image [https://i.imgur.com/15eGPa6.jpg]

Edward “Blackbeard” Teach walked about the Equinox’s deck in slow, thoughtful steps, while all around him his men worked the pumps, bringing water up from the bilge to douse the flames. The man’s face was a study, charcoal-blackened eyes raking over everything calmly. Ringed hands played with the single braid on the right side of his beard. A brace of pistols was strapped to his chest, and from his tricorne hat came four slow-burn fuses, both lit and hissing. John, Ellis, and all the Equinox’s crew knelt before him, hands behind their heads. Captain Garner lay on the deck, bleeding, shot through the gut and not expected to live, according to the murmurings of the surgeon knelt beside him.

Blackbeard paced in front of them all, occasionally bending over to examine a face or two, but he always walked on without saying a word. Then he walked over to look down on Captain Garner, snorted, and walked up the stairs to the quarterdeck to examine the wheel. He spoke to a few of his own men, pirates all wearing red bandannas, apparently giving them orders to go belowdecks. Then Edward Teach moseyed on down the stairs, swaggered over to the railing, opened his breeches, and pissed over the railing, into the sea. When he was done he fastened his breeches and walked over to one of the boys that had been recruited along with John. Teach stared down at him. The boy was whimpering.

Teach walked on.

When Teach’s eyes fell on John, he at last said, “You lad. Press-gangs bring you here?”

John was quivering. Might’ve even pissed himself a little. He’d heard the men mutter Blackbeard’s name, heard them recognize him by the slow-burn fuses coming from his hat. The name was becoming notorious back home, he knew the man to be a raper and murderer. He couldn’t find the words to speak. Dear God, I killed a constable only because he was going to kill me, and this is the fate You have given me? To be keel-hauled by the likes of—

“Well?”

John looked up. Licked his sun-dried lips. “S-sir?”

“Was it the press-gangs that brought you all the way out here? To this sea? To me?”

“Y-y-yes, sir.”

“Him too?” Blackbeard pointed to Ellis. “And them?” He pointed to all the others, most of them much younger than John or Ellis. The cabin boys and the ones always working the bilge and the ones that did all the deck-swabbing.

John barely knew most of their names. He hadn’t made many friends since leaving home. “M-most of them sir, yes.”

Captain Teach nodded, then drew a pistol like he meant to use it and John shut his eyes. In that moment he condemned God. It happened in a red-hot flash, he suddenly despised the Creator for all that He was. And he denounced the Devil, too. He denounced them all—

He felt a light tap on his head. Something metal. John jumped. When he opened his eyes, Teach was holding the pistol by its barrel, offering him the handle. “Stand up, take this pistol, and shoot someone.”

John gaped. “Wh-what?”

“Anyone. Could be the fucking Royal Marine major over there, or the captain, or perhaps anyone that diddled you when you thought you were safe in your hammock. Don’t tell me they haven’t tried, little nipper. Stand up, take this pistol, and shoot someone. Long as it’s not me,” he chuckled, and his men standing behind him exploded in gales of laughter. “Go on, take it.” John reached up and touched the handle, but didn’t quite grip it.

Behind him, Ellis whispered, “Do it, Johnny.”

“You there,” Teach said, drawing another of his pistols. “You sound like a lad knows what way the wind’s a-blowin’. Take this pistol here. You get one shot. This I allow just this once, so use it wise—”

John jolted when he heard the bang. He had been looking up at Captain Teach when Ellis grabbed the proffered pistol and fired into the chest of one of the men who had accused him of siphoning rum. John stood to his feet because some stupid thought told him to run. Run where? He looked around at all the shocked and fearful faces of the Equinox’s crew. His crew. And Ellis started beating another man in the head with the pistol until one of Blackbeard’s people peeled him away.

“Good God,” Blackbeard guffawed. “Usually takes the lads longer than that? But I commend your honesty of violence, boy.” Blackbeard looked back at John. “Well, lad?” he said. “What about you?”

John was suddenly aware he still held the pistol.

“You don’t have to do it. But you have to make a decision. Kill the bastard your heart desires most to kill, or else spare them.”

