The Pirate

He let his own gaze linger on the freight still on land. Which goods would be traded with the savages on the Guinea coast, he wondered, and which would make it all the way to the table of some rich colonist’s plantation mansion in Jamaica? This was only a passing concern to him though, something to occupy his mind other than the growing disquiet he felt when studying the vessel itself, all creaking timbers and spindly masts. So this was the craft that would take them to the edge of the world? She seemed barely able to hold water amongst the gentle lapping tide at Plymouth dock; what chance would she stand in the wilderness of the oceans, how would she cope with the malevolent mountains of waves that lay waiting for her there? He had once persuaded himself that he was happy to let fate decide his path for him – looking at the worm-ridden hull of the Anne he wondered if he was giving it the chance to make his path lead him anywhere other than the bottom of the sea.

As he moved nearer the gangplank the cacophony around grew ever more shrill in its urgency. Here the agents and tariff men counted aloud and traded insults as well as the goods they sought to barter. Here the merchants yelled their demands for payment. Small children, hands and faces blackened by exposure to the hot tar being painted on the ship’s bow, darted in between the departing crates, pilfering fingers eager for any spillage that might fetch a coin at the paupers’ market. Incessant noise, incessant demands, incessant questions, unrelenting squalor. Yes, the sea might make for a desperate gamble but it could also mean freedom, the one escape left open for men like him. Even a craft as unkempt and graceless as the Anne could be a transport of beauty capable of taking him to a heaven away from this hell. Only a few more steps to endure as he picked his way through the last casual traps of trip-ropes, splintered wood and excrement that marked the very end of England’s shore. He gripped the varnished rail of the Anne’s deck and hauled himself aboard. He did not look back, even though the premonition that he would never live to see it again grew all the heavier as he cleared the land in that final stride.

It was the captain who came to see him, announcing his presence outside the cabin with a hearty cough and gurgling of phlegm. A hand knocked loudly on the door.

‘Are you there, sir?’

‘Here, aye.’

The door opened and an almost ashen, pock-marked face confronted him. He put his book down to the floor and swung his legs free from the hammock.

‘Martin Law, sir, it is a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Thank you for accepting me aboard.’

‘Doctor Law, yes?’

The uncertain smile which greeted the remark verged upon the bashful. ‘Aye … and you are Captain Henry?’

‘Correct.’

A silence then hung between them. Evidently the captain expected the new arrival to lead in conversational matters, perhaps at this stage offering some presentation of credentials as to his suitability for the voyage. The younger man declined to do so, for surely his initial letters and the acceptance he had received in return correspondence had completed such formalities beforehand.

‘How long until we set sail?’

The captain took off his hat and scratched at his shaven head, black fingernails clawing at the silvery stubble as if being filed upon a piece of flint.

‘Some time after even tide. There is much still to be loaded and properly stored below deck. It may be that we cast off before the latter is complete and we bind the cargo down once we are under way. We might make back some time, aye, if the sea is calm … Still, we cannot leave of course until the damned tariff-keepers have had their fill.’

There was another quiet as the captain contemplated the blight of inspectors that assailed his ship, leaving the other to study his complexion. How old had he been when the smallpox struck? To leave scars like that it must have been severe, life-threatening. Did it ever recur? The medical journals spoke of fevers that would erupt amongst some men in the heat of the Africas; were these new diseases or old ones rekindled from deep inside? He would have to seek out what the books had to report. The captain moved to bring his mind back to practical matters.

‘I take it you have arrangements in place to bring your personal cargo aboard?’

‘I have no cargo as such, sir, only a few volumes of writing to assist in my work. These should be at the quayside shortly.’

‘No cargo? No personal venture? As ship’s surgeon an allowance has been made for you in the stern hold. I would rather you kept this cabin clear of possessions, there will be seven or so using it once we are under sail. Please have your books directed to the holds.’

He knew that the captain’s bafflement was understandable. The wages for voyages like this were pitifully poor, the only worthwhile consolation for those privileged enough to receive it was the opportunity to speculate on their own efforts to trade during the course of the trip. Senior crew-members such as the captain could expect to multiply their earnings tenfold by such means and the tonnage allowances permitted to each were eagerly sought and guarded.

