The Pirate Round Read online

  But he would not. He could feel the blood pooling under him, could taste it in his mouth, feel it slick on his hands and his cheek where they pressed to the deck. His vision was growing dark around the edges, the sounds in his ears dull and otherworldly. The pain in his abdomen was all-consuming – it devoured him whole – and he would have writhed with the agony if he had been able to move, but he could not. For the first time he saw death as a relief, and he welcomed it and wished it would come fast.

  He closed his eyes, whispered his daughters’ names.

  It was September 1695, when Thomas Tew died on the quarterdeck of his sloop, holding in his guts with his own hands, his stomach torn open by the freak glancing blow of a cannonball. Their famous leader dead, the men of the Amity panicked and surrendered with no further resistance. Their fate at the hands of the Great Mogul of India is not known.

  When word of Tew’s grisly death reached Newport, it might have caused some introspection, but it did not slow in the least the great wave of fortune hunters that were arming vessels and sailing the ‘Pirate Wind’ for Madagascar and the Red Sea and then back to the colonies in America.

  Thomas Tew made himself a fortune when he took the Great Mogul’s ship in 1692 and secured his place in that pantheon of sea rovers long remembered, men such as Long Ben Avery and Bartholomew Roberts and Blackbeard.

  But in terms of the history of seafaring and raiding, Thomas Tew did something far more important than establishing his own fame, something that would resonate for decades to follow, that would become the concern of the most powerful nations on earth.

  With his one bold attack, Thomas Tew created the Pirate Round.

  CHAPTER 1

  Thomas Marlowe was not studying a chart of the Indian Ocean.

  True, it was laid out in front of him, along with dividers and parallel rule and all those tools that a mariner might use to study a chart. A dagger, formerly the property of a lieutenant in the Spanish navy, held down the lower right corner of the rolled vellum. Holding the left corner were the sailing directions for that area, a volume he had picked up in Port Royal over ten years before, when he had first considered a jaunt against the Moors.

  But he was not considering it again. It was foolhardy, unethical. It was piracy, and that was not what he did. He was not studying the chart. He assured himself of that.

  He sighed, tossed the dividers aside, leaned back in the chair. August, hot and sultry in Virginia, a steamy heat after two days of rain. The windows to the library were flung open, and the lightest of breezes found its way in, rustling the papers on Marlowe’s desk. Accounts that needed settling, mostly. Un-encouraging reports from his merchant in England.

  Marlowe ran his fingers through his shoulder-length hair, scratched his scalp. Until just the past few months he had worn it close-cropped to accommodate one of the many elaborate periwigs that his station in Virginia society had dictated he wear. Finally, a combination of creeping age (he was nearing forty), a secure position in Tidewater society, and a general disgust at the expense and discomfort of the things had led him to abandon the fashion and allow his own hair to grow back, as he had worn it in his days at sea.

  With periwig gone and coat tossed over the seat of a straight-backed caned chair, Marlowe was about as comfortable as he was going to get on such a day. He stared out the window, across the wide expanse of lawn to the lush, green line of trees in the distance. It was his, all his. He felt the weight of it pushing him down.

  Today was a day for packing tobacco for shipment to England. Through the open window he could hear the squeak of the lever arm used to prize the air-cured hands of tobacco into the hogsheads.

  Marlowe smiled as he thought of it. When he arrived in Williamsburg in 1700, determined to give up a former life of piracy, he understood none of that. He did not know that tobacco had to be left suspended in a curing house to dry in the air after it was cut, did not know that it was bound up into little bundles called hands and then forced, or ‘prized’ into hogsheads.

  He knew only that he wanted a plantation, wanted to be lord of the manor. Money procured that. Once he owned a plantation, he set free the slaves that had come with the bargain and hired them to take care of the cultivation. That part of plantation owning, the agriculture part, did not interest him. Besides, the former slaves had forgotten more about it than he would ever know.