It was not the sea that made John sick this time, but it felt just the same. No, worse. He started shaking his head in defiance of something. He didn’t know what. But Teach seemed to think he was making his decision not to kill, and so he plucked the pistol from John’s hand and walked over to the dying Captain Garner and shot him in the head. “Best out of his misery. No!” he shouted to Mr. Felt. The Equinox’s first mate had just started to make the sign of the cross. “No signs to God here, my friend. God does not live here. This is Blackbeard’s boat now, and these are his seas. Or hasn’t anyone told you?”

Again, his crew all laughed.

“Yo-ho, maties. Some of you are my prisoners now, and will be sold as such when we come to Antigua. The Spaniards have been known to pay handsomely for English farmhands. Yo-ho!”

“Yo-ho!” the pirates around him shouted.

Blackbeard holstered his pistol, then clasped his hands behind his back and addressed them as if he was a navy admiral to his crew. “Those who do not wish to live in bondage, I will not make you. You can jump into the water now, but I will only allow you to make peace with your Maker once you’re in the briny deep. God does not live where I go. Am I understood?”

There were a few weak nods.

“Am I understood?!”

“Aye, sir!” they said.

“Very good. Those of you who do choose to become slaves…it’s not so bad,” he laughed. “Antigua already has many fetching women slaves. I’m sure you can all find lives there, perhaps even children. So then, half of you line yourselves along that plank there that Mr. Joseph has been so kind as to supply, and walk onto the Revenge. The rest of you shall stay here, as this ship will be taken to Panamá. Some of you will be clapped in irons, put in the bilge, and work the pumps. Half of my crew will also stay aboard the Equinox and guide her to Panamá.”

Blackbeard lifted a finger as if to make a salient point.

“Remember this mercy. Remember to talk about it wherever you go. You’re only dead if you mutiny. And if you do try to mutiny, I will keel-haul you and the two men in irons beside you. Think of that when you’re working the pumps. Lively now!” he thundered, and everyone leapt to their feet. “Except you two,” Teach pointed to John and Ellis. “Remain here on deck. My friend Mr. Braithwaite will have some instructions for you.”

With that, Blackbeard whirled away like a storm, and John and Ellis stood there on deck. John was shaking. But Ellis…Ellis was grinning.

____

John was taken by a spectacled man belowdecks and shown to the cook, a black man called Cutter who spoke perfect English. He was shown how to store the salted pork, the canned food, and the utensils. He was shown how to clean the kitchen area and how to prepare the plates so that Cutter could quickly lay out Captain Teach’s meals each day. Finally, he was shown how to deliver them, and to stand by the table during meals like a naval ship’s steward would do, waiting with pitcher in hand to refill anyone’s cup that asked.

Braithwaite tended to the young boys day and night, and John got the feeling that the man had been assigned to them as some sort of punishment. Braithwaite was an intellectual, the sole survivor of an exploratory vessel that foundered off the coast of someplace called Connecticut, which John thought was one of the Colonies. To hear others tell it, Braithwaite was an inventor of some repute, but when he was rescued by the Queen Anne’s Revenge from the island where he’d been marooned, he became part of the crew. But apparently he’d gotten a little drunk one night and insulted Blackbeard, and so now he managed the children of the crew as penance.

During the day, Braithwaite took John, Ellis, and the other boys on deck and showed them all that he’d learned about running a pirate ship. The boys already knew a great deal about sailing, but things were done differently aboard a pirate ship. For one, there was no one true “captain” per se, not until battle, where a single man led the fight. The crews all voted on where to go next, what targets to seize, what jobs to take, what partners to take on. Teams were assigned during “claims,” when the crew would line the boys up each day and select different boys for different tasks. The Queen Anne’s Revenge was huge, it towered above the sea, and so required constant cleaning and work to maintain her.

John was surprised that pirates worked with less sleep than English sailors, because, as Captain Teach put it, “Sleep is a weapon. If you want to stay ahead o’ the English and the bloody Spaniards, you have to be alert, not just awake. Constantly. Men on the account, we take naps, an hour, maybe two hours, in constant rotations throughout the day. We keep her moving,” he said, tapping the ship’s railing. “So anyone chasing us must lose sleep to find us.”

John and Ellis were mystified.