He watched the captain move to the door before halting.

‘So … Doctor … If you are not taking up your due I take it you would have no objection to others doing so?’

‘On my behalf?’

Another silence, another scratch of the scalp. ‘On the ship’s behalf, sir.’

‘Of course.’

The captain smiled. His first smile. It lasted but an instant. ‘Then I should bid good day to you, Doctor. I have work to do.’

From Glasgow to the south of France, summer of 1985. My first summer after starting university, four of us – myself, Paul, Ian and Maurice, all Strathclyde first years – living in two tents at a campsite a mile or so inland from St Raphaël, the heart of the Côte d’Azur. The excursion and its location was my idea, as was the stop-off en route in Paris to visit the grave of Jim Morrison. Not that we thought the stiff Lizard King would appreciate our visit, it just seemed appropriate to pay tribute to someone whom we, laughably, thought to be a kindred spirit. Jim Morrison had lived and died the full rock-and-roll trip, for him there was nothing that was forbidden, nothing that he denied himself. He had tested the parameters of the possible to glorious destruction. We four gathered around his tomb in silent salute and then made our way to the train that would take us south, our group preferring not to hitch its way there because it was deemed too risky by our parents. Welcome to the home of the existentialist French, where you live for the moment, once you’ve checked out it’s OK with mum and dad. Yes, things would have to change, for me at least; soon it would be time to cut loose.

France was liberating though, almost immediately. After a little more than a week’s stretching on the sun-baked sands I changed colour and became a different person. The heat also killed any appetite I might have had, it would have been from that time on that I took on the thin shape I have now, losing any normal appetite at least. And the rest of the boys? Well, I had taken them there, not that I had set myself up as expedition leader or chief fucking scoutmaster, but as the only one with any idea and any kind of will to see it through I became the travel coordinator, navigator and complaints department rolled into one. That would also soon change – I hadn’t sought this sudden elevation and I wasn’t cut out to be a consensus leader. Camping wasn’t really my bag either, truth be told, it was the lack of money and alternative options that had forced us under canvas. The site itself – Les Acacias – had been recommended by two Australian girls I’d befriended at Gare du Nord. They described it as the hang-out and rendezvous for the Riviera’s dispossessed, by which I took them to mean poor, but which just about described everyone when compared to the Cartier-garbed hommes and femmes hanging out in the yachts and restaurants of St Raph and the glitzy brand-new marina at Port-Fréjus. Millionaires, all of them, so it seemed. I’d never seen wealth like that before, the jewellery, sunglasses, white linen suits and limousines. Wealth worn and flaunted, to my open-mouthed wonder, though studiously ignored by the rest of the have-nots for whom the word ‘insouciant’ could have been especially devised. No, it was far, far away from the drab and rain-soaked quays at Greenock and Port Glasgow. It was hard to believe that the water that lapped these harbours of my youth was part of the same worldwide ocean. There was something that drew me to the sea in these places, even though I always felt as if on the outside of the people and activity that gathered around them; at home it had been almost by choice, here I wanted in, I wanted to belong to the crowd who had it all.

The Aussie girls had told me of the enlightened policy regarding campsite rents at Les Acacias, in that very few people actually paid them. You were meant to of course, the total due was added to on a daily basis, but most of the patrons tended to prefer a midnight exit through a hole in the hedge when their time was up. Strictly speaking then, it was those particular customers who were the enlightened ones, and with budgets being tight I intended to join them. Knowing this in advance, I had Paul give his passport number when we checked in. I wonder if he has ever had any comeback from our eventual abrupt departure? Perhaps, maybe many years later, he was arrested on arrival at EuroDisney with wife, in-laws and screaming kids because of this shameless plant. I hope he can forgive me for setting him up. The shit he found himself in.

