Hunt for White Gold

Chapter Six





Providence Island



Petition of merchants trading to different parts of H.M. Dominions in America to the King, 1716. (Extract)



Sir

Complain of severe losses occasioned by pirates sheltering in the Bahamas, so neglected by the Proprietors that they have been often plundered and ruin’d in times of peace, and during the late war four and several times taken and destroy’d by the enemy.



Urge the securing of Providence under H.M. immediate government.



These Islands are so advantageously situated that whoever is well settled and securely fortified there, may in time of war command the Gulf of Florida, and from thence be capable to annoy or obstruct the trade of other Nations to most parts of America.




Fifty-five signatures follow.


The flotsam and waveson had started the day before sighting the island. Captain John Coxon had been called to the fo’c’sle of the Milford, summoned respectfully by the bosun to attend to the spectacle of the dozens of barrels and hundreds of bottles merrily bobbing along beside them.

The crew had shared whispers and winks at the tide of waste that grew with each passing hour. Their mutterings were silenced by the cold stare of the captain who tried hard not to contemplate the significance of these unofficial buoys marking the way to Providence.

Providence Island. New Providence, now designated. A pirate kingdom. The filibusters and buccaneers of old had Tortuga. This new breed of ex-privateers and unemployed peacetime mercenaries had the Bahamas for their throne. And a fairer throne at that.

Sixty miles square and sitting in the twenty-fourth parallel, it gave swift access to the Florida coast and with the trade winds running northwards a crew could reach the snaking inlets and fat ports of the Carolinas in five days or less.

It had been almost a decade since the law’s writ had last run on the island, Whitehall being quite content to leave matters to a succession of Lords Proprietor who seemed ever more content to let the island fester.

Said island, in absence of proper government, had thereby found its own ‘law’.

British captains, whose letters of marque had promised them freedom to plunder as long as they fleeced only the Spanish sheep, found that the peace after Utrecht – the almighty treaty that ended the Spanish war – was a little too becalming and light of coin. Their country had been grateful in spirit but was at a loss what to do with them now. The privateers thus busied themselves in their own employment.

Men such as Henry Jennings and Benjamin Hornigold became lords of their own creation once the crown had no further use for them. And who could blame them for naming an island called Providence their realm?

But enough was enough for the Crown. With Spain fortifying in Florida the strategic placing of the island had made it attractive again and the strangulation of trade by the rovers that dwelt there would have to cease. But who to send? Who but a madman or a fool would undertake the task to rid the Bahamas of a two-thousand-strong pirate brotherhood?

The Lords Proprietor and the Privy Council had found such a man. Half broken in spirit, fully broken in purse, this sailor had girdled the earth and fought in every war he had been pitched into. He had captured treasure galleons, sacked Spanish towns in the name of the Crown and suffered to have the entirety wrested from him through a danse macabre of lawyers and taxes. He had been perhaps as much a pirate as any of them if not for the letters of marque in his name that had been sealed by the king.

Captain Woodes Rogers. He had actually petitioned for the duty.

He had been the only one.

As day broke and the horizon undulated with the haunches of the island herself, Captain John Coxon paced the deck, unable to avoid watching the clothes, the chests and hogsheads that bounced off the lines of the Milford as she swept towards the aptly named Providence.

Captain John Coxon. Post Captain. Veteran of two wars, wars for which every civilised nation had redrawn their maps. Now he was Captain John Coxon of the Company of Woodes Rogers, assailing Providence under the King’s Act of Proclamation against the pirates of the Bahamas.

His father was a Norfolk parson. His elder brother had been given a bible but Coxon had been sent to sea at nine years of age with a bag of clothes and a commission. He had never been home again and was now forty-two, his father dead, John’s brother preaching in his stead.

