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Book #8 of the Mogi Franklin Series
A month in the Caribbean, what could be better? Snorkeling, windsurfing, dreaming about lost treasure from ships sunk centuries ago—it’s all fourteen-year-old Mogi Franklin could hope for. But not everyone on the island of St. John is there to enjoy a tropical paradise. When a friend goes missing, Mogi and his sister, Jennifer, discover a dark mystery connected to an international crime ring. Or do they? Is Mogi just a kid with an overactive imagination, or is local law enforcement blind to a rich developer’s nefarious aims? The stakes are high as a hurricane threatens the island—and Mogi needs to trust his instincts.
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Read two chapters
Library of Congress Control Number 2018940779 Distributed by SCB Distributors, (800) 729-6423
Chapter 1
June 15, 1718, North of the Leeward Islands
"It’s flying a French flag, sir.”
Captain Jaan Detrich focused his attention on a ship that had suddenly appeared from behind one of the islands, as if it had been lurking in the shadows, waiting. “How big, Mr. Fleming?”
“She’s bow on, sir, but she’s three-masted under full sails. Moving fast, sir,” the first mate said.
The captain took the spyglass and studied this new neighbor. Carefully timing the ocean swells as they broke over the bow of the ship in the distance, he judged that his first mate was correct. Moving that fast, it was no merchant ship.
“Add more sail, Mr. Fleming. Then give us thirty degrees to port. We’ll see what she does.”
The Dutch-owned Hollander had taken on a full belly of cargo in Barbados, with barrels of sugar, rum, and molasses, a hundred bales of cotton, and two hundred smaller bales of silk and calico from India. The remaining space was packed with provisions for the long trip back home to Holland: barrels of water, salt pork and fish, pickled beets, coffee, fruit, chickens, ducks, goats, and other food-stuffs, plus extra sails, rope, and firewood. She was a good ship—a two-masted merchant vessel made for hauling commercial goods between the continents.
She was also a brigantine, carrying long oars for navigating through calm waters, ports, and harbors, and alongside plantation beaches. She had set off from Barbados a week earlier and was now sailing northward in the Caribbean Sea, out of the Leeward Islands and headed to catch the trade winds and eventually the current off the Bahamas that would speed her up the coast of America. Once past Cape Cod, the captain would turn her east and fly the sheets for home.
She was a good ship, but no fighter. Her crew amounted to twelve sailors, two cabin boys, a cook, a cooper, a carpenter, and three officers.
It wasn’t but a few minutes later that Captain Detrich knew the ship on the horizon was, indeed, company he needed to avoid. As his ship changed course and its speed was increased with an added sail, the bigger ship followed, appearing even more intent in its charge toward them.
Apparently the pursuing ship’s crew sensed that a chase was beginning, and the French flag was replaced with a long, red streamer snapping smartly in the strong winds above the main sail. The red flag signaled that it was a pirate ship and was now demanding that the Hollander heave to and prepare to be boarded.
Looking through his spyglass as the Hollander turned, Captain Detrich recognized the carved prow, the decks of cannon ports, and the shape of its sails. He understood who it was he was facing and it gave him a shiver. He lowered the glass, removed his hat, and gave his forehead a hard swipe. This day would call for sea smarts and courage.
“Mr. Fleming, I believe that Captain Teach intends to pay us a visit.”
The first mate’s eyes grew wide and he swallowed hard before he spoke. “Teach, sir? Teach? Good Lord! What shall we do?”
The captain clamped his hat back on his balding head and swept his spyglass across the horizon. He had chosen to sail among the islands of the Drake Channel to put off the harsher weather of the open sea. It was one of the best sailing lanes he knew—deep waters, calm seas, and light winds—and was peppered with many islands should he need shelter or supplies.
His spyglass briefly stopped on the islands of Tortola to his right, St. John to his left, and the Thatch Islands ahead. He could see dozens of inlets where he might take refuge, but he couldn’t be sure of the depth of the water. He needed depth. As much as he could find, as close to the shore as possible.
“Bring up the maps, Mr. Fleming. Let’s see where we are. And put us full windward, if you please, with as much cloth as we’ve got. Make us fast!”
The first mate flew down the stairway, yelling commands that sent the crew scrambling to alter the sails to align with the wind, pushing the speed of the ship for all it was worth. The news of Teach spread like wildfire among the men, and panic set in.
The first mate returned from a cabin below and handed the captain two rolled-up maps. He then returned to watching the sails in the distance.
The captain glanced over the maps, looked at the islands in the distance, counted green bumps, checked the depths of a few coves, used the spyglass, and checked the wind.
“We’re going to run for it, Mr. Fleming,” he said. “We’ll make for the bay east of Mary Point on St. John. We can’t win a race on the open sea, but we’ve a smaller draft. Make it into that bay and they’ll think twice about following us in. We’ll bury into the beach and make for the forest. Captain Teach, I’m sure, is looking forward to our being his entertainment tonight. He’ll want that as much as our cargo, but I do not plan to oblige him.”
The smaller ship surged forward under the turning of the sails, curving left, all hands eyeing the land ahead of them, and then the ship behind.
Even with full sails, the ship felt like a bobbing log. Every swell seemed to push against her progress, slowing her down and turning her from a clean path. Each seaman worked to eke out every bit of speed as he could—tightening a sail; swinging a yardarm in, then out; shifting the square sail off the bow—squeezing power from every breath of the wind.
Having decided his strategy, Captain Detrich now leaned against the ship’s rail, appearing cool and calm.
“Steady as she goes, boy,” he said to the young man who hung on the rudder arm. “We’ve got enough of a jump on the ruthless bugger to spoil him in the coral. That point, there—that’s Mary Point. Hold that point to starboard. Mr. Fleming!”
The first mate sprinted up from working among the men on the deck below.
“Mr. Fleming, procure my chest and stow the valuables. Pack it well because we’ll be slogging her beachside. Ready the long guns and pistols. Make the entry in today’s log, then stow the book. Keep the men informed, Mr. Fleming, but we’ll buck no slackers today. "The iron will be hot on the feet of any who don’t make the forest.”