  The squeaking stopped, followed a moment later by the peevish voice of Francis Bickerstaff saying, ‘No, no more. There is a finite amount these hogsheads will hold, you know. We shall blow it apart if we put one more hand in there. Affix the head now, cooper, and let us have another.’ He sounded like a schoolmaster lecturing a recalcitrant student.

  That was hardly surprising. Bickerstaff had been a tutor to a wealthy man’s children up until the moment his ship had been captured by the pirate vessel aboard which Marlowe was sailing. Marlowe had forced Bickerstaff to sail with him, to teach him to read, to speak properly, to pass as a gentleman. The two had become friends, the closest of friends, and remained so.

  Bickerstaff had a curious mind, as befitted a scholar. While Marlowe was happy to ride around the plantation and enjoy his lordship over it, Bickerstaff felt the need to learn all he could about raising, curing, and selling tobacco. After five years of living at Marlowe House, he knew as much as any planter in the Tidewater. Between Bickerstaff and the freed slaves, Marlowe’s plantation produced as much and as good tobacco as any plantation in Virginia or Maryland.

  Thomas drew a deep breath. Along with the sounds of prizing, the breeze carried the scent of the air-dried tobacco being readied for shipment. It was the smell of money in the Tidewater. Or had been, until now, the Year of Our Lord 1706.

  Now it was hard times for the once-prosperous colony. Queen Anne’s War had dragged on for four years, with not the least indication that it would let up. The markets of Europe were closed to English tobacco, just when the planters in Virginia and Maryland were enjoying record yields.

  Marlowe stared and pondered and idly massaged his right forearm. It had been broken four years before in an ill-advised attack on a French East Indiaman, and it still bothered him on occasion.

  He had forsworn piracy, but on a few occasions since beginning his new life he had wandered close to the sweet trade – and had made a fair amount of money in doing so. That booty had carried him through the hard times, had allowed him to keep out of debt and to pay his former slaves, as he had promised them he would. But his cache of loot was nearly exhausted now, and there was little money to be made from tobacco, and he did not know what he would do.

  He sighed again, glanced down at the tempting chart and its promise of fat Moorish treasure ships running down the Red Sea and through the straits of Bab el Mandeb. Somewhere off in Europe, armies were beating each other bloody to determine who would sit on the decadent throne of Spain, and it was ruining his life, like some black-magic spell cast from far off. He was accustomed to simpler problems, enemies that he could face with sword and pistol.

  He realized that he was looking for just that, a way to attack his problems with steel and powder, searching for some action he could take to fight his way back to solvency. I am still quite an unsubtle creature, he thought.

  The soft padding of feet beyond the door, the sound of his wife, Elizabeth, coming down the hall. He looked up at the doorway and then down at the chart, then up again, frozen in indecision. He did not want Elizabeth to think he was studying the thing, because he was not. But neither did he want her to catch him trying furtively to hide it from her.

  In the few seconds it took him to not make a decision, the decision was made for him when Elizabeth appeared in the door, gave a light rap on the frame. ‘Thomas, do you have a moment?’ She held in her arms the big ledger books for Marlowe House, which were her special charge.

  ‘Yes, my dearest, of course. I was just, well …’

  Elizabeth crossed over to the desk, glanced down at the chart that Marlowe was now rolling up with
a great show of innocence. ‘Madagascar and the Indian Ocean?’ she said. ‘I did not know you had such a chart.’

  ‘Yes, well, I have had it these many years. Just wondering about something. Francis and I were wondering about the size of Madagascar, you know. Turns out to be half again as long as I had thought.’

  ‘Hmm-hmm,’ was all that Elizabeth said. She laid the ledgers down on the desk slowly, a somber and foreboding gesture. ‘I have brought the accounts up to date. It is not a pretty thing, I fear.’

  Marlowe stared at the ledger books, hating them, as if they were to blame. He held them in the same light as he had held all books before he learned to read – as something he did not understand and therefore something to fear.

