The Pirate Round

Chapter 8

THE ISLAND of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, three hundred miles off the southeast coast of Africa. As if half of Mozambique had cracked off and drifted away, fetching up at last in that place. On a chart one can see where the island would still fit clean against the African coast, snapping into place like a puzzle piece or the perfectly tooled part of some machine.

But for all that kinship to the Dark Continent, the Madagascar of 1706 was a world unto itself, supporting a culture almost entirely unique in the world. It was the advance base, the dockyard, the chandlery, the marketplace, and in many cases the home of the men who sailed the Pirate Round.

Madagascar had not been the first choice of the Roundsmen, ideal though it was in so many ways. They had first set up on Bab’s Key, the little island marked Perim on the charts, at the entrance to the Red Sea. It was a perfect spot, insofar as it was at the very crossroads of the great wealth of shipping in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea-treasure ships bringing tribute to the Great Mogul; shiploads of wealthy pilgrims bound for Mecca; the lumbering, lightly manned ships of the British, French, and Dutch East India companies.

But Perim had no water, and that was the most precious jewel of all aboard ships that were at the mercy of wind and tide. A miscalculation in that area, especially in the arid and brutally hot Red Sea countries, could result in a death more horrible than anything the pirates could inflict on their most hated enemy.

So the Roundsmen had moved their operations to Madagascar. It was over two thousand miles from their hunting grounds, but piracy was a movable profession, and what Madagascar lacked in proximity it more than made up for in other ways.

The island was lush, fruitful, with an abundance of fresh water. The climate was perfect-not sweltering, not frigid-a place where a man could pass out drunk on the ground with no fear of the weather’s killing him. The natives were cowed by the power of firearms, and even if they had not been, they were far too involved with fighting among themselves ever to coordinate any real resistance to the Europeans’ encroachment. Any band of pirates had only to help the local tribe in a raid against its neighbor to find themselves welcome on the island.

The native girls had much to recommend them as well. Mostly local Malagasies, they had a well-earned reputation for comeliness, with none of the Christian women’s aversion to fornication nor the mercenary attitude of the whores.

So perfect a place was Madagascar, such the pirates’ Eden, that many never left. They took local girls for wife, set up in trade with other Roundsmen, idled away their days in ease and drunkenness. In the entire history of piracy, only Tortuga, Port Royal in Jamaica, and Nassau would come close to rivaling Madagascar as the pirates’ utopia, a place where they alone ruled.

And of all the pirate communities that developed along Madagascar’s extensive coastline, at Fort Dauphin and the Bay of St. Augustin and Diego-Suarez and Ranter Bay and lesser places, the jewel of them all was the tiny island of St. Mary’s, twenty-six miles long and one mile wide, less than ten miles off the northeast coast.

It was at St. Mary’s that the progenitor of the Roundsmen, Thomas Tew, first landed his massive take and divided it among his men. But Tew was not the first white man on St. Mary’s. By the time the Amity’s anchor splashed into the bay, St. Mary’s had already been settled by an Englishman named Adam Baldridge.

Baldridge recognized the island’s potential as a defensible outpost- its shallow harbor with an island like a fortress at its mouth, the vicious reefs that prevented ships from landing anywhere else but under his guns. He recognized Madagascar’s ideal location as a byway from Europe and America to the Red Sea and India. He saw in the island a fine place to hide from the murder charge for which he had fled Jamaica. St. Mary’s suited his every need.

Business exploded for him. Manufactured goods, rum, and naval stores poured in from England and America, plundered goods and gold and jewels from the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, with Baldridge standing right in the confluence of all that wealth.

From his tiny outpost, carved from the jungle, Baldridge established an empire that any of those men living along Pall Mall or St. James might have envied. He built warehouses, a stockade fortress, a mansion crafted in the English style from local materials, high on a hill that gave him a grand view of all he had created. He had a harem as big as any found in the East. He ruled his island kingdom without challenge.

By 1697 Baldridge was the undisputed “King of the Pirates,” even holding a personal court and adjudicating disputes from all over Madagascar.

In the end the king pushed his luck too far, sold a few too many of the local citizens into slavery, and his once-loyal people rose against him, driving him out.

