Coin O' The Realm

 

In her cabin, Morgan Corbye had spread on a coarse cloth what few coins remained from her last raid. If her quartermaster bought cheap, at most it would provide the crew of the Winged Adventure with a hard loaf or two and a scant handful of citrus fruits to stave off the scurvy. The sailors were no strangers to rough seas, metaphorical or literal, nor to short commons, but nonetheless, tempers were taut as rigging in a gale and as likely to snap when frayed by hunger. Weighed in the balance of her hand, the metal tipped the scales toward going ashore at Port Ryffe to risk a daylight raid smack beneath the pointed nose of Harbourmaster Beale, one of Capt. Corbye's principle adversaries. The ship put in to land some miles from the village in a tight cove closely guarded by forest. Morgan and two men set off on foot and in a few hours, were at the eastern edge of town. From her vantage point atop a bluff, she could see Beale on the docks, his cocked hat and swagger unmistakable even in the distance. Although the summer seas had not been kind to the pirate band, here Dame Fortune made up the shortfall for, as Capt. Corbye and her men left the concealment of the woodland, they came first upon a chicken yard behind a home rather larger than the others in the village. "By th' Lord 'arry," said Capt. Corbye, "a pot o' chicken stew would fill empty stummicks quite well, an' a spud or three if there's some about." A garden stood to one side of the poultry house, withered vines signalling that potatoes were ready for jigging, as indeed it seemed the absent gardener also had considered, for he had leaned a shovel against the garden gate in preparation for the work. Yet the hungry looters were to have a feast for their spirits as well as full bellies from this raid, as above the arched entrance to the garden hung a carven wood sign proclaiming it to be "Beale's Pleasance." Given this fortuitous discovery, the pirates felt compelled to have a much wider look at the homestead's inventory, and it was a full two weeks before Mr. Beale had identified everything which had gone missing.

Captain's Leisure

Although not odd to the point of eliciting deep curiosity, it was uncommon enough to generate whispers among the crew when two weeks earlier, the Captain had ordered the first mate to take her ashore in the jollyboat to the windward side of a heavily forested island. Nary a man was chosen to accompany her; thus one green wit among us put forth the indelicate suggestion that she was going to see a lover. Upon overhearing the hand's inevitable and scurrilous elaboration upon such a subject, the first mate fell into a wild fury, taking up a belaying pin with which to enforce his order to "Shut yer gob, ye filth!" The blow never fell, for at that moment the young sailor (a lad in his early 20s) tripped on a coil of rope and went crashing backward into the hold, to break his neck in the fall. The sudden shadow of death sobered us all, but none so much as the mate who had only meant to chastise, yet he sternly reiterated his admonishment that there would be "none o' that talk" among the rank and file at risk of the lash. How he might explain to the Captain our crewmate's absence was a matter he would have to reconcile on his own.

Perhaps he invented a tale of desertion, though were he caught out in a lie by Captain Corbye, his remaining hours of existence might be counted on the fingers of one hand. Whatever account he devised to mollify her wrath, she was in good humour when he brought her back aboard eight days later. One might say it was an exceptionally good mood, for she dealt us out each a generous handful of coin though we had not participated in obtaining it. Since that time, we had been under sail in ragged weather, making toward Port Ryffe against a stiff wind. Upon putting in to the safety of the harbour, the Captain dismissed those of us the ship could spare, joining the crew at the pub in the confidence that her foe Harbormaster Beale had been called to court to answer charges of dereliction of duty as a direct result of our previous visit to his fair town.

The Captain passed over to the publican a leathern bag, the contents of which rendered him wide-eyed and immediately subservient and obliging. In short order, ale or beer was in the hands of every jolly sailor, and at no lightening of our purses. The Captain drew up a weathered trunk as a seat, and equipped herself with a tankard of ale for although the chill of evening had shouldered through the door with the impertinence of an uninvited guest, no fire had been laid. The massed humanity within the cramped confines would soon raise the temperature. We fell to serious drinking, the patchwork of our conversations overlaid with occasional roistering song.

