Pirates of Savannah: The Complete Trilogy - Colonial Historical Fiction Action Adventure (Pirates of Savannah (Adult Version))

  Pirates of Savannah: The Complete Trilogy - Colonial Historical Fiction Action Adventure (Pirates of Savannah (Adult Version))

  Lupo, Tarrin P.

  Porcupine Publications (2011)

  * * *

  Pirates of Savannah

  The Birth of Freedom in the Low Country

  An Adventure Novel

  By Tarrin P. Lupo

  Porcupine Publications

  Anti-Copyright 2010 by Tarrin P. Lupo

  We believe that copying is a form of flattery and do not abide by the copyright laws. Those laws serve to restrict the flow of ideas, which no one can really own. Please share freely and frequently.

  ISBN 978-1-937311-06-3

  Available in print edition at www.Lupolit.com and other online retailers.

  Published with the spirit of

  This book is dedicated to all the past, present and future liberty activists who found the courage to say no to authority.

  Acknowledgements

  Editors:

  Final Editors: Sandi Britt & Ruby Nicole Hilliard

  Creative Editors: April Reed & Reagen Dandridge Desilets

  Editors: Marc Emery & Margie Jaques & Sky Reed

  Illustrators:

  Ruby Nicole Hilliard, Scott A. Motley & Lori Messenger

  Cover Art:

  Megan McLain, Johnson Rice & www.PhotosbyBecky.net

  Consultants:

  Cannon, Musket, Charles Towne and Low Country Historical Consultant: Reagen Dandridge Desilets

  Sword and Blade consultant: Mark McMorrow

  Archeological consultant: Audrey Salem

  Contributors:

  Teresa Warmke, Michael Sansone, Aziza Seven, Julie Chessher Stone, Jim Davidson, Mariana Evica, Luthor Freeman and all my great friends on Facebook who helped along the journey.

  Preface

  Pirates of Savannah is a historical fiction novel that takes place in a forgotten and fascinating time of history. This book is loaded with adventure and reminds folks just what it took to survive in such a rugged, harsh time. I have seen hundreds of great fiction novels written about the Civil and Revolutionary wars, but almost none use pre-Revolutionary days as their backdrop. This book brings forward many obscure historical events that were censored or forgotten by time.

  Unless you are from South Carolina or Georgia you might have no idea where the Low Country is actually located. It originally started out as a little section of southern South Carolina coastline and then grew to include the whole coastline of South Carolina and parts of Georgia's coast. These days it has been pretty much bastardized to the point where people all the way from Cape Fear, North Carolina to Saint Augustine, Florida also say they are from the Low Country. Perhaps in my lifetime the entire east coast will be absorbed into the Low Country as well.

  Most of the events in the book really happened and the famous characters are all real. I wrote this so the fictional characters weave in and out of real history so much, that unless you’re an expert in Low Country record, you will not be able to tell where the true past begins and ends. You can always check the epilogue at the end of the book to find out what was based on history and what was fictional.

  A map of the locations in the book

  I thought it would be interesting to write an entire book accurate to the speech and writing patterns of the time. That idea lasted about one hour. After I plowed through tombs of writings of 1700s’ lexicon, I realized how difficult and time consuming that style is to decipher. It slowed the story line to a crawl and took away from the enjoyment of reading it. So I have stayed true and used words from that time period, but not the confusing writing and speaking styles. You need to remember; standard rules for grammar did not come into play until the 1800s, so pretty much anything went. One could spell the same word five different ways and use them all in one giant run on sentence. If you are the kind of person with grammar and spelling OCD then you would have never survived back then.

  One last thing about spelling, some spelling was changed over time. When the book talks about Charles Towne instead of Charleston or Jekyl Island Instead of Jekyll Island it is not a mistake. Even some of the famous people in the book have multiple ways to spell their name. So if a name looks different than the way you remember, it is because I chose the version I came across the most.

  Here are other things you might need to know before diving into this book. The 1700s were filthy! I mean really, really disgusting. Think of the grossest college rugby or frat house and multiply it by one hundred times. Any personal hygiene was a luxury and most common folk only bathed once a season. Average people owned only one set of clothes and would have never even seen soap. My father even asked me to include a warning about the vividness of the first chapter in the book. He wanted me to tell you that the rest of the book is not that squalid. Oh, everyone is a critic!

  I'm sure you have heard the saying "History is written by the winners". I never realized just how true that was until I dove into stacks of old writings. People forget in this day in age how writings which criticized the powers that be was the fastest way to a noose. Most of the writings that survived that time period were the king's correspondences, militaries’ records and propaganda. When I was doing research, I tried to look past the flowery good reports and extrapolate what was really going on behind the scenes.

  Most people in school learn a watered down version of why colonists came to America. I was always told they came over so they could practice their religion without fear of being killed by the king. Now, it is true that many did escape from the king's religious persecution but that is not the full story. Many others came over to escape the rule of government all together. Some of those settlers were this nation's first freedom activists. They fled from generations of government tyranny in their homelands and came to the colonies hoping to just be left alone. To finally live a life without some government or authority telling them how they must live.