Anyway, at the height of the season there would be over a hundred tents rigged up on the hissing summer lawns, one giant lattice weave of wires and ropes, zips and poles, all intolerable sweat-holes under the morning and afternoon sun, damp with cold condensation at night. I remember queuing for the toilet every morning behind some farting Belgian, and the smell of gas and cooking bacon bringing out a curious sensation of nausea and hunger at the same time. Everyone would congregate at the wash-houses to shower and shave, then you would wait in line for fresh rolls and croissant at the site shop, the same place you would buy your cheap white wine at the end of the day. All of this was achieved with a degree of harmony the United Nations would have been proud of; there was a huge cast of nationalities managing to get by, despite their different languages, colour of skin, and reasons for being there. I remember it as almost like being in a Benetton ad. After a day or so of witnessing the clear-out that would occur after breakfast, when an assortment of beat-up cars, creaking trucks and rusty buses would arrive to pick up the same people we had been behind in one queue or another, I realized that whilst there were some holidaymakers on site, they were in the minority, everyone else was working.

One of the pick-ups was a yellow Volkswagen dormobile, showing up every day, audible before it was visible, its bleating, rasping engine shivering and shuddering as it coughed its phlegm of exhaust into the fresh morning air. The driver was a stringy guy in a vest, cut-off jeans and sandals. Usually the same vest, cut-off jeans and sandals, but that’s the French way I suppose. He had dark eyes and heavy eyebrows, again the French way, like Charles Aznavour. I guessed he might have been in his late thirties, although he seemed cool about this, in fact, cool about everything. It came to pass that one fateful day he caught me looking at him; I would have been getting up to meet the guys for breakfast some way into our second week. When he saw me he motioned for me to hop in and join his crew in whatever it was they were leaving to do. A simple gesture was all he needed to convey what he needed to convey; a shrug and a dropping of the chin, cheeks puckered, a stabbing sweep of his arm towards the back of the van. Blink and you would have missed it, blink and the door to a new way of life remains shut. I didn’t miss it, nor what was meant by it, and in an instant we understood each other in a way that would have been impossible to communicate by him in his fractured English or me in the ‘plume de ma tante’ French that had recently been drilled into me at school but had proved – surprisingly – to be less than fucking useless when tried out on natives who didn’t behave in the beret-and-onions way the textbooks would have had us expect.

So what did the rapid fire mime mean? Well, firstly that there was some kind of scam going on, one that I was invited to join, probably at a low or lightweight level, and that this venture wasn’t likely to be one currently under investigation by Interpol – I wouldn’t be joining in an armed robbery or sophisticated international fraud. In fact, it would be simple enough to pick it up as I went along, as indeed the others who were packing into his Tardis-like vehicle had done before. Most importantly though, the gesture indicated he was reaching out to me, trusting me to come and try, and not to squeal or rip him off if I didn’t like it; I’m cool with you, the motion said, can you be cool with me? I took a look at the state of those clambering in – there didn’t seem to be much room left amongst the German chicks in bikinis, Parisian hipsters with their stubble and crew-cut hair, half-caste reggae-boys in Bermuda shorts. I turned to seek out Ian and Maurice who had been behind me at the check-out in the camp shop; they were outside juggling rolls, fruit and wallets as they counted out their change. I knew where I belonged and where I wanted to be. The rattling door was closing over as the rusty machine revved up. I smiled through the window and they held it long enough for me to squeeze in. The tin rocket took off. I was a passenger looking out on its convulsive spurt of fumes, wondering where it would take me.

It was dark when the Anne finally cast off, Captain Henry quarrelling with the customs men to the last over a set of barrels which he insisted were to be loaded empty. The tariff-keepers seemed dubious and threatened to stay and observe the procedure until it was completed. Martin would hear later that the captain had told them this would happen at daybreak and had thus persuaded them to depart from the scene. Sure enough, no sooner had they done so than another set of traders appeared, men who made quick work of filling the casks with French brandy. The anchor was raised the very moment they were done and the booty on board. Below deck in his quarters Martin listened to the grumblings over the captain’s apparent greed and his willingness to employ such deceit and subterfuge simply to avoid the ten per cent duty which should rightfully have been due on the outgoing goods. There were other complaints too; that the late loading had left the stacked cargo now out of balance, heaviest highest in the hold and not properly bound in the evening darkness below deck. What might this do to affect the ship’s stability in the open sea? These arguments would be aired over and over as the voyage progressed, and initially Martin would remain indifferent to them. In fact, he was almost reassured. Captain Henry had proved that he was an experienced mariner; his actions, although dishonest, were hardly those of a novice.

