Howard Pyle's Book of pirates : fiction, fact & fancy concerning the buccaneers & marooners of the Spanish Main
pistol, firing it as he did so. The pirate staggered back: he was
down--no; he was up again. He had a pistol in each hand; but there was
a stream of blood running down his naked ribs. Suddenly, the mouth of
a pistol was pointing straight at the lieutenant's head. He ducked
instinctively, striking upward with his cutlass as he did so. There
was a stunning, deafening report almost in his ear. He struck again
blindly with his cutlass. He saw the flash of a sword and flung up his
guard almost instinctively, meeting the crash of the descending blade.
Somebody shot from behind him, and at the same moment he saw some one
else strike the pirate. Blackbeard staggered again, and this time
there was a great gash upon his neck. Then one of Maynard's own men
tumbled headlong upon him. He fell with the man, but almost instantly
he had scrambled to his feet again, and as he did so he saw that the
pirate sloop had drifted a little away from them, and that their
grappling irons had evidently parted. His hand was smarting as though
struck with the lash of a whip. He looked around him; the pirate
captain was nowhere to be seen--yes, there he was, lying by the rail.
He raised himself upon his elbow, and the lieutenant saw that he was
trying to point a pistol at him, with an arm that wavered and swayed
blindly, the pistol nearly falling from his fingers. Suddenly his
other elbow gave way and he fell down upon his face. He tried to raise
himself--he fell down again. There was a report and a cloud of smoke,
and when it cleared away Blackbeard had staggered up again. He was a
terrible figure--his head nodding down upon his breast. Somebody shot
again, and then the swaying figure toppled and fell. It lay still for
a moment--then rolled over--then lay still again.
There was a loud splash of men jumping overboard, and then, almost
instantly, the cry of "Quarter! quarter!" The lieutenant ran to the
edge of the vessel. It was as he had thought: the grappling irons of
the pirate sloop had parted, and it had drifted away. The few pirates
who had been left aboard of the schooner had jumped overboard and were
now holding up their hands. "Quarter!" they cried. "Don't
shoot!--quarter!" And the fight was over.
The lieutenant looked down at his hand, and then he saw, for the first
time, that there was a great cutlass gash across the back of it, and
that his arm and shirt sleeve were wet with blood. He went aft,
holding the wrist of his wounded hand. The boatswain was still at the
wheel. "By zounds!" said the lieutenant, with a nervous, quavering
laugh, "I didn't know there was such fight in the villains."
His wounded and shattered sloop was again coming up toward him under
sail, but the pirates had surrendered, and the fight was over.
Chapter VI
BLUESKIN, THE PIRATE
I
Cape May and Cape Henlopen form, as it were, the upper and lower jaws
of a gigantic mouth, which disgorges from its monstrous gullet the
cloudy waters of the Delaware Bay into the heaving, sparkling
blue-green of the Atlantic Ocean. From Cape Henlopen as the lower jaw
there juts out a long, curving fang of high, smooth-rolling sand
dunes, cutting sharp and clean against the still, blue sky
above--silent, naked, utterly deserted, excepting for the squat,
white-walled lighthouse standing upon the crest of the highest hill.
Within this curving, sheltering hook of sand hills lie the smooth
waters of Lewes Harbor, and, set a little back from the shore, the
quaint old town, with its dingy wooden houses of clapboard and
shingle, looks sleepily out through the masts of the shipping lying at
anchor in the harbor, to the purple, clean-cut, level thread of the
ocean horizon beyond.
Lewes is a queer, odd, old-fashioned little town, smelling fragrant of
salt marsh and sea breeze. It is rarely visited by strangers. The
people who live there are the progeny of people who have lived there
for many generations, and it is the very place to nurse, and preserve,
and care for old legends and traditions of bygone times, until they
grow from bits of gossip and news into local history of considerable
size. As in the busier world men talk of last year's elections, here
these old bits, and scraps, and odds and ends of history are retailed
to the listener who cares to listen--traditions of the War of 1812,
when Beresford's fleet lay off the harbor threatening to bombard the
town; tales of the Revolution and of Earl Howe's warships, tarrying
for a while in the quiet harbor before they sailed up the river to
shake old Philadelphia town with the thunders of their guns at Red
Bank and Fort Mifflin.
With these substantial and sober threads of real history, other and
more lurid colors are interwoven into the web of local lore--legends
of the dark doings of famous pirates, of their mysterious, sinister
comings and goings, of treasures buried in the sand dunes and pine
barrens back of the cape and along the Atlantic beach to the
southward.
Of such is the story of Blueskin, the pirate.
II
It was in the fall and the early winter of the year 1750, and again in
the summer of the year following, that the famous pirate, Blueskin,
became especially identified with Lewes as a part of its traditional
history.
For some time--for three or four years--rumors and reports of
Blueskin's doings in the West Indies and off the Carolinas had been
brought in now and then by sea captains. There was no more cruel,
bloody, desperate, devilish pirate than he in all those
pirate-infested waters. All kinds of wild and bloody stories were
current concerning him, but it never occurred to the good folk of
Lewes that such stories were some time to be a part of their own
history.