  The strong anti-government and pro-individual freedom message of the first settlers was censored over the years, especially after the Civil War. When people think of the Revolutionary War, the first images that come to mind are the Boston Tea Party, Boston Massacre, First Continental Congress, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. Did you happen to notice that all these celebrated events happened in the North? Interesting since two thirds of the Revolutionary War was fought in the South. How come all the events people celebrate are Northern victories?

  Part of the reason was Ben Franklin had his hand in most of the printing during that time and wanted to promote himself and northern states. However, the big reason for this is because after the South lost the War of Southern Secession, or the Civil War, the North purposely erased as much Southern history as it could. A propaganda campaign played out to change Southern minds so they would stop seeing themselves as independent and instead see themselves as part of one new nation. That held over and continued forward, even today. Just pick up a public or government school's history book and see what events are celebrated and what events are omitted.

  I hope to do my part to reteach that bit of missing rabblerousing history through an exciting and interesting story instead of a boring, crusty history book.

  Check out all the video, audio and other extras that accompany this book at www.Lupolit.com!

  Good Hunting,

  Tarrin P. Lupo

  Chapter 1

  Debtors’
Prison

  Patrick and the crew watch Isaac drag a dead body out of their cell to the fire pits

  Like a religious experience, the sun flooded the prison cell blinding the young man. A thick black cloud of buzzing flies poured out the door as they rushed toward the light that now bathed the young man. He rubbed the darkness from his eyes. He squinted at the intrusion of light, only being able to make out the blurry cloud of black flies that seemed to resemble smoke madly escaping from a burning building. For what felt like minutes, thousands of flies swarmed out of the doorway as the man’s eyes adjusted to the first light they had seen in two long weeks. Fourteen days without a hint of light, sealed in complete darkness, is not quickly erased from the eye. But after a few moments, he could see the guards.

  Tattered rags had been tied tightly behind the guards’ heads, covering their noses, revealing only their eyes. Their eyes were wide with fear of the disease that had swept through the prison so quickly. Even their hands were wrapped thick with cloth like filthy mittens. No chances would be taken this close to the foul of the cells that were littered with emaciated, diseased, and dying prisoners. The man watched dispassionately as a guard barked a muffled command to another inmate, ordering him to drag the dead from the cells to the fire pit to be burned.

  The man smiled weakly and thought, It must smell rosy in the barracks. He knew the guards only allowed the prisoners to remove the dead bodies when the festering smell of pox would creep up into their quarters. The prison cells used to be sanitary, but that was before the rampant pox. The only thing that had spread faster than the pox was the fear of the pox. In response, the dungeon had been sealed and unlucky, frightened guards were assigned to leave food and water by the door once a day.

  A selected few inmates were allowed to go to the door to retrieve the food and dispense it among their fellow prisoners, but the guards made sure only the healthy received the poor excuse for nourishment in this pit. The sick were too weak, unconscious, or dying to waste vittles and water on.

  The cell had become the dumping ground of those who did not have the minor great pox or, rather, the more deadly smallpox. A few unfortunate souls suffered from the malignant variety or worse yet, the dreaded black pox. In a place where human refuse reigned, it was no surprise that smallpox struck the prisoners with such fury. Already twenty of the twenty-five imprisoned men had succumbed, their bodies breaking out into papules filling with opalescent fluid. It was only a matter of time until the remaining sick would join their fellow inmates in the deep fire pit in the yard outside the prison.

  The extremely massive but emaciated prisoner dragging the corpses was handling his job with slight grace, but soon became nauseated by the thick fumes of ammonia that were emitting from the foul on the floor. He became overwhelmed and, gripping his stomach, he paused to expel his only meal all over the bloated, pus-filled bodies that were at his feet. His vomit, which did not get stuck in his long beard was an added spice to a floor already covered in a black and green slippery slosh of feces, urine, blood, dried, crusted semen and other diseased vomit. This vile sludge, as the prisoners referred to it, covered the floor an inch thick.

  The man had almost forgotten about the floor being alive until he saw it again in the rare sunlight beaming in from the open door. He recoiled from the sight; the throngs of maggots, fungus, and flies laying their nests in the filth. He had grown so accustomed to the constant buzz of flies and beetles coming from below his feet that he no longer heard them, but their squirming bodies, now illuminated, gave the illusion that the floor was a living, moving organism.

  There was a time that chamber buckets would have served to keep the cell sanitary, but they had since become overfilled and obsolete. The guards, so sickened by the smell of prisoners dumping the buckets, simply let the pots succumb to the vile sludge over time until they were simply two, large mounds of fungus and shit.

  "Hurry it up!" a guard commanded to the prisoner who was puking instead of dragging bodies. The man could see horror in the guards' eyes. They wanted to be exposed to the filth and disease of the cell as little as possible and it was already taking too long. The man could almost hear the guards desperately wondering if they made a mistake, questioning if the prisoner they chose to drag the bodies was sick himself.

