Mansfield and his men, not knowing whether they were in the middle of the first assault, the celebration, or the later fighting, with their nerves on the alert like those of every good pirate, went on their way to the beach, boarded their ships, and just as they were about to set sail, received a miserable amount for a second ransom of the governor. Never had a governor brought so little or been so poorly dressed, what with his pants so stubbornly determined to remain on the ground! Thus it was that although Mansfield in his jubilation had celebrated his victory too soon, yet they were unable to get the better of him, not even when inebriated, because he was still able to fight fiercely when in that state; nor was there the slightest trace of intoxication in his judgment, nothing of the lush, the souse, the tosspot, boozer, juicehead. Not like there was in Rackham, an Englishman who lost his ship to an English attack when they encountered him and all his crew totally drunk — even though two women fought to save him: Anne Bonny, capricious and rich, and Mary Read, clever but impoverished before becoming a pirate. Although we Brethren of the Coast ought not to be mentioning this, for it happened long after we had already been dissolved, when Exquemeling had been thirty years dead, when even Port Royal, the port of opulent pleasure, had already been swept away by the waves — yet why should we not bring it up here, since our sluggish pirate’s consciousness is also an instantaneous awareness, which, like our reactions, positions itself outside of time?….
With our spirits inflamed, then, our lack of gold having turned each of us into passionate, blazing flesh, and in that sense, dried-out and thirsty flesh, we pirates hastened to prepare for the next assault:
During the night it was when they found themselves separated from the other ships. Lack of skill? Winds that forewarned of those to come later on? Better for them if Lord Hurricane had come down upon them before they met us! Better to be devoured by the waves than find themselves alone off the island of Guadeloupe, in a tight bay whose entrance to the sea was surrounded by high reefs, carried there against their will by some current they had hitherto thought provident!
We had gone out aboard a sloop in search of canoes because L’Olonnais had decided on the site of our next assault, and with its being approachable only through shallow waters, the attack would have to be made in canoes, the which were to be taken by those of our party from the turtle fishers, even though these folk were never armed and had no other belongings than their poor canoes. This was not a pleasant task and I do not have the slightest idea why I joined them. The remainder of the freebooters awaited us on Tortuga.
“Ship ahoy!”
The Second Mate gave orders for our sloop to draw in close to the Spanish galley, waving the red flag that demanded their surrender. In the blink of an eye we would be ready, on the edge, eager to board their bulky ship with so unusual a crew and passengers: the Archbishop arguing hotly with the Captain without listening to reason; the officers giving orders right and left, most of them contradictory; the Second Mate panicking and gone mute. The Archbishop, not knowing what we were like, was demanding that they fight the pirates instead of merely fleeing inland and abandoning everything but their skins, as the Captain wanted. I am not certain whether he was cowardly or wise because although they were well armed he knew they would be defeated; for the soldiers who had custody of the Archbishop and his riches, instead of carefully and eagerly preparing for the fierce battle that was upon them, were simply complaining at the top of their voices about being separated from the rest of the fleet, while the galley slaves were deaf to the confused orders they were being given and kept rowing slowly and in disjointed fashion, moving the galley in a bizarre pattern, clumsy and pointless.
As soon as we came close enough to examine their deck, the musicians on board broke out in a dissonant racket, everything out of tune, as loud as they could. At the outbreak of that mangled music, we all began dancing on our own deck, the Captain in his tattered doublet with its gold brocade, his threadbare silk hose, and a hat trimmed with crumpled plumes, the rest of us shaking our rings, bracelets, and pendants, kicking out our legs, waving our arms to this side and that, occasionally shooting into the air. There we were, dancing, when the two prows bumped against each other; thus with musket in hand, knife between teeth, and having opened a breach in our sloop’s hull so there would be no way of turning back, we boarded the Spanish galley.
The Archbishop, erect, dressed appropriately as suited His Excellency, interposed his enormous crucifix between his person and us while he prayed in a loud voice and we rushed against the benumbed, cowardly soldiers who cried out for mercy here and there without even putting up a resistance. In a matter of minutes the ship would be ours, ours the gold cross mounted with precious stones, ours the Archbishop’s trappings.
But suddenly we heard a terrifying bellow, something like a scream or a howl that surged up out of the cargo hatches, outdoing the volume of our musicians: the galley slaves, despite being still in their chains, fed up with the rowing officer’s whip and his brutality, and aware of our boarding from the Spaniards’ nervous confusion, took advantage of his bewildered state and seized that officer who had so mistreated them until that moment, and then passed him along from one man to the next, gnawing chunks from his body and devouring them bite by bite, until he was hardly anything but bones, and, in the end, lifeless — which was when that frightful howling came to an end.
The booty was so abundant and the galley so useless for hunting down the turtle fishers that we thought to return to L’Olonnais as soon as possible, yet one of our men prudently urged us to wait because in the strong breezes of the previous night he believed he saw an early warning of other more forceful and hardly tamable winds: a hurricane. And even though we did not believe him in all conviction, such fear did the mere word “hurricane” put into us that we listened to him, though not to the letter, unfortunately. Because he advised us to move with all our booty to dry land, having the island so near, and look for a cave or dig a shelter, leaving the prisoners to sink with the galley but taking with us the two canoes we already had acquired in order to return to Tortuga, and to come back later for the booty. Oh, if we had only obeyed him in every detail!
TWELVE
What fist was it that had cast all these islands on this sea the way one sows seeds: shaking and opening all the fingers at once? The Caribbean is sown with islands great and small, lavishly populated by islands, unpeopled and primitive, subject to the fact that the owner of the fist that sowed the transparent sea might send a fearful wind to turn it into a Massive Ocean, an indomitable wind which, even though everyone knows, of course, that it may be repulsed by a few here and there, appears to have been tamed by no one: the terrifying Huracán, the god of the Indians who once peopled these islands: Huracán, never to be trusted.