It was in the spring of 1712 that he had liberated an Irish sailor of a French sloop of war. He had smiled that first day when the Irishman stepped forward out of the line of captives to offer their services to the King’s officers rather than have them slaughtered for their lack of English. Coxon had subsequently received his Post-Captaincy for the level of intelligence he was able to provide his admiral whilst still at sea. The Irishman had saved many lives that day. Coxon had rewarded the man by making him his steward. More than that, Coxon, a stranger to the ballroom culture of his officer peers, found companionship in the young man who was not only literate but could also divine the mathematical intricacies of navigation as if they were psalms to be recited. Coxon had seen something of himself in the Irishman. For years he had felt his father had turfed him out to sea, to be rid of him whilst coddling his elder brother to follow along the path of righteousness. It had taken a decade for him to understand that his father, who had sensed the approaching wars, had sent the brightest of his sons to sea. God would be best served by good hearts and knowledge in the struggle against the Catholics. He had never seen him again, but Coxon had been grateful to his father when the wars had ended and he contemplated how he had slashed his own way through. Coxon had written his name on the world by dint of his victories at sea.

Then it had ended. A few years working for the South Seas and India companies on peacetime half-pay followed. Then an illness, the African curse of dysentery, had almost carried him to the grave.

Bedridden for a month, he had sent his steward and his ship home to England without him. It was a month of dying for Coxon in Cape Coast castle on Africa’s Guinea coast, from which he awoke to find that his trusted servant had turned into a pirate – and a captain no less – and his beloved ship was lost. The Irishman whom John Coxon had taught to sail, taught to compare watch to map, peg to board, star to brass, was picking the pockets of the world and laughing at him the while.

Now this scatter of breadcrumbs from a pirate island was leading them deeper into an unknown forest. Turn away, the waves whispered. Turn your tiller home, Captain. For your own sake and the sake of your unborn.

See this debris, the tons of it upon the waves? This is us. We are legion. And this is our kingdom. We burnt your King’s ships the last time they came. We tore up his Proclamation of Peace. What can you do against us?


Coxon climbed to the quarterdeck and looked to his ship’s wake. He gave a small nod to the helmsman who was also trying not to look at the spent goods ornamenting the sea.

Coxon looked back to the ships of his fleet. This was the difference. This is what he could do.

There, majestically cutting the waves, was Delicia, an East Indiaman of forty guns. The new Governor of Providence, Woodes Rogers himself, was her captain. That diving bow galloping through the sea belonged to the frigate Rose. Shadowing her on either side, a cable length away, skipped the sloops Shark and Buck.

Altogether the Company mustered over three hundred able men and officers. Thrown in for good measure, by King George himself, were one hundred redcoats to establish a garrison on the island.

Lastly, confidently, two hundred and fifty colonists had signed on, refugees and hopefuls from the final pages of the wars.

They were Huguenots, Swiss farmers and German Palatinates who treated London as their second home and now went looking for ripe land in the Antilles.

Whole shops lay in the hold waiting to be nailed up and trading by dawn of their disembarkation. The missionaries of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge shuddered at the sorrowful sight of ladies’ torn clothing that floated by the head of the ship as they took their morning ablutions.

This is what I have, thought John Coxon, and steeled himself as the black forest of masts began to fill his spyglass and the green and blue hills rose up from the sea.

The flotilla approached from the south-east following the shore of Andros to the west and crawled past the treacherous coral reefs of the southern shore to make for the north and Nassau. Already they could see the sandbar that would prevent the Delicia from sailing inshore. This hazard was one of the island’s strengths, a natural barrier that halted any ship above three hundred tons.

To the north-east lay a smaller island, a long flat spit that created the great shallow harbour of Nassau. Hog Island.

Coxon took a moment to check his officers’ faces as he gave up counting the ships in the harbour. To his left and his right his lieutenants swept their spyglasses across the bay.

They saw a solid mile of nothing but sloops, brigs and hulks. He saw them gulp and observed their foreheads break into a sweat that trickled onto the brasses clamped to their eyes.

He slapped his three-draw scope closed, loud enough to break each officer from his study. They turned to the captain, glad to stop counting.

