Capt. Burt welcomed me with a big smile and a glass of wine. "You're lookin' healthy, Chris. How's everythin' on the Sabina?"
I said thank you and "Fine, sir. Novia had to shoot one guy while I was gone and hang another one, but she says it's done wonders to bring the rest into line. So do Red Jack and Bouton."
"I've known it to help, myself." Capt. Burt grinned. "You'll be short two men, just the same."
I shook my head. "You're right, sir, she was down two men. The man she hanged had killed Compagne, so that was two. But the one she shot-it was one of the Cimaroons-is recovering. I brought us another man when I came back, so we've only lost one, really."
"You're sure he ain't a spy, Chris?"
"He was a Moskito slave, sir. They just about beat him to death. He hates the Spanish worse than I hate… well, anybody."
"You trust him."
"Absolutely. If you knew him like I do, you'd trust him, too."
"Good enough." Captain Burt leaned back, making the steeple with his fingers. "Tell me about the fort."
"Strong on the water sides, not so strong on the others. The walls fronting the strait are granite, about four feet thick. Landward-"
"How many guns?"
"On the water side? Sixteen. There are ten eight-pounders, four twelve-pounders, and two twenty-fours. They have two furnaces for heating hot shot."
He rubbed his hands together. "You got into the fort, Chris?"
"Yes, sir. It was no great trick."
"I'm impressed. I thought you were a man worth havin' when we met in Veracruz. Remember that?"
"Yes, sir. I'll never forget it."
"I didn't know how right I was. Like some more wine?"
I shook my head and put my hand over my glass.
He poured more for himself. "Now let me count up. Four men for each of the eights, that's thirty-two. Four twelves, you said. Let's say six men for each of them, which is another twenty-four-fifty-six so far. Two twenty-four-pounders. They could be worked by eight, but let's allow ten-another twenty men. There will be officers, men to tend the furnaces, and so on. I'd say a hundred at least. Does that square with what you saw?"
I shook my head again. "It's more like two hundred, Captain. I'd guess about a hundred and sixty. Maybe a hundred and eighty, but at least a hundred and sixty."
He nodded, I would say to himself. "Stand against a fleet. L'Olonnais took the place, you know. Got a fortune out of it and scared Spain half to death. They've made it a lot stronger than it was in his day. Tell me about the watchtower. Is it part of the fort?"
"No, sir, it's not. It's on a different island on the other side of the strait- Isla de la Vigia. It means Lookout Island. It's a stone tower on a hill. I'd guess the tower must be about fifty feet high, but the top of the tower must be close to a hundred feet above sea level. Whenever a ship comes into the Gulf, the tower signals to the fort. I tried to crack the code, but I couldn't."
"I take it the strait's narrow? That's how it looks on every map I've seen."
"Yes, sir. Really narrow, and the channel down it is worse. Narrow and crooked. There's a famous sandbar called El Tablazo about ten feet down. A lot of ships get hung up on it."
"I've got the picture." The steeple came back. "What would prevent our taking the tower, Chris?"
"Fire from the fort. Soldiers from the fort or from the barracks outside the city."
"There are more soldiers there to defend the city, then."
"Yes, sir. About eight hundred, from what I saw of them."
"Good soldiers?"
I shrugged. "About average, I'd say. I don't know a lot about soldiers."
"Good soldiers stand straight and keep themselves as clean as possible. Like marines." Capt. Burt rose as he spoke, walked to the big stern windows and looked out at Snow Lady. "I don't imagine you know much about marines, either."
I said, "No, Captain. I don't."
"I wish I had some. I wish the Navy would lend me a couple of hundred. Or more." As he walked back to his chair, I noticed that the deck beams just cleared his head. I had to crouch in that cabin, just like I crouched in our cabin on Sabina.
"I've got two plans to propose, Chris. Maybe they're both workable. Maybe neither one is. I'd like your frank opinion of both."
