Free On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers Page A

not, to come slanting up westward from the open Atlantic beyond Barbados, ripping around Cuba and up into the Gulf of Mexico like spinning drill bits across a pane of glass, creating and splitting and even totally obliterating islands in their paths.
    But it was July now, and the New Providence harbor was still crowded with sloops and schooners and brigantines, and even a couple of three-masted ships, and cooking fires still smudged the air above the huts and shacks and sailcloth tents along the beach, and the whores and black market wholesale buyers still sauntered among the crews and watched eagerly for incomingcraft; for word had it that Woodes rogers had been appointed governor of the island by King George, and was due to arrive with a royal Navy escort any day now, bringing the King’s Pardon for any pirates that wanted to renounce piracy, and the punishments prescribed by law for any that didn’t.
    The philosophy commonest among the New Providence residents in the early weeks of July was most frequently summed up in the phrase “Wait and see.” A few, such as Philip Davies, were determined to be gone by the time rogers arrived, and a few others, chiefly Charlie Vane and his crew, had resolved to stay and forcibly resist this incursion from the authorities across the Atlantic; but most of the pirates were inclined to accept the offer of amnesty, and eliminate from their futures the specter of the ceremonial silver oar carried by the executioner when he escorted a condemned pirate to the gibbet and the clergyman and the crowd and the last knot the pirate would ever have dealings with. And after all, if they didn’t find life under the new regime an improvement, they could always steal a boat and follow the wind to some other island. Two hundred years ago the Spanish had made a point of stocking all their islands with pigs and cattle, and a man could do a lot worse than to live on some unmonitored shore, subsisting on fruit and fish and meat dried over the buccan fires; the buccaneer way of life had effectively ended a century ago when the Spaniards drove all such harmless beach gypsies off their islands and onto the sea—and the Spaniards had soon regretted it, for the evicted buccaneers quickly became seagoing predators—but the islands were still there.
    Oranges stippled the jungle now like bright gold coins on green satin and crushed velvet, and even the people who’d been raised in England followed the examples of the other races and graced their plain fare with tamarinds, papayas and mangoes; avocados by the hundreds hung fat and darkly green in the trees,often falling and thudding heavily to the sand and startling pirates who weren’t accustomed to seeing the things in the season when they were ripe.
    Cookery, in fact, had become a bigger part of daily life in the New Providence settlement, both because the imminent arrival of Woodes rogers meant at least the postponement of piratical ventures, leaving people the time to pay more attention to what they ate, and because the ship’s cook of the
Vociferous Carmichael
had not only proven to be competent, but had undertaken to prepare batches big enough to feed several crews in exchange for help in procuring the cooking supplies. In the three weeks since the
Carmichael
had arrived, for example, there had been seven “bouillabaisse endeavors,” in which just about everyone, pirates and whores and black marketeers and children, waded out into the harbor at low tide, armed with nets and buckets, and dragged out of the sea enough animals of one sort and another for the cook to make a vast fish stew, and when the stuff was bubbling in the several huge pots over the fire on the beach, pungently aromatic with garlic and onion and saffron, they said incoming ships would smell the stew long before they’d see the island.
    And as the month wore on and the days grew to their longest, at dinnertime more and more people had been