The English Monster by Shepherd Lloyd

Author:Shepherd, Lloyd [Shepherd, Lloyd]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2012-05-28T23:00:00+00:00

JUNE 1668

The two of us stood on the poop watching the sun go down on the South Cays: the little Welsh admiral, and his quartermaster. A small ship was inching its way into the island’s natural harbor. Outside the harbor vicious ocean waves swirled around, strong enough to break a ship’s anchor chain. Inside, the water was calm. This was the ninth vessel to creep into the harbor, and it was the last one we expected.

Admiral Morgan, as he liked to call himself, sighed. By now he was almost formally the Admiral of Jamaica, though such a title was new and not widely recognized. But he was also very much (and very unofficially) Admiral of the Brethren. Morgan always insisted he was no pirate, preferring the word buccaneer. He saw himself as fighting for England and its king, and demanded that ranks on his ships mirrored those of the Royal Navy. He was not, and never would be, a whoreson pirate. By now, after four years of plundering and adventuring, I was very much his lieutenant. Billy Ablass, commonly known among the Brethren as Long Billy, quartermaster.

The Brethren, now. They didn’t care at all whether anyone called them pirates. But they did care about authority, and who held it. They’d evolved a dainty little system of checks and balances, under which the quartermaster held almost the same authority as the captain while the fleet was harbored. During a raid—when the guns were firing and steel was flashing—the men would follow every command of the captain, as obedient as any drilled foot soldier. But once the smoke dispersed and the take was being distributed, the men didn’t want a dictator. They chose a quartermaster to represent them, a piratical tribune to look after the interests of the crew in the face of a cocksure captain who probably thought he was master of the world.

And on this fleet, they’d chosen me. There’d been no election and no hustings, just a fearful midnight visit from a few of them and a hurried plea and a gracious acceptance. The men were as scared of me—more scared, probably—as they were of Morgan, so perhaps I was the obvious choice. Appoint a bastard to watch a bastard, as it were. Morgan, needless to say, had hated the idea.

So tonight, the captain and the quartermaster, the emperor and the tribune, were viewing their fleet. And the captain was worried.

“Only nine,” he muttered. “Why only nine?”

The largest of the ships in the harbor, the Dolphin, only had eight cannon and carried barely sixty men. The majority of the boats were simple single-masted things, barely more than pinnaces. The second-largest ship, the one we were now standing on, had been stolen from the Spanish, and I’d picked a new Anglo-Saxon name for her. She became the Drake. She only had six guns, but she was fast. I loved that ship, and it was upsetting me that just now Morgan was carving something absentmindedly into the sturdy rail with a

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