They did mean however that by the time the vessel began to move it was loaded to the full, every possible inch carrying provisions of one type or another. Martin found no space where the captain had directed him to lodge his books and duly stacked the volumes in the cabin, disobeying the earlier instruction. Here they would be safe from the water that would wash through the decks when the waves were high, here they would be close to hand if needed. Martin was not dissatisfied with this outcome, his only concern being whether the colleagues who would share this space would be offended by his presumption. In time he would learn that they, like himself, had their attentions focused on other matters.

Forty-four hands in total, that was the roll call when the Anne made off for the Guinea coast. Martin was surprised at the number, having witnessed earlier in his youth the ships leaving Greenock with a fraction of such a crew. He surmised that this quantity of men was indeed required and would have been taken only if strictly necessary, given the efforts of Captain Henry to cut the costs of the voyage on every other front. In the full light of day it was the state of the sails which had shocked the most; a patchwork of discarded rags, hastily sewed seams struggling to cope with the scarcely bracing winds of the Channel. Still, the almost admirable philosophy of the trip seemed to be to mend and make anew in these early, gentle days, rather than have the ship tied at anchor whilst the same work was carried out in presumably more expensive surroundings. Consequently Martin was to spend his initial weeks observing the industry of the crew on the decks as the carpenters, coopers and even blacksmiths went about their business. Sailing men on sailors’ wages, earning less than their fellow craftsmen back on land – this had to be another ruse of the parsimonious captain. All the while Martin would try to ignore the creaking sound of the hull under strain as the Anne sat deep in the water and the sight of a hundred rusty nails growing ever more prominent by the day, like green shoots appearing through the earth in spring. Perhaps it is as well that there are so many of us, he thought, there is ample enough work to do.

Yet he knew that the fact that there were over forty hands manning a three-hundred-ton vessel owed more to the demands of the cargo that they planned to load off the African shore than it did to prudent maintenance. High numbers of men would be required to guard and subdue the holds filled with savages once they were on board, and perhaps to ensure that there were enough of them left once the malarial and yellow fevers had taken their toll on the outgoing crew. Back on shore the bars and taverns of the coastal towns were rife with tales of trading ships arriving back carrying nothing but ghosts once the illnesses that lurked in the jungle had taken their grip. Some said it was the lands themselves that were cursed, damning any civilized man foolish enough to visit. Others blamed the savages and their magic, and their attempts to poison the soul of the white man. Whilst Martin found no reference to either theory in his medical volumes he knew that it stood to reason that at least a quarter of the men he watched would die of such affliction. Yet they, like he himself, had boarded regardless. Indeed, to his knowledge, there was never a shortage of those willing to enlist and bed down in the vermin-ridden corners of the merchant fleet. This curiosity, he thought, watching the toils of the crew against the shifting backdrop of the restless sea, had to be worthy of debate and investigation, and he made a note to question the captain on his views later in the voyage, once he was sure he had gained his confidence.

But such a day seemed far off as the Anne followed her early course towards Cape Verde, blown by the favourable wind. Captain Henry kept himself remote, locked in his cabin with his papers, issuing instructions through his bosun and mates. It was only the purser he had time for, and the two would be in conference from dawn to daybreak poring over the balance sheet, if quarterdeck gossip was to be believed. And so it was that Martin found himself becoming fascinated with his more accessible new shipmates: some old like the master craftsmen on board, riggers and carpenters bearing the scars of a lifetime spent at sea, all bent bones and rotten teeth, with sallow skins that were testimony to endless scurvy-plagued voyages; others younger, boys hardly in their teens but already marked by the poverty and brutality of their childhoods ashore. Martin would watch them and wonder if their adoption of the sailor’s life was a noble defiance of the hand that fate had dealt them or a surrender to the inevitable. Were they like him, chancing a final throw of the dice in the hope of a different kind of life on the seas or merely succumbing to a different kind of servitude from the one they could expect on land? Irrational though he knew it was, he felt more of an affinity with the men climbing the masts and rigging than he did with his cabin-mates on the quarterdeck. That he who was educated, like them, and born into the relative middle-class privilege of officer life should somehow feel removed from them and more at one with the common crew was a cause of an unsettling disquiet. Was this not the trip that was going to cure him of such conceits, were these maritime endeavours not the ones that would so occupy his thoughts as to leave no room for such subversive and ungodly meanderings in his mind?