"Sure," I said. "You'll get it, Captain."
"Good. Here's the first. We land on the western shore of the Gulf, march along the coast staying out of range of the guns of the fort, and take the city."
"Sure." I nodded. "That's what I was thinking when I got there. It might be done, sir, but it carries some big disadvantages."
"Which are?"
"A tough march, to start with. The men won't like that. We'd have to leave half our force on the ships, just like Portobello, but Maracaibo's a lot bigger."
"And we've fewer ships. Go on."
"We'd be seen landing by the watchtower. That would give General Sanchez-he's in the city now-two or three days to arrange a defense outside the city. Not just soldiers, but cannon."
"No element of surprise," Capt. Burt murmured.
"Exactly, sir. It would also give General Sanchez time to call for more soldiers from Caracas. He'd get them, too. He's the highest-ranking officer in Venezuela, from what I hear."
"We might beat him before they got there, Chris. Or so I'd hope."
"Yes, sir. We might, but we'd have to get our hands on the gold fast, and they'd have had lots of time to hide it. If we hadn't gotten it, we'd have to fight the fresh soldiers, too. If we beat them, we'd still have to carry everything out to the ships the same way we came in. And if Caracas sent ships instead of troops marching overland-"
Capt. Burt cut me off. "Exactly. That's the great objection. Our ships'd be trapped in the Gulf like so many rats. They'd have to fight their way out, with their crews at half strength."
"Leaving us," I added.
"Right. I take it we agree my first plan's workable but damnably risky. Here's my second. Don't be afraid to get rough with it. All the guns in the fort are directed toward the strait?"
"All but two eight-pounders, sir. Those are pointed inland."
"Good. We could bombard the watchtower without being shot at by the fort, from what you say. We'll knock it down, blinding them. When there's a good stiff wind on a dark night, we'll run through the strait. We'll take the city and threaten to burn it and kill our hostages if the fort doesn't surrender."
I said, "I like that one a lot better than the first, Captain. The strait would be the tricky part. The longer we wait for a favoring wind, the longer the Spanish will have to send for ships and soldiers. And to get them."
Capt. Burt nodded. "I agree, of course. We'll have to act within the next few nights."
"It's narrow, too, and we'll have to feel our way with sounding poles. Any ship that runs aground will be knocked to pieces as soon as the sun's up."
"I understand."
"What's worse is that any ship that runs aground may block the channel for the others. If they've entered the strait, they'll have to kedge to get out. May I tell you how I'd do it, sir?"
He nodded, and I did. We came into the Gulf in broad daylight, proudly flying our black flags. Sabina was in the lead, and the man at the masthead called down, "Tower's makin' signals, Cap'n. I can't read 'em, though."
I grinned at Novia and said, "I imagine it is." I remember that so well that I cannot resist putting it in.
She insisted on going with me in the longboat. We landed-all our boats landed-on the west side of the Pigeon Island, the side away from the strait. Putting it another way, we landed just about opposite the fort, which put us behind the ambush that Hoodahs and I had found. I had hoped to catch the soldiers as they beat it back into the fort, but nobody had warned them. We came up behind them while they waited in their trench. We drove them like sheep to the northern end of the island, where our ships' guns did for a hundred or more before they could surrender.
After that we jumped the fort from behind, took it, and drove iron spikes into the touchholes of the guns. There was hardly anybody left inside, and I doubt that more than a dozen shots were fired.
So I had been wrong about the soldiers. I was wrong about the city, too, because I had expected street fighting with the civilians and General Sanchez's soldiers. He used his men to cover the evacuation instead. That might have been good if the civilians had stuck together. As soon as they were clear of the city they scattered like chickens, and he could not have covered them all with five thousand men. We sent strong parties pretty much wherever we wanted to, and rounded up a lot of them, with the gold, silver, and jewelry they had been trying to save from us.
