Kingston by Starlight Read online

  “We’ve raided this water until, like fields that were best left fallow, our finest efforts wither on the vine or else bear naught but small and bitter fruits,” said the first voice, which was gruff and full of unchecked passions. “To perdition with farming. Christ our Lord said we should be fishers of men. Jamaica is where we’ll find our catch.”

  “Jamaica would be the death of us all,” said a second voice, calmer and more measured.

  “But a glorious death,” said the gruff voice.

  “Great treasure is there, to be sure, but also great danger. All the privateers in the region have lately been drawn there, and so the island and its waters have been the central focus of a campaign against those who would live on account. Governor Woodes Rogers no doubt waits for us there, too, and, in addition, the forces of Sir Nicholas Lawes, his majesty’s captain-general and governor in chief. To sail there is all death.”

  “What say you then?”

  “We’ve lived off the sea longer than many others might, or have been able to. I say we set our sails for Brazile, or other lands situated in the torrid zone, from the equinoctial to the latitude of twenty-eight degrees south. There we might divide up what spoils we have and take our leave of this lifestyle while our lives we still have.”

  “Leave this life?” bellowed the gruff voice. “Never!”

  Now another voice made itself heard, low and with a musical undulation, and the speaker relayed this story.

  “I have more years than some of you, and thus can tell the tale directly. Port Royal, at its height, was a city of privateers and cutthroats, a place of drinking and revels, a sanctuary of unflagging commerce, where a working man might, at long last, profit from the sweat of his body and the ingenuity of his enterprise. It was, it must be said, a site more flourishing than Santiago de Cuba, Boston, or New York. Having escaped from a slavers’ ship— which is, in itself, another tale— I found myself in Port Royal, in the year of our Lord 1692.”

  “How does this story relate to our current troubles?” said the gruff voice.

  “Hold,” said the musical voice, “and you will come into understanding. Port Royal is located on the tip of a sandy spit of land; the peninsula curls a bit, forming a natural harbor. This sheltered space was the chief source of the city’s import. The water in the harbor was deep, right up to the land, allowing even the largest galleon to sail right up to the docks to dislodge its cargo and then, afterward, to careen and have its hull scraped clean of barnacles.

  “The city was, from all appearances, well armed and most solidly built. It was encircled by a stone wall twice as tall as a large man and protected, at intervals of many paces, by a series of battle stations: Fort James to the west, Fort Rupert to the east, Fort Carlisle to the north, and Fort Charles standing tall to the south. Each fort had a commanding view of the land and sea and each boasted numerous large black cannons.

  “I had been in Port Royal but for a fortnight or so, learning the lay of the land, and, in that time, unusual weather had blown in. It was a strange sky, the like of which I had never seen and, despite my experience, I have not seen since. The sun was bloody red, like the flesh beneath a freshly picked scab. The horizons echoed with the sound of stringed instruments striking wrong notes, playing broken rhythms out of time, snapping strings and then playing on, heedless of the discord. Intermittently, I could hear the mundane music of that cruel, great city: the sad splash of slave bodies striking water as they were disposed, the cries of strumpets in the night, the dying squawk of a cock fallen in a streetfight.

  “Now, all at once,” continued the musical voice, “I heard a rumbling in the Saint Andrews Mountains in the North. The sound was far away at first; from this distance, it was not unlike a man’s dry belly heaves, many times multiplied. A burbling, muffled by mounds of flesh. Then the roar grew closer and closer. It was like a thunderstorm passing through the ground. It seemed to me that the red earth grew redder, a deep shade of vermilion, as if flushed with anger or soaked in blood. The underground roar grew deafening, and my hands against my ears were no help; the noise sounded through my fingers, it shook my whole body, and I could feel the sound in my innards and in my bones. I fled, running through the gates of the city and heading for the hills, but the force of the noise and the movement of the earth threw me to the ground.

  “The earth now moved as if it were a living thing,” said the musical voice. “Now, from where I was lying, I could see the whole city. It seemed to me that the noise had become a vast music, great in rhythm and utterly lacking in harmony; it swelled up like a legion of deep-barreled drums beating in unison, pounding on toward some terrible crescendo.

  “I looked toward the outer ring of Port Royal,” said the musical voice. “The stone walls that circumscribed the city wiggled and writhed like eels. I saw the black iron cannons of Fort Charles and Fort James hurled into the air. The ground ’round the battlements rippled like the surface of a pond.

  “Great fissures opened up in the streets of the city. The jagged chasms looked like greedy mouths, gobbling up the brick and timber-built houses, slurping in the court, and the warehouses, too. The gaps sucked in passersby, merchants and sailors, slavers and strumpets, stray dogs and pack mules. Almost immediately a great wail went up from the dead and the dying, the sufferers and the mourning. Still, the great vents went about their awful work, opening and closing like eager jaws, crushing and chewing their prey. A gray smoke issued from each of the vents.

  “Almost no building was spared destruction— the Presbyterian church, the Quaker meeting house, the Jewish synagogue; all disappeared in bursts of splintered wood and shattered brick. The Anglican church was sucked down a dark hole, its tower bells jangling. The whorehouses and the prisons, the ramshackle market stalls, collapsed into the earth. Great clouds of plaster and powdered lime rose above the city.