The ship in the distance had closed the gap between the two vessels enough that the captain could make out the name carved along the bow: Queen Anne’s Revenge. Captured the year before and rebuilt for speed and fighting, she was a thirty-two-gun English warship of massive size. Five decks with a pirate crew of three hundred men, she was known throughout the Caribbean for the ferocious nature of her master: Edward Teach, commonly known as Blackbeard.
A cruel, ruthless animal of a man, Teach was huge— four inches over six feet, almost three hundred pounds— and he ruled his ship and his men with a sadistic glee. He wore an enormous beard, matted and stained with blood, rum, and food, parted and twisted into tails that he decorated with colored ribbons. When he approached his prey for boarding, he sometimes lit long cannon fuses and hung them from under his hat, causing the smoke to surround his face like a grim halo.
To be captured by Blackbeard was to be in the hands of the devil himself. The man enjoyed inflicting pain not only on his enemies, but sometimes even on his friends. Torture was routine, and death the only escape he allowed.
“Swing her around the point!” Captain Detrich yelled as the ship passed by the outlying rocks jutting up through the crashing waves of the island’s shore. Every man jumped to the ropes that were tied to the sails. The ship turned quickly, adhering to the line of Mary Point and slipping between coral reefs on each side. Then it rushed into the calm waters of the wide bay, lost its mo-mentum, and stuttered to an almost complete stop. The ocean breezes were now blocked by the tall hills of Mary Point, and the sails went slack.
Immediately, the crew slid long oars through openings in the ship’s railings and heaved for the far shore. The captain trotted to the front of the ship, watching the dark shadows of the coral beneath the surface of the water, calling out directions to the boy on the tiller. The more he could thread the ship through the reef, the closer he could get to the beach.
“Pull with all your might, mates—the dogs of hell are descending upon us!”
All the men worked doubly hard, sweat pouring down their faces and blotting their shirts. After only a minute, the ship skidded and balked as its hull scraped against the coral. The men gave all their strength to the final pulls as the ship’s keel banged through increasingly shallow water and then slammed into sand fifty feet from the beach. The oars jerked out of their hands and the men spilled onto the deck.
Mr. Fleming instructed the longboat to be lowered. The captain’s chest was handed down, the muskets were stowed, and every hand grabbed the smaller boat’s oars and shoved them into the water as they jumped to their seats. The captain was last to leave the deck, swinging from a rope to the head of the boat.
The men pulled the oars through the blue and green of the bay and the boat sprinted to the white sand of the beach.
“Ho, seadogs!” the captain yelled at his men. “I know this place. Plantations have been laid out and some roads cut in. Look for paths going up the mountain. The jungle gets thick on both sides, so keep your mind in front of you. We can have no battle here that would not buy us death, so we best run for it. Up the paths, lads, as far as you can, then scatter into the trees. May God be with us this day!
“Mr. Fleming, assign the chest and we’ll be on our way.”
* * *
As Blackbeard surveyed the entrance to the bay, his men gathered the main sails, reducing the ship’s speed. He had sailed about the island of St. John before, but his usual anchorage was on the south side, in Rendezvous Bay, where he used the beach for careening his ships. Here on the north side, he was less familiar with the shoreline. He set a man on the prow to sound the depth as he nosed the ship through the bay opening and aimed for the beached brigantine.
When the reef blocked any further progress, he set his anchors, stowed his cannon, and marshaled a boarding party on deck. There was no hurry. He could see a longboat on the beach and watched as a few stragglers disappeared into the forest. He was sure they hadn’t set charges in the ship; they would be hoping that their cargo would be enough for him.
And it might be, he thought. He had been headed for the town of Charlotte Amalie on the island of St.Thomas, just north of St. John, for a month’s rest and pleasure, so he hadn’t needed the extra prize of a Dutch freighter; raiding over the previous few months had already filled his holds to the limit. However, more cargo meant more money, and the short distance to St.Thomas would allow him to use the crew deck for cargo and to tie bales onto the main deck.
Dividing his crew, he sent most to the Hollander for plundering, some into the forest after the escaping crew, and some to scout any settlements along the shore. Since the plantations had not started producing anything yet, there was nothing worth stealing, but there might be “black gold” to be had.
* * *
Along with four men struggling with the chest, Captain Detrich and Mr. Fleming hurried up a narrow footpath. Nervously looking over their shoulders to measure their progress from the beach, they watched as the Queen Anne’s Revenge set her anchors. Seeing the pirates lowering longboats made their feet move faster.
They passed recent diggings and new stonework, outlines of a newly begun sugar mill. Further up the path, they met a dozen slaves. Underfed so severely that their ribs showed, barely clothed and barefoot, at the sight of Detrich and his men, the slaves flung their shovels to the side and disappeared into the jungle. Stolen from their homeland by men who spoke languages they did not understand, they lived in constant terror that they might be, yet again, yanked away and imprisoned on ships in a raging sea, watching their friends die like flies.
Captain Detrich glanced as he hurried by. The slaves were working on an earthen bridge that spanned a large gulley next to the path. The new bridge was probably one of many that would complete the road from the western plantations to St. John’s harbor on the east end of the island. The masonry work of the bridge had been finished.
Using a structure of bamboo poles to hold the rock in place until the mortar had set, a curved surface of fitted rock was built to form a wide stone arch from one side of the road to the other. Rock walls were built on ends of the arch, rising up on each side until the walls extended from one side of the gulley to the other. The space between the walls was filled with sand, broken coral, and rocks from the beach below, brought up one basketful at a time. Smoothing the fill to the road’s height with several feet of sand, the slaves had been laying tight-fitting red-colored bricks for the road’s surface.
The bricks had been the ballast from the bottom holds of English ships, Captain Detrich thought as he stopped to catch his breath. The plantation owners must have paid a pretty penny for real English bricks.
Ships with tall masts were the best sailing vessels of the day, but they required a large amount of weight in the bottom of each ship to offset the force of the wind on the masts. Without this weight, called “ballast,” ships with tall masts would tip over in strong winds. Usually the ballast material was heavy stones, gravel, or scrap iron from smelters. If so, the ballast was left in place throughout the voyage.
