A Pirate Story
by L.M. Spann
Leaned against a palm tree, the griot rubbed the smooth scar tissue where his thumb once met his hand. His audience sat in clusters scattered around the clearing, facing the mossy stump that served as a pulpit. Many villagers had heard the pirate story before—a few elders were alive when the ship of half-starved strangers sailed to their island—but the story is told and retold because the griot won’t let the people in it be forgotten. They were his family.
The griot and his drummer made their way from the treeline to the pulpit as the crowd settled. He sat on the stump and began. “I’m an old man now, but I was a boy when my part in this story began.” He held up his left hand and waved his four fingers, “I had all ten fingers then, but I would be dead if it weren’t for our captain, so I’ll start with her story.”
* * *
In a network of nine villages, the captain’s village was at the most western end of the river that connected them. One day, three men appeared at their village wall. All three wore dark robes that were too heavy for the heat and humidity of the season. Two of the three had hair like a decorative bush-bird—white and thin and wispy and sticking straight out in every direction—their skin was peeling and red as palm oil. The third looked like he came from the neighboring, northern tribes. His skin was a rich brown, but his hair, which should have been braided to indicate his marital status, was shorn to the scalp. He was drenched in sweat from the heavy robes he wore.
The captain was an adolescent at the time of the strangers’ arrival, so she didn’t understand the alchemy of ruling villages and kingdoms and adults. At that age, she only noticed that her mother frequently sought an audience with the village elders, and wouldn’t let her play in the tall grass beyond the village wall as she used to.
The two, red, peeling men were priests. They spoke Portuguese and the northern tribesman who traveled with them was their translator. Although, in the captain’s village, there was no need for translators. The food—which was prepared in a tradition even more ancient than the village elders, and shared with the three strangers in a welcome feast—enabled anyone who ate it to understand, speak and read any language once heard.
On the night of the welcome feast, conversation between the elders and the three strangers prompted many villagers to keep their children close. No children played in the tall grass beyond the village walls anymore.
Over the years, the Portuguese priests and their translator built a small church where the tall grass used to be. No villagers visited the church, but everyone noticed when more poorly dressed men began to crowd the Portuguese church. Their heavy clothing and red, peeling flesh marked them as strangers to the land. For some villagers, this physical rejection of the environment was enough of a sign to deem the outsiders a bad omen, and even dangerous. Many demanded that the elders take action—banish them, send warriors to burn their camp in the night, go to war. The suggestions were plentiful but the elders refused, suggesting that negotiation was possible; reassuring villagers that the Portuguese had agreed to compensate the village well for allowing them to inhabit the land so close to their village walls.
Eventually, an encampment developed around the church. The small buildings being erected began to form a protective barrier between the church and the village – as if to keep the villagers out, as if the church came before the village in the order of things, as if the church was something worth protecting. Many villagers came to many conclusions about the construction of the encampment, but it ultimately drove all of them to demand the elders take action against the growing number of Portuguese. The elders agreed, so the village went to war with the settlement.
The Portuguese had loud, dangerous weapons that no warrior had seen before. So many died that the elders, who would never admit defeat, agreed to a stalemate. Negotiations began, but it was clear the strangers’ weapons gave them the upperhand. The elders sent messengers to the neighboring villages, requesting their help in defeating this strange, new enemy, but it was too late. The strangers had forced their roots to grow in foreign soil, and the captain’s village was only the first to suffer the consequences.
One morning, a crowd of ships were seen bobbing along the sea’s horizon—the Portuguese had arrived in much larger numbers.
* * *
“Our paths would cross not long after those ships arrived.
“I was separated from my mother in a Portuguese raid on my village. I saw her being dragged into a small hut filled with other women and never saw her again. I was loaded into a roughly assembled cart with other children and taken to a Portuguese port along the coast.” The griot didn’t like dwelling in memories of the time after his mother or before the captain. “This is when I met the captain.”
* * *
The port was where hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were cargo—it was the largest market I’d ever seen and almost every product was a person.
