The Discovery

11 August 1665

The Griffin’s store of fruit had long since gone rotten, and was maggot infested besides.

“Eat it, young Samuel,” ordered York, the ship’s barber. “The maggots too. They’ll keep the teeth in your head.”

Samuel closed his eyes and took a tiny bite of the moldy apple. He could feel the wormy insects moving on his tongue, and quickly swallowed, choking back his nausea.

As barber, York was in charge of much more than cutting hair. He was the Griffin’s sole medical man, apothecary, and dentist.

“Scurvy takes the teeth first,” he lectured. “Then the mind. Then your life.”

It was true. At the start of the crossing, each crewman aboard the ship had been allotted a small quantity of fruit. Those who had not jealously hoarded their shares were now suffering deeply from the disease. Toothless, their bodies bent from pain, they stumbled around the barque, struggling to perform their duties. Many more had given up trying, and hung in their berths, eyes wide with vacant stares. Of two and eighty seamen and four and thirty Viscount survivors, only sixty men — barely half — remained. Now, nearly four months out of England, the rest had succumbed to scurvy, fever, and the relentless assault of the Atlantic. The gut-wrenching stink of death joined the mix of overpowering smells that made up the reek of the ship.

The funerals were becoming commonplace — two or three a day now. Normally, a body would be wrapped in a shroud for burial at sea. But sewing the shrouds was the office of the sail maker, and Evans was long gone. Samuel was struggling to take over the old man’s duties, but it was all he could do to keep the Griffin’s patchwork canvas aloft. So the dead were dispatched naked to their final resting places.

“It makes no difference to the sharks,” was Captain Blade’s opinion. “A meal’s a meal, wrapped or no.”

The cruel seaman never missed a flogging, yet never attended a single funeral. “A captain has more important things on his plate than feeding fish,” he told Samuel.

An hour did not pass in which Samuel neglected to curse himself for saving his master’s life on the ratlines. His hatred of the captain grew stronger, not weaker, as the barque approached the New World.

But even as resentment swelled inside Samuel, James Blade had begun to warm to the cabin boy who had stopped his fall that fateful day.

On the surface, there was no difference. The captain continued to treat him as a slave who was unworthy of even the slightest consideration. But it was Blade who had ordered the barber to keep an eye out for the young seaman the crew now called Lucky.

Never mind that the men of the Griffin avoided York like an evil spirit. He was most often seen covered in gore, sawing an unfortunate sailor’s leg off. His newfound “friendship” with Samuel only served to make the boy feel like even more of an outcast. And he had James Blade to thank for it.

Samuel’s feelings for the captain were not helped by the information he acquired on bailing duty in the ship’s bilge. As he battled the pumps and the stench, he overheard some sailors chortling over the day when the hold would be piled high with gold and silver. Soon, they said, the Griffin would wallow low in the water from a cargo of plundered Spanish treasure, and all aboard her would be rich.

Samuel pounded back to the captain’s quarters as soon as his shift was over, ignoring fatigue and the cramping of his muscles. He found Blade at the small desk, examining his rutter — the secret diary of a ship’s pilot who had sailed this route before. No map, no chart, no instrument was as vital to a safe voyage as a good rutter.

“Sir!” he cried. Distraught, he related what he had heard from the pumpers in the hold. “It can’t be so, can it, Captain? Tell me we’re not — common pirates!”

“Pirates?!” The bone handle of the snake whip came down on Samuel’s head with devastating, murderous force. The last thing he saw before the captain’s cabin went dark was James Blade, his cheeks suffused with purple rage.

Samuel awoke to a stinging pain so great it seared his very soul. He was in the barber’s surgery. York was pouring seawater over a bloody gash on the boy’s crown.

“A friendly piece of advice, young Samuel,” the man said, a trace of humor in his voice. “Never say ‘pirate’ to Captain Blade. A right good thing it is that he’s taken a liking to you.”

Samuel tried to sit up, but the torment was too much. “We are pirates,” he mumbled bitterly. “Thieves. Murderers too, probably.”

“Listen to me, boy,” York ordered. “We’re patriots, with the full backing of the king of England. There are papers on board signed by the Merry Monarch himself in proper London. They give us the right — no, the responsibility — to attack and disrupt enemy shipping in the Indies.”

Samuel frowned. “How does it help England if we steal their treasure?”

“Gold buys ships, boy. And trains soldiers, and equips them with muskets and cannon,” the barber explained. “We’re at war, Lucky, and wealth is power. The Royal Navy can’t waste a ship on every stinking fever-hole in the New World. That’s our lot — the patriots, the privateers! We’re legal as a magistrate, flush with letters of marque to raid the scurvy Dutch.”

“But—” Samuel was confused. “But they were talking about Spanish treasure, not Dutch.”

“True that is,” York agreed. “And a beastly nuisance to us that His Majesty, God bless him, called a truce with the cursed Spaniard. But the ocean is large, and the courtly affairs of Europe far distant. Mistakes are made, you see my point? A Spanish ship looks much like a Dutch ship in the heat of battle, and treasure is treasure, no matter whose dead hand you pry it from.”

He put an arm around the cabin boy’s shoulders, and Samuel winced from the stench of decay on his blood-spattered smock. The barber’s pockmarked face was barely an inch from his own, his breath as foul as the rest of him. “And in this part of the world, Lucky, no treasure shines as bright as Spanish gold.”