As the building of permanent structures grew in the colonies, smart English merchantmen replaced the regular ballast with tons of heavy clay bricks made in English factories. Tightly packed in the very bottom of the hull, the bricks proved effective as the counterweight necessary to balance the masts.
Fully packed, a merchant ship would set sail from a harbor in England. In Africa, the ship would offload cargo from the upper decks and fill the space with a hundred or more natives captured as slaves, the “black gold” of Africa. Sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to the islands of the Caribbean, the captain would not only sell the remaining cargo and the slaves, but the heavy clay bricks as well, bringing an even greater profit for his entire load.
To replace the weight of the bricks in the bottom of his ship, the captain filled the space with barrels of sugar, rum, and molasses, weighing a thousand pounds each. They served as ballast on the trip back to England and would be sold on the docks of the Thames. Restoring the ballast with clay bricks would begin another cycle of commerce.
But it was not these thoughts that currently occupied the mind of the Hollander’s captain. Now hundreds of feet higher than the beach, he finally signaled a stop, his chest heaving as he struggled to catch his breath.
“We’ve made it about halfway up. Survey a defensive position, Mr. Fleming. I don’t expect them up this far, pirates being rather lazy when given a mountain to climb, but we need to lay smart on high ground to give the buggers an uphill battle, if needed.”
With that, the captain and his men burrowed through the jungle and made secure for a fight.
After his men returned empty-handed from chasing the Hollander crew up the narrow forest paths, Blackbeard did not pursue his prey any further. His mind had been set on the pleasures of Charlotte Amalie and he was not to be put off any longer. After a day of pillaging the Hollander of its cargo, he swung the Queen Anne’s Revenge sideways to the abandoned ship and let his crew practice their cannonry. Within an hour, the poor merchant craft was a bobbing hulk of splintered timbers. Tiring of the game, Blackbeard sent men to set fire to what was left.
It seemed that the Hollander gave a last cry as its flaming timbers slowly sizzled into the water.
Captain Edward Teach had his men hook the Revenge to the longboats and tow her out of the bay to where she could maneuver on her own. Not looking back, he set sail for the City of Pirates and a retreat of drinking and gambling.
Far up the slope of the mountain above the beach, Captain Detrich and Mr. Fleming watched their ship burn.
“Mr. Fleming,” the good captain said, “I believe we’re on foot from here. We’ll make for the settlements, but I would have a barnacle for a brain to think that we should lug the chest with us. Take out our funds and then find a proper place to stow it. I’ll go ahead to the beach to assemble the crew, recover anything that might have floated away from the ship, and make plans for the night. Tomorrow, we’ll strike for Coral Bay. We’ll find another ship and come back for the chest.”
It took two days of hard going for the crew to work their way through the forest paths to reach the harbor settlement. Reporting their dire situation to the authorities at Coral Bay, they waited for another Dutch ship to make her regular deliveries before they booked passage back to Barbados. It would be another month before the Captain and his crew procured a new ship and sailed again for Holland.
They should have waited another week.
A few days into their new voyage, the Hollander’s crew met the Queen Anne’s Revenge for a second time, but the outcome was not as favorable. Since it was impossible to outrun the bigger ship on the open sea between the islands, Captain Detrich surrendered with few shots fired. The pirates boarded her, slaughtered the crew, and presented Blackbeard with the captain and his first mate.
The bloodthirsty Teach remembered the encounter from the month before. Complimenting Captain Detrich and Mr. Fleming on their clever escape, he cut off their ears, noses, and lips, and hung them by their thumbs, naked in the sun—punishment for spoiling his fun the first time. Their bodies were soon covered in blood, and the birds delighted in picking away their eyeballs, tongues, and other soft tissues. After a few days, once their moans had ceased, Blackbeard cut off their heads and threw the bodies into the sea.
The cabin boys washed the blood from the deck, and Captain Edward Teach continued north to the coastal towns of America.
"It’s flying a French flag, sir.”
Captain Jaan Detrich focused his attention on a ship that had suddenly appeared from behind one of the islands, as if it had been lurking in the shadows, waiting. “How big, Mr. Fleming?”
“She’s bow on, sir, but she’s three-masted under full sails. Moving fast, sir,” the first mate said.
The captain took the spyglass and studied this new neighbor. Carefully timing the ocean swells as they broke over the bow of the ship in the distance, he judged that his first mate was correct. Moving that fast, it was no merchant ship.
“Add more sail, Mr. Fleming. Then give us thirty degrees to port. We’ll see what she does.”
The Dutch-owned Hollander had taken on a full belly of cargo in Barbados, with barrels of sugar, rum, and molasses, a hundred bales of cotton, and two hundred smaller bales of silk and calico from India. The remaining space was packed with provisions for the long trip back home to Holland: barrels of water, salt pork and fish, pickled beets, coffee, fruit, chickens, ducks, goats, and other food-stuffs, plus extra sails, rope, and firewood. She was a good ship—a two-masted merchant vessel made for hauling commercial goods between the continents.
She was also a brigantine, carrying long oars for navigating through calm waters, ports, and harbors, and alongside plantation beaches. She had set off from Barbados a week earlier and was now sailing northward in the Caribbean Sea, out of the Leeward Islands and headed to catch the trade winds and eventually the current off the Bahamas that would speed her up the coast of America. Once past Cape Cod, the captain would turn her east and fly the sheets for home.
She was a good ship, but no fighter. Her crew amounted to twelve sailors, two cabin boys, a cook, a cooper, a carpenter, and three officers.
It wasn’t but a few minutes later that Captain Detrich knew the ship on the horizon was, indeed, company he needed to avoid. As his ship changed course and its speed was increased with an added sail, the bigger ship followed, appearing even more intent in its charge toward them.
Apparently the pursuing ship’s crew sensed that a chase was beginning, and the French flag was replaced with a long, red streamer snapping smartly in the strong winds above the main sail. The red flag signaled that it was a pirate ship and was now demanding that the Hollander heave to and prepare to be boarded.