He settled at last in New York and lived a long life there. He was content, but he was no longer king.

Now I am king. The thought drifted through Elephiant Yancy’s mind. I am king now.

Elephiant Yancy sat on the wide, second-story flagstone veranda that Baldridge had built, in a grand chair carved from slabs of mahogany and inlaid with ebony and ivory detailing. He was a small man, and thus the chair itself sat on a raised section of stone that he, Yancy, had had constructed, so that even seated he might look down on anyone standing before him.

Yancy rested his head in his hand and stared idly out beyond the low wall that surrounded the veranda. Beyond and below the house lay the town of St. Mary’s, where the pirates and whores and dealers in stolen goods and tavernkeepers made their homes. It was a variable population, perhaps two thousand people at its most crowded.

To the south of the town lay the shallow harbor with its black, muddy water. At the mouth of the harbor was a small island, Quail Island, which was home to a battery of cannon and not much else. But Quail Island was perfectly situated. With his men garrisoned there, ready at the great guns, Yancy could dictate completely who came and went from St. Mary’s.

From his veranda Yancy could see the southern half of the harbor. He watched as a small ship stood slowly into the anchorage, rounded up, and dropped her anchor under a backed main topsail. Wondered, with only the slightest curiosity, if she was from England or America, or if she brought mail.

He thought of Baldridge. Baldridge had created all this and had been forced to abandon it. He, Yancy, had found it, all but in ruins, had built it back up, had made it his own. Baldridge might have started the whole thing, but Elephiant Yancy, former pirate and Roundsman, had resurrected it to an even greater glory than Baldridge could have envisioned.

St. Mary’s Rediviva.

He repeated that thought, worked it around in his mind the way an Arab worked his prayer beads. He didn’t really believe it at all, which was why he had to keep telling himself it was true.

At length he looked down at the two pathetic creatures seated on the low chairs before him. One of them had been talking for… how long? Yancy did not know, had not been listening. As lord of the island, Yancy had taken it upon himself to sit in judgment in such petty disputes. It was part of the burden he had to carry as supreme ruler of the kingdom, and he accepted that, but it was still a great bother and a terrific bore.

He was king, but he was not so ostentatious as to use that title. He insisted, rather, that he be called “Lord Yancy.”

“It’s a lie, what he said, Lord Yancy, I swear to Jesus God it is,” one of the men was protesting. “That stuff he says I stole, it was mine, it weren’t never his. Except for the knife, and that I won in gaming, fair and all, and he knows it-”

“That’s a lie!” the other interjected. “Son of a bitch is trepanning you, Your Honor, and I can have a dozen witnesses say that’s a fact!”

Yancy sighed audibly, stared out at the harbor again. Other men might look at his wealth, his power, his harem of women, and they might be envious, but they did not understand the terrible responsibility he carried.

He looked back at the men, put thumb and forefinger under his nose, and slowly ran the tips of those fingers down his mustache, smoothing the hair and then stroking his neatly groomed goatee with his full hand. He had practiced that gesture in the mirror until he was certain he had achieved the thoughtful, contemplative look he wanted.

The two litigants were both talking at once, a jumble of sound that Yancy could not pull apart so as to hear the individual words. He waved his hand for silence, and both men stopped talking. They paused a moment, hung there in expectation. When Yancy did not speak, one of the men started in again, but the guard who stood to one side punched him in the head, and he shut up.

“I have listened to your arguments,” Yancy announced slowly, even though he had not. He did not in fact even recall what their dispute was about. “You are both liars and thieves, perfidious men. I banish you both from St. Mary’s. You have until sundown to leave.”

There, that was the simplest solution.

Both men looked stunned, and as the guards stepped up behind them, one shouted, “Yancy, damn it, that ain’t…”

The words died, withered under the heat of Yancy’s glare.

“Lord Yancy, sir, I mean-” the man stuttered.

“You argue with my judgment? Shall I cut your hands off and then banish you?”

Yancy saw the guards’ faces brighten at the thought, but the man shut his mouth tight and shook his head. Finally he managed, “No, my Lord…”

“Good. Begone.”

