The Second Fifty descended on Tortuga, and it was a disaster just like the first. Luckily, it was not a case of several fifties but only one, yet it was as harmful to the Brethren of the Coast as the earlier one was for the buccaneers.
But I have to give the reader fair warning: If I were to relate to you right now what this Second Fifty was like, and their devastation of Tortuga, its early end, and the discovery it brought me concerning Pineau and le Nègre Miel, this story would come to a halt here and now. But if I keep returning again and again to my tale, that is simply to fulfill the promise I made to le Nègre Miel on his deathbed: to undertake to make his memory live. And I still wish to describe the well-deserved end of the brutal L’Olonnais, not wanting to leave him alive; nor do I wish to leave myself in those turbulent seas, I want to get myself back to Europe, where today — if I am still any place at all — I am telling these stories.
Going back to where I was, then: When there was no longer a single one of us with a coin left in his pocket to keep the party going, we dogged L’Olonnais to organize another brilliant assault; and while he was working on that, some went out in canoes to raid the turtle fishers, others went to sea to try their luck on their own (with such bad fortune, it is said, that the moment came when they got hungry enough to raid the humble residents of the coasts just to get hold of their cassava flour and dried fish; and it was so bad sometimes that even these impoverished folk would manage to push them out of their homes without yielding them a thing), others went to Hispaniola to procure sufficient supplies, and still others, those with L’Olonnais, careened their ships to get them ready for the next expedition.
When the Caribs prepare for war, they throw ají, a kind of red pepper (somewhat like pimiento) on burning coals, provoking a sharp cough and an irritation in the mucous membranes, which they believe produces the state of mind needed to attack with sufficient fury. We pirates did not resort to ají or pimiento, nor did we go in for the wild dances that finally succeeded in inflaming the Caribs for their battles. We managed to achieve the state of mind needed for our assaults by feeling our empty pockets, our dry throats, the weariness of the fiesta that had been going on for weeks, and the satiety produced in us by the prostitutes, those women who had nothing for us written in their gaze and who took part in and gave support to the explosive outbursts provoked by our moods (if we had any) in order to achieve something that seemed like a calmness of mind based on a foundation of alcohol, gambling, plenty of food, and music; and they were in luck indeed if any of us paid them to actually perform, without some kind of stratagem, the labors characteristic of their office; since when it came to women, as I have already mentioned, the pirates preferred those who needed to be forced, women who resisted them, as they found pleasure in the humiliation and even more pleasure in extreme violence. One pirate (whose name I will preserve in silence so his soul, surely in difficulty even now, does not come after me for revenge) enjoyed killing the woman he was possessing, saying that her flagging flesh squeezed him in such a way that there was no greater delight than to have a woman die while being used; and there were many who tried it out to confirm this, some of them agreeing, others not, and still others who said they found it a pleasure only if the woman was killed by someone else.
Who, then, knowing the nature of our pleasures, would be surprised at the character of our assaults and our warfare? And who, with a knowledge of these, could imagine us to require any roasting of ají on burning coals to become galvanized? Yet whoever was aware of these things would still never understand that these men went through a definite alteration of feelings and sensations, depending on whether it was before an attack, during the fighting, or afterward, whether with loot in their pockets, or just after having squandered it, or … Although for the moment, what with the shock of this forceful reminder of Pineau and le Nègre Miel having been imposed on me by Benazet’s threats and his death, and the need to be preparing my surgeon’s supplies for the upcoming expedition because our departure seemed imminent, I kept myself to one side of these emotions, something apart from the body formed by the pirates as one whole being, warm and always ready and willing; yet was I well able to understand that we freebooters were hopeless; what could we do on shore with our pockets empty if we knew not how to slow the descent of someone sliding down a hill, someone without relief or remedy? When we would be awakened in the middle of the night, after too much alcohol, by its racing uncontrollably through our veins, being too much for them, we would wonder: How could people live on dry land, shut in behind four walls, and how could they resist the hopelessness of the red-tinged evenings of the New World, and how, without the breadth of the ocean, the water without borders, without corners, without banks or ports …? Because on the high seas, or in pulling down what others had raised up to shut themselves in behind, our freebooter hearts found the only places where we were able to drain off that abundance of intoxicated blood running through our veins!
Before we were able to put a stop to the feverish turmoil of the taking of a city, before we were able to suspend that delirium and see it as a thing apart from ourselves, even before we learned to tell ourselves the battle was over and that we had become rich because of it, by then we no longer had any money of our own, no longer a new shirt or a length of silk or linen or even a bit of common cloth! Nor did we realize that the end of that story had already caught up with us when we felt the necessity surging up of undertaking yet another assault somewhere.… The afternoons, then, raised the red banner of the attack, every afternoon, and each dawn as well, that huge banner waving before our eyes; and although others might not understand what this impassioned red thing was, all enveloped in the colors of the Caribbean Sea, we knew the red was the signal for a fight, that we pirates would have to keep on fighting, destroying, that our time was not yet done with, not quite … that we had to go on with a musket in each hand and a knife clenched between our teeth, although we were already being phased out, feeling everything as occurring too late, escaped from time, the only certain thing for us being the dark, drowsy wrath of the alcohol, since even though completely submerged in it, the pirate never forgets that, before all things, he is one of the Brethren of the Coast, as Mansfield discovered during the capture of Santiago, an inland city. After he had taken it, when they had already brought in and piled up all its riches, the freebooters launched into celebrating their triumph in Santiago itself, sharing the glory with the defeated inhabitants. They got everyone drunk, young and old, even the children, by making them gulp it down right from the barrels that had been made there to sell. With the conquered city in a state of intoxication, they forced the rich to dance for the amusement of the poor, and made them also parade their daddy’s little darlings around in loose, open dress, an invitation to be stopped and screwed by whoever (drunk and shouting) wished to. They ripped the buttons off the pants of the governor (for whom they had already received ransom money) who yet went around everywhere, fully drunk, shouting orders, trying to impose order with his pants at half-mast and slurring his words, since he could hardly speak for all the alcohol they had forced him to drink.
Still in a fervid state, the pirates undertook their retreat laden with copious loot, making their way toward the beach where they had left their ships; but a party of sober citizens under command of the still-intoxicated governor tried to stop them and would have been able to do so were it not that Mansfield and his Brothers, though enveloped in the cloud of rum that obfuscated their movements, were still living through the moment of the struggle when, making such good use of their wit and their forces, they had figured out how to make Santiago theirs in the first place. They had another exchange with the Spaniards and kidnapped the governor once more, and both sides began shooting until all their guns fell silent: both sides had run out of gunpowder. Then they launched into all sorts of invectives, the pirates demanding a new ransom for the governor; but there came a moment when they no longer heard any reply: the Spaniards, weary of the verbal war, were not answering; they had withdrawn.