‘Gentlemen,’ Coxon looked at each in turn. ‘Two pistols apiece. Five chosen men to your sides.’ He pulled his hat down at the brim and walked to the stair. There he turned and looked back – not at his officers but over the taffrail to the Delicia close behind.

‘I know each and every man on that island, lads. And so do you. They cleant your boots and touched their forelocks to you.’ He clumped down the stair, ‘Remember that, lads. Hands and backs, that’s all they were. And they fear your coming, mark me.’

At the foot of the stair he met the young man with the coarse blond hair and cracked tan who had come aboard in Bristol, the one who had worn a burgundy three-cornered hat tied with leather cocks, far too gentlemanly for a sailor, that Coxon had forced him to remove. The man had winked at Coxon as he came through the entry port that day, and the captain had noticed the scarred and bony jaw of battle. Toombs, Seth Toombs, that was it. Something seditious about that one. Something in his eye. Or perhaps it was just the yellowing wound that marked him as a wrong’un.

The man glanced up at him, tugged his forelock beneath his straw hat and returned to swabbing the deck around Coxon’s feet.

Coxon lowered his chin in a snap and ducked aft to his cabin to record his morning watch. Soon he would take the gig across to Woodes Rogers, and try hard not to stare at a wound similar to Toombs’s, inflicted by a musket ball that had blown off half his jaw and now caused Rogers to suck saliva down his throat every finished sentence.

Rogers was a privateer, a chartered pirate of war chosen like Harry Morgan before him to sweep his former brethren from the Caribbean. Yet he was a good man nonetheless, Bristol born and of solid Dorset stock, a sailor like Coxon and also like him no highborn gentleman. Rogers’ hands and face were cracked with salt and sun. He could pilot merely by the colour of the sea, using only sun and stars to confirm and satisfy his sailing master. His sword was worn and his pistols blackened.

Coxon wrote briefly in his log: The island sighted. The appointment made with Rogers to plan their assault and proclamation of amnesty to the pirates that ruled Providence.

His pen hovered above the page for a moment then he wiped the swan quill and replaced it in the crock holder, dusting his ledger and blowing it dry.

The sailing master knocked and entered the cabin. Coxon ordered the shortening of sail so to come about and point the prow towards the island; and also to bring his gig from beneath the counter.

He had not observed a black ship with a red-striped freeboard and grey sails. It was pointless to record its absence, however significant in his own eyes. The Shadow was not there but then who could say that Devlin still kept the frigate?

He armed himself with pistol and cutlass and swathed himself in his boatcloak to meet his Commander.

He had not sighted the ship. He would give no further thought to his former servant, not even recall his name.

Coxon winced slightly as he pulled open his coach door. The pain he felt was from the tell-tale, star-shaped soft scar hidden beneath his sleeve. It was his souvenir from his last meeting with Devlin.

He saw again the white flash of gunfire in his mind and felt the clashing of blades, the racing pulse and heaving breath of combat. His arm twinged again as Coxon stepped out onto his deck head down and walked impatiently to the entry port to see if his gig had appeared.


An hour later and Woodes Rogers stood with his captains in his state room preparing the order of the day. A month they had waited for this dawn, weeks of expectation on the high seas that would culminate in the next few hours.

On the table encircled by the four captains Rogers had laid the King’s Proclamation. Beside it were some tracts from the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The small books, typeset in an octavo format, were to be handed out to each pirate who took the King’s pardon. The society had even brought along a printing press, should they require more copies.

Rogers stood in a fawn-coloured great coat with a long elegant waistcoat to match but a simple calico shirt beneath, which was cooling in the close warmth of the cabin. His captains wore dark heavy wool coats and waistcoats, garments too heavy for the Mediterranean let alone the Indies.

The new Captain General and Governor-in-Chief over the Bahama Islands in America poured a glass of port for his gallant commanders.

‘Gentlemen,’ he raised his glass. ‘To our endeavours.’

They sipped in silence, broken only by the scuffling of feet above their heads. Rogers put down his glass beside the Proclamation. He began to speak as if he was already halfway through his forthcoming address.