Looking through his spyglass as the Hollander turned, Captain Detrich recognized the carved prow, the decks of cannon ports, and the shape of its sails. He understood who it was he was facing and it gave him a shiver. He lowered the glass, removed his hat, and gave his forehead a hard swipe. This day would call for sea smarts and courage.
“Mr. Fleming, I believe that Captain Teach intends to pay us a visit.”
The first mate’s eyes grew wide and he swallowed hard before he spoke. “Teach, sir? Teach? Good Lord! What shall we do?”
The captain clamped his hat back on his balding head and swept his spyglass across the horizon. He had chosen to sail among the islands of the Drake Channel to put off the harsher weather of the open sea. It was one of the best sailing lanes he knew—deep waters, calm seas, and light winds—and was peppered with many islands should he need shelter or supplies.
His spyglass briefly stopped on the islands of Tortola to his right, St. John to his left, and the Thatch Islands ahead. He could see dozens of inlets where he might take refuge, but he couldn’t be sure of the depth of the water. He needed depth. As much as he could find, as close to the shore as possible.
“Bring up the maps, Mr. Fleming. Let’s see where we are. And put us full windward, if you please, with as much cloth as we’ve got. Make us fast!”
The first mate flew down the stairway, yelling commands that sent the crew scrambling to alter the sails to align with the wind, pushing the speed of the ship for all it was worth. The news of Teach spread like wildfire among the men, and panic set in.
The first mate returned from a cabin below and handed the captain two rolled-up maps. He then returned to watching the sails in the distance.
The captain glanced over the maps, looked at the islands in the distance, counted green bumps, checked the depths of a few coves, used the spyglass, and checked the wind.
“We’re going to run for it, Mr. Fleming,” he said. “We’ll make for the bay east of Mary Point on St. John. We can’t win a race on the open sea, but we’ve a smaller draft. Make it into that bay and they’ll think twice about following us in. We’ll bury into the beach and make for the forest. Captain Teach, I’m sure, is looking forward to our being his entertainment tonight. He’ll want that as much as our cargo, but I do not plan to oblige him.”
The smaller ship surged forward under the turning of the sails, curving left, all hands eyeing the land ahead of them, and then the ship behind.
Even with full sails, the ship felt like a bobbing log. Every swell seemed to push against her progress, slowing her down and turning her from a clean path. Each seaman worked to eke out every bit of speed as he could—tightening a sail; swinging a yardarm in, then out; shifting the square sail off the bow—squeezing power from every breath of the wind.
Having decided his strategy, Captain Detrich now leaned against the ship’s rail, appearing cool and calm.
“Steady as she goes, boy,” he said to the young man who hung on the rudder arm. “We’ve got enough of a jump on the ruthless bugger to spoil him in the coral. That point, there—that’s Mary Point. Hold that point to starboard. Mr. Fleming!”
The first mate sprinted up from working among the men on the deck below.
“Mr. Fleming, procure my chest and stow the valuables. Pack it well because we’ll be slogging her beachside. Ready the long guns and pistols. Make the entry in today’s log, then stow the book. Keep the men informed, Mr. Fleming, but we’ll buck no slackers today. "The iron will be hot on the feet of any who don’t make the forest.”
The ship in the distance had closed the gap between the two vessels enough that the captain could make out the name carved along the bow: Queen Anne’s Revenge. Captured the year before and rebuilt for speed and fighting, she was a thirty-two-gun English warship of massive size. Five decks with a pirate crew of three hundred men, she was known throughout the Caribbean for the ferocious nature of her master: Edward Teach, commonly known as Blackbeard.
A cruel, ruthless animal of a man, Teach was huge— four inches over six feet, almost three hundred pounds— and he ruled his ship and his men with a sadistic glee. He wore an enormous beard, matted and stained with blood, rum, and food, parted and twisted into tails that he decorated with colored ribbons. When he approached his prey for boarding, he sometimes lit long cannon fuses and hung them from under his hat, causing the smoke to surround his face like a grim halo.
To be captured by Blackbeard was to be in the hands of the devil himself. The man enjoyed inflicting pain not only on his enemies, but sometimes even on his friends. Torture was routine, and death the only escape he allowed.
“Swing her around the point!” Captain Detrich yelled as the ship passed by the outlying rocks jutting up through the crashing waves of the island’s shore. Every man jumped to the ropes that were tied to the sails. The ship turned quickly, adhering to the line of Mary Point and slipping between coral reefs on each side. Then it rushed into the calm waters of the wide bay, lost its mo-mentum, and stuttered to an almost complete stop. The ocean breezes were now blocked by the tall hills of Mary Point, and the sails went slack.
Immediately, the crew slid long oars through openings in the ship’s railings and heaved for the far shore. The captain trotted to the front of the ship, watching the dark shadows of the coral beneath the surface of the water, calling out directions to the boy on the tiller. The more he could thread the ship through the reef, the closer he could get to the beach.
“Pull with all your might, mates—the dogs of hell are descending upon us!”
All the men worked doubly hard, sweat pouring down their faces and blotting their shirts. After only a minute, the ship skidded and balked as its hull scraped against the coral. The men gave all their strength to the final pulls as the ship’s keel banged through increasingly shallow water and then slammed into sand fifty feet from the beach. The oars jerked out of their hands and the men spilled onto the deck.
Mr. Fleming instructed the longboat to be lowered. The captain’s chest was handed down, the muskets were stowed, and every hand grabbed the smaller boat’s oars and shoved them into the water as they jumped to their seats. The captain was last to leave the deck, swinging from a rope to the head of the boat.
The men pulled the oars through the blue and green of the bay and the boat sprinted to the white sand of the beach.
“Ho, seadogs!” the captain yelled at his men. “I know this place. Plantations have been laid out and some roads cut in. Look for paths going up the mountain. The jungle gets thick on both sides, so keep your mind in front of you. We can have no battle here that would not buy us death, so we best run for it. Up the paths, lads, as far as you can, then scatter into the trees. May God be with us this day!
