The Spanish frigate approached quietly along the coast, thinking us asleep, because our sloop gave no sign that we were awake. The moment it came sufficiently close, we assailed the enemy ship with all our guns, taking it by surprise; to do this in the darkness made up for their superiority of strength, for in their consternation they did not know whether to fire at the sloop, at the piraguas which they must have gotten sight of by this time, or at the sky, because it never entered their heads that the pirates would attack them from the protection of the trees and underbrush.
We won, as might be assumed, and at dawn, accompanied by lurid bursts of the Antilles sky, L’Olonnais accepted the enemy’s surrender, without their discovering until much too late the conditions of their defeat: in less than an hour, or a period of time that seemed very much like it, L’Olonnais had put them all to the sword: the commanding general of the foot soldiers, Captain Don Pedro de Avellaneda; the Admiral of the Fleet and Field Marshal, Don Gonzalo Suárez Ossiz; the Sergeant Major and captain of one of the companies, the battalion captain, the captain of artillery, their adjutants, the standard-bearers, the chaplains, the royal lieutenants, the quartermaster, the keeper of supplies …
Although it was not very convenient for the return of the expedition, we were forced to take their frigate for our own, as the sloop had been damaged; and we sent a piragua that skirted around the island and warned our other men of the change, waiting for its return in order not to go ahead reduced not only in speed but also in strength, while we tossed overboard everything of any weight carried by the frigate, leaving only the meager ship’s stores, which turned out to be our booty, and making room for our cannons.
When the piragua returned, it bore a youth who had been caught red-handed; when one of the Brothers had embraced him he felt some hard object under the young man’s belt and ordered him to show what he had because this was his matelot and thus obliged to obey him; and when he refused, he was beaten until he was forced to reveal it to the Brother: a heavy necklace of gold and rubies that he had found somewhere in Maracaibo and had not handed over to the Society for the just and equal division of the loot. L’Olonnais had the thief brought before him. In front of all of us he cut off the little rogue’s nose and ears. I cauterized the wounds with le Nègre Miel’s herbs. We put him on the frigate, and the day of our departure we abandoned him on an islet with a wineskin of water and a musket with powder and balls for his only company. The best thing the thief could have done with them would have been to blow his brains out before going through a prolonged agony and death in the middle of the immense ocean when the tides would have covered the little bit of earth that sustained him! No one felt sorry for the sailor because he truly deserved the punishment.
In eight days, with no other interruption, our frigate in the lead, then the fleet of pirates slightly behind, we reached Île-à-Vache, where some French buccaneers live who sell dried meat to the freebooters as well as to the merchants who come there for the purpose of doing business with the freebooters.
We unloaded what we had taken, even the bells of the church in Maracaibo and the images and paintings, and the five hundred head of cattle. We divided the prizes amongst us, according to the agreement in the Contract. After having tallied everything up, we found 270,000 pieces of eight in cash. Once this was parceled out, everyone received pieces of silk, linen, and other things to the value of more than 100 pieces of eight. The wounded, many of them mutilated, received their portion first: for the loss of a right arm, six hundred pesos or six slaves, for a left arm five hundred pesos or five slaves, for a right leg five hundred pesos or five slaves, for a left leg four hundred pesos or four slaves, for an eye one hundred pesos or one slave, for a finger the same as for an eye … Then all the silver was weighed, figuring ten pieces of eight to the pound. The jewels were appraised at varying amounts because none of us had the slightest knowledge in the matter.
We passed on to the distribution of what fell to those who had died in battle or in some other way. Their portions were given to their friends to keep, so they could hand them over to their heirs eventually.
Once the distribution was concluded, we set sail for Tortuga, arriving there one month after having put in at Île-à-Vache, to the great joy of the others because many of them no longer had any money. When we landed on Tortuga, the merchants were already waiting for us.
And the prostitutes. The tavern keepers. The gamblers. And every other species of fauna capable of fleecing us in exchange for the grand fiesta.
The night that had begun during my earlier stay on Jamaica had not ended, it simply moved to Tortuga.
Nothing to complain of in that: our night is fiesta time. Our men arrived on the heels of two ships loaded with wine and liquor, the booty from other pirate raids, peddled in Jamaica and transported to Tortuga. On those first days the alcohol was worth as much as sunlight or cattle feed on the islands; ten days later it was ten times as expensive, and in ten days more its price multiplied a hundred times, raising its value from that of pasturage to gold, although the moment it passed down our throats it seemed just the opposite: those first days, something like a golden sun resided in our bodies, radiating light, like a candlewick, an artificial, twinkling light by which to cruise through the fiesta; and as the days passed it turned into a hard, gray stone deep inside, almost black, ensconced in our viscera, our blood, our muscles, darkening us more and more, as if it were getting us used to the surrounding night.
During the course of those days, we were very much accustomed to go in for table games and to bet on them, and to pay high prices to rent the cards and gambling tables.
The musicians who had gone with us on our raids fell silent here, while others rendered jolly songs, and you heard them wherever you were. I think they never stopped playing the whole night through, because I never stopped hearing them. Here and there, too, was heard the strange music of the African slaves.
The women of The House journeyed from Port Royal to be with us. They had improvised a little theatrical display for a welcome. As the curtains opened, they appeared in fixed tableaus, done to perfection in all their details. Among the freebooters I heard it said that some recognized the tableaus as reproductions of famous paintings and considered them quite exact, above all The Death of Dido, by Vouet, being the one that was most admired; it was said that such skill had gone into producing this one because Madame (as a child, now that I think back to her) had been the painter Vouet’s lover. I can say with certainty that one of the tableaus was exactly like one we had stolen, and it caused great laughter in us that what had made the Spanish breasts so fervent while it had hung on the walls of the church in Maracaibo now had its Virgin represented by our prostitute, its Joseph by the whores’ footman, the Child in the manger by a very serious hen who appeared to be setting on eggs, its Sainte-Anne by a girl we had screwed one night … After that, in beautiful pavilions improvised among the rocks and trees of Tortuga, after the manner of the Arabs, they gave themselves to us to satisfy our carnal appetites.
Here and there some were eating in sumptuous style, consuming dishes that seemed touched by fairies and sorcerers who had put their hearts into their flesh, which our whores never managed to do.