Verrill In the Wake of Buccaneers

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-3-98744-828-7
Verlag: OTB eBook publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 255 Seiten

Reihe: Classics To Go

Excerpt: There is no more entrancing body of water in either the Western or the Eastern Hemisphere?than the Caribbean Sea, with a fringe of lovely tropical islands on the one side and on the other the Spanish Main and its picturesque centuries-old towns and fascinating sights. Aside from its beauty, its delightful climate, and its ever-shifting scenes, the Caribbean and its shores are redolent of romance. It was the starting-point of those brave though ruthless adventurers who carved a new world for Castile and Leon. For centuries it was the treasure-house of the world and the battle-ground of the mightiest European powers. Across this sapphire sea sailed the caravels of Columbus, the Golden Hind of Drake, and the stately, plate-laden galleons of Spain. And across this same sea coursed those fierce sea-rovers the buccaneers. Of all the dare-devil spirits who sailed the Caribbean and ravaged the Spanish Main, the buccaneers were the most picturesque and romantic. [vi]Villains though they were; reddened with the blood of the innocent and helpless though their hands; black-hearted cutthroats beyond denial?yet there is something about them that appeals to all, and that, despite their ill deeds, fills one with admiration.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Verrill, A. Hyatt

Leseproben

CHAPTER I
AMONG THE CARIBBEES
I had started forth on a novel journey, a trip I had long wanted to take—a cruise in the wake of the buccaneers. Many a time I had traversed the Caribbean, steaming from port to port of those island gems, the Lesser Antilles, that are strung, like emeralds and sapphires, in a great curving chain stretching from our own St. Thomas, five days south of New York, to Trinidad at the mouth of the Orinoco. Many a time, too, I had skirted the coasts, climbed the mountains, and explored the bush of Cuba, Porto Rico, Santo Domingo, and Jamaica. And whenever I had stood upon a liner’s deck and watched the huge-sailed island sloops and schooners courtesying to the sparkling waves and, with lee rails awash, surging through the blue sea toward some distant isle, I had envied those aboard. I had vowed that sooner or later I too would stand upon the heaving deck of a nimble sailing-craft and cruise hither and thither among the islands, going and coming as humor willed, seeing the out-of-the-way places, the little-known islets, the hidden, quiet bays and coves which no churning screws had disturbed and no smoke-belching funnels had besmirched. No locality is more filled with romance, more remindful of adventurous deeds of the past, more closely associated with the early history of our country than the Caribbean. Here is the islet first sighted by Columbus after his long and thrilling voyage into the west. Here dwelt the conquistadors, the explorers, the voyagers who with fire and blood blazed their trails across the continents of North and South America. Here one may still see the crumbling houses in which such noted old dons as Ponce de Leon, De Soto, Pizarro, Cortez, and others dwelt when Hispaniola (Santo Domingo) was the center of wealth and fashion in New Spain. Here was established the first university of the New World wherein Las Casas taught his pupils a century and more before the Mayflower sailed into Plymouth harbor. Here the great nations of Europe contended for control of the new-found lands, and here cruised the buccaneers, ever seeking their prizes. But to sail these waters and visit these isles in a modern steamship robs them of their greatest charm. Who can visualize gilded, purple-sailed galleons swinging to anchor when buff steel masts, huge funnels, and wireless aërials fill the foreground? Who can picture swashbuckling, roistering pirates when the streets they once trod swarm with jitneys? Who can imagine mail-clad men about to embark on some great adventure when the jetty bears a creaking, wheezing crane, and sweating negro stevedores bustle and crowd and swear? No, to find the romance of these islands, to visualize their past and appreciate their present, one must forego luxuries and leave the beaten path, and, like the voyagers of old, seek new scenes in a white-sailed craft whose motive power is the humming trade wind and whose crew is made up of natives who, in appearance at least, might well have stepped out of the past. And at last Fate—in the guise of good-natured and sympathetic friends in the islands—had made possible my dream and I was cruising one-time pirate waters in a pirate ship. Yes, a real pirate ship, the Vigilant, whose solid teak keel was laid well over a century ago; the oldest boat plying the Caribbean, but still as stanch, seaworthy, and fast as when, manned by sea-rovers, she had swept under her cloud of canvas upon some lumbering merchantman or had showed her fleet heels to British corvettes, as, laden with a cargo of “black ivory,” she had crept forth from the fetid mouth of some African river, bound with her human freight for the slave marts of the Antilles. Privateer, pirate, slaver, and man-o’-war she had been in turn through the long years she had sailed the seas. Within her hold were still visible the ring-bolts to which the groaning blacks had been chained. In her timbers were still the wounds of round shot and bullets, and despite her peaceful present-day employment as a packet between the islands, she