  ‘Are we in debt?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, thank God for that at least.’ Debt was a death knell in the colonies. Once money was owed to merchants in England, men far beyond the reach of careful scrutiny, it was nearly impossible to get out. It was stunning how quickly a merchant’s fawning respect turned to scornful abuse once a planter owed him money.

  ‘Yes,’ Elizabeth agreed. ‘It is something. But the funds held by the bank are nearly gone, and, I fear, the … ah … contents of your warehouse in Jamestown are all but entirely sold off. There is only the silk you were holding on to and some ivory, but we have never found much of a market for that here.’

  ‘Hmm’ was all Marlowe could say to that. The warehouse in Jamestown, up the river from Jamestown, really, was known to only himself and Elizabeth and Francis Bickerstaff. It had been abandoned for years before Marlowe bought it, secretly, and it appeared abandoned still. In it he kept the booty he had gathered from his activities that, if not entirely illegal, would certainly have raised eyebrows – and questions – among those in authority.

  That was the bounty that had carried them along thus far, through falling tobacco prices and rising wartime costs. And now it was gone.

  Marlowe rubbed his temples. ‘Very well. What is to be done? I’ll confess I have no notion.’

  ‘Ah, as to that … I did have one thought …’

  Thomas looked up at his wife. She was displaying more hesitancy than was usual for her, and it piqued his curiosity.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, it seems to me there are two things that are making it quite impossible for us to realize any profit from our plantations – any of us here in the Tidewater. The first is the damned shipping rates. With the dearth of seamen and ships, we’ll not pay below fourteen pounds a ton this season, which is madness. In the best of times that would eat up most of our profit.’

  Marlowe leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers together. ‘Mmm-hmm,’ he agreed, watching Elizabeth. She had rehearsed this speech, he could tell, so she must be coming to something interesting. Interesting enough for her to be nervous about mentioning it to her husband, a man from whom she had no secrets.

  ‘The other thing of it is the convoys,’ Elizabeth continued. ‘All the ships gather together, we all load our tobacco aboard, and then the navy ships escort the whole lot across the ocean to London. The entire year’s crop arrives on the dock at the same instant, creates an immediate glut. The damned merchants name their price, and they ain’t over-generous. There is no profit to be made with those considerations.’

  ‘Mmm-hmm. And your thought …?’

  ‘Yes, well … you have a great advantage over the others, you see. You, unlike most in the Tidewater, own a ship …’

  He did that. The Elizabeth Galley. She was an old but solid merchantman when he bought her in ’02, and he had refitted her as a privateer. He had been forced to use her in hunting down his old friend King James, after he turned pirate. And once he had returned from that unhappy mission, Governor Nicholson had insisted on having back the Galley’s great guns, which were property of the colony and needed for her defense, now that England was at war.

  Thus unarmed, and with Marlowe’s desire for cruising quashed by the horror of what he had had to do the last time he put to sea, the Elizabeth Galley’s rig had been sent down, and she had been moored in the freshets of the James River to keep her free of weed and teredo worm. And there she had remained.

  ‘I do own a ship,’ Marlowe agreed. ‘Are you thinking we should get into the business of shipping?’

  ‘Yes. The cost of manning the ship would be nothing compared to the freight rates, I shouldn’t think, particularly if you were to command her.’

  ‘I’ll warrant you are right about that. Seamen are hard to find, but we could fill out the crew with some of our people here.’ By ‘our people’ Marlowe meant the former slaves who worked the plantation. ‘Some of those young fellows would make first-rate seamen, with just a bit of instruction. But that solves only half the problem. We are still faced with the glut of weed once we are in London.’

  ‘Yes, as to that … I had thought perhaps we could sail before the convoy. They will put to sea in three months’ time. Sure we could have the Galley ready before that. What are you grinning about, you son of a bitch?’

  Marlowe was indeed grinning, nearly laughing at this. Elizabeth had not led the most upright life before she had married him, but since then she had shunned any kind of impropriety.

  ‘You are suggesting we become smugglers?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘No, not smugglers. It is not illegal to sail without the convoy, if we get a permit to do so.’

