The Guns of Tortuga Read Free Page A

robes. Spanish marines were firing their muskets at us and screaming what I could only assume were curses. I hazarded a quick look forward. The ship’s forecastle had been hammered, its decking a shambles of twisted, splintered boards. One cannon had overturned, and the crew had wedged it, preventing it from sliding across the deck, through a hatch, and so through the bottom of the ship.
    But the towering foremast was whole, its sails drawing. We pulled away from the crippled monster. Behind us, the
Concepción
struggled to turn, but it was clear that she could not do so in time to fire effectively. “Got her rudder, we did,” yelled Abel Tate, one of our navy gunners, from astern. “Knocked it clean from its pintles!”
    Another shout rang out, this time off to our starboard side. The remaining pirate sloop was desperately trying to put us between her and the
Concepción.
Captain Hunter was yelling orders that I, with my ringing ears, could scarcely follow, but the
Aurora
heeled as we adjusted our tack, sailingalmost with the wind away from the Spaniard. She tried another broadside, but the shot merely ripped up the water astern of us.
    We were going to get away. We had met a much superior foe, bloodied his nose, stolen his prize, and stolen ourselves from his angry jaws. I felt like shouting myself, but then I looked around.
    The deck of the
Aurora
was littered with debris: splintered wood, bits of rope and rigging, and men—some bleeding and screaming, a few utterly still.
    As we sailed away from the dawn and the crippled Spaniard raging behind us, I pulled myself together and ran to where I was needed. Uncle Patch was in the sick berth, stitching up a six-inch gash in old Ben Pond’s arm. Ben, a gray-haired veteran with no teeth, watched the needle with interest and did not even flinch as it passed through his flesh. He gave me a friendly nod. “More comin’?” he asked.
    â€œAye,” I said. “Half a dozen wounded above.”
    â€œThen I will need your help,” my uncle said in an even tone of voice that told me I would be in trouble later for not being at his side earlier.
    â€œWell,” Ben said as Uncle Patch tied off andsnipped the catgut, “any gate, we touched up the big Spaniard and got away again.”
    As I helped him down and gave him the tot of rum that all the wounded could claim, I knew he was right. We had survived our first real battle. But the enemy had not let us get away unscathed.
    Nor did I think he would forget us.

Captain Barrel
    ALL THE REST OF that day we flew to the south and the west. When my uncle had finished his work, we found the butcher’s bill, as Captain Hunter called it, was tolerable: seven wounds in all, none of them fatal, and only two dangerous. A foretopman named Leach had been hit by a musket ball that had lodged deep in his chest, pressing on the lung. My uncle took it out, bandaged him, and put him in the sick berth, where he lay gasping for breath. The other was a bad splinter wound, suffered by a swabber named Wilson on the forecastle. It called for a world of stitching, and still, the unfortunate man might lose the useof his right eye and perhaps of his arm.
    When we were able to come on deck again, it was early afternoon, with a high tropical sun beating down. The ocean was as blue as ever I had seen it. Behind us the
Concepción
was nowhere to be seen, just the triangular sail of a very small vessel. Men were laboring at the pumps, sending jets of dirty gray water overboard, and forward, Captain Hunter was deep in consultation with the lean, scarred ship’s carpenter, whom everyone called “Chips.”
    â€œI can’t get at ’un,” Chips was telling the captain earnestly. “We can fother ’un, but to plug ’un proper-like, we shall have to careen the barky, and where are we to do that?”
    â€œA hole?” asked my uncle.
    Hunter turned and stared at him, head to