Yancy closed his eyes, massaged his temples as the guards shuffled the two away. He hoped someone was watching, as he knew that this particular gesture gave him the look of a world-weary monarch, a man who carried a great load on his shoulders.

Elephiant Yancy was not much above five feet tall, and thin, and he had the small man’s energy, but he tried not to display it. It was not fitting for one in his position.

But energy he had, and drive. He had the energy for pirating in the Caribbean, for sailing the Round. Five years before, he had stepped ashore with the small crew of his pirate sloop, the Terror, and taken possession of Baldridge’s old haunt from the few drunks who lived there. He had the vision and energy to see it built up again to its former glory, to court trade from the American colonies and from London.

He had done all that, and now he was at the top, and he moved with the languid quality of the nobility, let others serve him. He did not rush, he did not speak quickly, as was befitting a monarch. He dressed in the clothing of a gentleman and sported great capes lined with red silk and wide-brimmed hats with long feathers trailing behind. He understood that in order for his people to respect him as lord of St. Mary’s, his every action, his every word, must be lordly.

But for all his certainty about his own divine right to rule, Yancy was worried. He closed his eyes, still massaging his temples, pictured the faces of the guards. They were bored by the trial, pleased by the possibility of cutting off a man’s hands, disappointed when Yancy let him go. They were a brutish lot. Their loyalty was open to question.

There were currently more than five hundred men on St. Mary’s, and nearly every one was or had been a pirate, and those who had not were still of no higher moral character. They frequented the makeshift taverns along the harbor, caroused with the native girls on the beaches or in the thick jungle, spent their booty, died as broken wrecks in the dirt streets. They were his army, but how many could he really count on?

Thirty, he reckoned. Those men who had first come with him, who had helped him build this up, who had recognized his place as king of it all. He had made those men rich, had given them harems, slaves. They lived with him in the big house, surrounding him. His Praetorian Guard. They would stand by him. Of the others? A third, perhaps, would stand by him, but they would be loyal to whoever they thought wielded the most power.

The last would like to see him impaled. He had just added two more to that group.

He sighed, stood up from his chair, which he thought of as a throne but did not refer to as such. He walked across the wide veranda, his cape swishing behind in a dramatic swirl of cloth, leaned his elbows on the stone wall, looked down on the town and the harbor below.

The jungle spilled from the interior of the island right to the water’s edge, as if cascading down the hillsides, a thick green waterfall of vegetation running down to the sea. Here and there the green was splotched with color, the lovely flowers that were native to the place, bougainvillea and hibiscus, the air heavy with their scent.

A dusty road ran from the center of the town below and followed the shoreline to the harbor to the south, where it terminated at a battered old dock. A boat was pulling away from the newly arrived ship to the docks, which probably meant mail. Yancy hoped there would be some good word from some quarter. He could use that.

Soft footsteps at the far end of the veranda, and a native servant announced, “Dinner, Lord Yancy. Me bring there, lord?” The servants were all Madagascar men and women, some slaves, some freemen, depending upon their station. It was Yancy’s standing order that the servants announce themselves from a distance. He did not need people sneaking around behind him.

“Yes. Set it here,” he said, never taking his eyes from the harbor and the boat that had now reached the dock. He could see a man get out of the stern sheets, step onto the dock, hurry along the road to the town.

The servant set down the tray and retreated quickly. Yancy glanced at the food. Cold roast beef and a pot of mustard. Bread, butter, a slice of kidney pie. A gold chalice filled with wine. It looked like the Holy Grail.

The cook was English, enticed off a visiting vessel with absurdly high wages and a small harem of his own. He was good, but that did not mean he was trusted.

Each bit of food had a small piece carefully cut away where Yancy’s taster had taken his sample-cut cleanly to retain the neatness of the presentation, but cut obviously enough that Yancy knew that the food had been tested. A man as powerful as he had powerful enemies. He had to defend against assassination.

Lord Yancy reached for the bread, realized he was hungry, then stopped. What if his taster were part of a plot? He was the one person who could easily poison Yancy’s food. Taste it, declare it fit, then slip some poison or other in it.