As the Captain took a fourth beverage to her lips, her countenance was lit with a smile unsettling in its benignity. For a fraction of a moment, I saw her in freshly laundered and mended clothing, not as the master of a crew of blackguards and rogues, but as a woman of advancing years taking her leisure at the pub like any common matron of similar age. No artifice glinted in her deep eyes, neither of scheme nor of malice, the eroded tracks of prolonged wind and salt exposure softened somehow by a light not wholly external. Unsettling, I say, for it gave to Morgan Corbye a vulnerability heretofore unseen by this biographer. If known to her crew, none had dared speak it aloud, nor would, knowing it to be illusion. In the public-house dimness of the Nine-Tailed Cat, the Captain's harsh voice lifted in the recitation of "Leave 'Er, Johnny," crackling off-key above the keen of the wheezing bellows of a mysteriously-acquired concertina. My observations drawn perforce to the instrument and the hands which clumsily drew forth from it a mere approximation of the shanty's tune, I saw it: the sapphire ring which but a year ago her sister Kat had plundered at the cost of a long period of unconsciousness. How had this repossession happened, unbeknownst to any of the crew?

One did not ask questions of Morgan Corbye, but as the evening wore on and she slipped further toward the brink of the ale's sweet oblivion, she laid aside the instrument and came to sit at my side on a low stool. Her disfocused eyes raised to meet mine by the accident of her physical position and, for all that I am a tall man and she of diminutive stature, for a moment I was caught in an illusion of superiority. In syllables smeared by strong ale, she spoke.

"Och, bloody 'ell, lad. I be gettin' auld." I knew she was speaking from her cups, yet was at a loss for a means to stem the tide I feared was surging inland. I had at times been her confidant, but only in regard to plots and plans, nothing of a personal nature. To be cast in such a role was not a burden I wanted to bear, yet she seemed determined to steer into the rocks. "Dinna look at me so," she said. "I'll be a'ter outlivin' ye by a decade, sprout. I only means t' say tha'...well, bloody 'ell! Leave me t' tell th' tale an' see if ye're no' in agreement."

*     *     *     *     *

The theft of the sapphire ring by her sister was an affront Morgan Corbye could not ignore. Over the past year, she had engaged every available eye and ear on the mainland to the purpose of tracking Kat's movements until such time as her twin went to ground. Like the Captain, Kat had gone ashore unaccompanied on a certain wooded island, there to take a short respite from the hard labours of piracy in a lair she felt secure. Had it not been for the keen eye of one young fisherman, her plan might have succeeded but, duty-bound as he was to the chime of silver against silver, this ragtag urchin carried word to another of his gang who took it directly to his uncle who was in Capt. Corbye's employ. In possession of this knowledge, our Captain engaged the mate to convey her immediately to the same island, for time was of the utmost essence and the overland journey promised a hard challenge. When a few days later, Morgan Corbye caught first sight of her twin, she (Morgan) was bloodied and bruised by the cruelest of inanimate enemies; rocks, brambles and branches had torn her skin and hair as she passed through those lands where no other would venture. Her jubilation at seeing her twin nearly made her cry aloud when Nature's savagery had not, yet she took to cover and waited, the pangs of hunger cramping her belly unnoticed in her fierce concentration.

Expecting the tale to continue with a description of a fight and conquest, I leant back against the wall in anticipation. The Captain's next words struck like a thunderbolt.

