Chapter 214: Concordia’s Pirate Fleet

The cheers in the Broken Crown took a long time to die, and it turned out that cheering was the cheap part.

Seven hulls didn’t provision themselves, and none of them cared how well a captain had earned his hangover by shouting for Spain’s blood the night before. The days that followed belonged to rope, pitch, and split knuckles.

Sawyer’s crews went over every seam on every ship with caulking irons and hot tar, packing oakum in until more than one worker came away black to the second knuckle.

The storehouse was counted twice for powder and salt pork, once by Whitlock and once by Roberts, and Roberts refused to touch his hammock until the two missing casks between their tallies were found.

Between all that noise, the fleet began to invent itself a legend before it had earned one, as crews will do when glory gets close enough to touch.

One of the Grand Dame gunners, a man who three weeks earlier couldn’t hear a raised voice without flinching, began calling himself the Terror of El Morro and answered to nothing less.

Kit declared himself Conqueror of Havana a full week before anyone had fired even a warning shot at the place.

Then Bran laughed loud enough to shake loose rigging and claimed the same title for her own Crows. The two spent the rest of the voyage fighting over who had thought of it first.

James let them.

A crew that was busy naming itself rarely had much time left for being properly frightened.

By the time the Grand Dame went through Concordia’s reefs, with considerably less ceremony now, every ship behind her found the passage easy, and the whole settlement dwindled to a green smear astern and stayed there.

James himself took the Bloody Rose’s wheel, and tension in his chest loosened that he hadn’t realized was pulled tight.

Her spokes had been worn smooth by his hands and seemed to know them still. Her claret sails flickered against the wind just as he remembered, full and easy, and after weeks spent on borrowed decks, the familiarity alone was worth the voyage.

Her hull, the color of dried blood, cut a clean line through a sea gone deep and calm.

Forty-four broadside cannons had been checked and rechecked below him, her twin mortars were capped, and her cordage was coiled exactly as Cudjoe liked to find it.

James let the sight stand without spoiling it with a joke. A captain had finally come home to the one ship that had never once stopped waiting for him.

It took him longer than it ought to have to notice that he was not alone, even if he had known it all along without bothering to look. When he finally lifted his eyes from his own deck, the sight nearly took the wheel out of his hands.

To starboard sailed the fleet he had built with his two hands.

The Grand Dame came first, low and wide through the beam in a manner no shipwright would ever call modest.

Her foremast and mainmast rose over a hull with a lateen mizzen catching whatever the square sails missed. Forty-six broadside cannons lined a waterline higher than any respectable galleon had business to allow.

Don Rodrigo held her wheel below that towering rail, steadier than a man his years had any right to be. Roberts kept her decks tidy enough to shame a noble mansion.

Two hundred souls crowded a hull in comfort.

Not one of those souls had yet proved what they could do together under real fire.

James grinned at the size of her regardless.

Beside her, the Black Fortune cut a lean, wicked line through the water, three masts carrying a corvette rig that made her look almost like a miniature frigate beside the heavier ships around her. Thirty broadside cannons and a pair of swivels sat aboard a hull built for speed neither galleon nor brigantine could hope to match.

Her sails were pitch black from head to foot, and her hull was a deep, stygian black that seemed to swallow what little light touched it, a fitting coat for the lass.

Bonnet held her wheel with the earned confidence of a captain now, the man who had once run his sloop onto a reef and learned better afterward.

Whitlock stood close enough behind him to catch the tally board if it fell.

Smaller than either, and never once left behind by them, sailed the Marianne, one mast and fourteen broadside guns, built light and low for running packets across open water.

Bellamy wore that easy grin at her wheel, the one that made a man think the ocean had been put there for his amusement.

Larboard had the other half of the fleet, three captains who had thrown in on their own account.

The Queen Anne’s Revenge was the largest of the three, an East Indiaman’s stolen bulk and fitted for a war her builders had never imagined.

