ROEBUCK Tales of an Admirable Adventurer
By Luke Waterson
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First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Urbane Publications Ltd Suite 3, Brown Europe House, 33/34 Gleamingwood Drive, Chatham, Kent ME5 8RZ Copyright 息 Luke Waterson, 2015 The moral right of Luke Waterson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1910692387 EPUB 978-1910692042 MOBI 978-1910692059 Design and Typeset by The Invisible Man
Cover by Julie Martin Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire
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To my mother - the reason I first fell in love with writing
ONE
“We lay seven and twentie dayes driving to and fro without puffe or winde”
Anthony Knivet, Admirable Adventures and Strange Fortunes
They hanged him in the hottest part of the afternoon and we stood on the deck and watched. At first we watched out of duty, for our General was in such a foul mood we believed he would have strung us up there alongside the victim at the slightest provocation. But soon our curiosity kicked in. The General had instructed the noose to be tied in such a way strangulation would come, but slowly. As was customary, the man was dressed in full armour, so in this fierce sun his brain could cook before he would choke. And of course he had beer in a purse that his hands, though bound, could just reach; a tradition, like many King Hal had conjured up, aimed at eking out a wrongdoer’s agony. So there was the possibility of a long, lingering death. But – and here was the devilish ingenuity – that purse contained one further item: a knife. If the man so chose he could cut himself free. But because of the position of the mizzen arm to which he was fastened he would fall like a stone to the sea, and drown.
“He’ll choke,” guessed Waldren, our boatman, while the General was out of earshot. “He’ll guzzle the beer, then cut himself loose and get to go to the grave slightly drunk,” whispered Harris on my other side. “At least, that’s what I would do.” “No” I said. “He is a Portugal. He will give us some speech on how we will roast in our English hellfire of eternal damnation for what we have done to him. And if he does, it will most probably be an astute prediction.” “You were ever a cheery soul, Knivet.” The Portugal got one of his hands free fairly quickly. But the knots hampered him from freeing the other and he opted, rather than partaking of his beer, to clutch the mizzen arm to alleviate the pressure on his windpipe. For some minutes he held on, regaining breath, knife between teeth. He was bracing himself for the moment when he must again let the noose rip into his neck flesh, for, were he to prevail, he would need the one hand to liberate the other. He appeared to be deciding which part of his throat was least scarred to bear the rope’s pressure, but from where we stood it all seemed mighty raw. “Could he not… could the General not show some mercy?” ventured Barrawell, a young man of my own county for whom I confess I felt the closest thing to affection it was possible to feel on that ship. Waldren and Harris laughed. “Still so green, Barrawell? The General have a change of heart? He would sooner cut out his own than go back on his order! They say that on his last voyage, he beat a man to death for looking at him wrong.” Waldren leaned close to emphasise his words. “For
looking at him, lad, is like looking at the devil, and there ain’t nowt there in them eyes of his save a devastating determination to do his will.” “His will?” “Aye. To round that Cape of Horn a second time. And God knows he might as a devil, for no man ever managed it.” The Portugal was tiring. His eyes bulged. He had both hands again at his disposal, but seemed reticent to cut that final rope from around his Adam’s apple; thinking, perhaps, that there was nothing else between him and a nasty tumble should his arms fail. The day so was damnably still we heard each grunt he made. “What is he doing?” Barrawell asked. “Why does he twist his head so?” Then I saw I had misjudged the man’s actions. What I had taken for writhes to keep the rope from throttling him were far from it. They were movements to a rhythm. The poor dog was singing. And, given a noose had been crushing his throat the preceding half hour, in a voice that was remarkably resonant. “It is like angels,” Barrawell said, transfixed. And it was. “I can’t understand what he’s saying,” Waldren complained. “What’s he saying, Knivet?” “I believe it to be a sonnet.” “I care nowt for his form of verse. What are his words?” “Love,” I translated, dully. “He sings of his sweetheart, and how she will be waiting for him, in his homeland across the seas.” “Live!” cried Barrawell, and pathetic as this sounded, it occurred to me it was a human tendency to express such an elevated hope only when its very antithesis was
imminent. I will give you some food, you say to a starving beggar. All will be well, you say, after it has gone horribly, irrevocably wrong. Then, where normally there was a rush of sound – of barked commands, of straining rigging, of winds foul and fair – there was no sound. Our five boats, becalmed, lashed together on a latitude we could only guess at, and all the eyes of the company 1 fixed in fascination on the man the General had deemed a traitor, and sentenced without trial. “Quăo cedo de meus olhos te levou,” 2 the Portugal was gasping. How soon from my eyes were you taken… Unseemly froth welled at his mouth. He forced it away, impatiently, with the air of a man set on orating. I still believed my prediction could prove correct, and that he would start regaling us with some Catholic rant about our Protestant sins. But he concluded merely with a dedication of his ditty, which was, I will own, anticlimactic compared to my own vision of his demise, in which his accusatory screams about God’s wrath on English curs bombarded us along with a meteorite-like shower of brimstone and I stood in the middle of the deluge as everyone else fled, arms raised and laughing because the brimstone was glancing off me harmlessly. “To our General Don Cavendish,” he croaked, now in almost impeccable English, “with all my heart, may God…” We did not learn what the Portugal willed God to do or not do to us. The man cut the final rope, and his arms at long last gave up. At the aft end of the vessel alongside the General’s, I was well positioned to gauge the expression on the man’s face. It was a frown, as if he were confused about why he was being executed when so many of those
1 2
In this sense, all the men in the fleet: individuals bound together on an adventure. From the Luís de Camões sonnet Alma Minha Gentil
we depended upon to man the ships were managing to die without any assistance at all. And, perhaps because of the couple of tentative inches he had hauled himself along the mizzen before letting go, perhaps because at that moment the wind at long last got up for the first time in a month, the Portugal fell not into the sea as had been intended, but onto the gunwale. Blood and bad beer exploded around the broken body, but no one dared move. Not even the General’s boatswain, who, standing adjacent, had his smock spattered red from the discharge. “Glad it ain’t my job to mop up them brains,” Waldren grunted. Barrawell vomited. The General’s eyes swept over the company. 350 men, and we each shivered as though he could detect our slightest movements. “What are you waiting for?” he screamed. The buttons on his dandy’s doublet gleamed and I detested them but wanted them. “Clean that dog from my deck and get to work. This wind is for Brazil, and I do not mean to miss it on account of a heretic!” The General’s boatswain was still gawping at the expanding patches of blood on what were probably his only clean clothes, but had the presence of mind to set two of his underlings to the task. “The ninth circle,” I said, half to myself, but Waldren heard me. “I’d watch yourself, Knivet. You saw what just happened to the only other poet on this voyage.” Our supplies were nigh on gone, scurvy had already set in to some fifty of our company, we still had no idea how far we were from the coast of South America, and the boatswain’s mate was on the sterncastle deck scrubbing off the remains of the Portugal
pilot, the only man who had truly known the waters of the coast to which we were headed. I wondered, then, for the first time, why I had so readily abandoned my green homeland for this pitching deck at the mercy of our General’s increasingly evident madness, assailed by this sickly tropical air and the pit of hunger almost always in my belly. But the truth was that I had never had any choice, not from the very beginning.