“Mr. Fleming, assign the chest and we’ll be on our way.”
* * *
As Blackbeard surveyed the entrance to the bay, his men gathered the main sails, reducing the ship’s speed. He had sailed about the island of St. John before, but his usual anchorage was on the south side, in Rendezvous Bay, where he used the beach for careening his ships. Here on the north side, he was less familiar with the shoreline. He set a man on the prow to sound the depth as he nosed the ship through the bay opening and aimed for the beached brigantine.
When the reef blocked any further progress, he set his anchors, stowed his cannon, and marshaled a boarding party on deck. There was no hurry. He could see a longboat on the beach and watched as a few stragglers disappeared into the forest. He was sure they hadn’t set charges in the ship; they would be hoping that their cargo would be enough for him.
And it might be, he thought. He had been headed for the town of Charlotte Amalie on the island of St.Thomas, just north of St. John, for a month’s rest and pleasure, so he hadn’t needed the extra prize of a Dutch freighter; raiding over the previous few months had already filled his holds to the limit. However, more cargo meant more money, and the short distance to St.Thomas would allow him to use the crew deck for cargo and to tie bales onto the main deck.
Dividing his crew, he sent most to the Hollander for plundering, some into the forest after the escaping crew, and some to scout any settlements along the shore. Since the plantations had not started producing anything yet, there was nothing worth stealing, but there might be “black gold” to be had.
* * *
Along with four men struggling with the chest, Captain Detrich and Mr. Fleming hurried up a narrow footpath. Nervously looking over their shoulders to measure their progress from the beach, they watched as the Queen Anne’s Revenge set her anchors. Seeing the pirates lowering longboats made their feet move faster.
They passed recent diggings and new stonework, outlines of a newly begun sugar mill. Further up the path, they met a dozen slaves. Underfed so severely that their ribs showed, barely clothed and barefoot, at the sight of Detrich and his men, the slaves flung their shovels to the side and disappeared into the jungle. Stolen from their homeland by men who spoke languages they did not understand, they lived in constant terror that they might be, yet again, yanked away and imprisoned on ships in a raging sea, watching their friends die like flies.
Captain Detrich glanced as he hurried by. The slaves were working on an earthen bridge that spanned a large gulley next to the path. The new bridge was probably one of many that would complete the road from the western plantations to St. John’s harbor on the east end of the island. The masonry work of the bridge had been finished.
Using a structure of bamboo poles to hold the rock in place until the mortar had set, a curved surface of fitted rock was built to form a wide stone arch from one side of the road to the other. Rock walls were built on ends of the arch, rising up on each side until the walls extended from one side of the gulley to the other. The space between the walls was filled with sand, broken coral, and rocks from the beach below, brought up one basketful at a time. Smoothing the fill to the road’s height with several feet of sand, the slaves had been laying tight-fitting red-colored bricks for the road’s surface.
The bricks had been the ballast from the bottom holds of English ships, Captain Detrich thought as he stopped to catch his breath. The plantation owners must have paid a pretty penny for real English bricks.
Ships with tall masts were the best sailing vessels of the day, but they required a large amount of weight in the bottom of each ship to offset the force of the wind on the masts. Without this weight, called “ballast,” ships with tall masts would tip over in strong winds. Usually the ballast material was heavy stones, gravel, or scrap iron from smelters. If so, the ballast was left in place throughout the voyage.
As the building of permanent structures grew in the colonies, smart English merchantmen replaced the regular ballast with tons of heavy clay bricks made in English factories. Tightly packed in the very bottom of the hull, the bricks proved effective as the counterweight necessary to balance the masts.
Fully packed, a merchant ship would set sail from a harbor in England. In Africa, the ship would offload cargo from the upper decks and fill the space with a hundred or more natives captured as slaves, the “black gold” of Africa. Sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to the islands of the Caribbean, the captain would not only sell the remaining cargo and the slaves, but the heavy clay bricks as well, bringing an even greater profit for his entire load.
To replace the weight of the bricks in the bottom of his ship, the captain filled the space with barrels of sugar, rum, and molasses, weighing a thousand pounds each. They served as ballast on the trip back to England and would be sold on the docks of the Thames. Restoring the ballast with clay bricks would begin another cycle of commerce.
But it was not these thoughts that currently occupied the mind of the Hollander’s captain. Now hundreds of feet higher than the beach, he finally signaled a stop, his chest heaving as he struggled to catch his breath.
“We’ve made it about halfway up. Survey a defensive position, Mr. Fleming. I don’t expect them up this far, pirates being rather lazy when given a mountain to climb, but we need to lay smart on high ground to give the buggers an uphill battle, if needed.”
With that, the captain and his men burrowed through the jungle and made secure for a fight.
After his men returned empty-handed from chasing the Hollander crew up the narrow forest paths, Blackbeard did not pursue his prey any further. His mind had been set on the pleasures of Charlotte Amalie and he was not to be put off any longer. After a day of pillaging the Hollander of its cargo, he swung the Queen Anne’s Revenge sideways to the abandoned ship and let his crew practice their cannonry. Within an hour, the poor merchant craft was a bobbing hulk of splintered timbers. Tiring of the game, Blackbeard sent men to set fire to what was left.
It seemed that the Hollander gave a last cry as its flaming timbers slowly sizzled into the water.
Captain Edward Teach had his men hook the Revenge to the longboats and tow her out of the bay to where she could maneuver on her own. Not looking back, he set sail for the City of Pirates and a retreat of drinking and gambling.
Far up the slope of the mountain above the beach, Captain Detrich and Mr. Fleming watched their ship burn.
“Mr. Fleming,” the good captain said, “I believe we’re on foot from here. We’ll make for the settlements, but I would have a barnacle for a brain to think that we should lug the chest with us. Take out our funds and then find a proper place to stow it. I’ll go ahead to the beach to assemble the crew, recover anything that might have floated away from the ship, and make plans for the night. Tomorrow, we’ll strike for Coral Bay. We’ll find another ship and come back for the chest.”