  “Half of the city rose up and the other half sank. High Street and Thames Street and Queen Street, all parallel to one another, now tilted up together, east side low, west side high. The whole city was like the deck of a ship submerging beneath the waves.

  “There was another roar,” said the undulating voice. “The water round Port Royal now swirled and rose up. The single-masted sloops and triple-masted frigates and big-hulled galleons careening in Chocolata Hole, at King’s Wharf, at Waterman’s Wharf, broke loose their moorings, riding high on the crest of a series of mighty waves before disappearing, one and all, beneath the fathoms.

  “The HMS Swan, a great ship lately put to port, alone escaped this fate. One massive wave, taller tenfold than the highest building in Port Royal, carried the ship from the wharf and then over the city wall and then over the overwhelmed battlements and then over the tops of sunken houses. The Swan’s guns were torn away, so too its rigging and cables, and a hole was ripped in its hull where once the anchor was fixed. The great ship, now at the command of the wild waters, was carried by the flow straight onto High Street, where it sailed down the thoroughfare as if it were skimming down a great river. The ship finally came to rest atop the roof of a drowned house across the way from the fish market on Thames Street.

  “Water was now the master of Port Royal. The fashionable merchants’ houses on Thames Street and on Lime Street slipped beneath the waves. Water covered nearly everything, water covered Fort Rupert and Fort Carlisle, water covered Fort James and Fort Charles. Water covered all the alehouses and all the churches. Only debris moved on the surface of the sea— empty bottles of Rhenish wine, broken cart wheels, the yellow bodice of a strumpet, a great wooden chest, a cracked clay chamber pot— and bodies, black bodies that had been thrown into the sea by slaver ships the previous afternoon, along with the pale bodies of Port Royal residents who had perished that very day. Water took them all. The spit of sandy land that connected the town to the mainland was now one with the sea. Port Royal, once a peninsula, was now a sunken island. Streets were now rivers, ships now sailed the bottom of the harbor, and churches were entirely submerged with jus
t their steeples jutting over the surface of the waves.

  “I thought to myself then: the world is sand,” said the voice. “Nothing lasts— not people, not ships, not battlements or cities. The streets are all sand and the stars are sand, too. We must know when our time is up. I agree with those who say we must consider an end to our voyage, and Brazile is as worthy a spot as any. Let us divide up what spoils we may, before we, too, are swallow’d up, like our fellows in that poor city of Port Royal.”

  A silence greeted these words. I could hear my heart in my chest. Did the former suggestion mean what I took it for? Might the men of the William lower the black flag?

  “That’s a long tale to make a philosophic point,” said the gruff voice at last. “I’ve had shits that were not only of more substance, they were a good deal shorter as well.”

  Now a fourth voice— reasonable and commanding, unheard until now— introduced itself to the conversation: “Indeed these waters have grown hard. Within three days, we will run short of proper victuals. Within those same three days, we will run short of both grog and drinking water.”

  “For the men,” said the gruff voice, “the loss of the grog will be the worst of it.”

  “Much consideration have I given to changing course,” said the commanding voice. “These currents were plentiful in days gone by. But ’tis not treasure we now need but wood and water and food.”

  “So what’s the plan?” said the gruff voice.

  The words that followed next were softer and I could not hear them from where I stood, a few paces beyond the door. What plan could be afoot about the course of the ship? I crept closer and pressed my ear to the door.

  Just then the door open’d and I fell forward, face first, into the captain’s cabin.

  Struggling to my feet I saw around me Bishop (a mug of grog in hand), First-Rate (smoking a long pipe), Zayd (sitting cross-legged on a wooden chair), and Calico (cleaning the muzzle of his flintlock pistol). Bishop was the gruff voice, First-Rate the voice of calm, Zayd had told the tale of Port Royal, and Calico was the voice of command. All four had grim looks on their faces at my unexpected intrusion.

  “Let’s crucify this one now,” said Bishop.

  “Stealth and curiosity are virtues for men of the sea,” said First-Rate.

  “We’ll let him live— a night or two at least,” said Calico, merriment now playing about his lips.

  He offered me a hand up and pulled me to my feet. His hands were large and strong, I noticed. I have often passed trees that have grown around obstacles, locking them in a wooden embrace. My hand in his felt plung’d in oak.

  “So what say you of our ship’s dilemmas?” said Calico. “Come on now, raise your voice. You’ve signed on to the government of the ship’s articles, so our troubles have indeed become your own, as surely as if we were married in a church.”

  Calico’s voice was serious as he said these words but his eyes smiled a little. I noticed that his eyes were very much like a boy’s, bright and touched with some levity, but worried a bit around the corners like a man who carries with him the weight of many years.

  I swallow’d hard and found my voice.

  “My opinion is . . .”

  The men all leaned a bit closer.

  “My opinion is . . .”

  My underarms began to tingle with eddies of perspiration.

  “My opinion is that I’ll hold my opinion until I have more experience.”

  “Well said,” smiled First-Rate.