"An' there she sits, 'erse'f roostin' on a rock like a shag, a-starin' out t' th' empty sea," she continued, "an' I slips up be'ind 'er quiet-like...though I think she's gone a bit deef, that one...an' I runs me pig-sticker str'ight atween 'er ribs an' gives it a good twist, an' by gawd, she falls orf th' rock, dead as dead. Me sister, me ain flesh, dead at me feet." She paused as if collecting herself, and had I not known it for a trick of the light, I might have said that a tear crept into the corner of her eye. Were it there, it would not have been for the death of her enemy but for the loss of purpose to her life, and thus I understood the reference to age with which she had opened her discourse. I recalled her threat to take the sapphire as well as her sister's hand which wore it, and silently wondered yet again why such a minor token was worth the enmity. As if she knew the course of my thoughts, she said, "I cuidna do it, laddie. I cuidna take th' finger wot bore ol' Service's sapphire. It were bloody 'ard t' pry orf 'er, bu' I couldna sp'il me sister's carcase. I'd kilt 'er, lad. I cuidna do th' bloody thing!"

Service's sapphire? It had been Edgar Service who had inducted a twelve-year old stowaway into piracy those many years ago. Now her mood came into stark relief. What I had taken for a guileless mien was that wistful smile which so often disguises pensive melancholy, and that which I had read for vulnerability was in fact far more dangerous to the spirit and soul of a pirate. In the flickering lights of the pub, I saw that there lay in Morgan Corbye a seed, a mere grain but with the potential to sprout into a pernicious weed, a seed of conscience. However, never before had Morgan Corbye been more wrong. At that moment aboard the Grey Raven, her sister's compassionless surgeon was cleansing a deep knife wound with turpentine and sealing it with hot tar with complete disregard for the whiskeyed moans of his patient. Although her recuperation would be long and fraught with pain, Kat Corbye lived.

Peril At Port Ryffe

We had been at sea the summer long, provisioning ourselves from what beneficent Chance placed in our path, knew no dearth of any stuff save the dried mangoes which were a favourite with the Captain, and only put into land for maintenance and some well-contained recreation. Yet for all our idyll, Capt. Corbye took often to her cabin, there to be found frequently in a brooding, dark mood and poring over her charts. When the zephyrs of late August filled our sails, we set a course upon her rigid instruction and likewise held back from any raids, instead performing a series of short hops from port to port along the coast. An undercurrent of confusion circulated among the men for it seemed that the Captain had a plan but had not made us privy to it, and acting the roles of respectable citizens for a month's duration taxed us sorely though we strove to follow her orders expecting her intentions to be revealed. That we paid our bills and kept a clean slate on shore did not go unnoticed by the townspeople, and tongues began to wag until some were saying that we had renounced our pirating ways, all the while wondering by what means we had obtained our seeming fortunes.

The tide of gossip among the citizenry rippled outward and came to wash against the hull of the Grey Raven where she lay in a hidden harbour, her captain also in a sullen mood and for much the same reasons as those which affected Morgan Corbye. Two years had flown since last the sisters Corbye had met, and that Morgan was described to be revelling in plenty set like a fishbone crosswise in the throat of Katherine. Kat surveyed her charts with the keenest eye to the tides and an instinct for winds. Indeed as she suspected, her sister's course implied that the Winged Adventure was making for Port Ryffe.

To say that there existed an animosity between the sisters would be to do an injustice to a resentment and conflict so venomous that it stopped just short of deadly, and that because Morgan plainly took greater glee in humiliating Kat than could have been exacted by killing her outright. Kat, on the other side, felt no such sophisticated constraints and was prevented from demonstrating her passion by somewhat lesser skills with sword and knife. Yet despite having been bested in every encounter with her rival, she was not to be deterred from planning further assaults upon her twin, as always hoping to catch her in an unguarded moment. She had drawn blood on several occasions, in sufficient flow that it emboldened her and perhaps inspired a tendency toward ill-considered action as it did now. The Grey Raven took a heading toward Port Ryffe, her captain blithely unaware that she was being led into a trap.

