Hunt for White Gold

Chapter Forty-Three





Three to Charles Town




Three cabins and the same scene played out three times within. Three captains hunched over tables, the tools of their art before them: brass-hinged sector rule, dividers, compass card, loupe, pencil and log all dancing across charts of the Bahamas and south-eastern shores of the Americas, all working under the intense application of their magicians and the stifling heat of the noon.

The Adventure …

Edward Teach – Blackbeard – was shadowed by Israel Hands and Black Caesar as he crossed a pencil along the soundings. He knew the waters well but still the threes and fours beneath his plotting reassured him that the two frigates could not follow his path. The two men at his shoulders watched the lines draw out, the miles pencilled in effortlessly, excluding the shifting of lateen sails and hard reeving that would make them.

Aft through the slanting stern windows, a mile off his larboard-quarter swelled the ivory squares of the Milford under full sail, heeling to leeward from the easterly airs, the island of New Providence just a white and blue smear on the horizon far behind.

Israel Hands looked uneasily to the rippled glass and the three masts inching across the window frame. Teach saw the glance and slammed the desk to bring his quartermaster back to the chart. ‘Pay attention, damn you, man! Those sails will still be there else! We’re shaking him loose!’

‘Aye, Cap’n.’ Hands turned back, contrite, and stared down at Teach’s runes upon the chart. ‘We’re to traverse through Abaco and the Grand? Lose the Milford in the shallows?’

‘Aye, that be it,’ Teach growled and returned to the chart.

The Milford and Coxon drew too much water to follow through the white shallows of the passage between the two islands, now in sight already before their bow; and Blackbeard’s Adventure, built for speed, although with a quarter of the canvas could make the passage before the Milford’s sails had dried in the wind. Consequently she would follow Devlin, Teach affirmed.

Teach’s own passage, from this noon, would be sixty-nine miles nor’west until the 27th parallel and Hobe Sound then course up the coast, no colours, for another four hundred-odd miles to Charles Town. That meant nearly five hundred miles still to roll beneath their keel.

Teach dragged his log across the map, his calculations pencilled into the margins with his concentrated delicate hand. The Adventure could make seven knots off and on all the way and be in Charles Town in three days, or four with drinking and sleep. At best estimation, a pirate’s odds, his contemporaries upon the sea could make it in five days at full sail if they could wet four knots.

Teach sat back and let Caesar and Hands congratulate him. The Queen Anne’s Revenge, run aground weeks before, could not have helped them in such a task with her four hundred tons, and they slapped their captain’s back with the measure of it and his wisdom to trade down, sink his lot into one of his smaller tenders, which had trebled their account and would now safely take them back to the inlets and points of the Carolinas.

Never mind the white crisp sails, diminishing even now from their stern, nor the grey ones of the Shadow to their starboard beam, the Adventure would reach Charles Town and Ignatius first. Without the letters, true, but reaching him first alive far superior in choice than first dead if he chose to stand.


The Milford …

John Coxon threw the dividers to the table. His sailing master and Rosher flinched at the outburst.

‘Four knots! Four knots! That sloop, Mister Halesworth, Blackbeard’s sloop, is making seven! Devlin is almost ten cables from our bow and you offer me four knots!’

Halesworth stood his ground, ‘I cannot force the wind, Captain. The Milford has not been cleant since she came from England and these waters are as ugly as a parson’s widow.’

‘Then turn her into a brigantine, Mister Halesworth!’ Coxon went back to the chart, his knuckles digging into the table. ‘Rig staysails between the masts, get some boom-irons on and studding sails out. Good hands and carpentry should have it done in three hours.’ He picked up the dividers again and tapped urgently at the chart’s surface as the others looked on. ‘Devlin can’t make it through Abaco and Grand Bahama. It’s forty miles wide but barely knee deep to him and to me. To us. We shall make north-east by north to Eleuthera now, before he turns. Then we’ll see where he runs. By the time you have your new sails we may have the speed to catch the Shadow.’

‘That will put the wind to our starboard quarter, Captain,’ Halesworth sighed.

‘All the more reason for you to make up staysails between. What we lose to leeward we’ll gain abaft.’

Halesworth pulled out his book and licked his inch of a pencil, the shake of his head barely perceptible. ‘Aye, aye, Captain.’

Rosher mopped his brow, leaving beads of greasy sweat smeared across his linen. ‘What of Blackbeard’s sloop, Captain? Are we not to chase him in preference perhaps?’

The dark look from his captain shrivelled his voice like salt on a slug. ‘Is he not more notorious, I mean … more worthy … to some that is … to others that is?’ He smiled uneasily.

