Before I had time to think twice about it, we weighed anchor with our Admiral. I have already told you how alien fighting is to my blood. You will understand how repelled I was when you know how the freebooters behave, because they are so ferocious in their assaults, so cruel to those they have conquered, and also merciless with the weak. It was my good luck that that first expedition was extraordinary, Smeeks, extraordinary! It was not after the first attack that I decided never to sign another contract, but only after observing their cruelties and how they love to make the blood flow. But I admire the pirates. They are noble, they are loyal …
I accepted everything as if I had gotten the drift of it, even though I did not understand a word, but with those conversations, for which we snatched the time from my master (if he found out he would get back at me by whipping me for the work I had not done or the work I had put into deceiving him, or for my exhaustion and dullness from having stayed up the whole night long with eyes wide open, listening to le Nègre Miel, paying attention to his secrets and his skills instead of sleeping and resting in order to have the strength for the fearful workdays the Lieutenant General of the island forced on me), I gradually learned not only to recognize the medicinal herbs (to see, in his terms, the “spirit” in them) and how to prepare them and apply them and to what ailment or mood, but also who the pirates were, the way the Brethren of the Coast were organized, their Society, and, through his chatting, to love those terms I had never thought about before this—“freedom,” “equality”: the pillars of the Society. He told me about Tortuga and I was learning fascination for the island, thinking, in a dim but somehow correct fashion, that Tortuga remained at some distance from me, le Nègre Miel being my only connection with such a spot, a place where I would like to go and from which the beatings and cruelties of my master continually tore me away.
Le Nègre Miel told me the details of his first participation in a pirate raid, for it was not, as he himself said, violent by nature, but rather more like that of Hawkins, a pirate who, hating the blood but lusting after the winnings, would deceive and beguile; who on more than one occasion found from among his victims themselves the purchasers of goods he had recently seized. A band of freebooters with le Nègre Miel disembarked in the area around Campeche and waited in concealment, a little inland, for the passage of a group of Spaniards whom they subdued by force of blows, removing their clothing and tying them up with all manner of knots and ropes, and gagging them so cleverly that it took some time to remove the gags; they then dressed in their clothing and imitated their procession (something which amused le Nègre Miel greatly, he himself being dressed as a Spaniard, though an impossible one) as they hastily turned their steps toward the town square, where they began to raise a great fuss, pretending to be afraid, shouting out in the excellent Spanish of freebooters French and English, “The pirates are coming! Pirates are attacking! Pirates!” which of course was the truth, because they pointed back along the path where they themselves had just done the attacking, while le Nègre Miel, that no one would see his black face, covered it with his hands wrapped in bandages, screaming as if the devil were pecking at his eyes, pretending to have a wound that he didn’t have … nor would ever have, because all the well-armed men sallied out quickly in the direction shown to them, a little inland, while the rest of the pirate ships, receiving the signal agreed upon, sailed into the bay, took charge of the fortress, subdued the town, and closed off the entrance to the place with such a strong force that le Nègre Miel never heard a single burst of gunpowder; meanwhile the armed citizens of the town hastened toward Champotón for reinforcements, realizing they were too few to confront the pirates. The latter meanwhile hastily plundered the church, seized all the dyewood (called palo de Campeche by the Spaniards) piled up in a warehouse, along with several loads of cassava flour and a little gold they had managed to squeeze from the most pusillanimous of the rich, and, quite happy to have gotten their booty without any greater effort, went back to their boats just as the citizens came up with so many reinforcements that in any case it would have been impossible to vanquish them.
On the deck of the subjugated slave ship le Nègre Miel had seen more blood while freeing from his chains the old man who was mutilated then thrown into the ocean than in the assault on Campeche, but on the other hand, his second and last expedition was not one he wanted to tell me about, claiming that there were things it was better not to repeat and that nevertheless I would see enough of it if I stayed on Tortuga, because even though he had not taken part in other expeditions, he could cover the island with ink, if it were made of paper, from the tales of atrocities and violence by the Brothers in pursuit of their booty. And all for what? — le Nègre Miel always added — since the Brothers, like the good folk they were, well knew that their spoils were not worth anything at all, for they would squander them in less time than it took him to tell me about it, all on excesses that a boy of my age ought not to hear about.
Other things there were that he did not want to mention in front of me, either. One of them, had he done so earlier, would have saved me a great deal of embarrassment and the women of The House in Port Royal some annoyance, but the only reference he ever made to brothels was not in that sense, and even that one slipped out only in his final words to me. Because le Nègre Miel sickened suddenly (or he appeared to become ill), and, refusing to accept his own medicines, he wasted away rapidly before my very eyes, to my great grief and despair, claiming that his hour had come, without explaining to me why until the last moment, when he said to me, “I am going away now. I know that I should make you flee with the pirates and not leave you in the hands of someone who does not follow the Law of the Coast. But I am not abandoning you, Smeeks. My death is not natural. For the poison I was given, there is no remedy. My line will be cut off. I will not sow the earth with another of my blood. I gave no one the blood of consciousness, but you I have shown everything that one can learn. Le Nègre Miel asks you, this is his last wish, that you remember him always, so that my stay in the darkness of the earth is not altogether a desolation. Through your memories, what your eyes have seen will have entry to the darkness of my life, and after you die, what your children see and the children of your children; because you will speak to them about le Nègre Miel and they will remember me without having known me, as I remember my parents, the parents of my parents, and even their grandparents. Bequeath your lineage to me, for I squandered my seed among the Brethren and in the brothels of Port Royal, without ever thinking about the approach of my death! And respect the Law of the Coast above every other law!”
I tried to give him some serenity with a thousand and one words and demonstrations of affection born from the deepest sincerity. And I swore him an oath to which I am still faithful and which allows me to narrate my story to you: I will remember you always, and when I have children I will tell them about you, and they to their children, but if I have no descendants, I promise you, le Nègre Miel, that I will conquer death in the name of your memory, and that I myself, with these eyes that are watching you die, these ears that are listening to you, and this heart that loves you, will remember you always.