“It is a discipline of the pirates,” Braithwaite explained later, as he led them to the prow. “They sleep only when they are having to wait on something—pirates are allowed to sleep, therefore, even while on deck, as long as their work is done. Captain Teach wants his enemies tired and haggard, so they’ll be so desperate they’ll take shortcuts and make mistakes. And by keeping himself and his people well rested around the clock, he himself is not prone to those same mistakes.”

John and Ellis listened while stepping over three men who had fallen asleep in the shade of the mizzenmast.

But the order of the day was mostly the same as on the Equinox. “First watch rises early, usually at eight bells, and swabs the deck while second watch is being served small meals and drinks on deck and finishing up their duties,” Braithwaite explained, guiding down the four large decks of the ship. “This way, there is overlap between the watches, and any damage discovered to any part of the ship is passed on to the next watch.”

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The pirates kept checklists, took assiduous notes, and checked their food stores every hour. Either because they didn’t trust one another or because, being pirates, they could not moor in most harbours, and had to stay on top of every scrap of food and water. John thought it was both.

But the strangest thing was, sometimes they allowed anyone to steer. Not during battle, and never during a storm, but during calm days and easy weather they were allowed to steer, to feel how the ship responded to the slightest turn of the wheel. There was an enormous amount of cross-training of skills—even the cook knew how to steer a little, and the helmsman could at least make stew for dozens of crewmen if need be.

One night, while lying awake in their hammocks, exhausted from a day of swabbing and cooking and stowing, John and Ellis sang a song of home. Someone shouted, “Pipe down! We don’t dream of England here, boys! The Revenge is your country now, and Blackbeard be your king!”

Everyone in the forecastle laughed.

Despite this, Ellis whispered over to John, “I think we might be all right. Captain’s letting us steer! Have you ever heard of such a thing! Boys our age steering a bloody ship?” He giggled. “I think we’re going to be all right, Johnny.”

In those days, John was in a haze of life-altering events. Sometimes he forgot the smell of his mother’s cooking, or the sound of his sister’s singing, or the birds in the forest behind their house. And also the rage. The shouting. The strike across his face, first from his mother, then his father. Look how you’ve upset your mother! Look how disgusted she is by you! And there was the sadness on his sister’s face, and the pity on his brother’s face. John had never been so ashamed to be alive, to draw breath.

Yet still, he missed it. The smell of honeysuckle in the spring, the grass beneath his bare feet, and solid ground that did not constantly rock back and forth, side to side, while men grunted and farted and shat in buckets.

“But what about home, Ellis? We were only supposed to serve a few more months on the Equinox. We could’ve returned home and nobody would’ve ever known…what happened. How the bloody hell do we get home now?”

“What home, Johnny boy? You heard the man. The Revenge is our home now.”

____

“I say, boy, why did you not kill them?” asked Captain Teach one night at table. He belched and used a napkin to wipe soup from his beard, but he never took his eyes off of John, who stood in the corner with a pitcher of wine, ready to pour. “I could tell by the look in your eye there was someone worth killing on Equinox’s crew, and the eagerness of your friend must’ve felt infectious.”

It was the first time Blackbeard had spoken directly to him since that day, and just as then, John did not know how to respond. “He…that is, they, um…”

“You don’t have to explain it to me, boy.”

John felt naked before the many solemn gazes in the room. “How did you know?”

“I’m old, boy. Credit me with enough wit to know wrath when I see it. I was once young, and therefore know the depravity of so-called God-fearing men, who somehow feel God’s vision becomes blurred and imprecise once they’re far away from home, far away from women and friends and family. They left God back in England but still like to invoke His name from time to time to induce men to do what they want.”

“Yo-ho,” said one of the other pirates at table, and sipped his rum.

“Well, I don’t mind men having religion on my ship, long as they don’t speak it or try to spread it. Worse than scurvy, it is. Worse than fucking plague. But come, tell me, why would you not kill them? I’m sure whoever has drawn your ire would not flinch to silence you forever, if only to keep you from announcing their crimes to the world.”

John swallowed. Shrugged. “I…already killed once, sir. By accident, I promise. It’s why I’m here.” The words were out of his lips before he could stop them. “I didn’t like the feeling. Even though it was an accident I still don’t like knowing that…that I, um…”

“Speak up, boy!”

