Noting the pause and the look, Esteban bounded forward, his face livid.
“Have you broken faith, you curs? Has he come to harm?” he cried—and the six Spaniards behind him grew clamorous with furious questionings.
“We do not break faith,” said Hagthorpe firmly, so firmly that he quieted them. “And in this case there was not the need. Don Diego died in his bonds before ever you reached the Encarnacion.”
Peter Blood said nothing.
“Died?” screamed Esteban. “You killed him, you mean. Of what did he die?”
Hagthorpe looked at the boy. “If I am a judge,” he said, “Don Diego died of fear.”
Don Esteban struck Hagthorpe across the face at that, and Hagthorpe would have struck back, but that Blood got between, whilst his followers seized the lad.
“Let be,” said Blood. “You provoked the boy by your insult to his father.”
“I was not concerned to insult,” said Hagthorpe, nursing his cheek. “It is what has happened. Come and look.”
“I have seen,” said Blood. “He died before I left the Cinco Llagas. He was hanging dead in his bonds when I spoke to him before leaving.”
“What are you saying?” cried Esteban.
Blood looked at him gravely. Yet for all his gravity he seemed almost to smile, though without mirth.
“If you had known that, eh?” he asked at last. For a moment Don Esteban stared at him wide-eyed, incredulous. “I don’t believe you,” he said at last.
“Yet you may. I am a doctor, and I know death when I see it.”
Again there came a pause, whilst conviction sank into the lad’s mind.
“If I had known that,” he said at last in a thick voice, “you would be hanging from the yardarm of the Encarnacion at this moment.”
“I know,” said Blood. “I am considering it—the profit that a man may find in the ignorance of others.”
“But you’ll hang there yet,” the boy raved.
Captain Blood shrugged, and turned on his heel. But he did not on that account disregard the words, nor did Hagthorpe, nor yet the others who overheard them, as they showed at a council held that night in the cabin.
This council was met to determine what should be done with the Spanish prisoners. Considering that Curacao now lay beyond their reach, as they were running short of water and provisions, and also that Pitt was hardly yet in case to undertake the navigation of the vessel, it had been decided that, going east of Hispaniola, and then sailing along its northern coast, they should make for Tortuga, that haven of the buccaneers, in which lawless port they had at least no danger of recapture to apprehend. It was now a question whether they should convey the Spaniards thither with them, or turn them off in a boat to make the best of their way to the coast of Hispaniola, which was but ten miles off. This was the course urged by Blood himself.
“There’s nothing else to be done,” he insisted. “In Tortuga they would be flayed alive.”
“Which is less than the swine deserve,” growled Wolverstone.
“And you’ll remember, Peter,” put in Hagthorpe, “that boy’s threat to you this morning. If he escapes, and carries word of all this to his uncle, the Admiral, the execution of that threat will become more than possible.”
It says much for Peter Blood that the argument should have left him unmoved. It is a little thing, perhaps, but in a narrative in which there is so much that tells against him, I cannot—since my story is in the nature of a brief for the defence—afford to slur a circumstance that is so strongly in his favour, a circumstance revealing that the cynicism attributed to him proceeded from his reason and from a brooding over wrongs rather than from any natural instincts. “I care nothing for his threats.”
“You should,” said Wolverstone. “The wise thing’d be to hang him, along o’ all the rest.”
“It is not human to be wise,” said Blood. “It is much more human to err, though perhaps exceptional to err on the side of mercy. We’ll be exceptional. Oh, faugh! I’ve no stomach for cold-blooded killing. At daybreak pack the Spaniards into a boat with a keg of water and a sack of dumplings, and let them go to the devil.”
That was his last word on the subject, and it prevailed by virtue of the authority they had vested in him, and of which he had taken so firm a grip. At daybreak Don Esteban and his followers were put off in a boat.
Two days later, the Cinco Llagas sailed into the rock-bound bay of Cayona, which Nature seemed to have designed for the stronghold of those who had appropriated it.
CHAPTER XIII.
TORTUGA
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