That was the problem at this stage of the journey, the paucity of stimuli to exercise his faculties. For all that he chose to observe the men of the ship at work and amuse himself with the formulation of theses as to each one’s past and future prospects, he knew that these were not his charges and represented neither reason nor purpose to his presence on the Anne. No, he would have to wait for his work to begin, once they were moored off the African shore. Then the trading would start and his scant medical knowledge would be put to the test. Which of the negroes on offer would make the best slaves, which would be most likely to survive the trip to the Americas, which hid the fever they were already surrendering to? Ship’s Surgeon. A gloriously impotent title, he reflected bitterly. Who amongst the crew would seek his advice for their ailments? None. They would be better served following their own instincts, given the inadequacy of his expertise. Somehow the tawdry nature of his qualifications seemed ever more transparent now his maiden voyage was underway. Conversations with his fellow officers had been strangled, stunted affairs as he struggled to conceal what he felt were ruinous shortcomings. Ship’s Surgeon. By what right did he answer to this preposterous title? By virtue of the handful of lectures he had attended, by virtue of the boxful of dusty volumes he had brought aboard to saddle the Anne with even more dead weight? Yes, these, and a curiosity which did not always serve him well when dealing with figures of authority, and the ten guineas which had secured him his practitioner’s certificate. No, the privilege he had been born with had brought him to the title, his space in the quarterdeck cabin and his exemption from onerous duties on deck. Was this the reason for the vague sense of guilt which ate at him with a growing relentlessness, the same sense of guilt which he had taken to the sea to escape? Perhaps, he thought without pleasure or emotion, perhaps. For this identification was worthy of no respite, it was a diagnosis without cure. All he could do was wait for Africa, wait to busy himself amongst the savages; at least they were unlikely to be inquisitive about his past.

The stringy guy in the vest and cut-off jeans turned out to be called Henri. Once you were up close to Henri you could appreciate why he didn’t tend to talk much. Not that I hadn’t seen worse teeth, just that they usually belonged to horses or ancient shrunken heads. Once you were up close you could study his skin colour and still be none the wiser as to whether this was a tan or ingrained dirt. For all this, my first impressions of the man were accurate, he was cool about most things; cool with you if you were cool with him. I’m about to describe how I, on the face of it, ripped him off after he’d trusted me enough to give me my start in the apple donut trade, although I can’t say I meant to rip him off from the start, it was just the way things worked out. Anyway, in advance of going through how this came to be, let me also point out that for every franc, centime and pastry that I took from him I would estimate that I repaid him twice or threefold in increased revenue from my efforts and those of the recruits that I brought to him. I’m sure he knew this and would be cool if I were to see him right now. And how I would like to see him now, a friendly face; could he take me back to those times?

Henri’s van took us to the beach where we would meet with the car of Henri’s pal. Henri’s pal’s name is not relevant, he was just the supplies man, he had made the journey to the bakery whilst Henri had been gathering his itinerant workers from the campsite and a host of other equally prestigious Riviera addresses. We, the contents of the van, were then introduced to the contents of the car, the donuts. Our mission was then explained to us in tones of exhortation. That mission was simple and straightforward: sell the bastards, lots of them. At least, that was how it was explained to me on that very first day, in a mixture of Henri’s, and giggling German chicks’, pidgin English. They knew I would have a hard time that day, they must have been pissing themselves at the look of bewilderment on my face as I was kitted out like a cinema ice-cream girl – minus torch – with my tray of donuts, bag of change and patch of land to patrol. I was shown the rendezvous point where the van would come to collect me and my leftovers at the end of the day’s toil. The money I would be paid was dependent on my own success in selling; this was made very clear, together with the final, crucial, part of the briefing.