Prince Rupert, the Buccaneer

by Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

Watkin sipped his rum and winked. "Well, between you and me, Mr. Prince, I'm no great seaman, and I know it as well as the next man. So I leave sea adventures for whoever wants 'em, and for long enough I've been looking out for a place where one could earn a parcel of honest plunder elsewise. Now mark you, the Spanish towns on the coast are the best guarded, because they are always expecting visits from the buccaneers. So they cost many to storm and sack them. But further into the country the fortifications are built more for the look and comfort of the thing than for real use, because they think that buccaneers are web-footed creatures who dare not venture far away from the friendly sea. So my idea was to find my town inland, but yet not too far inland, because when buccaneers return with their plunder, few of them remain over from the previous fighting, and of these many are wounded and many are fever-struck, and the rest are well addled with drink, and such a convoy is easy cut up, as previous experience has shown."

"You know the conditions of warfare finely."

"You never said a truer thing, Mr. Prince. Here's to your health again, though I've drunk it before. And now, in your ear, the place that's going to fill my purse is named Coro. It lies just at the bottom of the Golfete de Coro. La Vela's the port, and it's some ten miles away to the Nor'-east and the passes between are sown with gates and forts and drawbridges, all built very superior." He took a small stained chart from his pocket, and unrolled it on the deck beneath the glow of a battle lantern.—"There's the place, Mr. Prince."

"I see. Just on the neck of the Paraguana peninsula. Then, Master Watkin, if all preparations are made to resist entry on the Eastern side, I should say that a call could be made with less formality from the Westward."

Captain Watkin smacked his thigh delightedly. "You've hit it in once. My strategy's this, Mr. Prince. I want Captain Wick to go in front of La Vela, and make all the noise there he's capable of. That will bring the troops tramping down to the batteries and fortifications, and in the meanwhile I with my merry men will work round into the Golfete and land at the Westward side, as you have said, and tumble in by the back door with few to stop us. I've taken care," said Watkin with a sly wink, "that there shall not be the full quota of troops in the place when we make our call, or rather I have done my best to that end. But as you'll know for yourself, Mr. Prince, these engagés are not over and above reliable."

"Engagés?" said Rupert. "I'm afraid I do not quite understand. Buccaneers' apprentices, do you mean?"

"Just those. They were part of a cargo of prisoners the Lord Protector Cromwell shipped out to Tortuga—cavaliers or malignants he called them, but I am so long from home that I forget English politics now—and Monsieur D'Ogeron sold them to the buccaneers of Hispaniola. They were the engagés of these same bright fellows who have shipped with me and whom you see drinking down there on the main deck now; and as they were ours, body and soul, to do with as we pleased, we set them ashore some forty miles from Coro as a species of decoy. Indeed we had only landed them a day before we came up with you, and were standing off and on to give them time to do their work. Their orders were to burn, sink, and destroy, to set up faction fights amongst the Indians if the chance came in their way, and in fact to do what they could to draw out an expedition from the town. You see my strategy, Mr. Prince?"

"More clearly than your kindness to these engagés?"

"Why, what better could they have? it is their bounden duty to make themselves of use to their masters, and if when they draw the Spaniards down about their ears they all get killed, why, by the Lord, they've only themselves to thank for it. They should have learned to fight better. They're not without promise of a fine reward to give them keenness. All who do their work and remain alive, and contrive to join us in Coro when we've took the place, will be given freedom, and made full Brethren of the Coast with due ceremony and rejoicing. Now I ask you, what better guerdon could an engagés wish for than that?"

Prince Rupert sighed. "I am a man that's seen a good handful of service, Master Watkin, but I fear I'm not up to the true buccaneer's standard of hardiness yet. And besides, you named these poor fellows as cavaliers, and it sticks in my mind that many amongst them will have been my old fellow-soldiers in the English wars."