But if Dappa is right, and the schooner suffers from the defect of leewardliness, then all’s not as it seems. The wind will push her sideways, away from Minerva and toward the Race Point shallows-she won’t be able to intercept Minerva soon enough, and, to avoid running aground, she’ll have to tack back to the west, taking her out of the action. If that is true, Minerva ’s best course is to maintain her present close-hauled state and wait for Teach’s sloop to make a move.
It’s all in the arithmetic-the same sort of arithmetic that Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, is probably grinding through at this very moment at the Observatory in Greenwich, toiling through the night in hopes of proving that Sir Isaac’s latest calculation of the orbit of the moon is wrong. Except here Minerva ’s the Earth, that schooner is Luna, and fixed Boston is, of course, the Hub of the Universe. Daniel passes an extraordinarily pleasant half-hour turning Dappa’s steady observations into sines and cosines, conic sections and fluxions. Pleasant because it is imbued with the orderliness that taketh away his fear. Not to mention a fascination that makes him forget the throbbing and pulling stitches in his flesh.
“Dappa is correct. The schooner drifts to leeward, and will soon fall by the wayside or run aground,” he announces to van Hoek, up on the poop deck. Van Hoek puffs once, twice, thrice on his pipe, then nods and goes into Dutch mutterings. Mates and messenger-boys disseminate his will into all compartments of the ship. Minerva forgets about the schooner and bends all efforts to the expected fight against Teach’s wicked sloop-of-war.
In another half-hour, the leewardly schooner provides some coarse entertainment by actually running aground at the very knuckle of Cape Cod’s curled fist. This is ignominious, but hardly unheard-of; these English pirates have only been in Massachusetts for a couple of weeks and can’t expect to have all the sand-banks committed to memory. This skipper would rather run aground in soft sand, and refloat later, than flinch from battle and face Blackbeard Teach’s wrath.
Van Hoek immediately has them come about to west by south, as if they were going to sail back to Boston. His intent is to cut behind Teach’s stern and fire a broadside up the sloop’s arse and along her length. But Teach has too much intelligence for that, and so breaks the other way, turning to the east to get clear of Minerva ’s broadside, then wearing round to the south, pausing near the grounded schooner to pick up a few dozen men who might come in useful as boarders. After a short time he comes up astern of Minerva.
A tacking duel plays out there off of Race Point for an hour or so, Teach trying to find a way to get within musket-range of Minerva without being blown apart, van Hoek trying to fire just a single well-considered broadside. There are some paltry exchanges of fire. Teach puts a small hole in Minerva ’s hull that is soon patched, and a cloud of hurtling junk from one of Minerva ’s carronnades manages to carry away one of the sloop’s sails, which is soon replaced. But with time, even van Hoek’s hatred of pirates is worn down by the tedium, and by the need to get away from land while the sun is shining. Dappa reminds him that the Atlantic Ocean is just a mile or two that-a-way, and that nothing stands any more between them and it. He persuades van Hoek that there’s no better way to humiliate a pirate than to leave him empty-handed, his decks crowded with boarders who have nothing to throw their grappling-hooks at. To out-sail a pirate, he insists, is a sweeter revenge than to out-fight him.
So van Hoek orders Minerva to come about and point herself toward England. The men who’ve been manning the guns are told to make like Cincinnatus, walking away from their implements of war at the very moment of their victory so that they may apply themselves to peaceful toils: in this case, spreading every last sail that the ship can carry. Tired, smoke-smeared men lumber up into the light and, after a short pause to swallow ladles of water, go to work swinging wide the studdingsail booms. This nearly doubles the width of the ship’s mightiest yards. The studdingsails tumble from them and snap taut in the wind. Like an albatross that has endured a long pursuit through a cluttered wilderness, tediously dodging and veering from hazard to hazard, and that finally rises above the clutter, and sees the vast ocean stretching before it, Minerva spreads her wings wide, and flies. The hull has shrunk to a mote, dragged along below a giant creaking nebula of firm canvas.
Teach can be seen running up and down the length of his sloop with smoke literally coming out of his head, waving his cutlass and exhorting his crew, but everyone knows that Queen Anne’s Revenge is a bit crowded, not to mention under-victualled, for a North Atlantic cruise in November.
Minervaaccelerates into blue water with power that Daniel can feel in his legs, crashing through the odd rogue swell just as she rammed a pirate-boat earlier today, and, as the sun sets on America, she begins the passage to the Old World sailing large before a quartering wind.
There is, doubtless, as much skill in pourtraying a Dunghill, as in describing the finest Palace, since the Excellence of Things lyes in the Performance; and Art as well as Nature must have some extraordinary Shape or Quality if it come up to the pitch of Human Fancy, especially to please in this Fickle, Uncertain Age.
-Memoirs of the Right Villanous John Hall, 1708
MOTHERSHAFTOE KEPT TRACKof her boys’ ages on her fingers, of which there were six. When she ran short of fingers-that is, when Dick, the eldest and wisest, was nearing his seventh summer-she gathered the half-brothers together in her shack on the Isle of Dogs, and told them to be gone, and not to come back without bread or money.
This was a typically East London approach to child-rearing and so Dick, Bob, and Jack found themselves roaming the banks of the Thames in the company of many other boys who were also questing for bread or money with which to buy back their mothers’ love.
London was a few miles away, but, to them, as remote and legendary as the Court of the Great Mogul in Shahjahanabad. The Shaftoe boys’ field of operations was an infinite maze of brickworks, pig yards, and shacks crammed sometimes with Englishmen and sometimes with Irishmen living ten and twelve to a room among swine, chickens, and geese.
The Irish worked as porters and dockers and coal-haulers during the winter, and trudged off to the countryside in hay-making months. They went to their Papist churches every chance they got and frittered away their silver paying for the services of scribes, who would transform their sentiments into the magical code that could be sent across counties and seas to be read, by a priest or another scrivener, to dear old Ma in Limerick.