Pieces of Eight. John Drake

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       Chapter 10

       Dawn, 2nd October 1752 The southern anchorage The island

      “All hands mustered and ready for to march, Mr Gunner!”

      “Very good, Mr Joe,” said Israel Hands, and did his best to look over the men as Long John would have done.

      There were a dozen of them, paraded on the beach, with muskets, water canteens, and big hats constructed of sliced and plaited palm-leaves for protection against the sun. They stood grinning and yarning, some of them chewing tobacco, but they were cheerful and ready, and Israel walked up and down the line, making sure that each one had a good pair of shoes, and water in his canteen rather than rum, and that no lubber had primed his firelock without orders.

      “You! And you!” cried Israel Hands, picking two of the nimblest. “You’re the advance guard, which shall march ahead as lookouts.” Then he picked the two biggest: “You two shall follow on behind, a-walloping and a-belting of them as won’t keep up!” The men laughed.

      “And the rest shall proceed in line astern of myself and Mr Joe, and shall attend to my signals–” He put a bosun’s call to his lips and blew a single sharp note. “Well?” he said.

      “Forward!” they cried.

      “And this?” he said, blowing a sharp double-note.

      “’Vast heaving!” cried some.

      “Belay!” cried others.

      “Stop!” said Israel Hands. “That’n means stop!”

      “Stop!” they said, nodding.

      “And this?” A long trembling call.

      “Enemy in sight!” they roared.

      There were a few more simple signals: easily understood, and a credit to Israel Hands’s capacity to innovate, since never before had he led men through a forest.

      “Stand by!” cried Israel Hands.

      “Huzzah!” cried the men.

      “Forward!” cried Israel Hands.

      In single file, they set off up the beach towards the palms, leaving the tented encampment almost empty. “Camp Silver” they were calling it now. A few men were still working on the wreck of Lion, while most of the others had already left–on Long John’s orders–on expeditions led by Black Dog and Sarney Sawyer.

      There was also a small guard of ten men left to defend the camp with a quartet of four-pounders charged with canister and mounted in their carriages on firing platforms of ships timbers, the better to load and train in case of attack. These men were also responsible for Long John’s parrot, who’d never go willingly into a boat–even with him–and awaited its master’s return here, with its own perch and a supply of food and drink, and a bit of shade rigged over it.

      The bird squawked at Israel Hands as he scrunched past, ankle deep in sand, bobbing its head in greeting.

      “Ahoy there!” it cried, and Israel Hands grinned, knowing himself favoured, and he plodded on.

      He smiled again as he looked at Mr Joe marching ahead, a heavy Jamaican cane-cutlass in his belt, ready to clear a path if need be. The lad was a slim, wiry black who’d grown up with such a quick temper that he failed to see the joke when an overseer, finding Joe bent over to cut cane, had merrily cracked his arse with a whip. Thus Joe replied with a cutlass slash that removed a diagonal quarter of the overseer’s head, plus all hope of promotion for Joe in his career as a plantation slave, obliging him to seek advancement elsewhere.

      Israel Hands grinned at the thought. Joe was quick and intelligent, and under Hands’s instruction he was speedily learning his letters and his numbers, to the point that he was now rated gunner’s mate, and addressed as Mr Joe by all hands, even Long John himself.

      Joe had his little faults, of course. He could not stand to be teased, and he was dreadfully afraid of the dark, since as a child he’d been told by his mother that, if he didn’t behave, at midnight the Jumba-Jumba man would come in his big black hat and fetch Joe away in a sack. Even at nineteen years of age, Joe was still looking out for him, but Israel Hands thought no worse of the lad for that, since all sailormen believed such things: Mr Hands himself–when alone–would never look over the side at night for fear of seeing Davy Jones, the hideous fiend that lay in wait for the souls of drowned men.

      A day’s marching, with stops for meals and the heat of noon, had taken Israel Hands’s team clear of the palms and sweltering jungle that lined the island’s southern shores. Steering by a small brass compass, they had moved steadily north into a terrain of sandy hills interspersed with small, open clearings surrounded by broadleaf trees: mainly live-oaks, but with an increasing number of pines, and all with dense foliage at their bases. With night falling, they set about making camp–and made their first discovery.

      “Look, Mr Hands,” said Joe. “You see them stumps there?”

      “Aye, lad,” said Israel Hands. The spot they’d chosen was a clearing that the forest was slowly reclaiming. About a dozen big trees, all pines, had been felled many years ago, leaving stumps which were now so heavily overgrown with moss and fungus, and so surrounded by undergrowth and young trees, that it was hard to spot them. But they were there if you looked; proof that men had been this way before.

      “Looks like this island ain’t so secret as some would believe!” said Israel Hands.

      “Aye, Mr Hands,” said Joe, peering into the darkness between the standing trees. “Now we get back with the others, eh? And we make the fire?”

      “Aye,” said Israel Hands, smiling, СКАЧАТЬ