It is time fully to disclose the fact that the survival of the story of
Captain Blood's exploits is due entirely to the industry of Jeremy Pitt,
the Somersetshire shipmaster. In addition to his ability as a navigator,
this amiable young man appears to have wielded an indefatigable pen, and
to have been inspired to indulge its fluency by the affection he very
obviously bore to Peter Blood.
He kept the log of the forty-gun frigate Arabella, on which he served as
master, or, as we should say to-day, navigating officer, as no log
that I have seen was ever kept. It runs into some twenty-odd volumes of
assorted sizes, some of which are missing altogether and others of which
are so sadly depleted of leaves as to be of little use. But if at times
in the laborious perusal of them--they are preserved in the library of
Mr. James Speke of Comerton--I have inveighed against these lacunae, at
others I have been equally troubled by the excessive prolixity of what
remains and the difficulty of disintegrating from the confused whole the
really essential parts.
I have a suspicion that Esquemeling--though how or where I can make no
surmise--must have obtained access to these records, and that he plucked
from them the brilliant feathers of several exploits to stick them into
the tail of his own hero, Captain Morgan. But that is by the way. I
mention it chiefly as a warning, for when presently I come to relate the
affair of Maracaybo, those of you who have read Esquemeling may be in
danger of supposing that Henry Morgan really performed those things
which here are veraciously attributed to Peter Blood. I think, however,
that when you come to weigh the motives actuating both Blood and the
Spanish Admiral, in that affair, and when you consider how integrally
the event is a part of Blood's history--whilst merely a detached
incident in Morgan's--you will reach my own conclusion as to which is
the real plagiarist.
The first of these logs of Pitt's is taken up almost entirely with a
retrospective narrative of the events up to the time of Blood's first
coming to Tortuga. This and the Tannatt Collection of State Trials are
the chief--though not the only--sources of my history so far.
Pitt lays great stress upon the fact that it was the circumstances upon
which I have dwelt, and these alone, that drove Peter Blood to seek
an anchorage at Tortuga. He insists at considerable length, and with a
vehemence which in itself makes it plain that an opposite opinion was
held in some quarters, that it was no part of the design of Blood or of
any of his companions in misfortune to join hands with the buccaneers
who, under a semi-official French protection, made of Tortuga a lair
whence they could sally out to drive their merciless piratical trade
chiefly at the expense of Spain.
It was, Pitt tells us, Blood's original intention to make his way to
France or Holland. But in the long weeks of waiting for a ship to convey
him to one or the other of these countries, his resources dwindled and
finally vanished. Also, his chronicler thinks that he detected signs of
some secret trouble in his friend, and he attributes to this the abuses
of the potent West Indian spirit of which Blood became guilty in those
days of inaction, thereby sinking to the level of the wild adventurers
with whom ashore he associated.
I do not think that Pitt is guilty in this merely of special pleading,
that he is putting forward excuses for his hero. I think that in those
days there was a good deal to oppress Peter Blood. There was the thought
of Arabella Bishop--and that this thought loomed large in his mind we
are not permitted to doubt. He was maddened by the tormenting lure of
the unattainable. He desired Arabella, yet knew her beyond his reach
irrevocably and for all time. Also, whilst he may have desired to go to
France or Holland, he had no clear purpose to accomplish when he reached
one or the other of these countries. He was, when all is said, an
escaped slave, an outlaw in his own land and a homeless outcast in any
other. There remained the sea, which is free to all, and particularly
alluring to those who feel themselves at war with humanity. And so,
considering the adventurous spirit that once already had sent him
a-roving for the sheer love of it, considering that this spirit was
heightened now by a recklessness begotten of his outlawry, that his
training and skill in militant seamanship clamorously supported the
temptations that were put before him, can you wonder, or dare you blame
him, that in the end he succumbed? And remember that these temptations
proceeded not only from adventurous buccaneering acquaintances in the
taverns of that evil haven of Tortuga, but even from M. d'Ogeron, the
governor of the island, who levied as his harbour dues a percentage of
one tenth of all spoils brought into the bay, and who profited further
by commissions upon money which he was desired to convert into bills of
exchange upon France.
A trade that might have worn a repellent aspect when urged by greasy,
half-drunken adventurers, boucan-hunters, lumbermen, beach-combers,
English, French, and Dutch, became a dignified, almost official form of
privateering when advocated by the courtly, middle-aged gentleman who
in representing the French West India Company seemed to represent France
herself.
Moreover, to a man--not excluding Jeremy Pitt himself, in whose blood
the call of the sea was insistent and imperative--those who had escaped
with Peter Blood from the Barbados plantations, and who, consequently,
like himself, knew not whither to turn, were all resolved upon joining
the great Brotherhood of the Coast, as those rovers called themselves.
And they united theirs to the other voices that were persuading Blood,
demanding that he should continue now in the leadership which he had
enjoyed since they had left Barbados, and swearing to follow him loyally
whithersoever he should lead them.
And so, to condense all that Jeremy has recorded in the matter, Blood
ended by yielding to external and internal pressure, abandoned himself
to the stream of Destiny. “Fata viam invenerunt,” is his own expression
of it.