When I first saw the captain she was a young woman—maybe the same age as my youngest aunty at the time. We were on a ship, in a wooden box constructed above deck for housing cargo. She was busy whispering to a group of young women—probably planning our escape even then—and I was trying not to cry again. I’d seen some children being beaten by the ship’s crew members for crying too much. I must have taken my eyes off of her for a moment because I didn’t notice when she approached me.
She said something in a language I couldn’t understand, so I didn’t reply—just stared at her round face. How had it stayed so round? I wondered. Most of the other adults I’d seen at the port grew thinner by the day. We weren’t starved, but we weren’t fed well enough to be so chubby-cheeked. As a child, even I lost some of youth’s fluff because of the poor living conditions.
The woman repeated herself, more urgently this time.
“My name?” I guessed tentatively.
“Yoruba!” She exclaimed. “I thought you looked like a Yoruba boy!”
I was in shock. I hadn’t heard anyone speak the language since being separated from my mother. I burst into tears, she held my head in her arms, and I became her shadow from that day on. She told me about her village’s gift of language, and in the days that it took for all of us to be loaded onto the ship, the gifted woman discovered that many of us spoke languages that were mutually intelligible. We all came from different people but the same region. During that time, I learned the word ‘captain’ from overhearing the Portuguese. I asked her what the word meant, she told me, and I decided to call her Captain from then on.
Eventually, the wooden box above deck was filled to its capacity—about one hundred bodies—before it was unassembled and its planks repurposed. The adults were put below deck and the ship set sail.
We all suffered: prisoners and crew members alike fell ill from the filth and heat of the ship. Children were allowed to roam the ship freely, but the adults were only permitted above deck during the hottest point of the day, to avoid overheating. In that time, some crew members would wash the hold—rinsing away some of the rancid slurry that had accumulated below deck. It was not uncommon for a healthy crew member to go below deck and die from illness within three days—this was the severity of the filth.
While above deck, adults were forced to dance or exercise to prevent their muscles from atrophy. I remember watching the performances with the other children and feeling sick with rage. If someone refused to dance, they were strung up and beaten; sometimes, their thumbs would be put into a machine which tore the flesh, broke the bone and rendered the finger useless. A net hung from either side of the ship which I learned was there to prevent us from taking our own lives. I saw a Portuguese crew member throw himself overboard and into the net; his captain had him retrieved, whipped, and left to hang on a sail’s mast.
Some thought the Portuguese were planning to eat us, but what strength could our diseased and broken bodies offer them? Why embark on such a long journey? We did not know our fate—not even our captain, with her gift of language, had been able to overhear the crew’s plans for us—so it felt urgent that we begin to shape it.
We outnumbered the Portuguese captain and his crew by at least eighty, but the entirety of the ship had been outfitted to prevent our rebellion. The crew was heavily armed with muskets, and cannons sat on either side of the barricado above deck. The barricado was a large wooden wall which bisected the ship above and below deck to keep the men and women prisoners separated. In addition to this preventative measure, the men were restrained by iron shackles at the wrists and ankles and chained together in pairs at all times. I thought their hands and feet would be lost. Women were left unrestrained for easier access to their bodies—crew members took advantage of this almost daily which contributed to our broken spirits.
Below deck, the hold wasn’t tall enough for anyone but a child to stand up straight, so the adults were forced to sit in their own filth, backs bent and tightly packed together. Nonetheless, in the stench of the ship’s lower deck, a plan was whispered into action. Us children were used to carry messages between the men and women. This is how I lost my thumb—the Portuguese captain’s officer caught me whispering a message to a pair of Yoruba speaking men above deck and my thumb was torn off.
“Captain says, the next time they open the hold we’ll—”
“Você” a crew member shouted before I could finish delivering my message.
After that, the Portuguese captain forbade children from speaking, and our Captain began plaiting messages into our hair. Our plotting became silent and no more thumbs were lost. Our lives were still in danger, carrying those messages, but so much had already been taken from us that losing a life—even a child’s life—did not seem like an unnecessary risk in regaining at least some control over our fate. Captain assured me that even if our fate would be death in the battle to come, it would be our choice.