That was when I really found out why Capt. Burt rated buccaneers as highly as he did. Our buccaneers could load and fire twice in the time it took a soldier to load and fire once, and they could bowl over a running man at fifty paces. There were days when it seemed like the only time anybody was hit by one of those soldiers was when the soldier was aiming at somebody else. Hand-to-hand was liable to be pretty even-the side with the most men won. (That was just about always us.) But the way to win with the fewest losses was to follow a party of civilians who were hot to get away from us and pick off the soldiers who were trying to protect it. In half an hour they would have hardly one man left.
I would be lying to you if I said there was no rape and no torture, but I did not do it and did my best to stop it. As well as I can remember I succeeded twice.
Here I ought to say more about torture. I have been skipping over things, I know, and I would like to skip over that. I am not going to do it here because I understand very well how useless it is to make a confession that does not confess.
Besides, I know that a lot of things are considered torture now that would just be punishments on a ship. A sailor would be keelhauled, for instance. It meant that he was tied to rope looped around the ship's waist and dragged under water, beneath the keel, and up on the other side. When he came up he would be half drowned, and half skinned by the barnacles, too. If he did not die, he might be given a week or two in chains to recover. When he was a little stronger, he would be returned to his duty, and nobody called it torture.
We burned our prisoners, dropping live coals onto their faces and roasting them over fires. We cut off men's private parts and raped their wives before their eyes. We tied ropes around people's heads, stuck a stick through the ropes, and turned that stick until their eyes came out and hung down on their cheeks-all this to get them to tell where they had hidden money, or where somebody else had.
We did all that, and while we did it we knew that if we were captured by the Spanish we might be treated the same way. The Spanish often tortured a Native American slave just to make their other slaves fear and respect them.
When I was looking for Hoodahs-it was the third day we were in Maracaibo, and we were getting ready to sail-I went to the inn where I got him, thinking he might have gone back there because he knew where something would be hidden. I did not find him-or any gold either-but I found the bodies of his old master's sons. One's head had been split with an ax or a hatchet. I think it was the only time I saw a human face divided like that. The other had been dismembered, it seemed while he was still alive-his arms and legs hacked off, and the rest left to bleed to death.
Let me say something here about the Spanish and their king that most people today do not know. Not even most pirates knew it. When a Spaniard got a land grant from the King of Spain, he had to swear that he would protect the Native Americans whose land he was getting and teach them Christianity.
Hardly any of them did it. The Native Americans were taught Christianity, yes. But it was not done by the men who got their land. It was done by priests and brothers, Jesuits, Franciscans, and Dominicans. They protected the Native Americans, too, as much as they could. Mostly that meant protecting them from Spanish laymen.
After reading this, you are bound to judge people like Capt. Burt, Hoodahs, and me pretty harshly, and I am not saying we do not deserve it. No doubt God will judge us with severity. But God will not forget that the times in which we buccaneers plundered the Spanish Main were not like these times, and that the men we tortured for gold would have tortured us for sport.
All of us had known that Maracaibo was rich. It turned out to be richer than any of us had expected. We loaded our ships and two Spanish ships that had been in the harbor, and headed off to Jamaica with so much gold and silver, and so many tons of cacao beans, that I expected Capt. Burt to give up his plan and head home to Surrey.
He did not, but before I get into that, I want to say something more about Maracaibo. The Spanish made two mistakes there (in my judgment) that were characteristic of them, the kinds of things that let us operate as freely as we did.
The first was being too confident of their defenses. They envisioned one kind of attack and defended against it. When somebody does that, his enemy sees he has done it and adjusts his plans. It is not enough to guard against the obvious move and let everything else slide. If the colonel I talked to in the fort had patrolled the shore of Pigeon Island, he and his men would never have been caught like they were.
