I never went back to the cabin. Whenever I returned to Tortuga, I would sleep any old where, like the other pirates, nor did I practice as a surgeon while on land as Pineau had done. That day I loaded up my things and slept in the forest on Tortuga to get more herbs for my remedies, crowding as much as possible into the last little corner of time before the moment of departure.
Everything being well prepared, with 1,670 men in eight ships, after making an inspection of the arms we each one of us would rely on and the artillery aboard the ships, we set sail at the end of April and proceeded toward Bayala on the northern coast of Hispaniola to take on enough smoked meat for the voyage. There, a party of hunters joined us of their own free will, having provided us with all manner of necessary supplies. We spent May and June on that part of the island. There, in actuality, my life as a pirate began. I attached myself to them, sleeping a dream called “surprise,” and when we arrived at Bayala I began to live like they did, sleeping every night in a different place. I realized that ever since leaving Europe I had been living like a woman, repeating the routine of going to sleep every day in the same protected corner and at about the same hour. There are so many who live that way — like women, shut up behind the walls of a convent, a prison, a house, a shop, hidden behind the many skirts of the one single place that shields them with its constant being there! … From that day on, and for many years (thirty-seven), I lived a constant challenge to the sun, the wind, following the inclemencies of the strange, luminous nature of the Caribbean.… We freebooters are the mirror of the day, of the untamed ocean waves: the mirror of the squall, the storm, the fiercely cruel wind called Huracán! To be able to be this reflection of the days as they go by, we reject any routine, every routine. We do not eat every day, but when we do eat, our tables are always set differently: sumptuous and costly, or simply meager, but never the same: tables set for those who do not live like women!
I stopped being Smeeks and became one of the Brethren in the Society of the Coast, and was baptized by them under the name of Le Trépaneur (a word which means someone who bores into the skull), as I said before, and as I told myself day and night in order to convince myself of it, to understand it, to know it, to make it so.
I had not found out who murdered Pineau and poisoned le Nègre Miel. I had no past, though in my present life the pair of them gave me support as a full member of the Society, and if it were not for them I would be an apprentice on trial, a matelot like all the other recent arrivals when they joined the Society. Pineau and le Nègre Miel, with the trade they had taught me together, had provided my initiation as a pirate. Moreover, everyone knew that Le Trépaneur was the heir to le Nègre Miel’s wisdom and the one that Pineau had trained, and consequently it was I who stood for the things they had defended with their deaths, although I did not realize it then. Just as I never realized anything, scatterbrained as I used to be, and still am, because of the way I am made up, for my mind fixes its attention rather on vain, superfluous things than on what is definitive or principal. I repeated a phrase to myself: This is the hour of Le Trépaneur! and in that phrase, without my knowing it, I was upholding, in the way that le Nègre Miel and Pineau had taught me to do, the survival of the wisest law ever made for mankind, the Law of the Coast, the root, trunk, and fruit of the Society of the Brethren that on Tortuga makes men into the most generous beings, as well as the fiercest, ready to wrest from the Spaniards what no one can ever defend as belonging to them.
I, who used to be a pirate and defended the Society at risk of my life and who now am nothing but a scribbler, jotting things down on a sheet of paper in order that the memory of le Nègre Miel may not fade, I still become emotional after hundreds of years (in my memory) over the dream of the Brethren of the Coast.
FOUR
En route to Punta de Espada our good fortune began, when we sighted a ship coming from Puerto Rico loaded with cacao for New Spain. But this first battle would also be one for our eyes only: we had to wait for L’Olonnais on La Isla Saona, south of Punta de Espada, so that he could take on the prize all alone.
The battle lasted three hours, after which they surrendered to L’Olonnais. The prize was mounted with sixteen guns, and it carried fifty men to defend it, as well as 120,000 pounds of cacao, forty thousand pieces of eight, and jewels to the value of ten thousand pesos. It was sent to Tortuga to be unloaded and with orders to return immediately because L’Olonnais wanted it for himself in order to give the one he had to Antonio Du Puis. While it was on the way back to us we took another ship, one that had come from Comaná with arms, powder, and shot, in addition to the payroll for the soldiers on the island of Santo Domingo.