For a number of days—which I did not think to count—we allowed ourselves to remain prisoners; but one night, as I carried silent messages below deck from one side of the barricado to the other, a woman asked me in heavily Edo-accented Yoruba “When will we take the ship?” I froze. Children weren’t allowed to speak. Even worse, our captain told me to never stray from my path when delivering a message. It was important that we kept our team of conspirators small to avoid being caught by the crew. It was the captain’s hope that others would join the rebellion spontaneously when the time came. Maybe, it was better that word had spread.
“Soon,” I said as quietly as I could before scurrying away.
On the day of the rebellion, our Captain told the four children to hide in the hold. Below deck, we could hear the violence above. Through the heat warped planks, I saw one of the Portuguese crewmen fall and be shot by a warrior who wielded a stolen weapon; the Portuguese crewman’s head landed right next to the crack I’d been peeking through, and the thud his fall made was followed by the loud crack of a musket firing. The Portuguese captain and his officer came hurtling down the ladder to the hold and I thought they’d come looking for us. The four of us scurried to the other side of the barricado, but the captain and his officer didn’t seem to be looking for anything but a place to hide. Two men who’d successfully unshackled themselves rushed down the ladder after the cowards and beat them to death. When they were done, the two men went back to the battle above and the four of us stayed below deck with those bloodied bodies until we heard the fighting come to an end.
“A mind can be lost as easily as a thumb, hand or foot. Best to treat them all with equal care.” That's what the Captain said. Accordingly, once the Portuguese were dead, we discarded their bodies, unchained every man, removed the netting from around the ship, tore down the barricado, washed the hold then ourselves with salt water, took stock of the ship’s food and water rations, and rested. Two more of our people died from sickness, but that was restful too. We held small ceremonies for our dead and gave their bodies to the large, carnivorous fish that had begun trailing our ship. Because they looked the same at sea as they did on land, we used the sun and stars to navigate, and the moon to mark the passing of time.
There were thirty of us left—four children and twenty-six adults—when the storm came. At first, we were grateful for the rain—we collected it in tin pots for drinking—but we didn’t know how to sail our enemy’s ship through a storm. Waves yawned and washed over the deck with no regard for us and all we’d suffered. The sails were open and our ship was nearly capsized by the strong winds and rough water; we lost six of our thirty.
Twenty-four of us lived through the storm—just me and twenty-three adults. I was adopted by twenty-three aunties and uncles. From then on, I think my survival became the new center of their focus. We were getting low on resources, but I slept with a full stomach every night. The captain’s cheeks had long lost their chubbiness.
A ship was sighted; it emerged from the fog that followed the storm and the morning. The vessel was so similar to the one we sailed that I thought we’d come across more Portuguese. Luckily, they were pirates.
Like us, they’d stolen a Portuguese ship. Unlike us, they were very familiar with the waters we sailed, details of Portuguese trading routes, and the nature of Portuguese trade. Captain was our translator and she told us that these pirates were once employed by the Portuguese to engage in warfare at sea—I’d never heard of such a thing. When their services were no longer needed, the Portuguese abandoned them at sea and the sea-warriors became pirates. Their disdain for the Portuguese must have been their reasoning for helping us. Our captain must have played into it while speaking with them because, instead of taking what resources we had for themselves and selling us back into the slave trade—which I learned extended beyond the Portuguese tribe—, these pirates taught us. What shores to avoid while evading re-enslavement, how to take advantage of the wind and the currents, how to identify and be identified as a pirates’ ship, how to wreck a passing ship for its resources, and so on. They shared stories about sea beasts that could swallow ships whole, Mami Watas who called men to their watery deaths, starving men desperate enough to catch sea turtles and drink their blood for sustenance, seafaring diseases that killed crews of two-hundred men, storms with waves capable of breaking ships in two, ships maned by ghost-crews, sea madness, deserted islands, crews who made their wealth attacking foreign vessels and selling their stolen cargo, and the like.
We gave the pirates cannon fodder and several barrels of sorghum crackers to show our gratitude. Their parting gift to us was a Portuguese map. We had no way of confirming the accuracy of the map, but having it was better than the aimless sailing we’d been doing—at least we knew what land to avoid.