  The man smiled again, blinking in the blinding light, and thought, Serves the bastards right.

  To add to the madness of the cell, most of the prisoners were touched in the mind from the prolonged fevers they contracted. Their bodies would rebel from the smells of the floor until even their physical senses left them. Soon, they would crumple like wet paper mâche to stew in their own bile. Weakness would overtake their wills and they would eventually fall into the puddles of decaying and fresh human waste on the floor.

  The man would listen from a bench with his knees drawn up to his chest and his arms wrapped around his knees, hearing the wet, flat sound of bodies hitting the floor. The only reason he was not dead from infection was the sanctuary of the bench he sat on. It was the only bench in the cell and it was like an island with just enough room for six castaway prisoners. The old, wooden bench had been broken so many times in the past, it was now barely held together with a rigging of thighbones and rags taken from dead prisoners to keep it standing.

  Now with an empty stomach and his chest and beard covered with brown vomit, the nauseous prisoner soon regained his composure enough to finish his chore and dragged the corpses into the hall one by one. The man closed his eyes and rested his head on his knees drawn to his chest as the guards closed and locked the heavy cell door, leaving him once again in darkness.

  With only the constant wails and moaning of the dying to keep him company, the man, just as he had every day for the past seven years, returned to thoughts of home and the fateful day of his arrest. He rubbed the long scar on the left of his jaw and silently vowed he would live to meet William Potts again.

  * * *

  His name was Patrick Willis and he was once an aspiring jeweler. His father was a jeweler to the high society in the outskirts of London. Sadly, his father died of consumption when Patrick was fifteen. It was a horrible, slow death of hacking coughs, phlegm, and blood. The fever lingered a long time and the elder Willis lost his mind, inevitably sinking Patrick’s family in debt. Patrick's family placed the patriarch in a sanitarium that promised to cure him, but the money ran out before a cure was found. Then the sick, old man had to be moved back to home where he was cared for by Patrick's mother and his three sisters.

  Before his father’s debts were called, Patrick made a desperate move to keep him out of prison, still hoping he would recover. He took every scrap of valuable jewelry the family had left and went to make a deal with a competing, ruthless jeweler named William Potts to buy their family's interests out. He hid the jewelry well and disguised himself as a pauper while traveling to Potts’s shop so as not to arouse suspicion.

  Fortunately, Potts recognized Patrick as soon as he entered the shop but he did not throw him into the street, as he normally would of any true pauper. Potts invited Patrick to the back of the shop so that the young man could display his wares which he kept in a hidden bag concealed on his person. The swag was mostly bits of wire scraps of silver with a few rare stones. If he had the luxury of time, Patrick could have found buyers fetching a decent price for the swag, possibly just enough to pay his father’s debts. Sadly, this was not the case. Patrick did not have time and he had to desperately acquire as much money as he could before his father was sent off to debtors’ prison.

  Mr. Potts scratched his chin, taking painfully long to examine the swag, and could see the sweat beading on the young man's brow. He relished Patrick’s desperation and anxiousness. The older Potts assumed correctly this was Patrick’s first financial transaction. He also heard the rumors of the elder Willis's plight and was quite happy to see his competition sinking into illness, debt and desperation.

  Mr. Potts slowly examined every stone, rolling them in his fingers
and occasionally sighing for affect. The master jeweler took far more time then he needed considering the level of his expertise. It was all a game, to test young Patrick’s patience and to judge the depth of his desperation. Finally, after what seemed like a painful eternity, Mr. Potts simply grimaced and stated flatly, “No,” without any further explanation.

  Patrick grabbed Potts by the sleeve and begged, "Please, sir. Reconsider. I will give you a dandy of a deal."

  "No, boy," Mr. Potts smiled coldly. “Now release me and get out.” Patrick's jaw went slack with shock. He released the older man's arm and felt as if the hope of saving his father from debtors’ prison was slipping through his fingers. Brushing off his sleeve as if Patrick's touch had soiled him, Potts reiterated, "Go on now. Out with you!"

  As Patrick staggered through the shop's front room towards the door, he looked over his shoulder to take a glimpse of Potts one last time. Maybe his father's competition would change his mind. Perhaps this was all a ploy to lower the cost of what he would have to pay for Patrick's valuable snippets.

  Potts had strutted to behind his shop counter where another man in a rich red coat was casually leaning. Both men grinned maliciously and spoke to each other in cutting, hushed tones. Embarrassingly, Patrick was startled by the sound of the tiny bell that hung above the shop's door when it chimed softly as he made his exit. The two men roared in laughter and Patrick could only hang his head and walk out with a defeated gait.

  Humiliated, Patrick slowly began his dejected ambulation home. His mind scrambled trying to find the words he could tell his poor mother that his last, desperate plan was a failure. He thought about his poor little sisters and how they would fare in a life of poverty, with no dowry and no prospects for betterment.