Van Hoek payed no attention to those clouds, which were many hours in their future; he was gazing at the waves around them, which began to develop little white hats as the sun and the wind came up. “They will be able to make six knots,” he said, referring to the Spanish ships that would be chasing them, “and that beauty will be able to make eight,” nodding at Météore, which was becoming visible a few miles in the distance. Jack and everyone else knew perfectly well that in these circumstances—the hull recently scraped and waxed, and combining the use of sails and oars—the galleot could likewise sustain eight knots.
They might, in other words, have been able to flee from the jacht and make a run for freedom on this very day—but first they would have had to fight the Corsairs on board. And at the end of the day they’d have to rely on other Corsairs to protect them from Spanish vengeance. So they adhered to the Plan.
The first several miles, from Sanlúcar de Barrameda to Cadiz, might have been an ordinary morning cruise, no different from their training-voyages around Algiers. But Météore—now flying French colors—raised as much sail as she could, and began to shadow them, a mile or two off to the west. Perhaps she only wanted to observe, but perhaps she was waiting for an opportunity to board them, and seize all the proceeds, and send them back into slavery or to David Jones’s Locker. So they made as much speed as they could, and were already running scared, and rowing hard, when they came in sight of Cadiz. Two frigates sailed out from there and challenged them with cannon-shots across the bows—evidently messengers had galloped down from Bonanza during the night.
The day then dissolved into a long sickening panic, a slow and stretched-out dying. Jack rowed, and was whipped, and other times he whipped other men who were rowing. He stood above men he loved and saw only livestock, and whipped skin off their backs to make them row infinitesimally harder, and later they did the same to him. The ra?s himself rowed, and was whipped by his own slaves. Whips wore out and broke. The galleot became an open tray of blood, skin, and hair, a single living body cut open by some pitiless anatomist: the benches ribs, the oars digits, the men gristle, the drum a beating heart, the whips raw dissected nerves that spun and whorled and crackled through the viscera of the hull. This was the first hour of their day, and the last; it quickly became too terrible to imagine, and remained thus without letting up, forever, even though it was only a day—just as a short nightmare can seemingly encompass a century. It passed out of time, in other words, and so there was nothing to tell of it, as it was not a story.
They did not begin to be human again until the sun went down, and then they had no idea where they were. There were not as many men in the galleot as there had been when the sun had come up and they had dipped dry oars into the whitecaps as the bugle played. No one was really sure why. Jack had a vague recollection of seeing bloody bodies going over the gunwales, pushed by many hands, and of an attempt that had been made to throw him overboard, which had come to naught when he had begun thrashing around. Jack assumed that Mr. Foot could not have survived the day, until later he heard ragged breathing from a dark corner of the quarterdeck, and found him huddled under some canvas. The rest of the Cabal had all survived. Or at least they were all present. The meaning of survival was not entirely clear on a day like this. Certainly they would never be the same. Jack’s similitude about trapped beasts gnawing their legs off had been intended as a sort of jest, to make Dappa feel less guilty, but today it had come true; even if Moseh, Jeronimo, and the others were still breathing, and still aboard, important pieces of them had been chewed off and left behind. That night, it did not occur to Jack that, for some of them at least, this might amount to an improvement.
Raindrops were coming out of the dark, and they lay on their bellies on the benches letting the water cleanse their wounds. The galleot was bucking in huge pyramidal seas that rushed at her from various directions. Some were afraid they would run aground on the shore of Spain. But van Hoek—once he was able to speak again, and had finished praying to God for forgiveness and redemption—said he was certain he had spied Tarifa off to port, gleaming in the sunlight of late afternoon. This meant that the weather was driving them into the open Mediterranean; that the Corsair-countries were on their starboard; and that they were now a part of Spain’s glorious past.
*The East London mudlark who had succeeded in stealing an anchor only after sacrificing Dick Shaftoe to the Thames, and then passed out drinking so that he was apprehended the next day.
?Who was not especially pleasant to pass the time with, but who had a knack for getting things done.
*”Ship” in this context meaning anything with three masts, square-rigged.
Off Malta
LATE AUGUST 1690