*     *     *     *     *

Shortly before our arrival in Port Ryffe, Morgan Corbye called together the crew of the Winged Adventure and let it be known that they had served without foreknowledge as instruments in her plan. Her justification for secrecy soon smoothed over any resentment we might have felt at not having been taken into her trust; our belief in the rumour we had helped to start was crucial to its success. Capt. Corbye had dipped heavily into the ship's coffers in confidence only with Robin Penn, our one-legged bursar and her most trusted confidant, funding our on-shore revels in a manner which lent us the temporary appearance of having come by a vast windfall. We had in fact done well over the summer, though the mass of our wealth was but an illusion, chum tossed in our wake to draw a certain shark to the gaff. Should the Captain's plan succeed (and we had no cause to think that it would do otherwise), we would be reimbursed from the chests of the Grey Raven, our autumnal carousals paid in full or more.

We dropped anchor at the limb of a small estuary where low tide gave but inches to spare for the Winged Adventure's keel, and a handful of men set out in a jollyboat to put in upon a steep and rocky shore. Atop the bank, this land rolled back into a tangle of trees and thorny vines which without the service of cutlass and machete was nigh impenetrable by any creature larger than a rabbit. Upon the orders of the Captain, we made a foray into the interior at a heading of SSW to twice the length of a rope brought for the purpose of taking a measure. There, we scouted out a large rock on which we took a compass bearing and paced off its distance from our previous mark. From point to point we progressed until we had charted a route to an indistinct but identifiable feature where with no caution to conceal the evidence of our presence (again under the Captain's direction), we dug a pit and buried a small wooden hamper laden with a jumble of precious metals. "Bait," explained the Captain, "needs must suit th' fish."

At the moment of our emergence from the forested zone, filthy and with shovels over our shoulders, Kat Corbye had climbed into the rigging of the Grey Raven some distance off and with spyglass determined that we had been up to some mischief she felt compelled to investigate at the first opportunity. To that end, we provided her with the occasion by sailing 'round a promontory to the east, there to tuck into a cove where we were fairly well concealed. Canny as a fox, she did not at once make her approach. In fact, we kept our station for three days, taking watches both day and night from cover on the shingle. She stayed well off, the ship's lanterns mere points of light in the darkness and her masts naught but a faint fringe on the horizon by day. At five bells o' the forenoon of the fourth day, she made her move and sailed boldly forth, presuming us to be again on the move to our next port of call.

For three nights and days, Morgan Corbye and the bo'sun (himself a fine swordsman) had kept themselves out of sight on land whilst the Winged Adventure was hove to, and little did the Captain's twin know that when she anchored the Grey Raven well into the deeper portion of the cove, our sleek barque was turning tide and wind to advantage. Kat Corbye went ashore in the company of but two other sailors, leaving her crew in a vulnerable position which we were quick to exploit. We fell upon them swiftly from astern, making off with what loot our boats would hold and leaving the ketch's crew trussed and stacked like cordwood in the ship's filthy hold.

Upon making landfall, Kat sent her two men ahead following our well-trodden line and when neither reported any evidence that some of our crew might have stayed behind, she cast caution aside and went herself at an expeditious pace into a small grove of trees where she found a stone, flat-faced and canted at an angle at the roots of one and disturbed ground at its base. "'Tis 'ere they've left summat," she said, "an' frae 'ere 'tis we wot will take it. Dig, ye dogs, an' quick about it!" The sailors fell to the work and shortly brought Morgan Corbye's hamper to the light. Its weight required the two to carry it together from the woodland to the shore where Kat ordered it laid among the rocks and then in an unconsidered move sent her meagre retinue again into the brush to hunt after rabbits, a suggestion inspired by their discovery of a trap which we had deliberately left behind. It was not long before the pair was laid out between logs and quite oblivious to the world, sent into dreamless slumber by our bo'sun and his Captain.

