“There you are,” he said, holding out the volume to Johnson, who took it and looked at it curiously, and turned back to the group of a dozen or so of his followers who had been squatting on the ground behind him silently watching the proceedings.
They peered at the writing over Johnson’s shoulder; others came to look as well, and they fell into a chattering debate.
“Not one of them can read, My Lord,” commented Spendlove.
“So it appears.”
The pirates were looking from the writing over to their prisoners and back again; the argument grew more intense. Johnson seemed to be expostulating, or exhorting, and some of the men he addressed drew back shaking their heads.
“It’s a question of who shall carry that note to Kingston,” said Hornblower. “Who shall beard the lion.”
“That fellow has no command over his men,” commented Spendlove. “Harkness would have shot a couple of them by now.”
Johnson returned to them, pointing a dark, stubby finger at the writing.
“What you say here?” he asked.
Hornblower read the note aloud; it did not matter whether he spoke the truth or not, seeing they had no way of knowing. Johnson stared at him, studying his face; Johnson’s own face betrayed more of the bewilderment Hornblower had noticed before. The pirate was facing a situation too complex for him; he was trying to carry out a plan which he had not thought out in all its details beforehand. No one of the pirates was willing to venture into the grip of justice bearing a message of unknown content. Nor, for that matter, would the pirates trust one of their number to go off on such a mission; he might well desert, throwing away the precious message, to try and make his escape on his own. The poor, ragged, shiftless devils and their slatternly women were in a quandary, with no master mind to find a way out for them. Hornblower could have laughed at their predicament, and almost did, until he thought of what this unstable mob could do in a fit of passion to the prisoners in their power. The debate went on furiously, with a solution apparently no nearer.
“Do you think we could get to the ladder, My Lord?” asked Spendlove, and then answered his own question. “No. They’d catch us before we could get away. A pity.”
“We can bear the possibility in mind,” said Hornblower.
One of the women cooking over the fire called out at this moment in a loud, raucous voice, interrupting the debate. Food was being ladled out into wooden bowls. A young mulatto woman, hardly more than a child, in a ragged gown that had once been magnificent, brought a bowl over to them – one bowl, no spoon or fork. They stared at each other, unable to keep from smiling. Then Spendlove produced a penknife from his breeches pocket, and tendered it to his superior after opening it.
“Perhaps it may serve, My Lord,” he said, apologetically, adding, after a glance at the contents of the bowl, “not such a good meal as the supper we missed at the Houghs’s, My Lord.”
Boiled yams and a trifle of boiled salt pork, the former presumably stolen from some slave garden and the latter from one of the hogsheads stored here on the cliff. They ate with difficulty, Hornblower insisting on their using the penknife turn about, juggling with the hot food for which both of them discovered a raging appetite. The pirates and the women were mostly squatting on their heels as they ate. After their first mouthfuls they were beginning to argue again over the use to be made of their prisoners.
Hornblower looked out again from the shelf at the view extended before them.
“That must be the Cockpit Country,” he said.
“No doubt of it, My Lord.”
The Cockpit Country was territory unknown to any white man, an independent republic in the northwest of Jamaica. At the conquest of the island from the Spaniards, a century and a half earlier, the British had found this area already populated by runaway slaves and the survivors of the Indian population. Several attempts to subdue the area had failed disastrously – yellow fever and the appalling difficulty of the country allying themselves with the desperate valour of the defenders – and a treaty had finally been concluded granting independence to the Cockpit Country on the sole condition that the inhabitants should not harbour runaway slaves in future. That treaty had already endured fifty years and seemed likely to endure far longer. The pirates’ lair was on the edge of this area, with the mountains at the back of it.