Three masts stood over two full tiers of gunports running black along her side, fifty-six broadside cannons behind them. A mortar squatted on her forward deck like something that had wandered off a battlefield and decided it liked the place.

Israel Hands kept the discipline inside the deck.

James, counting her ports from old habit, still saw her as a fat merchant hull playing soldier in a borrowed coat rather than a true vessel of war. That thought sat alongside the other one he refused to finish, the one about a beard still two years shy of a bowsprit.

He put both thoughts away where he wouldn’t have to look at either.

The old Revenge sailed close beside her enormous sister, one mast, sixteen broadside guns, no mortar to her name and no complaint about it. She continued her same steady work, under whoever happened to be minding her wheel, while her rightful captain played admiral aboard some lass considerably grander.

Last came the Ranger, a small brigantine with two masts, fourteen broadside guns, and the compact look of a ship built to run hard and fight when escape was no longer an option.

She was a respectable step up from the sloop Cormorant. The Ranger had more sail, more gun, and a little more weight to her stride, though she was still small enough to slip where the larger ships could not.

Vane stood in that wheel, Rackham beside him in his calico finery.

The familiar shimmer gathered before him as every ship finally showed itself in the count at once.

🏴 [FLEET OVERVIEW — CONCORDIA’S PIRATE FLEET]

Bloody Rose — Flagship

Type : Brigantine

Size : Large for her class

Role : Line Combatant

Armament : 44 Broadside Cannons, 2 Mortars, 4 Swivel Guns

Perks : [The Rose’s Luck], [True Shot], [Devil’s Hull]

Captain : James Calloway

Status : Underway, Voyage

Grand Dame — Man o’ War

Type : Galleon

Size : Large for her class

Role : Line Combatant

Armament : 46 Broadside Cannons

Perks : [Coastal Giant]

Captain : Don Rodrigo

Status : Underway, Voyage

Black Fortune — Screen

Type : Corvette

Size : Average for her class

Role : Skirmisher

Armament : 30 Broadside Cannons, 2 Swivel Guns

Perks : [Wind Dancer]

Captain : Stede Bonnet

Status : Underway, Voyage

Marianne — Allied Vessel

Type : Sloop

Size : Average for her class

Role : Skirmisher

Armament : 14 Broadside Guns

Captain : Samuel Bellamy

Status : Underway, Voyage

Queen Anne’s Revenge — Allied Vessel

Type : East Indiaman

Size : Large for her class

Role : Line Combatant

Armament : 56 Broadside Cannons, 1 Mortar

Captain : Edward Thatch

Status : Underway, Voyage

Revenge — Allied Vessel

Type : Sloop

Size : Large for her class

Role : Skirmisher

Armament : 16 Broadside Guns

Captain : William Howard

Status : Underway, Voyage

Ranger — Allied Vessel

Type : Brigantine

Size : Small for her class

Role : Skirmisher

Armament : 14 Broadside Guns

Captain : Charles Vane

Status : Underway, Voyage

Seven ships. Two hundred and twenty broadside guns between them, three mortars, and enough gunners and powder monkeys to crew a fair-sized township.

I have chosen not to calculate your odds against the Spanish Crown directly. Some sums are kinder left unfinished, and this experiment has grown almost fond of watching you learn the hard way.

James laughed.

He let the number go before it turned sour and became what he might have to answer for.

Closer to home, Cudjoe stood where he always stood, a fixture on the Rose’s deck about as permanent as her mainmast.

Closer still, Anne and Milagros had claimed his side without waiting for an invitation.

James finally turned his eyes forward, past the bow and past every hull following in his wake, to where the sea at last gave up what it had been hiding all morning.

A dark shadow broke the horizon, low, long, and unmistakable.

The north coast of Cuba was rising out of the water exactly where he had known it would.

Havana still lay beyond it, hidden and unaware, for now, of what seven ships and every soul aboard them intended to bring to her front door.