Kat at that moment was tucking a particularly attractive sapphire-set piece into the security of her bosom, for her dispatch of the sailors had not been entirely well-intentioned. That the crew needed meat and other provisions was fact and a few rabbits would have been a welcome supplement, but fairness with her crew was not a trait Kat Corbye shared with her sister Morgan and whenever possible, she made arrangements to skim the cream from Fortune's cup unobserved by other eyes. Given wholly to greed, the passage of time was naught to her as like Midas, she fingered the contents of the hamper, selecting the most portable goods to go into her personal keeping, and thus allowed Morgan to come upon her with stealth from behind. Her first awareness of her sister's presence was of a sword point pressing firmly upon her spine between the bones of her shoulders and her second, the sudden release from its prickling pain. In the next instant, the flat of the blade caught her on the side of the head and sent her sprawling, her unconscious form disposed upon the rocks in a graceless pose from the force of the blow.

The fracas had not gone unnoticed by the Winged Adventure's crew, back aboard their own ship with such stores as they had brought from the Grey Raven, and four men had set out in our second jollyboat to come to the Captain's side. Morgan Corbye was not yet done with her sister; she had ordered buckets of offal and fish guts brought to land, there to be dumped in quantity over Kat where she lay. "Leave 'er t' th' gulls," she said, "an' may they get a bellyache o' peckin' at 'er."

Thus we sailed from the encounter, Morgan Corbye again victorious and relishing the ignominies she had committed upon the hapless Kat, our stores and coffers replenished beyond the degree of their former depletion, and no loss of life or limb on either side of the feud. Yet all was not as cheerful as it might have been within our pirate's Elysium when at nine days out, our Captain took inventory of the contents of the wooden hamper which had proved her sister's undoing. Louder than the lapping of the waves of the season's first storm and the wind snapping in our sails, the curses emanating from her cabin struck all hands with foreboding.  "Me ring! Me bloody sapphire ring! I'll be 'avin' 'er 'ead on a pike, th' cesspot! A pox on ye, Kat Corbye! Ye've gone an' pinched me bloody sapphire! I'll be 'avin' it back, ye rot-gilled bottom feeder! Aye, an' th' 'and wot wears it! We shall meet, o sister mine,  an' on me sworn oath, ye'll regret when ye was borned."

Spider Island

Very little inspires Captain Morgan Corbye to loathing or disgust, those sentiments reserved for government representatives the likes of Franklin Beale, her arch foe. However, on the occasion of putting the Winged Adventure into a small island cove for careening, it was soon to be discovered that spiders rank close alongside the officious Harbourmaster.

Whilst ship's bursar Robin Penn watched over the sailors hard at work scraping the ship's barnacled hull lest in their enthusiasm for the task they might damage the wood, the Captain took it upon herself to head up a provisions party. Hoping at the very least for a few rabbits to relieve the diet of salt beef and dried fish the crew had taken aboard following their last raid, Capt. Corbye brought with her the ship's best archer, Padraic Alane. Though as a Scot, she damned him for an Irishman whenever his shots went wide of the mark, Paddy had bagged two brace, almost enough for a good stew, and was bending his bow in the hopes of a fifth when a shout of profoundly profane invective caused him to flinch and release the arrow prematurely. "'Tis a great bloody bastard o' a hairy bleedin' spider is gone down me shirt! O, 'elp me! Come get it orf me, ye cowards! It's atween me bloody damned boosums an' I canna get holt o' th' bastard!"

To a man, the crew froze in place, uncertain whether it was best to leave our Captain to the spider or risk losing a limb to her sword for a misplaced hand. It was Paddy Alane who came to her ultimate rescue, nocking an arrow, the tip of which he had blunted by inserting it into the first soft thing he could find before letting it fly as gently as possible to its target. With a shocked expression upon her sun-browned face, the Captain gave one brief look at the mushy remains of a mangled banana slug upon her chest, then peered into her linens and said, "Paddy, ye're a guid lad an' me saviour. I make o' ye now a 'onorary Scotsman, an' nevermore wi' damn ye fer Irish." Thus did Spider Island come to be so named.