It took two days of hard going for the crew to work their way through the forest paths to reach the harbor settlement. Reporting their dire situation to the authorities at Coral Bay, they waited for another Dutch ship to make her regular deliveries before they booked passage back to Barbados. It would be another month before the Captain and his crew procured a new ship and sailed again for Holland.
They should have waited another week.
A few days into their new voyage, the Hollander’s crew met the Queen Anne’s Revenge for a second time, but the outcome was not as favorable. Since it was impossible to outrun the bigger ship on the open sea between the islands, Captain Detrich surrendered with few shots fired. The pirates boarded her, slaughtered the crew, and presented Blackbeard with the captain and his first mate.
The bloodthirsty Teach remembered the encounter from the month before. Complimenting Captain Detrich and Mr. Fleming on their clever escape, he cut off their ears, noses, and lips, and hung them by their thumbs, naked in the sun—punishment for spoiling his fun the first time. Their bodies were soon covered in blood, and the birds delighted in picking away their eyeballs, tongues, and other soft tissues. After a few days, once their moans had ceased, Blackbeard cut off their heads and threw the bodies into the sea.
The cabin boys washed the blood from the deck, and Captain Edward Teach continued north to the coastal towns of America.
Chapter 2
The Island of St. John, part of the United States Virgin Islands, Present Day
Mogi Franklin’s throat was dry. He was thirsty like crazy, his stomach was churning—almost cramping— and his eyes were burning from saltwater, sweat, and the sun’s glare. Surrounded by an ocean, he thought he should be feeling cool, but the sun reflecting off the water was roasting him like a hot dog.
It was a bad situation, and he didn’t know what to do. He had dreamed of riding a windsurfer so much that he was sure he’d really be good at it. The videos he’d watched made it look like riding a skateboard on steroids, and if you fell off, you hit water, not cement, which sounded like an improvement.
Debating with himself for most of the week, he finally rented a windsurfer from the Little Maho Bay beachside rental shop and, after two minutes of instruction from the rental guy, launched it from the beach where the water was calm. He stood up, slid his feet into the loops on the board, turned the sail until it caught the breeze, pulled back on the grab bar, picked up speed, and gradually slid across the water.
He’d never felt such raw freedom, and he couldn’t help grinning as he flew across the bay. It would have helped if he’d had more weight to pull against the sail, but he was tall, thin, and only fourteen; his gangly arms and legs gave him leverage, but not much power. Doing turns was the tricky part. Moving from one side of the board to the other, holding on to and adjusting the sail as he walked around it, and then tilting the sail as he took hold of the grab bar on the other side— it was complicated, and he plowed the sail and himself into the water several times. He finally got the hang of it, but preferred just to zoom in one direction and not worry about turning.
Then he came off a swell, made an awkward turn in the air to keep from falling off, and slammed the board flat onto the surface of the water. He heard a loud snap, and the sail yanked him into the air, twisted out of his hands, arced wildly in the wind, and splashed into the water some fifty feet away. Mogi hit the water with a hard slap. Tied to the large board by an ankle tether, he pulled it toward himself, climbed on, and paddled in the direction he guessed the sail had crashed.
He looked around as he rode the waves up and down, but the sail had disappeared.
It was bad enough that the sail had broken, but he realized now that he had no idea where he was. Little Maho Bay was an isolated curve in the shoreline of the much larger Maho Bay, a mile-wide, partly enclosed cove of water on St. John’s north side. Windsurfers were cautioned to stay within the big bay where the ocean currents were mild.
He had not. He had ignored everything except his feeling of freedom and the pure pleasure of zipping across the water. He had zipped straight out of Maho Bay and was a half-mile into the open ocean before he realized the danger. He was making his way back when the sail took off on its own.
Mogi lay on the board, pointed it toward the shore, and used his arms to paddle like he’d seen surfers do on TV. Despite his efforts, the bay continued to fade into the distance. The current was strong and was moving parallel to the island instead of toward it.
His arms quickly grew tired. He sat up on the board, his legs dangling in the water on each side, looked around at an awfully big, empty sea, and felt a wave of terror. He thought about swimming, but knew he didn’t stand a chance—if he couldn’t make progress with the board, he’d be doomed without it. Standing up so someone might see him seemed the thing to do, but the heaving of the ocean swells made it impossible. He doubted he could be seen from the shore, anyway.
So he sat. Thinking. Worrying. Burning in the sun. And really needing a drink.
How long could he survive? How long before a ship would pass his way? How fast was he drifting? Would he reach another island? When would Jennifer notice he’d been gone too long? He had told her what he was doing, but would she remember the details? How long before the rental place noticed that he had not returned his windsurfer?
A half hour later, a large speedboat appeared on the horizon, skimming across the waves toward him. Mogi stood as well as he could and waved his arms frantically. He was almost in tears as he watched the boat slow and come up beside him.
“Hey, mon, you need a lift?”
The friendly voice was followed by several people reaching over the side of the boat to pull him in. Someone pulled Mogi’s windsurfer out of the water and tied it to the deck. The people on board—a group of tourists and two islanders—all introduced themselves, but Mogi was not yet able to speak.
As the boat accelerated in a curve and headed toward the land in the distance, Mogi struggled to stop his shaking. Someone offered him a bottle of water and he guzzled it without shame, so very thankful for the taste of fresh water.
“He saw you when he was up in de air, mon” a tall islander in shorts and a T-shirt explained, pointing to one of the passengers. The islander had a lyrical accent, pronouncing several words differently from what Mogi was used to, such as “mon” for “man,” and “de” instead of “the.”
The boat was equipped for parasailing, with a large metal pipe arching from side to side and a broad platform at the rear. The two islanders were in the business of belting their passengers into a harness hooked to a parachute. When the boat accelerated, the parachute, attached by a cable to a winch, filled with air and lifted the passenger high into the sky. From all accounts, the ride was beyond thrilling.
A few minutes later, they pulled up to the beach in Little Maho Bay and returned Mogi and his broken windsurfer to the shore. Laughing and waving, the parasailers took off, carving a huge wave with the bow as they went back out into the ocean.