He pulled his hand back slowly, as if the food might strike out at him like a snake if he made a sudden move. He felt his appetite melt away. He tried to recall if the taster had a family, a wife, children? If so, should he arrest one or more of them, hold them as collateral, with the promise that they would be tortured to death if he died of poisoning?

He was staring at the food, trying to formulate a plan of action, when he heard boots on the cobblestone veranda, walking fast, confident. Henry Nagel, Yancy’s quartermaster during his days on the account, his second in command now, his chief adviser, his lord chamberlain. No one else would dare approach so boldly. He held a canvas bag in one meaty hand.

“Ship just come to anchor, my lord,” Nagel said as he approached. “Arrived from London, forty days out. Brought mail. Captain brought it ashore, right off.”

Yancy turned and looked at Nagel, who stood a respectful five feet away. Nagel was the physical opposite of Yancy-a big, powerful brute of a man, a seaman and pirate through and through, but with enough insight to realize that it was brains, such as Yancy had, and not brawn like his, that made a man a leader.

“Henry, how loyal are the men of this island to me?”

“My lord,” Nagel began, and Yancy could hear the placating tone in his voice.

“Tell me true.”

Nagel straightened, tried to summon the words. He was the only man on the island who was not afraid of Yancy, and if his loyalty were not so far beyond question, Yancy would have had him killed. As it was, he could not imagine ruling St. Mary’s without Nagel, the only man who dared tell him the truth.

“My lord, the men here, they’re pirates. End of the day, they don’t give a tinker’s damn for any but themselves, but that ain’t something you don’t know. All us from the Terror, we what came here with you, we’d die for you and never think on it. You know that. The others? I reckon most of ’em would fight for you-if they thought there was a better than even chance you’d win against who you was fighting.”

Yancy nodded. “What of our defenses? How are they?” The battery and stockade on Quail Island looked formidable indeed, with ten heavy guns trained out over the water. Any ship going in or out had to run the narrow entrance, with the big guns at point-blank range.

But the appearance was deceiving. The guns had been there since Baldridge’s time. Indeed, in Baldridge’s time there had been forty of them, but Yancy had sold off most of them, reckoning ten were more than enough for the job.

Those that remained had received no maintenance for years. They were blacked now and the carriages repaired, but blacking and new carriages would not prevent them from blowing apart if the metal had grown weak through age or defects in the casting. Yancy had never fired them. He did not dare.

“Well, as to that,” Nagel said, “the stockade’s in pretty good shape. There’s some parts are rotting, but I mean to get some men on that, shore it up. Guns, well…”

“Yes, yes, very well.” Yancy had heard enough. He was suddenly tired of that conversation. “Is this the mail?”

“Yes, yes, my lord.” Nagel knew when to let a subject drop. He hefted the canvas bag and gently poured the contents onto the low stone wall. “Ain’t sorted it out. Thought you would want to see it first.”

“Yes, yes…” Yancy said, sifting through the letters that were piled on the wall. They were not all for him, of course. Some were for other denizens of St. Mary’s, those well enough established to receive correspondence there, those few men who could read and write or knew someone who could read and write.

Two letters from Yancy’s merchant in London, another from his merchant in Newport, Rhode Island. “Bloody thieves…” he muttered, setting those letters aside. They were his middlemen, and they robbed him with never a scruple, but he needed them.

He continued through the pile, separating his letters from the others. Here was a letter for Bartleby Finch, who operated one of the taverns near the harbor. Yancy had granted him permission, but still he did not trust the villain. “Let us see who is writing to this dog,” Yancy muttered, and he set Finch’s letter with his own.

A letter from his wife in New York; he wondered how she had smoked his whereabouts. She had been a pretty thing, the last time he had seen her, pale-skinned and blue-eyed.

His gaze wandered off for a moment, unfocused, as he thought of her. He loved the girls of his harem, every one of them, their dusky skin and dark hair. But he missed the creamy skin and soft blond hair of the white women he had known. He had had a surfeit of Malagasy girls. He longed for a woman of European blood.