Occupation Of Port Ryffe

Two years had passed since we last berthed at Port Ryffe, there to take on victuals, but before we had set sail again on that occasion, chance brought our captain into close contact with her deadliest rival and twin, Katherine. The encounter had left a scar on the captain's hand and the taste of gall on her tongue, a rancor directed as much at the port's government as at her sister for the matter of having harboured her. The captain had sworn vengeance, exacting it upon her sibling when another circumstance brought the two together, yet the score had not been settled with the official bodies at Port Ryffe to the captain's satisfaction. Thus each man of the Winged Adventure's crew knew that salt meat and dried fruits were not Capt. Corbye's sole interests when she laid the chart and ordered all hands to make sail toward that shore.

Coincidence is a tool in the Devil's hand. None would have thought that Morgan Corbye's plan to relieve the port of its rum stores and to lighten the government coffer-chest would bring her to a tete-a-tete with yet another old foe, Harbourmaster Franklin Beale. Engaged at a gaming table in the local pub, Beale was observed exchanging the publican's dice for his own shaved pair from behind a dusty curtain. Stifling the sneeze she felt building when she let the draperies fall, Capt. Corbye slipped into the darkened alley behind the tavern and brought her men together in conference.

"We've a change o' plans, lads. We're takin' Port Ryffe. Back t' th' ship right quick, an' bring th' irons. That cheatin' scoundrel Beale wants some teachin' in th' way o' 'onesty. You," and she addressed Robin Penn, our one-legged bursar, as she threw a purse of coins to him, "see to it 'e stays at table. Lose, but lose wisely. Keep th' sums in 'is favour, but just. You," she said, motioning to your narrator, the sorriest excuse for a pirate of the lot, "bait that mealy codfish they calls guv'nor down here, an' I don't care how but do ye no' force it! Tell 'im 'is auld mither is sickenin' t' die or summat. Nae, tell 'im th' bloody truth o' it! Tell 'im auld Beale's been cheatin' at dice an' someone's lookin' t' 'ave a piece o' is 'ide fer it. Beale's 'is pet, is Beale. That'll bring 'im. Get on! Go!" I sped off on foot and was not privy to the remainder of the Captain's outline.

Port Ryffe is not sizeable and therefore is managed exclusively by the Governor, an aide who is little more than a secretary, and two constables. Each, save the innocent and rather naive aide, has a personal method for lining his pockets with an undue portion of the common man's wages. It was the captain's surmise that Harbourmaster Beale had devised the means to serve his own interests at the cost of the local government and, knowing this, the Governor and his allies would undoubtedly treat any proof of disreputable dealings as an opportunity to discredit the very man who sought to profit at their expense.

It was quite easy to convince the Governor that he should be witness to such a criminal act, and that he should bring both constables to the pub to support the accusation it was his intention to make. All three men came along nicely, followed by the aide who was anxious to see how the due process of the law would be effected. When all had arrived and were grouped around the tables, Robin Penn, upon a signal from Captain Corbye again at her station behind the velvet, rose upon his good leg and knocked over his stool with his peg. "Ye bloody b-----d!" he swore. "Cheat a one-legged man outer 'is pittance? Ye're a rascal wot deserves throwin' t' th' 'ogs wi' th' rest o' th' swill!"

At that moment, seven members of the Winged Adventure's crew and the Captain herself sprang from the shadows and, two to a man, pinned them to the ground where they were shackled. Only the aide was spared. Justice was indeed served as all four agents of the goverment were frog-marched to the piggery, there to be rolled in the mud and subsequently put on public display through a hot September afternoon, the mix of earth and pig-soil hardening in the sun as rum and ale were served to all comers. The young aide was heard to plead with Capt. Corbye, "Oh, please! Take me to be a pirate!" but the good Captain refused, saying, "Ye'll make a better guv'nor when yer time comes, lad. Much better by far."