But one day a schooner came drifting into Lewes harbor--shattered,
wounded, her forecastle splintered, her foremast shot half away, and
three great tattered holes in her mainsail. The mate with one of the
crew came ashore in the boat for help and a doctor. He reported that
the captain and the cook were dead and there were three wounded men
aboard. The story he told to the gathering crowd brought a very
peculiar thrill to those who heard it. They had fallen in with
Blueskin, he said, off Fenwick's Island (some twenty or thirty miles
below the capes), and the pirates had come aboard of them; but,
finding that the cargo of the schooner consisted only of cypress
shingles and lumber, had soon quitted their prize. Perhaps Blueskin
was disappointed at not finding a more valuable capture; perhaps the
spirit of deviltry was hotter in him that morning than usual; anyhow,
as the pirate craft bore away she fired three broadsides at short
range into the helpless coaster. The captain had been killed at the
first fire, the cook had died on the way up, three of the crew were
wounded, and the vessel was leaking fast, betwixt wind and water.
Such was the mate's story. It spread like wildfire, and in half an
hour all the town was in a ferment. Fenwick's Island was very near
home; Blueskin might come sailing into the harbor at any minute and
then--! In an hour Sheriff Jones had called together most of the
able-bodied men of the town, muskets and rifles were taken down from
the chimney places, and every preparation was made to defend the place
against the pirates, should they come into the harbor and attempt to
land.
But Blueskin did not come that day, nor did he come the next or the
next. But on the afternoon of the third the news went suddenly flying
over the town that the pirates were inside the capes. As the report
spread the people came running--men, women, and children--to the green
before the tavern, where a little knot of old seamen were gathered
together, looking fixedly out toward the offing, talking in low
voices. Two vessels, one bark-rigged, the other and smaller a sloop,
were slowly creeping up the bay, a couple of miles or so away and just
inside the cape. There appeared nothing remarkable about the two
crafts, but the little crowd that continued gathering upon the green
stood looking out across the bay at them none the less anxiously for
that. They were sailing close-hauled to the wind, the sloop following
in the wake of her consort as the pilot fish follows in the wake of
the shark.
But the course they held did not lie toward the harbor, but rather
bore away toward the Jersey shore, and by and by it began to be
apparent that Blueskin did not intend visiting the town. Nevertheless,
those who stood looking did not draw a free breath until, after
watching the two pirates for more than an hour and a half, they saw
them--then about six miles away--suddenly put about and sail with a
free wind out to sea again.
"The bloody villains have gone!" said old Captain Wolfe, shutting his
telescope with a click.
But Lewes was not yet quit of Blueskin. Two days later a half-breed
from Indian River bay came up, bringing the news that the pirates had
sailed into the inlet--some fifteen miles below Lewes--and had
careened the bark to clean her.
Perhaps Blueskin did not care to stir up the country people against
him, for the half-breed reported that the pirates were doing no harm,
and that what they took from the farmers of Indian River and Rehoboth
they paid for with good hard money.
It was while the excitement over the pirates was at its highest fever
heat that Levi West came home again.
III
Even in the middle of the last century the grist mill, a couple of
miles from Lewes, although it was at most but fifty or sixty years
old, had all a look of weather-beaten age, for the cypress shingles,
of which it was built, ripen in a few years of wind and weather to a
silvery, hoary gray, and the white powdering of flour lent it a look
as though the dust of ages had settled upon it, making the shadows
within dim, soft, mysterious. A dozen willow trees shaded with
dappling, shivering ripples of shadow the road before the mill door,
and the mill itself, and the long, narrow, shingle-built, one-storied,
hip-roofed dwelling house. At the time of the story the mill had
descended in a direct line of succession to Hiram White, the grandson
of old Ephraim White, who had built it, it was said, in 1701.
Hiram White was only twenty-seven years old, but he was already in
local repute as a "character." As a boy he was thought to be
half-witted or "natural," and, as is the case with such unfortunates
in small country towns where everybody knows everybody, he was made a
common sport and jest for the keener, crueler wits of the
neighborhood. Now that he was grown to the ripeness of manhood he was
still looked upon as being--to use a quaint expression--"slack," or
"not jest right." He was heavy, awkward, ungainly and loose-jointed,
and enormously, prodigiously strong. He had a lumpish, thick-featured
face, with lips heavy and loosely hanging, that gave him an air of
stupidity, half droll, half pathetic. His little eyes were set far
apart and flat with his face, his eyebrows were nearly white and his
hair was of a sandy, colorless kind. He was singularly taciturn,
lisping thickly when he did talk, and stuttering and hesitating in his
speech, as though his words moved faster than his mind could follow.
It was the custom for local wags to urge, or badger, or tempt him to
talk, for the sake of the ready laugh that always followed the few
thick, stammering words and the stupid drooping of the jaw at the end
of each short speech. Perhaps Squire Hall was the only one in Lewes
Hundred who mis-doubted that Hiram was half-witted. He had had
dealings with him and was wont to say that whoever bought Hiram White
for a fool made a fool's bargain. Certainly, whether he had common
wits or no, Hiram had managed his mill to pretty good purpose and was
fairly well off in the world as prosperity went in southern Delaware