  ‘But you know perfectly well that they grant permits only to well-armed ships, which we are not, not anymore. Besides, there is never enough time to secure a permit.’

  ‘Well, I had thought …’

  ‘No, no. None of your excuses. I am not saying I don’t like the idea. I do. I just want you to say, “Yes, Thomas, I am suggesting we smuggle.”’

  ‘Thomas, damn you …’

  ‘Say it …’

  Elizabeth glared at him, then seemed to accept defeat. She deflated, flopped down in the chair facing his desk. ‘Yes, Thomas, I am suggesting we smuggle. There is no way around it – we are lost otherwise. I have no doubt we can carry some of our neighbors’ tobacco as well. They would be as happy to beat the convoy as we would.’

  Thomas looked at his wife, her lovely face now touched with sadness. She was twenty-eight years old, and the first twenty-three years had not been easy for her. But together they had managed to build something good at Marlowe House. An honest, respectable life. It was something new to both of them, and there was nothing Elizabeth would not do to hold on to it.

  ‘I think this is a capital idea,’ Marlowe said, and he was entirely sincere. ‘We might even pick up a cargo for the return voyage, perhaps buy some goods to sell when we are home again.’

  It was a good plan. With just a little luck they would realize enough from this voyage to keep themselves out of debt for a few more years at least.

  ‘We may not be able to do it, in any event,’ Elizabeth continued. ‘We’ll need sailors, we’ll need to get the Galley ready for sea, which will cost money. And, of course, there are no guns aboard. We would be most vulnerable to attack.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Yes, we. Did you think you would sail off again without me?’

  In fact he had, though there was no pleasure in the thought. But still … Elizabeth on board? ‘I don’t know if it is quite the thing—’ he began in weak protest.

  ‘There is no helping it. You know nothing of the tobacco trade, you admit it freely. I know what our yield is, what it is worth. I do the books here. You are useless with numbers, another thing you have often admitted.’

  ‘True. But Bickerstaff—’

  ‘Francis knows the growing and curing and prizing. He does not know the selling or bookkeeping.’

  That was true enough. Elizabeth had always dealt with the factors and agents once the crop was in, kept the books. Bickerstaff had probably been less involved in that part of it than even Thomas, and that was very little indeed.

  The older field hands were certainly capabl
e of seeing to the plantation without his or Elizabeth’s or Bickerstaff’s supervision. Marlowe House would be safe in their absence: there was no one left in the Tidewater who might wish to cause them grief. He was running out of arguments.

  ‘There is also the point …’ Elizabeth continued, and Marlowe could tell she had rehearsed this speech as well. He was surprised; that kind of preparation was unlike her. ‘Perhaps you should not be seen along the waterfront in London. One never knows when a fellow from the old days might recognize you …’

  She did not have to say more. They both understood. One reliable witness, and Marlowe would hang for piracy. There was no pardon for his crimes.

  ‘That is true as well,’ Marlowe admitted. ‘And there is also the point that I could not bear to be parted from you for the half a year the voyage would take.’

  Elizabeth smiled, her stern, businesslike demeanor melting before his words, and suddenly they were connected again, like man and wife, not partners in a merchant firm. Their love and passion for one another, which had not diminished in the least over the years, sparked between them and moved like a potent spirit.

  ‘I had hoped you might feel that way,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘Indeed, my love, I am much buoyed by this plan. No doubt we can scrape up the funds we need to get the ship to sea, and I am equally sure our neighbors will want to get in on this. Sailors we can find – yes, my beloved, I think this is a fine idea. I shall begin at once to get things moving along …’

  His voice trailed off, and his eyes moved unconsciously down to the rolled chart on his desk. In his mind they had already completed Elizabeth’s plan, had the money in hand from the merchants in London, and now they were moving on to the next thing and the next after that.

  Marlowe had made the decision even before he stood up from his desk. There was no reason to dally. Suddenly his desire to act was like a physical pressure, pushing from within. It was time to get under way.