“I don’t like thinking of myself as a murderer, Captain!” he shouted.

Everyone else in the room laughed. Mr. Druce, the second mate; Mr. Cutter, the carpenter’s mate standing by the door with a fresh plate of pudding; Mr. Felt; and the quartermaster Sully; all of them laughed. But Blackbeard never did, and when they noticed, they all stopped laughing. Blackbeard said, “What is your full name, lad?”

“Connor.”

“Your real name. Don’t lie to me. I smell lies like sharks smell blood in water, and it puts me into an equal feeding frenzy.”

He felt cornered, so he just said it. “John. John Alfred Laurier, sir.”

“John Laurier.” Blackbeard reached out with his fork and stabbed a slice of brined beef and shoved it in his mouth, and spoke around it. “John Laurier, would you call me a murderer if I told you I once killed a dog that went rabid, and bit my hand when all I did was try to feed it?”

John shook his head.

“No? Why not?”

“Because it…the dog, sir…it bit you first. It was diseased. It was dangerous to you.”

“Mm. And what if the dog had bitten me, but I came away mostly unscathed, and later I saw that same dog, still foaming at the mouth, and knew that someday, somewhere, it would bite someone else? What if I shot that dog dead? Am I a murderer now, even though the attack on my person is in the past, and the dog isn’t currently doing anyone any harm?”

John squirmed. “Well…no, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Because, sir, you were only protecting others from the dog’s attacks that might later.”

“Name him.”

“Name who, sir?”

“Name the man you most want dead in the world.”

John tried to recall one of the men’s names that pulled off his breeches. “Lance, sir. Don’t remember his last name.”

Captain Teach nodded ruminatively. Then he stood up and walked to the other side of the ward-room and removed one of the pistols from his brace. John knew what he was going to do, and dreaded it. Teach took the pitcher of wine out of John’s hands, and gave him the pistol. “It’s ready to fire. Just pull back the hammer here, see? Then point and fire. You have my permission to kill Lance. The time and place are yours to choose. When you’re ready.” Teach clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Now, Mr. Cutter, is that your famous pudding I see on your platter there? Because if it is, I’m going to insist Mr. Felt and Mr. Anderson wrestle for their portions again.”

The room erupted in gales of laughter again.

“I’ll place a wager on fat fuckin’ Felt!” laughed some Dutchman.

“Aye! And I’ll get the oil, grease these two fuckers up real nice!” roared a one-eyed Irishman.

“Like two wet pigs! That’s what they looked like last time!” Blackbeard wheezed.

The room was consumed by laughter.

John looked at the pistol in his hand.

____

Braithwaite’s hobby was sketching. Often around meals, men would gather at his table and watch his pen move across paper. It was like magic, watching the lines emerge from the tip of his pen to elegantly depict some contraption none of them could comprehend. John learned it had been Braithwaite who designed the special fire-barrel-slinging trebuchet that had burned half of Equinox’s deck.

One evening while the ship was becalmed, the crew mostly lounged around with not many chores to do. At these times, pirates slept, even while hanging up in the crosstrees and ratlines. But John and Ellis always sat near Braithwaite and watched the man work. They often begged him to draw something for them, such as a crewman’s face or a dog flying into the air or a monster rising out of the deep.

“I’m afraid I’m not that kind of artist, gents,” he said. “Drafting and architectural lines was what my mentor taught me. Boring stuff, I know.”

“Look now at this, nippers,” said a carpenter named Fitzroy, bringing his plate and grog over to the table to join them. “Braithwaite and I have become fast friends. He thinks stuff up, an’ I build ’em.”

“Not everything,” Braithwaite said, not looking up from his drawing.

“Well, no, not what you’re workin’ on now. I work with wood, not metals.”

John leaned in to look at Braithwaite’s most recent work. It was a curvy thing, which started out narrow at the top, and widened at the bottom. “Looks like the bell we ring to tell the time,” he said.

