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CARIBBEE
Barbados, 1648. The lush and deadly Caribbean paradise, domain of rebels and freeholders, of brigands, bawds and buccaneers.
An assured, literate saga, the novel is brimming with the rough and tumble characters who populated the early American colonies.
The powerful story line, based on actual events, also puts the reader in the midst of the first major English slave auction in the Americas, and the first slave revolt. We see how plantation slavery was introduced into the English colonies, setting a cruel model for North America a few decades later, and we experience what it was like to be a West African ripped from a rich culture and forced to slave in the fields of the New World. We also see the unleashed greed of the early Puritans, who burned unruly slaves alive, a far different truth from that presented in sanitized history books. Finally, we witness how slavery contributed to the failure of the first American revolution, as well as to the destruction of England's hope for a vast New World empire.
We also are present at the birth of the buccaneers, one-time cattle hunters who banded together to revenge a bloody Spanish attack on their home, and soon became the most feared marauders in the New World. The story is mythic in scope, with the main participants being classic American archetypes--a retelling of the great American quest for freedom and honor. The major characters are based on real individuals, men and women who came West to the New World to seek fortune and personal dignity.
Publisher's Weekly said, "This action-crammed, historically factual novel . . . is a rousing read about the bad old marauding days, ably researched by Hoover."
"ACTION-CRAMMED, HISTORICALLY FACTUAL ... A ROUSING READ"
-PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"METICULOUS . . . COMPELLING"
--KIRKUS REVIEWS
"IT SHOULD ESTABLISH THOMAS HOOVER IN THE FRONT RANK OF WRITERS OF HISTORICAL FICTION"
--MALCOLM BOSSE author of THE WARLORD
BOOKS BY THOMAS HOOVER
Nonfiction
Zen Culture
The Zen Experience
Fiction
The Moghul
Caribbee
Project Daedalus
Project Cyclops
Life Blood
Syndrome
All free as e-books at
ZEBRA BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp. 475 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10016 Copyright 1985 by Thomas Hoover. Published by arrangement with Doubleday and Co., Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews. First Zebra Books Printing: December 1987 Printed in the United States of America
Key Words:
Slavery, slaves, Caribbean, sugar, buccaneers, pirates, Barbados, Jamaica, Spanish Gold, Spanish Empire, Port Royal, Barbados
Early existence in the Caribbean was brutal, and at first these immigrants struggled merely to survive. Then, through an act of international espionage, they stole a secret industrial process from the Catholic countries that gave them the key to unimagined wealth. The scheme these pious Puritans used to realize their earthly fortune required that they also install a special new attitude: only certain peoples may claim full humanity. Their profits bequeathed a mortgage to America of untold future costs.
The Caribbean shown here was a dumping ground for outcasts and adventurers from many nations, truly a cockpit of violence, greed, drunkenness, piracy, and voodoo. Even so, its English colonists penned a declaration of independence and fought a revolutionary war with their homeland over a hundred years before the North American settlements. Had they respected the rights of mankind to the same degree they espoused them, the face of modern America might have been very different.
The men and women in this story include many actual and composite individuals, and its scope is faithful to the larger events of that age, though time has been compressed somewhat to allow a continuous narrative.
To Liberty and Justice for all.
The Caribbean
The first day passed with nothing. Through a cloudless sky the sun scorched the empty sand for long hours, then dropped into the vacant sea. That night lightning played across
Jacques le Basque, the dense-bearded bear of a man who was their leader, declared in his guttural French that this was a historic moment, one to be savored, and passed a dark onion-flask of brandy among the men. Now would begin their long-planned campaign of revenge against the Spaniards, whose infantry from Santo Domingo had once burned out their settlement, murdered innocents. It was, he said, the start of a new life for them all.
The green wood sputtered indecisively, then crackled alive, sending a gray plume skyward through the damp morning air. Jacques circled the fire triumphantly, his dark eyes reflecting back the blaze, before ordering the men to ready their dugouts in the brushy camouflage along the shore. As they moved to comply, he caught the sleeve of a young Englishman who was with them and beckoned him back.
The young man had been part of their band for almost five years and was agreed to be their best marksman, no slight honor among men who lived by stalking wild cattle in the forest. Unlike the others he carried no musket this morning, only a long flintlock pistol wedged into his belt. In the flickering light, he looked scarcely more than twenty, his face not yet showing the hard desperation of the others. His hair was sandy rust and neatly trimmed; and he alone among them wore no animal hides-- his doublet was clearly an English cut, though some years out of fashion, and his sweat-soiled breeches had once been fine canvas. Even his boots, now weathered and cracked from salt, might years before have belonged to a young cavalier in Covent Garden.
He moved to help Jacques stoke the fire and pile on more green limbs. Though the blaze and its plume should have been easily visible to the passing frigate by now, the sleepy lookout seemed almost to fail to notice. The ship had all but passed them by before garbled shouts from its maintop finally sounded over the foggy waters. Next came a jumble of orders from the quarterdeck, and moments later the vessel veered, its bow turning into the wind, the mainsail quickly being trimmed.
As it steered into the bay, Jacques slapped at the buzzing gnats around them and yelled out a Spanish plea that they were marooned seamen, near death. As he examined the frigate through the morning fog, he grunted to himself that she was small, barely a hundred tons, scarcely the rich prize they'd braved the wide Caribbean in dugouts for.
But now a longboat had been launched, and two seamen in white shirts and loose blue caps were rowing a young mate toward the pair of shadowy figures huddled against the smoky pyre at the shore. Le Basque laughed quietly and said something in a growl of French about allowing the ship's officers to die quickly, to reward their hospitality.
The younger man wasn't listening. Through the half-light he was carefully studying the longboat. Now he could make out the caps of the seamen, woolen stockings loosely flopping to the side. Then he looked back at the ship, seamen perched in its rigging to stare, and thought he heard fragments of a familiar tongue drifting muffled over the swells. Next a crowd of passengers appeared at the taffrail, led by a well-to-do family in ruffs and taffetas.
They weren't Spanish. They couldn't be.
The man wore a plumed hat and long curls that reached almost to his velvet doublet, London fashions obvious at hundreds of yards. The woman, a trifle stout, had a tight yellow bodice and long silk cape, her hair tied back. Between them was a girl, perhaps twelve, with long chestnut ringlets. He examined the rake of the ship once more, to make doubly sure, then turned to Jacques.
"That ship's English. Look at her. Boxy waist. Short taffrail. Doubtless a merchantman out of Virginia, bound for Nevis or Barbados." He paused when he realized Jacques was not responsive. Finally he continued, his voice louder. "I tell you there'll be nothing on her worth having. Wood staves, candle wax, a little salt fish. I know what they lade."
"But no silver. There's no English coin out here in the Americas, never has been. And who knows what could happen? Let some ordnance be set off, or somebody fire her, and we run the risk of alerting the whole Spanish fleet."
The younger man stared at him blankly for a moment, feeling his face go chill. Behind him, in the brush, he heard arguments rising up between the English hunters and the French over what to do. During his years with them they had killed wild bulls by the score, but never another Englishman.
"Jacques, we're not Spaniards. This is not going to be our way." He barely heard his own words. Surely, he told himself, we have to act honorably. That was the unwritten code in the New World, where men made their own laws.
"Anglais, I regret to say you sadden me somewhat." Le Basque was turning, mechanically. "I once thought you had the will to be one of us. But now . . ." His hand had slipped upward, a slight motion almost invisible in the flickering shadows. But by the time it reached his gun, the young man's long flintlock was already drawn and leveled.
"Jacques, I told you no." The dull click of a misfire sounded across the morning mist.
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