The Black Joke, Page 2

  One of the Spence dories–a flat-bottomed, high-sided boat about sixteen feet long–was moored to the end of their stage and while Peter and his father collected brooms, scrapers, brushes, paint, and tar from the store, Kye climbed nimbly down into the dory and began bailing out the accumulated rainwater. After loading the gear into the boat the others joined Kye, and the two boys took up the double set of oars and began to row toward the islets. They rowed standing up, leaning hard against the oars so that the narrow little boat leapt forward and in a few minutes was bumping her bow against Black Joke’s side.

  Apart from a weekly visit to pump out her bilges, the ship had been deserted since the preceding autumn. When Kye pushed back the slider over the companion hatch leading down into her forepeak, he was greeted by a gust of damp, foul air.

  “Whew!” he said. “Seems like we must have left half the fish in her last fall.”

  “Open her up, b’ys, open her up!” said Jonathan. “Let her breathe and she’ll soon be sweet again.”

  The boys jumped to obey, opening ports and hauling off hatch covers to let the spring air into the dark lower spaces. Meanwhile Jonathan walked aft and, standing with his hands on her big wheel, let his eyes wander over his ship. He was seeing her, not as she was now, dirty and unkempt, but as she would be when she put to sea again.

  She was not a big vessel–about seventy feet long on the deck line, if you did not count the big bowsprit which jutted out for another dozen feet. Just behind the bowsprit was a homemade anchor windlass and just aft of this again was the curved hood of the companionway leading down into the dark little forepeak where the crew lived and slept. The forepeak was like a cave, lit only dimly by a single round deadlight set into the deck overhead. It contained six narrow bunks in two tiers of three, a triangular deal table between the bunks, and a rusty stove. Apart from the deadlight, the only other illumination was supplied by an ancient brass lamp which swung in gimbals so that it would always stay upright no matter how much the vessel rolled or pitched.

  Aft of the forepeak was the main fishhold, a cavernous black space stretching from the foot of the foremast to abaft the foot of the mainmast, a distance of nearly thirty feet. Dark as pitch, it stank of bilge water, salt fish, and wet wood.

  Astern of the fishhold was the engine room, a tiny hold just big enough to take the old-fashioned single-cylinder gasoline engine which was the ship’s auxiliary power. This “bullgine,” as it was called, was twenty-five years old–an antique–but Black Joke was lucky to have even this aged monstrosity, for most of the coast schooners could afford no engine of any kind.

  In the stern of the ship was a tiny cubbyhole known as the “master’s cabin” but this was only a courtesy title for it was so small and damp that the captain never used it, preferring to bunk and eat with the crew in the forepeak.

  The helmsman stood right out in the open; and in heavy weather, salt spray burst over him with every sea that came aboard. As Jonathan stood at the wheel now, he could almost feel the spray in his face and, looking up at the bare spars, he could imagine a full press of canvas bellying to the gale as he had so often seen it on Black Joke’s long sea passages.

  The thought that he might have to part with this ship, which he loved next to his own family, struck him with intolerable pain. Shaking his head to put the thought out of mind, he left the wheel and went forward to where the boys had already lit the galley stove in the forepeak and had placed a pot of pitch to soften on its top.

  Once started, the boys and the man worked with a will. Equipped with a sharp, three-sided scraper, Peter was soon swarming over the vessel’s upperworks, scraping away the peeling paint and laying bare the clean spruce beneath; and Kye worked in the engine room, oiling the old motor and repairing the bilge pump. Meantime Jonathan, equipped with a caulking mallet and a wad of tar-smelling oakum, was busy caulking the deck seams. As he finished each seam, he sent Peter below to fetch the pot of hot pitch, and then he carefully poured a fine stream of it into the seams, over the oakum. A little wind came curling around in the quiet harbor and the smell of oakum, pitch, and wood tingled in the nostrils.

  All three were so engrossed in the pleasurable task of getting the ship ready for sea that they did not even look up when the bumpu-bump-bump of a single-cylinder engine came echoing across the still waters. A big open motor skiff had cast off from the elaborate wharf in front of Simon Barnes’s store and warehouses, and was bearing down on the cluster of moored schooners. Standing up at the tiller was Simon Barnes himself, a lump of a man who had once been as powerfully built as an ox, but who had gone soft with many years of easy living. His jowls were whitened with a week-old beard, but above his craggy nose his black eyes still shone as bright and hard as those of a gull.

  The motorboat came alongside Black Joke and Barnes pulled the switch to cut the motor just as Jonathan looked up. Barnes waved a hand.

  “Morning, Skipper. Fine day for boat work, ain’t it now?”

  At the sound of the voice, Peter popped his head out of the engine room where he had been helping Kye to clear the suction of the bilge pump. His cheerful face hardened into a look of dislike as he recognized the merchant.

  “Kye!” he called softly. “That ole dogfish Barnes’s come alongside. Stand by to repel boarders!”

  Pirate phrases and pirate thinking came naturally to both boys. They relished the ancient family association with Captain John Phillip, and the fact that the first Black Joke had been one of the most famous pirate vessels in Atlantic waters. Kye’s reaction to Peter’s challenge was immediate.

