"Them and us two, Cap'n?"
"Yes, Mr Bones."
And here Billy Bones grew puzzled. He felt his own pockmarked cheeks and looked at his immaculate master.
"But you ain't had it, Cap'n."
"No, Mr Bones, but never fear. I shall survive."
Flint remembered his father taking him to the Smallpox Hospital, where a visiting Turkish doctor made a tiny cut in his arm, inserted matter from the sick, and applied a bandage. A bandage which was seen by his mother, triggering a hideous quarrel and a kitchen knife brought out in rage, which his father struck from her hand… for the hysterical boy to thrust into his father's back, sinking him to the floor, where his mother took up the knife and butchered a man who was already dead.
Flint shuddered. Some memories were too much even for him.
But the Turk's technique was sound. Flint was immune to the smallpox.
Meanwhile, Billy Bones, who hadn't ceased his puzzling, came up against another stumper:
"But, Cap'n. All the monkeys is gone, ain't they?"
Now Flint smiled. For knowing British tars as he did, he guessed that they'd have searched the launch, and they'd have found the one that Dreamer didn't quite finish off. They'd have found it and made a pet of it, and healed it and cherished it, such that it would be scampering all over them…
Even now this very minute…
And he was right…
Chk-chk-chk!
Afterword
This is near to my heart. My hobby is black-powder shooting and I own an American long rifle, which — in the hands of a skilled man — would do everything I have described in this book, including shooting a lead ball at supersonic speed.
I have, however, simplified the loading drill. Yes, you load with powder, and a patch and a ball, but if you use the ramrod, the ball won't go down, and you'll break the ramrod trying. I know — I did it, and with people looking on! Oh dear. What you need is a starter: a short stick with a fat end. You put the stick on the ball and smack the fat end with your hand. The stick drives the ball the first few inches down the bore… and then you use the ramrod to shove it all the way down.
That's what your dad would have told you in days gone by. I learned by trial and error, and I offer it to you young shooters with apologies for not putting it in the book, because nobody wants a lecture on shooting in the middle of a story.
Final thoughts on the long rifle, alias the Pennsylvania or Kentucky rifle: some modern scholarship indicates that it may have been developed for — and originally used by — Native
American hunters, so there really may have been someone like Laoslahta the Dreamer, who told the Pennsylvania German gunsmiths how to improve their European rifles. But I hesitate to enter so controversial a field, and one so close to the American heart.
Think Iroquois… then forget it, because it's a mistaken naming of the Haudenosaunee: the confederation of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscurora nations — believed to have been founded in about 1500, though possibly much earlier — and which was extinguished by 1800 as the dominant civilisation of northeast America.
Now think of the familiar Plains Indians (as in Cowboys and Indians), who were hunter-gatherers, with horses and ever-moving camps… then forget them, too, because the Haudenosaunee were entirely different. They were settled, agricultural people who lived in forest clearings, in fortified villages defended by heavy palisades of timber, which the early white settlers termed "castles", such was their strength. Their society was complex and formal, with decisions made by prolonged discussion, and women holding considerable status as matriarchal family heads.
They lived in long houses of very great size: perhaps a hundred yards long by twenty wide, with many families sharing one house. Fearless warriors, they were prized as allies by the English, Dutch and French. They took scalps, being encouraged to do so by white men who saw this as a way to kill enemies without personal risk, offering bounties of £100 per scalp — a tasty sum by eighteenth-century standards (equivalent to £100,000 in modern money). And tax-free at that.
They were indeed hopelessly affected by alcohol, but considering the numbers of people in our own society who make idiots of themselves with booze and drugs, we have no cause to feel superior.
There was no Patanq nation. They are pure invention, but the descendants of the real Haudenosaunee still live in North America and cherish their ancient traditions.
The story of the Left-Hand Twin and the Right-Hand Twin, born of Sky Woman's daughter, is a genuine part of Haudenosaunee mythology. Likewise, the Left-Hand Twin, responsible for all that is crooked and nasty, has many names, of which, one really is… Flint — which made the hair stand up on the back of my neck when first I read it.
Dreamer was a great man: a Haudenosaunee Winston Churchill. He suffered severe migraine attacks throughout life, and I've described his symptoms from personal experience, because it afflicts me too, though far less, and I don't foretell the future afterwards.
Some migraine sufferers — including me — see a pattern of lights, called aura, or fortifications for the odd reason that, to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century people, they looked just like the zig-zag lines of earthworks displayed in plans of contemporary forts. These appear as a blob in the middle of the visual field, then grow and spread out to the edge of vision. They shimmer and twinkle and are coloured black, yellow and violet. These days, having grown out of the worst of migraine, I see only the lights and nothing follows, but for others the lights precede nausea and vomiting, and then a vicious headache.
So that's the zig-zag pattern Dr Cowdray recognised on Dreamer's wampum belt.
I have shamelessly stolen the marital history of Edward Teach — the legendary Blackbeard — and devolved it upon Captain Danny Bentham, whose taste for repeated marriage is described in Chapter 2. Blackbeard (c.1680–1718), probably the most famous pirate who ever lived, would get drunk ashore and marry… any trollop that takes his fancy, and whom he might have had for sixpence…
He took something in the region of fourteen "wives". The only difference from Danny Bentham is that Blackbeard presumably consummated his unions in conventional style.
In Chapter 4, Flint devises the cruel torture of walking the plank: that spectacular, piratical, and constantly depicted means of dealing with prisoners deemed surplus to requirements. When I started writing Pieces of Eight, it was my belief that walking the plank was a piece of fiction, but further research indicates that it really happened, with the earliest reported incident occurring in 1769. I therefore presented it as a novelty aboard Walrus in October 1752, when Flint surprised his men with this special entertainment.
Also in Chapter 4, Cornelius Van Oosterhout gets himself off the plank by promising to show Flint how to find longitude at sea, which he duly does — and it is impossible to overemphasise how important that was by eighteenth-century seafaring standards. It must be remembered that, in those days, most sea-borne navigators knew only very roughly where they were. Thus in Chapter 30, Captain York confesses that he worked by "lead, log and latitude" — educated guesswork, in other words. As a result, it was common for ships to be wrecked and lost simply by running on to hazards that were supposed to have been elsewhere.