Prince Rupert, the Buccaneer

by Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

The Governor of Tortuga thrust back his chair, and for a minute looked like an animal about to make a spring. But he knew when he was beaten, and being a man who regarded honour as imbecility, he sought only to make the best bargain suitable to his own convenience.

"Your Highness," he said, "the dice you hold are useful to me."

"I make no doubt of it," said the Prince. "I have watched you throw them with profit during these past many hours."

"It would please me to buy them back. I will pay for them a suitable canoe and victual, such as you ask for."

"With leave for Master Laughan to voyage with me as personal attendant?"

"I will throw him in as a makeweight if your Highness will condescend to forget any small feats which it seemed to you the dice were kindly enough to perform in my favour."

The Prince surrendered the box with a courtly bow. He could be courtly even with such vulgar knaves as the Governor of Tortuga. "You may continue to use these ingenious dice as you please, Monsieur," said he. "I am not sufficiently enamoured of your good subjects here in Tortuga to wish to set up as their champion. And," he added, "I make no doubt you will be as glad to be shut of me as I am to be rid of your society. We do not fall in with one another's ways, Monsieur. We seem to have been differently brought up."

In this manner, then, Prince Rupert and his humble secretary got their quittance from Tortuga, and put across the strait to the vast island of Hispaniola, where men of the French and English races hunt the wild cattle, and the Spaniards war against them with an undying hostility. It was in a lonely bay of this island that the blacks set them ashore, and at once the discomforts of the place gave them the utmost torment. For the night, to ward off the dews and the blighting rays of the moon, the blacks built them a shelter of leaves and branches, but there was little enough of sleep to be snatched. The air drummed with insects. In the Governor's castle at Tortuga the beds were warded by a tent-like net of muslin, called in these countries a pavilion; but these they lacked, and the expedient of the buccaneers, who fill their residences with wood-smoke, they considered even worse than the insect pest itself. In the morning they rose in very sorry case. They were sour-mouthed for want of sleep, their bodies were swollen and their complexions blotched with the bites, and the negroes (doubtless by order from Monsieur D'Ogeron) had sailed off with the canoe during the night. Of food they had but a very scanty store, of weapons only their swords, and the country beyond them was savage and deadly in the extreme.

The Prince, however, was in no wise cast down. Through the thick grasses on the bay side he discerned some semblance of a track, and saying that it was as likely to lead them to the buccaneers as any other route, shouldered his share of the provisions, and stepped out along it at a lusty pace. His secretary followed him, as in duty bound, though with great weariness; and together they toiled up steep slopes of mountain under a sun that burned like molten metal. The shrubs and the grasses closed them in on either side, so that no fanning of breeze could get nigh to refresh them; and though fruits dangled often by the side of the path, they did not dare to pluck and quench their thirst, being ignorant as to which were poison. Twice they heard noises in the grass, and fearing ambuscade, drew, and stood on guard. But one of these alarms was made by a sounder of pigs which presently dashed before them across the path; and what the other was they did not discover, but it drew away finally into the distance. And once they came upon the bones of a man lying in the track, with a piece of rusted iron lodged in the skull. But no sign of those they sought discovered itself, and meanwhile the path had branched a-many times, and was growing in indistinctness. It was not till they were well-nigh exhausted that they came upon the crest of the mountain (which in truth was of no great height, though tedious to ascend by reason of the heat and the growths), and from there they saw stretched before them a savannah of enormous width, like some great field, planted here and there with tree clumps, sliced with silver rivulets, and overgrown with generous grasses. For full an hour they lay down panting to observe this, and to spy for any signs of buccaneers at their hunting; and at last, in the far distance, saw a faint blue feather of smoke begin to crawl up from amongst a small copse of timber.

On the instant his Highness was for marching on; and although his secretary brought forward many and excellent reasons for a more lengthened halt, his Highness laughed them merrily enough to scorn, and away once more they went, striding through the shoulder-high grasses, and panting under the torrent of heat. More and more obscure did the track become as they progressed, and more and more branched. Often it seemed as though it were a mere cattle path, bruised out by passing herds. And, so uncertain were they of the directions, being without compass and not always seeing the sun, that they were fain to ascend every knoll which lay in their path to justify their course.