The Privateer Brig: The Money Ship, #2

By Joan Druett

On a shimmering morning on the Moluccan Sea young Jerusha is sent by her father, Captain Michael Gardiner, to pay a call on a mysterious brig that had arrived in the night. Not only is the dashing craft more piratical than Jess had expected but the man who hailed her as she clambered on board is as flamboyant as the vessel he commands — a very tall and very thin gentleman with jet-black hair that grew down his cheeks, wearing a green waistcoat with a matching bow tied at the throat of his white ruffled shirt. He may be a comical figure, but this encounter with Captain Rochester was to change her life and all those around her ... because of his obsession with pirate treasure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Old Salt Press
• Release date: Dec 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386698258

Joan Druett

Joan Druett's previous books have won many awards, including a New York Public Library Book to Remember citation, a John Lyman Award for Best Book of American Maritime History, and the Kendall Whaling Museum's L. Byrne Waterman Award.

Book preview

The Money Ship

Book Two

The Privateer Brig

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1

The pod of whales showed up clearly through the spyglass. They were playing about just five miles away, so happy in their native element, rolling and fish-tailing and blowing their dandelion spouts.  Jess could pick out the fat cows, nudging at each other and the seven or so young, and every now and then she saw the spout of the bull, lying almost completely submerged as he blew. He loafed about on the outskirts of the school, seemingly much more intent on keeping an eye on his harem than in scanning the sea for danger.

Jerusha lowered the spyglass and cautiously studied the decks below. She was in one of the two lookout hoops at the top of the fore topgallant mast, and there was no one else in the rigging.  In the water, on the starboard side, a ghastly carcass was secured by chains and ropes to the ship.  It floated half-submerged on its back, the long narrow under-jaw gaping upwards, pathetic despite the hard teeth, surrounded by blood and floating pools of grease and several dozen sharp fins.

Regardless of the sharks, men were working on the corpse. A narrow stage on wooden legs had been lowered over the dead whale, encompassing it, and three men were standing on this precarious platform, facing the side of the ship with their bellies firmly lodged against the waist-high rail, jabbing at the revolving carcass with long-handled cutting spades. One of them was her father. He had his head bent, but she recognized his hat, a tattered object made of coconut fiber that Mr. Turpin had left behind when he had made his ignominious departure from the ship.

Other men were heaving at the windlass, to winch the blubber off the whale. Jerusha could hear Mr. McIntyre, the second mate, shouting in his thick Scots accent as he urged them on. The fat came up in a thick yard-wide ribbon, stretching up the mainmast at the end of the big blubber hook and spurting pools of grease into the water, which sent the sharks into a frenzy. When the strip was long enough more men hacked it off and lowered it into the blubber room between decks, to be chopped up into chunks. Jerusha could easily envisage the grease-soaked men sliding about precariously, each one armed with a huge razor-sharp boarding knife. She didn’t want to think about it. Instead, she lifted the spyglass again, and went back to watching the pod.

The calves were the most fun to watch.  They blundered about so engagingly, at times hurling themselves right up into the air, and then plunging down with a flick of ludicrously miniature flukes. When their mothers and aunts nudged them, they shot sideways. Jerusha became so absorbed that she didn’t realize she had company until she felt the vibration in the rigging.

The first mate clambered up behind her, easing his powerful frame into the second lookout hoop, the one that faced the other way, on the other side of the mast. He reached out his hand and Jess silently handed him the glass. When she looked at him over her shoulder he was turned sideways, the spyglass aimed unerringly at the distant school. Then he lowered it, and studied her in that infuriating way of his, one black eyebrow arched higher than the other.

Brat, he said.

She gave him her best beguiling smile, but he refused to smile back, saying sternly, What the devil are you doing in the rigging?

Well, at least I’m out of the way, she coaxed.

Nelson O’Cain shook his head in despair. When he had glimpsed the distant figure in dungaree pants and loose frock-shirt, he had thought it was one of the boys, trying to avoid his share of the work. If he’d realized it was Jerusha, he would have looked the other way.  Now, he didn’t know what to do about it.

He felt at his wits’ end so often.  Over the past thirty-five months his life had moved in jerks, tumbling him from one rank to another and then another.  He had first climbed on board of the Huntress as a sixteen-year-old greenhand, almost totally ignorant of the ways of the sea, yet determined to work hard, study hard, and rise in the ranks — and now, at the age of nineteen years, he was probably the youngest chief mate in whaling history. Which, as he brooded now, left him singularly ill-equipped to manage many of the problems that faced the man who was second-in-charge of the ship. Including how to cope with the captain’s wayward daughter.