“It’s a revision of a design by a man named Bendall,” Braithwaite said, adjusting his spectacles and smiling. The man was ravenous for knowledge, everybody knew, but also loved to lecture to any willing ear. “He devised a sort of large container, big enough for one man, which you drop into the sea and trap air in the top half. He used barrels in his design, I’m thinking something a deal more sturdy, one that doesn’t leak. I thought of a bronze bell. You see, you attach it to a crane—like the one we used to assemble the trebuchet—and lower it down into the water by chain. Heavy weights take the diving bell to the bottom of the ocean, and the divers breathe the air trapped inside.” He drew four precise circles on the outside of the bell. “Small windows here would let them see out into the ocean floor. Isn’t that exciting? They could also hold their breaths and take short swims around the seafloor.”

“Won’t they eventually run out of air?” asked Ellis.

“Eventually, yes. But I’m thinking a rope here should run all the way up to the deck, and when the divers pull on it, it’ll ring a bell on the deck, letting the crew know to reel them back in.”

Fitzroy scoffed. “But what bloody good is it? So you can see what’s on the seabed. Big deal, mate.”

Braithwaite removed his spectacles and cleaned them with his shirt. “Not very astute, Mr. Fitzroy. The purpose is not just to look around, it’s to find things. Sunken ships, perhaps. Like the Santa Rosalía or the Santa Eva Maria.”

At this, Fitzroy stopped eating. Leaned in. “Treasure?”

“Perhaps.”

“What treasure?” John asked.

Braithwaite put his glasses back on. “You tell him, Mr. Fitzroy, I’m tired of telling the story.” He returned to his drawing.

Fitzroy spoke around a mouthful of biscuit. “He’s talking about the Spanish Silver Train, lads. Two years ago, the Spaniards had themselves a bad bit o’ luck. Bad bit o’ luck, indeed. Seven ships set sail from Panamá, fat with gold and silver, and they did it during the right season, shouldn’t have been any storm that time o’ year. But there was. Storm like you ne’er saw. Waves as big as the sky, they say! The ships couldn’t handle it. Five of ’em foundered and sank, a sixth one took enough damage that it had to take harbour somewheres, and the British found it and took it. The seventh one limped home.

“But them five massive ships, boys, the ones that sank, they be sittin’ fat still, way down in Davy Jones’s locker.” Fitzroy pointed a single finger down at the table. “Way, way down. Savvy? It’s all just a-sittin’ down there. Too bad nobody knows where that was.”

“Not true,” Braithwaite mumbled.

“Oh, here we go again—”

“What?” John said, fascinated. No conversation back home had ever been as invigorating as this.

Fitzroy sighed wearily. “Ol’ Braithwaite here claims to know a man was on the San Luis, the ship that got taken by the English. The man lives in some small port town—eh, what’s it called, Braithwaite?”

“Nassau.”

“Nassau, that’s it. Claims this man was an intellectual, like our Braithwaite here, and they got to talkin’, back when the ship Braithwaite used to be on passed through there. This man—”

“Pedro Salazar,” Braithwaite supplied.

“Right. So Pedro, he confides in our man here that there was a specific island the Silver Train passed just before it sank. Pedro said he recalled the shape o’ that island, and saw at least two o’ the ships—the Santa Rosalía or the Santa Eva Maria—go down. The other three ships were probably with them, he said. Said he wanted to return there. But poor ol’ Pedro was sick with plague—”

“It wasn’t plague. If you’re going to tell the story, Mr. Fitzroy, tell it right. He died of dysentery.”

“—dysentery, then. And before he died, he claimed he’d never confided in anybody else the shape o’ that island.” Fitzroy smiled wryly at Braithwaite. “So, our friend here is the only one knows what island that might be, and where the Silver Train went down.”

John winced. “What about the seventh ship?” he whispered.

“Eh?”

“You said a seventh ship made it back to Spain. Couldn’t they have told someone where the ships went down?”

Braithwaite looked up with a smile of surprise. “You are very keen, Mr. Laurier. Yes, indeed, the Spaniards likely know whereabouts the rest of the ships went down. But access is the problem.”

“Access?”

“Yes. For one, how could they get enough ships this far into contested waters without the British or French noticing? And second, by what means could they dive to the bottom of the ocean to retrieve it all? Untold tons of treasure, John. How could they swim down, and breathe long enough to bring it all back to the surface?”

John smiled and said, “A diving bell would be a good start, sir.”

Braithwaite went back to drawing. “Very astute, Mr. Laurier.”