Coxon went back to his chart. ‘Devlin is already far ahead of him. This Blackbeard is conning for the shallows north, away from us both. They may be cohorts. They may not. They may join up somewhere later, which we will establish once we are further into the Atlantic and in a better position to determine. For the now, and this is not personal, Mister Rosher, the Milford is better suited, both for speed and for power, to chase after the rated ship rather than the sloop, would you not agree?’ Coxon looked calm again and waited for the young man to answer.

Rosher seized the opportunity to reaffirm his loyalty. ‘Absolutely, Captain. I would advocate no other path.’ He bowed smartly.

‘Good,’ Coxon nodded. ‘Then make it so Mister Rosher, Mister Halesworth. Dismissed and about your business.’ Their salutes were disturbed by the sailor in straw hat and slops who lurched breathless into the doorway, remembering just before he spoke to rap urgently on the door.

‘’Tis the sloop, Cap’n!’ he blurted. ‘She’s making north! Toward the islands!’ He backed out of the shadow of the cabin to make way for Rosher and Halesworth as they hurried deckwards to confirm his words.

On paper the islands of the Bahamas were scattered like Dandelion seeds blown from the Gulf of Florida. Skinny strips of land almost too numerous to list. Most sailed round them, their sand bars and shallows too treacherous to navigate. These were grand pirate waters for sloops and xebecs but hazardous to the men in heavier ships that hunted them. Their treacherous and shallow draft was perfect for Teach’s keel to forge ahead. The others would have to make for the deep blue Atlantic.

At the starboard gunwale they descried the larboard beam of the sloop slowly moving across their bow through their forward rigging and they ducked to maintain the view when the foot of the courses blocked the sight as the bow rolled down.

Halesworth nodded approvingly. ‘She’s going for the shallows to be sure. Box-hauling. Running away from us.’

‘So the captain is right,’ Rosher looked above to the sails on a hard reach. ‘We should stand on. Make for Devlin’s ship as best we can.’

Halesworth tipped his chin to the dark cabin, the door still open and Coxon still within, for he had no need to follow them in looking after the route of Blackbeard. ‘I don’t think there was ever going to be any other way, Mister Rosher.’ He tapped his hat. ‘I am to my sails. This watch will be a busy one.’ He turned away, leaving Rosher to stare out at the black pirate frigate now maybe eight cable lengths distant, a nautical mile, and alone before them. He wondered, swallowing drily beneath his necktie, at what the pirates made of them at their tail.




The Shadow …

‘I see it, Bill,’ Devlin said, declining the offer of the scope to watch Blackbeard’s sloop cutting away. They stood out on the larboard quarter gallery, where the black-pitched shrouds met the hull at the channels some feet out, giving them an observation platform. The wind played an evil howl through the dead eyes as Devlin leant through the ropes, resting his forearms on the ratlines, and contemplated the Milford’s square courses and gallants shining brightly in the distance, steadfastly encroaching as if the Shadow’s capstan was winding her in.

‘Blackbeard will make to course between the islands and to the Americas, whereas we can only go by way of Eleuthera and the sea. If we can make five knots we’ll be to him in as many days.’

‘Aye, with Coxon at our hawser hole all the way,’ Bill noted. ‘And him with you always in mind.’

Devlin agreed. ‘And he came to me in the gaol in Providence. Offered me a pistol which I didn’t take. Knowing I had something else brewing. I think it was purely the man’s instincts that must’ve kept him alive through the war.’

‘Aye. Whether he catches us now or catches us in Charles Town we’ll find out soon enough. Either way we’ve caught us a Tartar.’ The pirate’s reference hearkened back to the savage Asiatics, and meant through ill-luck or bad judgment to come up against a foe that could not be taken nor would quit.

Again Devlin agreed but now turned his head back to the cabin and to the table where he had plotted the five-hundred-and-fifty-mile course up the coast of America; and to the pile of yellowing parchments that curiosity could not withstand examining – the letters that the whole world seemed to seek, made up of the intricate writings and diagrams of Father d’Entrecolles. Devlin thought again on Dandon’s words concerning the limit of Ignatius’s knowledge.

He knows our history. But he does not know us.

Devlin’s customary, almost childish grin began to form again, and Bill saw the warming of the game in his captain’s eyes.

‘Make your sails, Bill. Keep Coxon at our quarter. I’ll grab Dandon from out of a bottle and confer with him a while.’ He ducked back into the cabin, leaving Bill alone to sample the sight of the first of the staysails appearing between the masts of the Milford.