Hunt for White Gold

Chapter Twenty-Nine





It was always the Portuguese. Wherever and whenever a man first licked his thumb and placed it on the edge of a map and questioned what lay beyond he did it upon the rocking deck of a carrack out of Lisbon. So it was that in the early sixteenth century the first of many dropped their anchors in Guangzhou harbour and began there also to drop silver, returning with the first batches of the mysterious Chinese hard-paste porcelain for the royal tabletops of Europe.

One hundred years later the Dutch discovered the fabled route, but rather than trade with the Chinese they preferred to pirate the Portuguese vessels to such an extent that even James I and Henry IV travelled to Holland to bid for the stolen wares.


Once the Portuguese route was known to all, the Dutch and English East India companies began to ship as much porcelain as the factories could produce and the Hongs would allow. It was only a matter of time, and greed, before Europe demanded the secret for themselves. Black Sam Bellamy’s Whydah carried the letters of the priest, the wad of papers corked in a bamboo tube and sealed within the bronze cannon, the same cannon that Captain William Guinneys had purchased for the purpose of smuggling the letters out of China under the noses of the Hongs and all the East India companies.

The cannon was carried to Charles Town and to Ignatius, then ferried north by Bellamy for safety, once word went abroad following Guinneys’ wake. Then the gun drowned along with Bellamy and his pirate crew in April 1717. Thus the arcanum was lost to the West again.

The ship had capsized in shallow waters off Cape Cod, making the hold tantalisingly accessible, and the wreck brought treasure hunters from as far as the Bahamas. The salvagers had found negresses particularly adept at the art of diving, their body fat a better insulator in the deeper, colder water – as the Spanish had discovered after they had exhausted their supplies of the local Caribs and Lucayans in scavenging sunken wrecks.

The teredo worm had feasted well on the Whydah’s keel and she was punched in easily by the slaves’ fists, which opened a hole large enough to swim through.

Hours were spent plumbing the depths, with respite for the women found in the caulked wooden diving-bells floating around the wreck like giant jellyfish. There, some hot air could be gasped and the divers could fill the leather bags hanging inside with gold and silver coins salvaged from the Whydah’s hold.

Randomly their masters would slit open the belly of one of the returning women to check for precious stones and coins and deter the other divers from stealing.

For the local council the looting of the Whydah had become a circus. Locals and ‘moon-cussers’ set up stalls along the shore, gleefully selling rings still sitting on swollen fingers cut from the washed-up bodies that piled along the shoreline with each dawn.

In light of this, William Tailer, the governor of Massachusetts, commissioned the revered cartographer and captain, Cyprian Southack, to officially salvage the pirate ship on the crown’s behalf. Southack sailed back to Boston a week later with nothing more than: ‘two anchors, some junk … and two great guns.’

Much of the gold and silver, the ivory, even the bulk of the indigo blocks had been already liberated. Captain Southack’s official haul was auctioned within the month. The crown remarked little on the paltry tribute. The only significant sale was the one of the guns, a curious anonymous purchase of fourteen hundred pounds for an antique minion, a small bore Chinese gun, its barrel blocked by crustaceans and clay. Its only possible value was as bronze scrap for smelting.

Palgrave Williams’s wagon drove the gun out of Heston’s auction house in May 1717 and Palgrave vanished from the earth. He had been Black Sam Bellamy’s partner and had left his wife and children, also his business as a goldsmith, and had blackened the good name of his father to become a pirate. Five warships now cruised the New England coast seeking him. Warrants were posted even to the natives for the apprehension of the pirate who had become the Americas’ most wanted man. And he had sat with his hands crossed upon his lap in the front row of Heston’s auction and waited for his moment.

He had bid for and bought the gun, then hidden it in plain sight in the abandoned Spanish fort on Providence until the world had forgotten him and he could come back and claim his pension. But the King had reclaimed Providence, New Providence now deemed, and it was no longer safe to return. It was now a year after the sinking of the Whydah and the crown had still not laid a hand upon him. Only the Devil could find Palgrave Williams now for surely only the Devil would know where to look.




For Palgrave Williams in his current predicament, hell could threaten little more. Roped tight within the bowels of the sloop Adventure, half his body lay soaking in the well of the bilge and his arms were chained above his head keeping him from drowning. Rats scampered across his lap, nibbled at his leather belt and boots. The cool of the water accomplished nothing against the stale, hot air below the waterline.

It had been days now, feeling the pressure of water above his head outside the keel and the Bermudan tide swaying in the stagnant well all about him.

He had found sanctuary in Bermuda, in St George’s Town, biding his time until the English gave up on saving New Providence and he could return to collect the gun.

Perhaps it had been a mistake to make his way to Bermuda. His reasoning had been that the English island had defended itself well from pirates over the years yet was just a couple of days’ sail back to Providence and only six hundred miles from the Carolinas. He could keep his fingers in the pie but be far enough removed from the squadrons on land and sea that hunted for him daily.

But pirates did haunt Bermuda. Not as boldly or as veraciously as the string of islands to the southwest perhaps (a pinch of slave smuggling now and then around Rum Cay was Governor Bennett’s most bothersome infraction), but come they did and it would have been in droves if it were not for the shallow shoals keeping their keels at bay.

Local fishermen, for a price, would guide pirate sloops through the rocks and Charles Vane, since fleeing from Providence, had fully taken advantage of their cupidity. Vane’s boldness had caused a stir around the islands and Palgrave began to feel the need to move on.

He did not know the sloop, Adventure, that the swarthy quartermaster claimed to be a part of when he paid a coin to be introduced one evening in the Angel inn but he liked the offer of free passage back to the Americas providing he could haul a sail. Palgrave had assured the man, Israel Hands, that his current formal dress was not to be taken as a measure of his worth. Had he not been a commander of one of Black Sam Bellamy’s ships himself? Had he not spliced and reefed with the best of them? Israel Hands was not to worry about Palgrave Williams or his stout belly and advanced years. He would not slow them down.

Now Palgrave found himself wallowing in the bilge amidst the lead ballast of the Adventure waiting for the Devil to appear, as Israel Hands had promised, laughing all the while as he tied Palgrave like a hog and cast the darkness upon him with the closing of the hatchway.

Days passed, foetid days of starvation to lower his will, days spent counting over the last years of his life and charting his mistakes. The third time he stirred awake, startled by a noise above and disgusted at the tiny bubbles of his own urine floating over his breeches, he presumed it to be night by the movement of a lamp along the deck of the hold over his head.

The golden light sliced through the beams above as someone moved with a crab-like scuttling, too tall to just lower his head and creep along judging by the laboured breath and cursing.

The hatch door creaked open, the sound and descending light sending the rats swimming and jumping away from Palgrave’s body, shrieking to their wives and children to hide themselves.

Palgrave recognised the rattle and clink of a man brimming with steel.

The lantern swung over, momentarily blinding Palgrave. A rum-laden chuckle aimed itself straight at him and the man stepped closer, swinging the lamp and throwing his monstrous shadow around the walls of the bilge.

‘Well, well,’ Blackbeard growled. ‘I be pleased to meet you, Palgrave. You be a man well sought for. I’ve a mind to let you keep your freedom and as to that I have a proposition for you. I knows about the gun. I knows where it lies. But I don’t aims on setting foot on Providence to gets it. But you, Palgrave. You have a use to old Blackbeard, so you do.’