With his feet on the sand, with the entire Earth solidly below him, Mogi finally closed his eyes and let the relief sweep over him.
“Uh, so what about the sail?” he said to the rental guy. “Am I going to have to pay for it or something?”
“Nah. I’m sorry it broke. That’s really unusual. We’ll send somebody out with a jet ski to look for it, but I doubt they’ll find it. It’ll wash up on shore somewhere, and we’ll eventually get it back. I’ll give you your rental fee back since it was an equipment failure.”
Mogi gave another deep sigh of relief—windsurfers cost over two thousand dollars. Not being responsible for the broken sail made things a lot better. He thanked the man, bought another bottle of water, and started hiking up to the resort, leaving the clean, fresh air of the shoreline and plunging into the wet, thick air of the jungle.
Some hundred yards up the walkway, Jennifer’s cottage was more of a tent than a building. The top and sides were made of canvas and screen, but the canvas was stretched over a wooden frame that formed it into a small, semi-permanent, cabin-like structure. The hard door and zip-up screens let in the much-appreciated breeze but kept the birds, bats, iguanas, mongooses, snakes, and creepy-crawlies on the outside.
In Mogi’s mind, it was the perfect escape from the harsh sun and the circling insects.
There were over a hundred cottages perched on wooden platforms, built on posts high above the jungle floor. The tropical forest surrounded the platforms with drooping coconut palms and the heavily leafed branches of other trees. Built atop the giant ferns, tall grasses, and creeping vines on the ground, the cottages were mostly hidden behind huge curtains of green, with an occasional splash of bright yellow and orange flowers.
The cottages were connected to each other and to the resort’s facilities by wooden walkways that threaded through the forest in a dozen directions. The walkways led up and down the steep slopes of the mountainous terrain, beginning and ending at the resort’s office building and restaurant. They were located halfway up the mountain at the end of a paved road.
All together, the walkways, cottages, and buildings made up the Maho Bay Beachcomber Resort, one of only a few privately owned vacation resorts hugging the north shore of the island of St. John, the second largest island in the U.S.Virgin Islands, and part of the more than a thousand islands known as “the Caribbean.”
The office building and restaurant were the center of activity for the resort’s business. Mogi’s sister, Jennifer, who was seventeen, worked in one of the craft buildings as a recycler, helping to convert the worn sheets and linens of the resort into shirts, pants, napkins, placemats, comforters, quilts, and other items that were sold in the gift shop and in the village of Cruz Bay, St. John’s largest town. Cruz Bay was on the western tip of the island, a thirty-minute ride by the resort’s shuttle or by the island’s minibus, which could be boarded at the public parking lot near the beach.
Winded from sprinting up the walkways, Mogi collapsed at a shaded table outside the restaurant and used a fistful of napkins to mop the sweat pouring down his face. The heat wasn’t the problem. In his hometown of Bluff, Utah, it was typically hotter, with the temperature hovering around a hundred degrees in the summer. But the air was dry there, and the vegetation amounted to scattered clumps of grass, tamarisk trees along the San Juan River, a handful of juniper and piñon trees, and isolated cottonwoods, all of which had a tiny effect on the miles of barren slickrock sandstone that dominated the landscape. It was the opposite of a jungle, and the humidity was commonly in the single digits.
St. John, however, even with temperatures in the eighties and nineties, was surrounded by ocean and covered in dense jungle. The thick vegetation held the moisture close to the ground, filling the air with water vapor that made Mogi sweat continuously. In Utah, his sweat evaporated almost immediately; here, it ran in continuous streams. If he didn’t keep drinking water, he’d shrivel like a raisin.
Living on an island in the Caribbean was as far out of his experience as living on the moon.
Mogi Franklin’s throat was dry. He was thirsty like crazy, his stomach was churning—almost cramping— and his eyes were burning from saltwater, sweat, and the sun’s glare. Surrounded by an ocean, he thought he should be feeling cool, but the sun reflecting off the water was roasting him like a hot dog.
It was a bad situation, and he didn’t know what to do. He had dreamed of riding a windsurfer so much that he was sure he’d really be good at it. The videos he’d watched made it look like riding a skateboard on steroids, and if you fell off, you hit water, not cement, which sounded like an improvement.
Debating with himself for most of the week, he finally rented a windsurfer from the Little Maho Bay beachside rental shop and, after two minutes of instruction from the rental guy, launched it from the beach where the water was calm. He stood up, slid his feet into the loops on the board, turned the sail until it caught the breeze, pulled back on the grab bar, picked up speed, and gradually slid across the water.
He’d never felt such raw freedom, and he couldn’t help grinning as he flew across the bay. It would have helped if he’d had more weight to pull against the sail, but he was tall, thin, and only fourteen; his gangly arms and legs gave him leverage, but not much power. Doing turns was the tricky part. Moving from one side of the board to the other, holding on to and adjusting the sail as he walked around it, and then tilting the sail as he took hold of the grab bar on the other side— it was complicated, and he plowed the sail and himself into the water several times. He finally got the hang of it, but preferred just to zoom in one direction and not worry about turning.
Then he came off a swell, made an awkward turn in the air to keep from falling off, and slammed the board flat onto the surface of the water. He heard a loud snap, and the sail yanked him into the air, twisted out of his hands, arced wildly in the wind, and splashed into the water some fifty feet away. Mogi hit the water with a hard slap. Tied to the large board by an ankle tether, he pulled it toward himself, climbed on, and paddled in the direction he guessed the sail had crashed.
He looked around as he rode the waves up and down, but the sail had disappeared.
It was bad enough that the sail had broken, but he realized now that he had no idea where he was. Little Maho Bay was an isolated curve in the shoreline of the much larger Maho Bay, a mile-wide, partly enclosed cove of water on St. John’s north side. Windsurfers were cautioned to stay within the big bay where the ocean currents were mild.
He had not. He had ignored everything except his feeling of freedom and the pure pleasure of zipping across the water. He had zipped straight out of Maho Bay and was a half-mile into the open ocean before he realized the danger. He was making his way back when the sail took off on its own.