Cutlass

"There's t' be no killin,' an' any man wot does will answer t' me, by Gawd! Ye'll lay 'em out in any way ye can, make 'em fast t' summat, an' ye'll leave 'erself t' me!" The fire in Morgan Corbye's eyes glittered with reflection of stars. The winds had borne us to a chance encounter with the Captain's oldest rival, neatly berthed on the opposite side of a small island. The keen eyes of the dog watch had caught the flicker of a lantern in the dark, too high above the water to be coming from a shack or other habitation, and by maneuvering the Winged Adventure so that the faint moonlight favoured us, the Captain picked out the definitive silhouette of a ketch drawn close to shore. We were near enough to her to know that we had not been seen, for had her crew been alert to our presence, a hue and cry would have arisen immediately as the ship so berthed was none other than the Grey Raven and the foe the Captain's own sister Katherine, known also as Kat.

We dropped anchor in the protection of a small bay, lowered the jollyboats alongside and the men slid silently into them, the Captain in the foremost. Neither splash of water nor clatter of arms broke the crystalline bowl of night as the oars slipped into the waves and moved us forward. We hugged the shadows until we were nearly upon her, trusting luck to cover us as we crossed through exposed water. Our agile bo'sun clambered aboard the ketch by the stern, and dropped lines for the remaining men who followed, but before our party had got themselves all up, the shifting of weight brought us unwanted attention. As the crews laid about with whatever weaponry they had to hand, Morgan Corbye cleaved a swath through the melee to face her sister at the helm. Kat Corbye met her twin's dagger with a cutlass, but was taken down by our Captain's nimble swiftness and skill with the knife and was assured a sound sleep of a few hours by a belaying pin applied with force against the side of her head.

Demoralized by the fall of their captain, the Grey Raven's crew surrendered and were bound according to plan. In the light of day, Morgan Corbye stripped to her shirt and leapt overboard, and not an eye failed to follow her lithe form. She swam thrice around the ketch and climbed back aboard, the sea-washed muslin transparent and clinging to her skin. When I questioned her later in regard to the plunge, "T'was fer luck," she told me, adding, "Ed'ard Teach done it wi'out 'is 'ead, they says."

Morgan Corbye claimed nothing but her sister's cutlass from this raid, though blood was spilt on both sides, albeit without any serious injury. "Me prize is wot I done t' 'erself's dignity. Aye, she'll be smartin' frae that 'til we meets again."

Tortuga Bound!

"Heave! Heave, ye moulderin' codfish! H'ist them sails! Th' wind be in our favour an' we be Tortuga bound!" The bo'sun's cry in the night, harsh as the salt-weathered canvas, lifted the spirits of the Winged Adventure's crew as they hauled upon the lines and the sails filled. Morgan Corbye's hand was on the tiller, and not a man would dare to doubt her strength, for all her slightness of stature. The barque sprang forward in the dark, the captain taking her on a tack for speed. The ship pierced the swells like a porpoise, her crew barefoot to a man, the better to grip the deck as she leapt and dove. Your unfortunate biographer had come topside to observe, a decision I was coming to regret, bundled against cold and spray to which the sailors seemed to be impervious. This was no summer zepyhr bearing us along. It was a building storm and the captain was clearly in her element, sweat beading on her brow despite the chill.

By morning, the gale had subsided and the captain relinquished the tiller to her helmsman and went below for some much-needed sleep. I went to my bunk as well, with many thoughts to keep me wakeful, for moreso than the average mariner, the pirate must have exceptional skill at sailing if he is to stay ahead of those who would persecute him. He must be more cunning, more adaptable, stronger and quicker, and he must have greater endurance. Too, he must be a better swordsman than his foe if he is to survive and succeed. Yet what brings a person so gifted to the life of piracy instead of normal business? I turn to Captain Corbye for the answer: "I needs me adventure an' independence," says she, and none can claim she goes without either in any degree.