Chapter 310: The Admiral of the Free Harbor

The lamps in the alliance headquarters had burned down to their last inch, and no one had bothered to fetch more. That told enough about the night.

By the time the doors were pushed open, the table had taken a beating along with everyone around it. Candle stubs sat in their wax, the tea was cold, and the corners of the chart had been rubbed soft by hands that kept pressing it flat, as though the coast might change its mind if they pushed hard enough.

The Falmouth’s eighteen-pounder still held one door open, and the fifteen came out through it into the dark.

They came out together, shoulders back and strides longer than when they had gone in. Anyone watching from a dark window would have thought they had found an opportunity and intended to make use of it.

Above the bay, the stars were thick and clear.

They had two days.

The bell began to ring at dawn and kept at it until the streets around the Assembly Hall were packed from wall to wall, with the crowd spilling all the way back to the surrounding districts.

Tom, still stiff with salt, told the people the British Crown intended to shut the bay, starve the town, and burn it to ashes, leaving every harbor in the Caribbean to smell the smoke and consider whether independence was worth the consequences.

Fear came through the crowd, as mothers dragged their child tight against skirts and farmers sat down on the cobbles.

Hatred followed, and it proved the stronger of the two.

These were renegades, field workers from sugar estates, tenants driven off their land, deserters from half the navies in Europe, and widows from villages that no longer had a name. The very bastards sailing toward them under the King’s flag had robbed, whipped, and sold them, and now the Crown had come for the one place where they had found peace.

The sentiment went from a spark to an open flame.

The tokens went into the cask, green for aye and red for nay. Whitlock tallied them on the steps in front of everyone, leaving no room to claim afterward that the numbers had been fixed. Every adult soul who could stand in a town of two thousand two hundred had turned up, while the children watched from their parents’ shoulders.

There were fifteen hundred and twelve tokens, one thousand four hundred and eighty-two of them green, ninety-eight percent, the largest vote Concordia had ever cast. The thirty who voted red weren’t humiliated, which told enough about the town, too.

The Assembly placed the defense of the town in Don Rodrigo’s hands.

Concordia called it martial law, but the Code remained in force, the Assembly remained in place, and the old conquistador took command of the guns, the ships, and the muster, with no authority beyond that.

Thus he was named Admiral of the Free Harbor, and the townspeople took up his words, liberty or the gallows, carrying them through the streets like a flag.

When the vote was finished, the admiral went down to the water and inspected his armada.

There was the Grand Dame, a galleon that drew surprisingly little water for her size and carried forty-six guns.

Then the Black Fortune, black as a moonless night, with thirty guns and two swivels.

And the Royal Mistake, the King’s frigate with a new name and about thirty guns of her own.

Along with them were three Runt sloops returned from their errand, the Silent Mouse, the Plump Partridge, and the Sweet Lemon.

Against a man o’ war, five frigates, and a cloud of transports, it was a small armada, and the old man wasn’t foolish enough to pretend otherwise.

The rest of the Runts were out on the wide sea, busy hunting and trading, and there was no way to summon them home. Apart from them, no one knew where Thatch was or Vane, as the free captains had always come and gone as they pleased.

Nassau would send no one, either. It had been chosen as the decoy, the ugly rock the Crown was expected to attack first, but beside Concordia’s prosperity, Nassau had dwindled so badly that the King’s fleet had sailed past without a glance, and the entire plan had come to no use.

For two days, the old conquistador forgot no one’s name.

The muster took longer to tally.

Nearly six hundred sailors manned the hulls in the bay, and the town raised a militia of one in ten to stand beside them, more than two hundred people in all.

Farmers came from the drained marsh, fishermen from the villages around the bay, freedmen, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Spaniards, women who hadn’t waited to be asked, and hunters from the hog camp.

The pirates already had their weapons, while the farmers and fishermen had their hands, which was a start but not much of an arsenal. So the forges worked day and night, smiths hammering out pike heads, hatchet heads, and cutlass blades until their arms shook.

The sawpit turned out ash shafts by the hundred, and every kitchen surrendered its cleavers and hooks.

Fortunately, food and water were the least of their worries.

The British commodore wouldn’t expect such from a fledgling town, but Concordia’s fields were green, the nets were full, and the cistern was full.

As for the bay fortifications, a dozen guns, all taken from prizes, stood in the fresh embrasures with their muzzles directed over the channels. The curtain wall across the landward front, the bastion behind it half raised, and the rampart on the hill as far as the stone would allow.

It wouldn’t stop a man o’ war, nor had anyone built it for that purpose, but the Frenchman who had designed the defenses was seen to smile once when a mason finally cut an embrasure true. The town agreed that the matter need never be mentioned again.

At night, the admiral stood alone in the alliance headquarters with a lamp, a chart, and his parrot.

Concordia lay deep among the reefs and channels of the Andros island.

Rumor had spread through every harbor in the Caribbean that the free town was somewhere in the Bahamas, which was helpful as far as rumors went, since the Bahamas contain a great many islands. Andros was the largest of them, a green land of pine, swamp, and coral, but which corner of that island held the bay was another matter.

The Crown knew Andros existed, yet it had never found the town.

The man o’ war couldn’t cross the reefs. She drew too much water, and the corals would finish her business.

By his reckoning, the navy would spread its ships across the channel entrances, while its soldiers would land across the coast and march through the jungle toward the town, with a few sloops or boats sent through the reefs ahead of them to scout the way.

His plan came down to one simple idea, and he explained it to the parrot.

Hit and run.

Strike the fleet from the sides, harass the soldiers as they marched, and use every root and tree on the island to their advantage. The land belonged to them, after all, and the King’s soldiers had never seen it.

Naturally, a head-on fight with the Royal Navy was out of the question.

Don Rodrigo had learned that lesson in the Yucatán, in jungle where he had marched an army to bring its peoples to heel. They had answered with arrows from dense trees and fever rising out of the ground, beating him more times than he cared to remember.

He buried men beside the road and left others where they fell, but he had kept every lesson, which was more than could be said for many commanders.

That night, all around the town, bread was baked in quantities no army could possibly eat. No one slept, and those who tried lay awake listening to the forges.

Dread sat down to supper at every table, and resolve sat beside it and sharpened the knives.

No sail appeared, though every eye on the headland watched for one.

Then dawn came flat and gold over the bay, and the crews went down the piers to their ships as the boats slipped into the channels with their oars wrapped in rags.

The militia climbed the trails with pikes and hatchets, the hunters went ahead into the trees, and the admiral stood with his parrot, watching his whole free town spread across the water and jungle to meet the Royal Navy.