Little idea did I have from these encounters of what an attack by pirates was like, because L’Olonnais happened to be in too nice a mood and simply pardoned the defeated ones — though by this I mean that he just threw them overboard in order to avoid having to put any food into Spanish maws, thus killing them quickly and without demonstrating his natural cruelty; and so often having been told about the clever way he had escaped from Campeche after witnessing the festivities mounted to celebrate his own death (as I will relate here), together with many other entertaining episodes concerning him, I had gotten a mistaken notion of the freebooters’ thirst for blood, one that tinged it with lightness, with humor and charm.
L’Olonnais’s ship foundering in a storm near the coast of Campeche, the crew reached the shore where the ruthless Spaniards, apprised of the shipwreck, were already waiting for them with drawn swords and loaded muskets in order to annihilate them altogether, congratulating themselves on their good luck and expecting to be easily able once and for all to finish off the savage L’Olonnais.
Soon wounded, and not knowing how else he might save his life, he gathered up some handfuls of sand, mixed it with blood from his wounds, spread this on his face and other parts of his body, and stealthily arranged himself among the dead, waiting until the Spaniards left the spot.
Then he stole the clothing off a dead Spaniard and carried it with him into the jungle nearby, where he hid himself and bandaged his wounds as best he could so they would not become infested with mosquitos and worms; then he disguised himself as a Spanish gentleman and threaded his way toward Campeche.
The city was burning candles to celebrate his death. He struck up a friendship with a slave, and, after giving him a chance to tell all about his troubles and, in the process, reassuring himself of the fellow’s hatred for his master, L’Olonnais promised him freedom, immunity, and membership in the Brethren of the Coast if he obeyed him and trusted him. The slave undertook to enlist others in the same plight, and at night they stole a canoe from one of their masters and set out on the open sea with the pirate, where they paddled constantly, thrilled to be so near their freedom, until they reached Tortuga. What a pretty picture, that of the pirate escaping even as the city was giving thanks for his death!
I heard this and other tales while we were taking on supplies before our departure, or else waiting for the capture of the ships and their return from Tortuga, stories like the one about the aristocrat Jean François de la Roque, Seigneur de Roberval, wrongly called Roberto Baal by the Spaniards (who mix everything up in their slapdash language), and second in command to Jacques Cartier, the discoverer of Canada and Lieutenant Governor of all the lands discovered by order of Francis I, King of France; who, choosing piracy over glory, attacked Santiago de Cuba in 1543. Or the one about the uncle of Montbars, “The Exterminator,” who, when he saw his small vessel cut off and about to be taken, had it blown up rather than surrender it to the odious Spaniards. Or the one about Montbars himself: The night before their departure on an ambitious expedition, Montbars invited all his captains to a council in order to decide which place they would assault, considering the forces available and how long their resources would last. While the captains were enjoying themselves in the quarterdeck cabin, everyone else was doing the same on deck, and all of them, even the surgeons, were drunker than the wine. By accident, a spark fell into the store of gunpowder, and the ship blew sky high with everyone on board. As on this ship the powder was stored in the forecastle, those in the cabin at the stern suffered little harm except to find themselves in the water, but three hundred of their men were drowned. The expedition was delayed by this event, yet after a week fifteen vessels and 970 freebooters weighed anchor for Maracaibo (just like ourselves) where they tricked a newly arrived Spanish fleet with a fire ship (a bark filled with straw and gunpowder that was sent against the enemy ships to set them afire) in which they set up a dummy pirate crew with old straw hats on sticks. Before setting it loose, Montbars said to his men, The arrival of the squadron is splendid news; the Spanish are giving us a glorious victory. Be brave! Those shitheads will see our faces, but we will see only their backs! (I recall seeing him years later, cruising in the Gulf of Honduras. He was astute, alert, and brimming with energy, like all Gascons, olive-skinned, tall, erect, and quite strong, there being no one able to get the better of him one-on-one. It is hard for me to describe the color of his eyes with certainty because his thick, dark eyebrows closed in an arc above them and covered them almost completely, so much so that his eyes seemed hidden inside a dark cave. Yet everyone knew at first sight that this was a man to be feared, that he conquered through the terror induced by his gaze.)