If he resisted so long, it was, I think, the thought of Arabella Bishop
that restrained him. That they should be destined never to meet again
did not weigh at first, or, indeed, ever. He conceived the scorn with
which she would come to hear of his having turned pirate, and the scorn,
though as yet no more than imagined, hurt him as if it were already a
reality. And even when he conquered this, still the thought of her was
ever present. He compromised with the conscience that her memory kept so
disconcertingly active. He vowed that the thought of her should continue
ever before him to help him keep his hands as clean as a man might in
this desperate trade upon which he was embarking. And so, although he
might entertain no delusive hope of ever winning her for his own, of
ever even seeing her again, yet the memory of her was to abide in his
soul as a bitter-sweet, purifying influence. The love that is never to
be realized will often remain a man's guiding ideal. The resolve
being taken, he went actively to work. Ogeron, most accommodating of
governors, advanced him money for the proper equipment of his ship the
Cinco Llagas, which he renamed the Arabella. This after some little
hesitation, fearful of thus setting his heart upon his sleeve. But his
Barbados friends accounted it merely an expression of the ever-ready
irony in which their leader dealt.
To the score of followers he already possessed, he added threescore
more, picking his men with caution and discrimination--and he was an
exceptional judge of men--from amongst the adventurers of Tortuga. With
them all he entered into the articles usual among the Brethren of the
Coast under which each man was to be paid by a share in the prizes
captured. In other respects, however, the articles were different.
Aboard the Arabella there was to be none of the ruffianly indiscipline
that normally prevailed in buccaneering vessels. Those who shipped with
him undertook obedience and submission in all things to himself and
to the officers appointed by election. Any to whom this clause in the
articles was distasteful might follow some other leader.
Towards the end of December, when the hurricane season had blown itself
out, he put to sea in his well-found, well-manned ship, and before he
returned in the following May from a protracted and adventurous cruise,
the fame of Captain Peter Blood had run like ripples before the breeze
across the face of the Caribbean Sea. There was a fight in the Windward
Passage at the outset with a Spanish galleon, which had resulted in the
gutting and finally the sinking of the Spaniard. There was a daring raid
effected by means of several appropriated piraguas upon a Spanish pearl
fleet in the Rio de la Hacha, from which they had taken a particularly
rich haul of pearls. There was an overland expedition to the goldfields
of Santa Maria, on the Main, the full tale of which is hardly credible,
and there were lesser adventures through all of which the crew of the
Arabella came with credit and profit if not entirely unscathed.
And so it happened that before the Arabella came homing to Tortuga in
the following May to refit and repair--for she was not without scars, as
you conceive--the fame of her and of Peter Blood her captain had swept
from the Bahamas to the Windward Isles, from New Providence to Trinidad.
An echo of it had reached Europe, and at the Court of St. James's angry
representations were made by the Ambassador of Spain, to whom it was
answered that it must not be supposed that this Captain Blood held any
commission from the King of England; that he was, in fact, a proscribed
rebel, an escaped slave, and that any measures against him by His
Catholic Majesty would receive the cordial approbation of King James II.
Don Miguel de Espinosa, the Admiral of Spain in the West Indies, and his
nephew Don Esteban who sailed with him, did not lack the will to bring
the adventurer to the yardarm. With them this business of capturing
Blood, which was now an international affair, was also a family matter.
Spain, through the mouth of Don Miguel, did not spare her threats.
The report of them reached Tortuga, and with it the assurance that Don
Miguel had behind him not only the authority of his own nation, but that
of the English King as well.
It was a brutum fulmen that inspired no terrors in Captain Blood. Nor
was he likely, on account of it, to allow himself to run to rust in the
security of Tortuga. For what he had suffered at the hands of Man he had
chosen to make Spain the scapegoat. Thus he accounted that he served a
twofold purpose: he took compensation and at the same time served, not
indeed the Stuart King, whom he despised, but England and, for that
matter, all the rest of civilized mankind which cruel, treacherous,
greedy, bigoted Castile sought to exclude from intercourse with the New
World.
One day as he sat with Hagthorpe and Wolverstone over a pipe and
a bottle of rum in the stifling reek of tar and stale tobacco of a
waterside tavern, he was accosted by a splendid ruffian in a gold-laced
coat of dark-blue satin with a crimson sash, a foot wide, about the
waist.
“C'est vous qu'on appelle Le Sang?” the fellow hailed him.
Captain Blood looked up to consider the questioner before replying.
The man was tall and built on lines of agile strength, with a swarthy,
aquiline face that was brutally handsome. A diamond of great price
flamed on the indifferently clean hand resting on the pummel of his long
rapier, and there were gold rings in his ears, half-concealed by long
ringlets of oily chestnut hair.
Captain Blood took the pipe-stem from between his lips.
“My name,” he said, “is Peter Blood. The Spaniards know me for Don Pedro
Sangre and a Frenchman may call me Le Sang if he pleases.”
“Good,” said the gaudy adventurer in English, and without further
invitation he drew up a stool and sat down at that greasy table. “My
name,” he informed the three men, two of whom at least were eyeing him
askance, “it is Levasseur. You may have heard of me.”