Mogi lay on the board, pointed it toward the shore, and used his arms to paddle like he’d seen surfers do on TV. Despite his efforts, the bay continued to fade into the distance. The current was strong and was moving parallel to the island instead of toward it.
His arms quickly grew tired. He sat up on the board, his legs dangling in the water on each side, looked around at an awfully big, empty sea, and felt a wave of terror. He thought about swimming, but knew he didn’t stand a chance—if he couldn’t make progress with the board, he’d be doomed without it. Standing up so someone might see him seemed the thing to do, but the heaving of the ocean swells made it impossible. He doubted he could be seen from the shore, anyway.
So he sat. Thinking. Worrying. Burning in the sun. And really needing a drink.
How long could he survive? How long before a ship would pass his way? How fast was he drifting? Would he reach another island? When would Jennifer notice he’d been gone too long? He had told her what he was doing, but would she remember the details? How long before the rental place noticed that he had not returned his windsurfer?
A half hour later, a large speedboat appeared on the horizon, skimming across the waves toward him. Mogi stood as well as he could and waved his arms frantically. He was almost in tears as he watched the boat slow and come up beside him.
“Hey, mon, you need a lift?”
The friendly voice was followed by several people reaching over the side of the boat to pull him in. Someone pulled Mogi’s windsurfer out of the water and tied it to the deck. The people on board—a group of tourists and two islanders—all introduced themselves, but Mogi was not yet able to speak.
As the boat accelerated in a curve and headed toward the land in the distance, Mogi struggled to stop his shaking. Someone offered him a bottle of water and he guzzled it without shame, so very thankful for the taste of fresh water.
“He saw you when he was up in de air, mon” a tall islander in shorts and a T-shirt explained, pointing to one of the passengers. The islander had a lyrical accent, pronouncing several words differently from what Mogi was used to, such as “mon” for “man,” and “de” instead of “the.”
The boat was equipped for parasailing, with a large metal pipe arching from side to side and a broad platform at the rear. The two islanders were in the business of belting their passengers into a harness hooked to a parachute. When the boat accelerated, the parachute, attached by a cable to a winch, filled with air and lifted the passenger high into the sky. From all accounts, the ride was beyond thrilling.
A few minutes later, they pulled up to the beach in Little Maho Bay and returned Mogi and his broken windsurfer to the shore. Laughing and waving, the parasailers took off, carving a huge wave with the bow as they went back out into the ocean.
With his feet on the sand, with the entire Earth solidly below him, Mogi finally closed his eyes and let the relief sweep over him.
“Uh, so what about the sail?” he said to the rental guy. “Am I going to have to pay for it or something?”
“Nah. I’m sorry it broke. That’s really unusual. We’ll send somebody out with a jet ski to look for it, but I doubt they’ll find it. It’ll wash up on shore somewhere, and we’ll eventually get it back. I’ll give you your rental fee back since it was an equipment failure.”
Mogi gave another deep sigh of relief—windsurfers cost over two thousand dollars. Not being responsible for the broken sail made things a lot better. He thanked the man, bought another bottle of water, and started hiking up to the resort, leaving the clean, fresh air of the shoreline and plunging into the wet, thick air of the jungle.
Some hundred yards up the walkway, Jennifer’s cottage was more of a tent than a building. The top and sides were made of canvas and screen, but the canvas was stretched over a wooden frame that formed it into a small, semi-permanent, cabin-like structure. The hard door and zip-up screens let in the much-appreciated breeze but kept the birds, bats, iguanas, mongooses, snakes, and creepy-crawlies on the outside.
In Mogi’s mind, it was the perfect escape from the harsh sun and the circling insects.
There were over a hundred cottages perched on wooden platforms, built on posts high above the jungle floor. The tropical forest surrounded the platforms with drooping coconut palms and the heavily leafed branches of other trees. Built atop the giant ferns, tall grasses, and creeping vines on the ground, the cottages were mostly hidden behind huge curtains of green, with an occasional splash of bright yellow and orange flowers.
The cottages were connected to each other and to the resort’s facilities by wooden walkways that threaded through the forest in a dozen directions. The walkways led up and down the steep slopes of the mountainous terrain, beginning and ending at the resort’s office building and restaurant. They were located halfway up the mountain at the end of a paved road.
All together, the walkways, cottages, and buildings made up the Maho Bay Beachcomber Resort, one of only a few privately owned vacation resorts hugging the north shore of the island of St. John, the second largest island in the U.S.Virgin Islands, and part of the more than a thousand islands known as “the Caribbean.”
The office building and restaurant were the center of activity for the resort’s business. Mogi’s sister, Jennifer, who was seventeen, worked in one of the craft buildings as a recycler, helping to convert the worn sheets and linens of the resort into shirts, pants, napkins, placemats, comforters, quilts, and other items that were sold in the gift shop and in the village of Cruz Bay, St. John’s largest town. Cruz Bay was on the western tip of the island, a thirty-minute ride by the resort’s shuttle or by the island’s minibus, which could be boarded at the public parking lot near the beach.
Winded from sprinting up the walkways, Mogi collapsed at a shaded table outside the restaurant and used a fistful of napkins to mop the sweat pouring down his face. The heat wasn’t the problem. In his hometown of Bluff, Utah, it was typically hotter, with the temperature hovering around a hundred degrees in the summer. But the air was dry there, and the vegetation amounted to scattered clumps of grass, tamarisk trees along the San Juan River, a handful of juniper and piñon trees, and isolated cottonwoods, all of which had a tiny effect on the miles of barren slickrock sandstone that dominated the landscape. It was the opposite of a jungle, and the humidity was commonly in the single digits.
St. John, however, even with temperatures in the eighties and nineties, was surrounded by ocean and covered in dense jungle. The thick vegetation held the moisture close to the ground, filling the air with water vapor that made Mogi sweat continuously. In Utah, his sweat evaporated almost immediately; here, it ran in continuous streams. If he didn’t keep drinking water, he’d shrivel like a raisin.
Living on an island in the Caribbean was as far out of his experience as living on the moon.