  “All right,” he whispered back. “You sneak out on deck and slip the pump hose through the scupper where he’s got his boat. Give a kick on the deck when she’s all set…I’ll do the rest.”

  When Barnes hailed him Jonathan answered politely, for it is in the nature of the outport people to be polite–even to those they do not like.

  “It’s a good enough day, Mr. Barnes…for any kind of honest work,” he replied slowly.

  There was just the slightest extra emphasis on the word “honest,” but if Barnes noticed it, he paid no attention. He seemed determined to be amiable.

  “Yiss,” he said. “A fine day, indeed. Though it do seem a pity, the time it takes a man to overhaul his vessel, and no work waitin’. What you plan to do with her this summer, Skipper Spence?”

  Jonathan answered with calculated vagueness.

  “Well now. That do depend. Might be I’ll take a voyage to the Banks. Then might be, again, I won’t.” He stooped and deliberately began to pour a stream of hot pitch into a seam, as if he assumed the conversation to be at an end.

  Barnes was irritated by the rebuff, but he kept his temper.

  “These do be right hard times, Skipper,” he said affably. “However, your name’s as good as any on the coast. A man would never lose on you. Anything you need for fittin’ out, now, you let me know. Anything at all. You come alongside t’store and let me know. I likes to see a man who don’t give up easy. Yiss, sorr, I likes to give a hand to a man….”

  He was suddenly cut short. With a gruesome gurgle a big rubber hose that had eased its way through a scupper hole under Black Joke’s rail, directly over the motorboat, began to jet a black and stinking flow that pulsed with every ounce of pressure Kye could exert on the rotary bilge pump. The solid mass of bilge water caught Barnes just below the chin. Staggered more by surprise than by the strength of the jet, he lost his balance and fell on one knee so that the water hit him square on the side of the face. His white stubble-beard turned black with old bilge oil and, as he opened his mouth to yell his anger, the filthy water trickled into it and almost gagged him.

  From the deck Jonathan’s stentorian bellow echoed across the harbor.

  “PETER. KYE. LAY OFF THAT PUMP!”

  The jet of water slowed to a trickle and then stopped. Kye turned to his cousin with wide-open eyes.

  “We got him, Peter! We got him square! Only I guess now we’ll git it
too!” he muttered.

  “Worth it, a million times,” Peter replied; but there was a quaver of uncertainty in his voice.

  On deck, Jonathan was leaning solicitously over the rail.

  “Now that’s a turrible thing to happen, Mr. Barnes,” he said. “The b’ys never know’d you was alongside. I’ll whop them good for bein’ so careless.”

  Barnes had no answer that he could trust himself to deliver. Scrambling to his feet he bent and spun the flywheel of the engine and, as the boat got under way, he deliberately turned his back upon Black Joke and spat, with feeling, into the harbor. It may only have been, of course, that he was trying to get the taste of bilge water out of his mouth….

  As Barnes’s boat puttered down the harbor, Jonathan called the boys on deck. They came slowly, dragging their feet and refusing to look at him. When they were only a yard away he said in his sternest voice of command:

  “Look up, ye pair of tom-cods! Look UP, I say!”

  Reluctantly they raised their eyes; only to find Jonathan standing with his legs widespread, and a grin on his broad face that no amount of self-control could master. Even as they watched, the grin spread wider and the big man slapped himself on the stomach and broke into a rolling bellow of uncontrollable laughter.

  “Oh, ye young devils!” he sputtered when he could talk again. “Ye should have seen his face….” But here a new wave of laughter overwhelmed him. The boys, knowing Jonathan of old, realized that there would be no sore seat for either of them and they relaxed, joining their mirth to his.

  As he cut his engine to come alongside his own wharf, Simon Barnes heard the echo of that laughter and his fists clenched. He knew very well that the incident would become a story to be told against him for three hundred miles along the coast. Nevertheless, as he threw the mooring line to one of his clerks and climbed ashore, Barnes displayed no sign of the anger he felt, for he had good reason to believe the Spence family would soon have little enough to laugh about.

  It had been no casual visit he had paid to the Black Joke that day. His visit had been prompted by the contents of a letter which had arrived the previous night from St. Pierre, one of the three small islands still owned by France (and the last of her once-mighty possessions in North America) which lie less than twenty miles off the south coast of Newfoundland.

  St. Pierre, a treeless, rocky island usually shrouded in fog, was a free port, which is to say that foreign goods could be imported and exported without payment of customs duties. As a result, it had been the center of a smuggling business for two centuries.

  The smuggling had always been a local affair until prohibition was enforced in the United States in the 1920’s. Then St. Pierre became the headquarters for an immense contraband liquor trade. Hundreds of thousands of cases of whiskey, brandy, and other spirits were landed there by big ships from Europe, for transhipment to rum-running vessels bound for the New England coast.