It had all happened so fast. The first jolt had come only six weeks after leaving England, when the Huntress had dropped anchor at Fayal, in the Azores, to collect fresh water and trade for provisions. Unfortunately, Fayal happened to be the home town of the first mate, Mr. Atlas Diego, also known as Ichabod Matthews. Under one or the other of his two identities, he had got into a drunken battle, apparently as part of a family feud. He had come off much the worst, with one leg so badly broken it had to be cut off, and so the ship had sailed without a chief officer.

Nelson hadn’t known what to expect when Captain Gardiner had called him up to the quarterdeck, particularly as the American’s expression had been so set and angry. Nelson had searched his conscience as he made the long walk aft, but it had turned out that the bad temper wasn’t on his account. Captain Gardiner had curtly informed him he was now a harpooner, and to shift his sea-chest into the steerage, where the cook, carpenter, cabin boy, and harpooners had their berths.  It was a distinct step up from the dank and crowded forecastle, but one that brought big challenges for a lad who was just sixteen, and still learning as he went.

The next jerk in his life happened when the Huntress made port at Kupang, Timor, six months after leaving the Azores. No sooner had the water stopped rippling around the anchor chain than soldiers marched on board, and arrested Mr. Turpin, who had replaced Matthews-Diego as chief mate. Apparently, Turpin was wanted for murdering a Dutch comprador’s clerk the last time he’d been in this place. The entire crew had watched spellbound as he was carried on board a Dutch East Indiaman in chains, headed for a hanging in Europe. Captain Gardiner was forced to promote the bushy-bearded Mr. Huggins to his position, and find someone to take the third mate’s place, so Nelson had found himself called up to the quarterdeck again, this time to be told to shift his sea-chest into the after-quarters.

He was suddenly the third officer, which meant he was now called Mister O’Cain, and shared a stateroom with just one other man, Mr. McIntyre, a Scot who had been shipped at the Cape of Good Hope. Another sign of his great rise in status was that he and the other officers had their meals with the captain and his family at the big table in the mess cabin, just forward of the captain’s private rooms. Those meals were quite a bonus, because Mrs. Gardiner prepared the meals for the after-quarters, and what she could do with basic ship provisions was a miracle.  An odd drawback was that Nelson had affectionate babyhood memories of Eliza, when she had worked in his mother’s kitchens — how she had picked him up and soothed him after falls, and had fed him little pastries — and it was hard for him to connect those vague, warm connections with the short-tempered woman who ruled the messroom of the Huntress.

Jerusha had eyed him askance when he first came aft with his sea chest, but then had suddenly decided he was worth cultivating. At first, Nelson had been at a loss to think of a reason for his popularity, being neither the carpenter nor the cook (the most important men on board, or so she had informed him), but one evening she arrived beside him on the bench at the big table, where he was writing up the ship’s logbook, and asked him for help. There were some hard words in the books she was trying to read, she confided, and wondered if he knew how to work them out.

They were certainly hard — words like venesection, diaphoretic, and carminative. To Nelson’s amazement, her books were medical tomes that had been left behind by the surgeon, who had taken his discharge during that dramatic visit to Timor. The doctor had been more interested in brandy and adventure than in treating a shipload of whalemen, and it was just another sign of his cavalier attitude that he hadn’t bothered to take his medical books with him. What was remarkable was that the captain’s daughter — who was only eight at the time — should have taken them over. While Jess was eager to learn, she was obviously very short of reading matter.

Together, they had puzzled out the meanings, and written them down on pieces of paper, becoming quite companionable. Then she became fascinated by the Bowditch he was studying one evening after supper, and had wanted to learn navigation. A few months after that she found him reading Hume’s history of England, and wanted to learn history, too.  They spent so many of his off-duty hours together that the second mate joked that the captain’s little daughter was in love with him, but Nelson only laughed.

––––––––

But that they had become teacher and pupil made the problem of finding her illicitly in the topmast hamper even harder, he meditated now. Quenching a sigh, he put on his sternest schoolmaster look.

So you’ve taken to running the rigging in the broad of day, he scolded.

Her dark brows — so surprising, when her hair was so blonde — lifted.  In the broad of day? she echoed.

That’s what I said.

So you already knew I climb the rigging in the dark?

I’ve known it ever since we left Fayal. 

That disconcerted her, but she rallied fast. And you didn’t tell my father Captain Gardiner?

No, of course I didn’t. 

At the time, it hadn’t even crossed his mind to report that he’d seen the captain’s daughter sneaking up into the rigging.  He was a newly promoted harpooner, with too much on his mind already, and it was none of his business, anyway.  He had understood her reasons, too. Being aloft at night could be magical, the air so clear it sometimes seemed possible to reach out one’s hand and grasp a star, and toss it down into the phosphorescent wake.  He also knew that the rigging was her refuge. When Nelson had been promoted to harpooner, twelve-year-old Tom Windermere, who had been the cook’s assistant, had been sent to the forecastle to take over Nelson’s vacated berth, and Jess had become the cabin boy, and the butt of her