They had, indeed. He commanded a privateer of twenty guns that had
dropped anchor in the bay a week ago, manned by a crew mainly composed
of French boucanhunters from Northern Hispaniola, men who had good cause
to hate the Spaniard with an intensity exceeding that of the English.
Levasseur had brought them back to Tortuga from an indifferently
successful cruise. It would need more, however, than lack of success
to abate the fellow's monstrous vanity. A roaring, quarrelsome,
hard-drinking, hard-gaming scoundrel, his reputation as a buccaneer
stood high among the wild Brethren of the Coast. He enjoyed also a
reputation of another sort. There was about his gaudy, swaggering
raffishness something that the women found singularly alluring. That
he should boast openly of his bonnes fortunes did not seem strange to
Captain Blood; what he might have found strange was that there appeared
to be some measure of justification for these boasts.
It was current gossip that even Mademoiselle d'Ogeron, the Governor's
daughter, had been caught in the snare of his wild attractiveness, and
that Levasseur had gone the length of audacity of asking her hand in
marriage of her father. M. d'Ogeron had made him the only possible
answer. He had shown him the door. Levasseur had departed in a rage,
swearing that he would make mademoiselle his wife in the teeth of all
the fathers in Christendom, and that M. d'Ogeron should bitterly rue the
affront he had put upon him.
This was the man who now thrust himself upon Captain Blood with a
proposal of association, offering him not only his sword, but his ship
and the men who sailed in her.
A dozen years ago, as a lad of barely twenty, Levasseur had sailed with
that monster of cruelty L'Ollonais, and his own subsequent exploits
bore witness and did credit to the school in which he had been reared. I
doubt if in his day there was a greater scoundrel among the Brethren of
the Coast than this Levasseur. And yet, repulsive though he found him,
Captain Blood could not deny that the fellow's proposals displayed
boldness, imagination, and resource, and he was forced to admit that
jointly they could undertake operations of a greater magnitude than was
possible singly to either of them. The climax of Levasseur's project was
to be a raid upon the wealthy mainland city of Maracaybo; but for this,
he admitted, six hundred men at the very least would be required, and
six hundred men were not to be conveyed in the two bottoms they now
commanded. Preliminary cruises must take place, having for one of their
objects the capture of further ships.
Because he disliked the man, Captain Blood would not commit himself at
once. But because he liked the proposal he consented to consider it.
Being afterwards pressed by both Hagthorpe and Wolverstone, who did not
share his own personal dislike of the Frenchman, the end of the matter
was that within a week articles were drawn up between Levasseur
and Blood, and signed by them and--as was usual--by the chosen
representatives of their followers.
These articles contained, inter alia, the common provisions that, should
the two vessels separate, a strict account must afterwards be rendered
of all prizes severally taken, whilst the vessel taking a prize should
retain three fifths of its value, surrendering two fifths to its
associate. These shares were subsequently to be subdivided among the
crew of each vessel, in accordance with the articles already obtaining
between each captain and his own men. For the rest, the articles
contained all the clauses that were usual, among which was the clause
that any man found guilty of abstracting or concealing any part of a
prize, be it of the value of no more than a peso, should be summarily
hanged from the yardarm.
All being now settled they made ready for sea, and on the very eve of
sailing, Levasseur narrowly escaped being shot in a romantic attempt
to scale the wall of the Governor's garden, with the object of taking
passionate leave of the infatuated Mademoiselle d'Ogeron. He desisted
after having been twice fired upon from a fragrant ambush of pimento
trees where the Governor's guards were posted, and he departed vowing to
take different and very definite measures on his return.
That night he slept on board his ship, which with characteristic
flamboyance he had named La Foudre, and there on the following day he
received a visit from Captain Blood, whom he greeted half-mockingly as
his admiral. The Irishman came to settle certain final details of which
all that need concern us is an understanding that, in the event of the
two vessels becoming separated by accident or design, they should rejoin
each other as soon as might be at Tortuga.
Thereafter Levasseur entertained his admiral to dinner, and jointly they
drank success to the expedition, so copiously on the part of Levasseur
that when the time came to separate he was as nearly drunk as it seemed
possible for him to be and yet retain his understanding.
Finally, towards evening, Captain Blood went over the side and was rowed
back to his great ship with her red bulwarks and gilded ports, touched
into a lovely thing of flame by the setting sun.
He was a little heavy-hearted. I have said that he was a judge of men,
and his judgment of Levasseur filled him with misgivings which were
growing heavier in a measure as the hour of departure approached.
He expressed it to Wolverstone, who met him as he stepped aboard the
Arabella:
“You over persuaded me into those articles, you blackguard; and it'll
surprise me if any good comes of this association.”
The giant rolled his single bloodthirsty eye, and sneered, thrusting out
his heavy jaw. “We'll wring the dog's neck if there's any treachery.”
“So we will--if we are there to wring it by then.” And on that,
dismissing the matter: “We sail in the morning, on the first of the
ebb,” he announced, and went off to his cabin.