time as the Spaniards, and almost everyone’s shot missed.
The nao raised her boarding net in an attempt to prevent Hazard’s men from coming over. Now was the time, while the Spaniards were reloading.
“Now!” Anne hauled another one of the grappling hooks herself and hurled it in a long arc. The Ladyman and several others repeated this process—fire muskets, toss over a rope while the enemy reloaded, fire the cannons, sending up splinters and other debris to rattle them, then toss over more rope while the cannons were reloading, then fire muskets, and keep doing it.
The galleon’s rifleman force was divided, for they also had to deal with the Lively’s crew, who would be on her port side tossing over their own grappling hooks.
And all the while, the fire on the galleon continued to spread, but the flames were weak, thanks to the downpour. But she was clearly taking on water, which would also occupy much of her crew’s efforts. Every bit was critical, for a galleon her size could have a crew of anywhere from fifty to four hundred, and the more work Hazard gave them to do, the more divided they were, the less chance they could cohere into a competent fighting force. Any damage to the rudder, for instance, or to the rope that conveyed the will of the helmsman’s wheel, could take as many as sixty men to fix.
So Hazard kept hitting them, kept giving them work to do, holes to plug, wounded men to carry off, masts to repair.
“Stand at the ready!” Laurier cried.
Anne saw what was about to happen. They all did. She made sure her cutlass was solidly sheathed and her pistol was tucked nicely in her waistline. The Spanish ship, waterlogged and grappled, was now as vulnerable as she was going to get. Now the Ladyman shouted, “Hoy up, men! Hoy up!”
“Hoy!” the men answered.
“Today we enter into immortality! Fear neither sea, nor man, nor God!” The wind and thunder tried to steal his words, but the Ladyman was having none of it. “Should we perish today, we do not die, we reconvene on Fiddler’s Green, then walk back from the land of the dead and finish what we started!”
“Hoy!” Up and down the portside, men started smacking their swords against one another’s.
“The enemy fear us because they fear death! But we’ve seen worse, and we are about to show them!”
“Hoy!”
“Ready…ready…”
The two ships bobbed up and down. The galleon, normally so much taller than a sloop-of-war, had dropped well below what was safe for her and was now scraping the seafloor. She could very well run aground soon. Most of the grappling hooks had connected with her netting hanging from her sides. It was now or—
“Now!”
The men leapt across. Anne followed without question. One man, a fellow they had picked up in Port Royal named Omar, and who Anne had had a dalliance with, missed completely and fell into the sea. She never even looked back at him. She half leapt, half scuttled up the rope, and slammed against the nao’s hull.
The rest of them grabbed hold of rigging, the corners of the gunport shutters, the anchor, the runners, anything to give them purchase. And, as the men aboard Hazard let loose another salvo, Anne and the boarders maneuvered as the captain had planned. They all made it to the galleon’s runners and climbed back from the bowsprit. The runners only protruded three inches from the hull, and one or two men lost their footing and slipped and fell into the sea. The survivors kept climbing.
Anne had lost sight of the captain. She had lost sight of everyone except Okoa, the one-legged African who had abandoned his spot at the gunnery (for every man was needed in a boarding action) and slipped from a runner and would have fallen if Anne had not reached out and caught his arm and guided him back to a piece of limp rigging. It was too dark to see his expression, or to see anything but the light of the flames coming from over the edge of the galleon’s gunwale, but she could sense his gratefulness.
They moved along the side of the ship, the sea rushing up to them. Once, the galleon heeled so hard to starboard she and Okoa both went underwater for several seconds. She heard nothing but the roar of the sea, and imagined she heard the wails of spirits trapped below the waves. They reemerged. The cannons above their heads fired once more.
It was now or never.
Anne gritted her teeth and growled her hate for all things Spanish and climbed up to the nearest gunport. She climbed above it, held on to loose rigging with her callused hands, bent her legs so that her arse was facing the Hazard, and then kicked out and swung her legs through the gunport window and swam inside to the gun deck. She came through with such speed and force she knocked the Spanish gun captain over. Anne’s sword was out and her pistol drawn before the rest of the gun crew knew what was happening.
She tried firing the pistol, but, unsurprisingly, the charge was too damp, since she had just been underwater, and it misfired. She flung the pistol into the face of a Spaniard coming at her and then skewered him with her sword.
Okoa came through the gunport awkwardly, and would have been killed had Anne not deflected the dagger coming at him. Okoa lashed out with sword and dagger, flailing, sometimes hopping, sometimes pushing off of walls to reach his next enemy.
More of Hazard’s men came in through the gunport like maggots seizing on a wound, firing pistols and thrusting blades and biting faces and gutting Spaniards like fish. “With me!” Anne screamed, and charged forward into pitched battle. The men, as always, followed her.