Yancy shook off that thought, turned back to the letters. More nonsense from merchants, a letter from the governor of New York…

His hand paused in midreach as he saw a familiar seal. He lifted the letter from the pile, gently, as if it might break, and turned it over. Richard Atwood. He had not heard from him in over a year.

Atwood was one of Yancy’s triumphs, a well-placed secretary within the British East India Company. Yancy sent him yearly tribute in the amount of five hundred pounds. To Yancy it was a trifle, but it was more than twice the salary that the East Indian Company paid. In exchange, Atwood forwarded along shipping schedules, naval information, intelligence on the doings of the Great Mogul. Yancy had used that information to earn back many times what he had paid for it.

He unsheathed the ornate stiletto that he always wore at his hip. The razor-sharp blade sliced away the seal, and he unfolded the letter. The paper was covered with Atwood’s neat clerk’s handwriting in even lines. “Lord Yancy, I trust this finds you well…” it began, as Atwood’s letters always did. He knew to address his benefactor with respect.

As you, sir, are all too Aware, the Company has at Various times in the Past endeavored to make sundry attacks on what they perceive as the great threat of Pyrates in Madagascar. They have never met with any great success, in part, I flatter myself to think, due to my timely warnings of their pending Action, but also in part due to a want of intelligent or active officers to lead such an Enterprise.

There is now in the making another such Enterprise, but this one of a more Secretive Nature than the others. A few of the more influential members of the Company have undertaken to Outfit a private man-ofwar and tender for the purpose of routing out Pyracy in Madagascar and there is reason to believe that their enterprise will meet with greater success than those past. In part this is due to their affording every request of the commander in the article of weaponry, supplies, and men, who are well paid and very numerous, and this being just the beginnings of their Preparations.

The men who are secretly arranging this Expedition, with the consent of the Queen, have hired a privateer captain well known for his active nature and in whom they place great confidence. His name is Roger Press…

Yancy gasped as if he had been doused with cold water, felt his hands clench, heard the crackle of Atwood’s letter as he crushed it in his fist.

Press!

It was not possible. Yancy stared out over the water, but he did not see it. He saw only Roger Press’s ugly, pockmarked face, that damned toothpick wagging between his lips like a little accusing finger.

No, it is not possible. Press could not have escaped…

But how many were there with that name? And of all of them, how many would be of such a kidney as to lead a raid against a pirates’ stronghold? It was not inconceivable that Press had somehow redeemed himself, worked his way to a place of trust, at least trust enough that he might be given a secret and dangerous mission such as this.

Nagel stood patient but worried. He knew better than to ask Yancy what the trouble was.

Yancy looked at the date on top of the letter. The second of August, 1706. Almost three months past. If Press had sailed at the same time as the ship that had brought it, he could arrive any day. Even if he had not, he would not be far behind.

Yancy whirled around, put his hands flat on the low wall, looked down at the cluster of buildings below and the few figures moving around, as if he could judge from there their fidelity and willingness to fight for his kingdom.

“… Affording every request of the commander in the article of weaponry, supplies, and men, who are well paid and very numerous…” That was what Atwood wrote. Would those villains down there stand and fight a well-armed and motivated band of mercenaries? Not bloody likely.

In his mind he saw himself racing down a strange hallway, flinging open doors, looking for the one that concealed the plan, the right action to meet this new threat. Door after door, and then he opened one and behind it was something he recognized as an idea. He studied the thing, and as he did, it resolved into a possibility. A minute’s more consideration and it had become a full-fledged plan of action.

Elephiant Yancy had not become Lord Yancy by folding in panic in the face of every adversity. He had become Lord Yancy by recognizing that all adversity held in its core potential opportunity.

And here was adversity: his most hated enemy, still alive, well armed, and coming for him. But what Yancy saw was Roger Press sailing right into his arms. Roger Press, coming right to him and thinking it was all a great secret.

He straightened, turned to Nagel, but before he could speak, he was overcome by a hacking cough that doubled him over and rendered him incapable of speech for half a minute.

He looked up again, at Nagel’s worried face. “The time has come, my dear Henry. To prepare for the future. We cannot tarry. Our fate will be upon us soon.”