Burdened with the knowledge gained from the pirates, our ship became restless. For ten days and nine nights, we prepared for the worst. The pirates told us that the Portuguese, and other tribes like them, were stealing land across the seven seas. We loaded our cannons with the few cannon balls we had, washed the deck and the hold daily to stave off disease and infection, and established rotating watch parties for surveillance throughout the days and nights.
We continued to sail and expected the worst. Nothing happened, but it felt as if any moment could and would bring a storm to swallow us whole, tentacled beasts to crush our ship in its grips, disease to reinfect us, starvation and dehydration to take us slowly, or another, less friendly, ship of pirates who would see us and see cargo—re-enslavement would be another death. On top of all that worry, our resources were running low again.
At dawn, after the ninth night of watch parties, I saw a ship appear along the horizon. I shook the uncle dozing off next to me and he scurried down the mast to alert the others. Captain decided to approach the ship. Our food, drinking water, even the hard sorghum crackers at the bottom of each emptied barrel was running low; we approached the ship because we could not starve. We applied our pirate lesson on shipwrecks, turning our sails to approach the ship head-on, loading and firing a cannon. We anchored our ship and fifteen people boarded the small rowing boat stored on our ship’s side.
It was odd that the ship’s crew had no response to our warning shot, but stomachs were empty and no one thought anything of it.
* * *
“This part of the story, I only know from what Captain told me as a child. A stench wafted from the larger ship’s deck.” the griot continued.
* * *
It was discovered that the ship our pirates approached was a former slaver’s ship—like our own. The bodies on board were lifeless and it was clear that at least three hundred of them had attempted to free themselves. The stench—which could now be smelt from our own ship’s deck—grew thicker as our pirates approached. It was worse than the hold; worse than the stench of excrement and heat and disease. Captain discovered that the smell was coming from open, rotting wounds teeming with plank worms. She thought there might be survivors in the piles of bodies scattered across the deck, but quickly realized the movement she’d seen was that of the worms wiggling as they feasted.
Captain was called to relieve the sparse contents of her stomach over the side of the ship.“Let’s be quick” she said, once recovered.
The small team searched the entirety of the ghostly ship for salvageable resources. The task of transferring resources from one ship to another was carried out silently; they made several trips between the two ships, and returned to ours with enough non-perishable food and clean (once boiled) drinking water to last us another thirty days. There was enough rum to supplement the food and water once it ran out—we would be drunk, but we would have something to fill our stomachs.
The decay of the bodies aboard the ship flooded their senses; the tears that filled their eyes were from the stench in the air and for all the death in the months since our first encounter with the Portuguese.
We used our new surplus of cannon balls to fire at the ship until it began to sink—it was the least we could do for the hundreds of lives lost.We departed the scene and continued our journey, but it was not lost on anyone that our fate could have been the same. If our rebellion had not gone as it did, we would have been a ship equally filled with death. The encounter gave us new resolve to find a place safe from the numerous and unnatural deaths we’d faced on our journey.
Twenty-eight more days came and went since our encounter with that ship. No more lives were lost. There were several storms, but we learned to sail through them. Captain claimed she saw a group of fish-men swimming alongside the ship during one of her night watches, leaping from the water and chattering amongst themselves. She translated some of their conversation for me and I told her she’d had too much rum.
We sailed away from the Portuguese, but we had no destination. Survival was enough—as our resources ran low again, Captain tasked some men with devising a way to catch the sea turtles we’d spotted.
Then we saw land unaccounted for in the Portuguese map we’d been gifted.
* * *
“This land was surrounded by the sea and filled with forest. This land was farther from home than I’d ever been and still I was reminded of home. The greens and blues and heat and rain and starchy, ground provisions still remind me of home.”
The griot stepped down from his mossy pulpit and allowed his drummer’s playing to serve as the story’s ending. The two headed towards the treeline and the griot felt grateful that he was still alive and able to tell this pirate story. He felt grateful to be an old man.
L. M. Spann is an Atlanta based writer. Find more of her creative writing on her website, https://www.lmspann.com/.