The other is that the loss of the city was not one man's fault. It was the fault of just about every Spaniard there except the soldiers under General Sanchez. (They were the ones who died, more than any of the rest; but at least they were not tortured.) General Sanchez had eight hundred soldiers left after we took the fort. There had to be at least five thousand men capable of bearing arms in Maracaibo, and a lot of them had muskets, pistols, or swords. I doubt that there was even one who did not have a knife or an ax. If those men had been organized and led against us, we would have had to get out and get out quick. They were not. I doubt that as many as a hundred of the five thousand fought us. They depended on the soldiers to defend them instead, and the soldiers tried to do it when they should have been attacking us. If they had hit us hard when we were drinking and looting, they would have driven us back to our ships in short order.
Was that colonel at the fort stupid? Maybe he was-I fooled him, after all. But I spoke his language at least as well as he did, and he had no reason to suspect me. The north end of the island was the obvious place to land, and that ambush he had planned was well thought out. If we had walked into it the way he expected, we would have been wiped out. He was not stupid, he was careless.
As I write this, it is Christmas Eve, and that is what I plan to preach about at midnight mass. Before I get back to Maracaibo, I should say that my homily seemed to go pretty well. I began by explaining that intelligence in God's service is a great blessing, but that we are not judged by it.
"It is innate. For God to favor you because you're smart would be as unjust as it would be for Him to favor me because I'm tall. We're all born with certain talents-His gold, that the Master has left with us-and without certain others. If we are wise, we use our talents in His service. Every member of our choir was born with a good voice, and has wisely chosen to honor God with it. You can think of many other examples, I know.
"Saint Thomas Aquinas was a genius, and Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us of Jesus more than any other saint. I would not be surprised to learn that Saint Teresa of Avila was the most extraordinary woman since the Holy Mother. Have any of them gone to a better Heaven than Brother Juniper? I promise you, they haven't-and they wouldn't want to. Many saints were just children when they died-Saint Agatha is the one I think of first, but there are a lot of others. Bernadette was a plain village girl, and so was Saint Joan.
"Examples like the ones I just gave could be trotted out all day, but you saw much better ones when you came into church. Wise men from the east were called to witness the Incarnation. So were shepherds. Shepherds and wise men, both called as witnesses.
"So am I called. So are every one of you, or you wouldn't be here. Many of you are smart, I know. I know, too, that I'm not. I'm a plain man and not always a good man, a man who in a rougher age might've been a pig farmer or a pirate. Knowing it, I'm very happy in the knowledge that God does not put me down because I'm not a genius. He asks me to be careful- something every one of us can do. If I'm careful to learn the will of God for me and careful to do it, then I'm one of the witnesses Jesus wants.
"You see, it doesn't matter whether we're captains or just ordinary sailors. The wise men went away and told others that Christ had come into the world. The shepherds did the same, spreading glad tidings of great joy.
"You and I can do it, too. If we know what Christmas means and where true happiness lies, then all we have to do is to wish others a Merry Christmas. And mean it.
"I wish you a Merry Christmas, you good people of Holy Family. A Merry Christmas to us, one and all." HERE I SIT, tapping my teeth with the end of my pen. I feel sure I have forgotten half the things I wanted to write about Maracaibo. No doubt that is for the best.
In Maracaibo I understood why Capt. Burt had wanted two hundred marines. He could have held them together and kept them from looting until the Spanish had been beaten, not just driven from the city. General Sanchez could have held his Spaniards together, too, and hit us hard that evening. I have already said what would have happened if he had. Was he a bad general? I doubt it. He had known, I think, what he ought to do. But he had worried much too much about what people might say if he left the civilians to escape-or be captured-on their own. Some of those civilians had been men of wealth and position. (I know they were, because we captured some of them.) They would have yowled like cats to the governor in Caracas that Sanchez had not protected them. From his viewpoint, he had been smart.
A plain general, one who thought of his men on the battlefield and not of the governor and what the governor might say and do, would have beaten us. Year in and year out, the Spanish thought too much about governors and about Madrid. In the end it cost Spain an empire that covered a quarter of the world.