was yet the typical pirate craft—the “long, low, black schooner with raking masts” so dear to writers of lurid fiction.1 And we were bound to that erstwhile haunt of the sea-rovers, the Virgin Islands. When Columbus, cruising westward on his second voyage, sighted these green-clad islets rising above the blue Caribbean, he despaired of finding saint’s names for all of them, and so called them collectively “The Virgins,” in honor of the eleven thousand companions of St. Ursula. The name was not inappropriate, for while there were not eleven thousand of the isles, they were far too numerous to be counted. The history of these bits of wave-washed coral and volcanic rock, since their discovery by the great navigator, has been anything but happy and peaceful. The Spaniards, finding neither gold nor precious stones upon them, contented themselves with kidnapping the primitive inhabitants and then, having depopulated the islands, left them severely alone. Later, after a period of varying fortunes and misfortunes, they were parceled off among the European powers, changed hands over and over again, were sold, bartered, and fought for, and at last, with the exception of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and one or two others, were dubbed worthless and were virtually forgotten by the nations which had battled so long and bloodily to retain them. Here in close proximity, often but two or three miles apart, were islands belonging to half a dozen powers,—British, French, Danish, Swedish, Dutch,—with one owned jointly by Holland and France, while close at hand, conveniently and temptingly near, in fact, were rich Spanish possessions. And here, to the eleven thousand Virgins, came the pirates and the buccaneers. So it was fitting that my cruise in the ancient but rejuvenated Vigilant should begin with the Virgin Isles. Presently, above the impossibly blue sea loomed a bit of land, a tiny, gray-green, barren cay, rimmed with ragged, weather-beaten rocks in whose coves and hollows coral beaches gleamed, white as the beating surf, beyond the turquoise water. Leaning upon the schooner’s rail, I gazed idly and curiously at the little isle, the one break upon the shimmering sea, a lonely spot whose only signs of life were the circling sea-birds hovering over it in clouds. I turned to the fellow at the wheel—a giant of a man, black as ebony and muscled like a Hercules, naked to the waist, his dungaree trousers rolled to his knees and supported by a wisp of scarlet sash, his huge flat feet wide-spread, and a flapping jipijapa hat upon his huge head. His lusterless eyes, bloodshot from constant diving (for he was a sponger by profession), and the huge hoops in his ears, gave him a fierce, wild look, and, glancing at him, one might well have imagined him a member of a pirate crew, a corsair steering toward some doomed prize. “Sam,” I asked, “what’s that island over there to port?” The big negro slowly turned his head and gazed at the speck of rock and sand. “Tha’ ’s Dead Man’s Chest, Chief,” he replied in the soft drawl of the Bahaman. Dead Man’s Chest! Instantly, at his words, the song made famous by Stevenson flashed through my mind: “Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest—Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!” Dead Man’s Chest! The little cay at once took on a new interest. Now I could almost picture them yonder,—those shipwrecked men, fifteen of them,—gaunt, fierce-visaged, unshorn; sprawled on the sand in the scanty shade of the twisted sea-grape trees above the surf. Marooned, cast away, but reckless daredevils to the last; gambling in the face of death, tossing a gleaming golden doubloon in their final game of chance—the stake, their lives against that one bottle of rum! And then drink and the devil would have done for them as for the rest, and only their whitening bones over which the sea-birds fought and screamed would remain to tell their grim tale. Dead Man’s Chest! What more fitting than that this bit of ocean-girt land should have been the first of the isles made famous by the buccaneers to greet my eyes, and what more appropriate than that I should have sighted it from the deck of a real pirate craft! Fortunate indeed had I been when her owners delivered the Vigilant into my hands for my cruise, and I pondered, as we sped past wave-beaten Dead Man’s Chest, on the story the Vigilant might tell could she but speak. Then my thoughts were brought back to the present as Sam spoke: “The’ says as how the’ ’s plenty o’ tr’asure yonder, on Dead Man’s Chest,” he remarked, “but Ah can’ say as how true ’tis, Chief. Plenty folks has s’arched for it, but Ah can’ say as the’ ’s foun’ it. I ’spec’ the’ ’s tr’asure a plenty on th’ cays here ’bout. The’ says as how th’ pirates was num’rous roun’ here.” “Yes, it was a great place for pirates,” I replied. “You know these islands well, Sam. Have you ever run across any old guns or forts or wrecks on any of them? By the way, what’s your last name?” Sam grinned. “Ah got a right funny name, Chief,” he responded. “Ah don’ ’spec’ you ever hear it. It’s Lithgow, Chief.” Lithgow! What a name to conjure with, in the old buccaneer days! Red Lithgow, the bold, unprincipled pirate chieftain who hailed from Louisiana and met death at the end of a rope from his own yard-arm! Perchance—nay, in all probability—some of the old rascal’s blood still flowed in Sam’s veins; for all through the islands one finds lineal descendants (though they may be brown, black, or yellow) of the buccaneers, whose progeny was legion. But...