‘Last year the Proclamation Act came to Providence. A pardon for all Englishmen who had turned to piracy. You may know that the pirates burnt the ship it came in on. Her captain and crew were never heard of again,’ he paused to allow his audience to dwell on the fact. ‘We therefore are delivering it once again. Personally. And with a bit more iron to back it up, eh? Our aim is to colonise this hole. Turn these scoundrels into farmers. Build two more forts to protect against the Spanish mongrel. I know some of you, probably all of you, would rather be at the war, out in Sicily or wherever, but this has metal too!’ He banged the table, dragged a fingernail along the map secured there, from Bermuda to Providence and up to the Carolinas. Spanish Florida lay just a couple of inches away.

‘This island must be taken! It sits precisely at the point where one enters the Caribbean or leaves it to reach the Americas. Bermuda and Providence are like watch-towers for the provinces and they will be held! They will remain English!’

No-one spoke. No huzzahs or rapping of knuckles against wood commenced, only some sniffing of port and nods of approval. Rogers went back to the map.

‘The Shark and the Rose will sail into the harbour as soon as practicable, gentlemen. Let our colonists know that we are here in force. Meet any party who comes out with grace. I will row in with Captain Coxon, the keels of Milford and Delicia being too deep for these sands. The Buck will stay as a rear guard.’

Cawford, the Shark’s young commander, nodded confidently to them all and drained his glass. ‘I’m sure we will find some good men still abroad.’

Whitney, captain of the Rose and a seasoned sailor, eyed Cawford with raised brows. ‘I hear there may be as many as two thousand pirates, Cawford. Where do good men hide from such a force?’

‘As I understand it,’ Cawford returned, ‘there be the shopkeepers, the tavern owners and such.’

Whitney sniffed and finished his port. Rogers continued.

‘These are the ringleaders we must seek out, my lads.’ He passed out a note to each, in his own hand, hardly pausing to let them read as he reeled out the names himself from memory: Barrow, Burgess, Jennings, Hornigold, Vane, Teach, Martel, Fife and a dozen more. As he spoke Rogers sucked at the saliva draining from his ruined mouth.

‘These are the ones who must take the pardon. If they fold, their crews will follow. I will offer the principals, Barrow, Burgess, Jennings and Hornigold a place within us. As privateers. I will flatter them that I need their service. And in truth perhaps I do.’

Coxon was no longer listening. He had reached the bottom of the list.

‘Governor Rogers?’ he spoke for the first time since he had entered the cabin. Rogers swallowed some more saliva and lifted his head. ‘Yes, John?’

Coxon drew a breath and held out the waxy paper. ‘I do not see the pirate Devlin’s name here, Governor.’ He looked at the eyes watching him. ‘I assumed he would be among such a band. His name is not here, Sir.’

Rogers looked at the list, ‘Quite right, Captain. There is no Devlin listed. Were you expecting him to be?’

Coxon looked over Rogers’ shoulder to the lapping sea outside the stern windows. ‘I had thought that after all … after his notoriety, he would be one of the main. That is all.’ He dropped his eyes back to the paper.

‘I see,’ Rogers said quietly. ‘My intelligence does not deliver me any knowledge of Devlin being on the island. Although I agree he would be a bird to bag, Captain Coxon.’ He smiled politely. ‘Perhaps we will be fortunate, eh?’

‘Aye, sir,’ Coxon folded the paper and slipped it into his coat. ‘Fortunate we may hope.’

Whitney elbowed Coxon. ‘Perhaps he will join you again, eh, John? Perhaps he misses starching your breeches!’

The others grinned and showed their white teeth. All except Rogers, who now could only ever leer.

‘He might at that,’ Coxon acknowledged. ‘I’m sure he’s missed such pleasures.’

‘Perhaps he can wash all our breeches, lads.’ Rogers dabbed at the drool on his chin with a shirt cuff. ‘Now. Back to the fox at hand. We have a door to knock on this day. And no doubt we shall not be welcome.’