  Bishop sneered.

  “But this I’ll say,” I continued. “The sea, it has always seemed to me, rewards men of daring. The fisherman must run the coral reef to catch the crevalle jack.”

  Calico seem’d lost in thought, and hardly seem’d to hear my words. He was bent over in his chair, stroking the sides of his well-polished boots, which he had removed.

  “There are those who would judge a man by what he stands in,” Calico said. “My father had boots such as these. His were not so polished nor well kept, for he had no money for repairs nor for replacement. He would work every day, or else look for work on the days on which he had none, and when he returned home, he would place his boots before the fireplace. Our hearth in those days was surrounded by gilded pictures of our relations. Soon the frames were sold, the portraits tucked away, and only the boots remained. We lost even the hearth, when we lost the house, which follow’d hard upon a press-gang conscripting my father in the night. But the boots remained. They were not dissimiliar, as I have said, to the ones I wear now— they had a square toe, as mine do, but also a large brass buckle, one that seem’d as big as my head when I was a child, and a tongue that curled up and out, like a black wave of leather. I remember well what my father wore.”

  Calico’s face was full of passion but he mastered it. He slipped on his boots and stood up.

  “So many have profited so much from these waters and we have yet to earn our fortunes,” he said. “I recall when Port Royal was alive— bright like some glittering bauble hung between a harlot’s breasts. Now that great port has sunk into the sea and another port, Kingston, has sprung up across the harbor. Cities rise and cities fall and still we have not earned our fortunes. How I hate the thought that so many fools and knaves and mountebanks have grown rich while we, full of intelligence and courage, labor on under the shadow of poverty and disaster! I curse God for it and all his angels, too!”

  Calico motion’d the others to their feet.

  “Our councils are at an end, for now,” he said. “We will continue in these waters. But may the devil help us if our catch does not increase.”

  chapter 14.

  The days grew desperate. Laughter died, conversations grew terse, and the men went about their appointed duties with a kind of flintiness— full of sharp edges and given to spark. The weather, she blew hard and dirty, with much rain and little sun. Over the course of the next two days, while sailing off the coast of Harbour Island, we encounter’d several more fishing vessels. Each of the craft Calico did the favor of relieving the crew of their nets and tackle, and, if there were bondsmen on board, he bade them to join us, and they invariably did. Then Calico would send the fishermen back on their course, wiser, but in the main unharmed. Bishop counseled that dead men would be entirely unlikely to reveal the whereabouts of our vessel, but Zayd advised it best for our ship to avoid the infamy and increased scrutiny that accompanies unnecessary cruelties. Calico took the latter’s advisement, and so we sail’d on with hardly a fight.

  With no great prize having been encounter’d, and no sea-battle to heat the blood, complaints and dissatisfactions ran their course on the ship, like the visitation of some great plague, and, indeed, the general mood among the men took on a sickly pallor. Everything seem’d to be running out: supplies, patience, time. The new recruits taken from the fishing vessels drained the ship’s resources even more. The stores and barrels of fresh drinking water were very nearly exhausted. For victuals, Sugar-Apple offered the crew only iron-hard biscuits, which, when broken, were full of weevils with long black heads, jagged pinchers, and soft white bodies. The men, in search of sustenance in whatever form, sampled the weevils, but found them to be bitter in taste and, when swallowed, most times triggering an uncontrollable heaving of the innards. When duly criticized for his offerings, Sugar-Apple just shrugged and bade the men to catch and eat the multitude of rats that ran freely in the ship’s hold, which men of the William did, judging the rodents to be a significantly more satisfying repast than the biscuit-weevils.

  Calico remained distant from the fray. He dined among the men— when there was something to eat— but did not drink spirits with them. He would walk the decks and issue orders, but rarely would he pause for a conversation of any great length or depth. The men loved him, to be sure, despite the troubles, but none really knew him intimately. I approached him at various times over different matters, none of any great importance, and it seem’d to me that prolonged closeness almost seem’d to cause him physi
cal pain. At first I attributed this to the burden of command, which must be particularly heavy in a time of scarcity and want, but, upon reflection I wonder’d what was at the root of his shielded character.

  Most of the ship’s company, and I count myself among this number, sought refuge from the ongoing troubles in the solace of routine. Indeed, there is a rhythm to the seafaring life that is orderly and unstoppable, vibrantly youthful and yet rooted in comfortably timeworn traditions. The bulk of the men on the ship who were not officers slept in cramped quarters below deck that at first inspired hostility and anxiety but, in time and by necessity, eventually conjured a certain familial feeling among the men. Our hammocks were strung so close together that only a slight shift while sleeping would rock several hammocks, one ’gainst another. Close by me was Poop, who mumbled passages from his prayer book each night before taking to his hammock. Once caught up in his rest, he was also given to sobbing in his sleep and calling out for his parents, much to the merriment and mockery of all the crew members within hearing range, who, given the close proximity of the sleeping arrangements, were plentiful. Angel’s hammock was some distance from me, but he seemed ubiquitous: the fellow, when he slept, snored like Vesuvius issuing life-smothering ash on poor Pompei.