Free The Buccaneers by Iain Lawrence Page B

stove in. And just below here”—he slapped the deck—”there's a ball stuck in the hull like a cork.”
    “Can we repair it?” asked Butterfield.
    “We can patch it.” Abbey coughed. He spat out a dribble of seawater. “But we'll have to do more than that before we load at Trinidad.”
    Again he went over the side, and he plugged the holes with canvas and tar. But still the sea came in. We were pumping for an hour in every watch by the time we sighted the old Spanish Main ten days out from Jamaica. Butter-field went down to uncurtain his windows, and with trees and green hills at our side, we worked our way east. By daywe beat into the trades, and at night we rode breezes that smelled of rivers and jungles.
    But the leak quickened in the hull until, pumping both night and day, we worried that we'd sink before we ever got to Trinidad. Abbey said, as though the thought were his own, that a third shot must have hit us. “We'll have to dry her out,” he said.
    Horn knew a place, a broad beach at a river's mouth on the shore of Venezuela. It had been used for centuries, he said, by the Spaniards and the buccaneers. Then he clapped me on the shoulder. “You might even find doubloons in the sand,” he said, grinning ear to ear.
    It was a lovely bay he took us to, the sort of place I'd always conjured in my mind whenever I'd thought of the Indies. Coconut trees leaned over a strip of silver sand, their huge fronds spread like parasols. At the head of the bay, mangroves lined the shore, standing on their roots as though they sought to climb above the water. Beyond them was a chaos of green: trees and vines and ferns all tangled in a mass. And the river twisted from the vegetation, brown as dirt, like a living snake coming from the dank, green thickness.
    A burst of bright-colored birds rose at the dropping of our anchor. We furled the sails, then flocked ashore like children. Some swam, some took the boats, but all of us went. Or all but Horn. He rigged a hammock for himself between the shrouds and the foremast, and put an awning above it. There he slept, in the shade, planning to dream— he said—of native girls.
    We played bowls with coconuts; we splashed in waterwarmed by sun. I dug in the sand but found no doubloons. It would have been a paradise if it hadn't been for the hordes of flies.
    I had never seen anything like them in England. Long-legged things, armed with spikes that sucked our blood, they flew with a high and irritating whine in clouds about our heads. Abbey called them mosquitoes. They drove us from the beach in the end, and we set to work to heel the
Dragon
down.
    We shifted the cannons all to one side, then stretched a line from the capstan to the masthead and down to a mangrove that was as thick as a barrel. The tree's trunk was ringed by scars, the marks of ropes, like those I'd once seen round the neck of a man who had been hanged. Most of the rope marks were ancient but some were very new, and we spaced our own lines between them. Then we hauled round the capstan, and the
Dragon
lay on her side like a great wooden beast.
    Uncle Stanley took it into his head that he would like to catch a parrot to take home to England. So he set off up the river in the dory, with dimwitted Mudge to row, as I and the others scraped the schooner's hull.
    We peeled away acres of grass, tons of thick-shelled barnacles, mussels, and squirting sponges that popped under our feet. Abbey found the source of our leak: a shattered plank far below the waterline. “Well, you were right,” he said when he took me there to see it. “Only a cannonball could have done this.” He knelt on the round of the hull and pressed his fist against the plank. He could nearly push right through it.
    “You see?” he said. “They hit us three times.”
    “Or more,” I said.
    “No, only three.” He looked up at me, his good eye closed against the sun. “Unless there's something on the other side.”
    “No,” I said. All our hits, I