  The resultant prosperity brought a building boom to St. Pierre, and most of the lumber required to satisfy it was supplied from the forests of Bay Despair, a multi-armed fiord which runs deep into the south coast of Newfoundland some thirty miles distant from Ship Hole. Control of this lumber trade fell into the hands of half a dozen south coast merchants, of whom Simon Barnes was one. This trade brought him into close contact with several prominent businessmen on St. Pierre, and the letter which led him to pay his disastrous visit to Black Joke was from one of these businessmen.

  This letter had come wrapped in an oilskin packet carried in the inner pocket of a St. Pierre fisherman’s blouse. Two nights earlier this fisherman had landed his big sea-going motor dory on a deserted beach three miles from Ship Hole. There he had gone ashore and, with the aid of a carefully shaded flashlight, had located a pile of lobster traps stored in a cleft in the rocks. He had no difficulty picking out one particular pot which was marked with a splash of red paint across one end. Thrusting his hand into this pot, he found a thin copper box under the anchor stone, and in this box he placed the letter. Then he climbed aboard his dory which he and a companion rowed until they were well off shore. Only then did they start their engine. When dawn broke, it found them innocently anchored over a cod bank several miles off the coast, busily jigging for fish.

  That same morning a man named Millar from Ship Hole was rowing his own small dory out of the harbor mouth. Millar too was a fisherman, though he never caught much fish–a fact which did not prevent him from getting unlimited credit at Barnes’s store. As Millar came opposite the uninhabited cove, he was quick to see that the topmost lobster pot of the pile was now crossways to the rest. Casually he beached his dory and, after a good look about him to make sure he was unobserved, he ambled up to the pile of pots. An hour later he was sidling through the door of Simon Barnes’s private office to lay a small package on the merchant’s desk.

  This unofficial postal service between Ship Hole and St. Pierre was not only quicker than the official one, it was also much more private, which, considering the kind of correspondence it carried, was no doubt just as well.

  The letter described the current situation regarding the rum-running trade from St. Pierre to the United States. For a long time the rum-runners had used mother ships sailing from St. Pierre to points outside American territorial waters (which extend three miles seaward from the shore). Here the mother ships would rendezvous with fast motorboats which would then load up with contraband and slip it ashore at unguarded places on the New England coast. As long as the mother ships remained outside United States waters, the authorities could not touch them. As for the motorboats, they were so fast the revenue vessels could not catch them at all. It had been an excellent system in its time, but now–so the writer of the letter explained–things had changed.

  The United States government had begun to wage all-out war on the rum-runners. A number of high-speed navy torpedo boats had been pressed into service. In addition, agents had been planted in St. Pierre, equipped with short-wave transmitters with which they could notify the American authorities of the departure of suspicious vessels laden with liquor.

  The result of these measures was to disrupt the trade. Several of the fast motorboats had already been captured. The departure of a mother ship from St. Pierre was now quickly known to the authorities, and these ships were so closely shadowed that they had no chance of approaching the United States coast in secrecy.

  The situation was becoming desperate for the rum-runners. Their warehouses at St. Pierre bulged with tens of thousands of cases of contraband whiskey, representing a value of millions of dollars–if it could be delivered in the United States. New smuggling methods were needed, and so new methods had been invented. The smugglers had now concluded that where speed and power would no longer serve them, cunning would have to be substituted.

  Now for generations big fleets of sailing schooners had put out each year from many New England and Nova Scotian ports to fish for cod on the Grand Banks. The sight of these comparatively slow sailing ships beating heavily homeward with their holds full of fish was a familiar one all along the Atlantic coast. These fishing schooners had never been used for large-scale smuggling attempts and no one ever suspected that they might be so used. The rum-runners had therefore decided that certain chosen schooners, mostly small two-masters, were now to be purchased and refitted for a new “trade.” False bottoms were to be rigged in their fishholds, and they were to be given powerful diesel engines. By day, or in clear weather when there were patrol boats or aircraft about, these innocent-looking vessels would mosey along under sail alone. But at night, or when they had thick weather to conceal them, they would proceed under the full power of their new engines.

  When they sailed from St. Pierre, they would apparently be laden with salt cod, or even fresh fish–but this cargo would only be a thin cover, and under it the main holds would be filled with whiskey. To all intents and purposes the schooners would look like legitimate fishing vessels bound either for New England ports with fresh-caugh
t cod, or for Caribbean waters with salt cod. In point of fact they would proceed to secret coves and harbors on the American coast and there deliver their illegal liquor cargoes.

  The rum-runners naturally wished to buy the fastest schooners available for their new venture, and it was inevitable that they would have heard about Black Joke. So it was that the St. Pierre representative of one of the American smuggling syndicates undertook to arrange for her purchase, and wrote his good friend Simon Barnes about it. His letter concluded with these words:

  …and so, my dear Barnes, we can make an offer of very high price for this schooner. I myself think perhaps ten thousand dollars. If this makes an interest to you I am delighted to hear, but I will tell you we must have quick possession. The vessel should be delivered into St. Pierre before the first of June.

  There was no question about Barnes’s being interested in the proposal! Ten thousand dollars was an immense fortune in those times and in that place. The fact that he did not own Black Joke, and therefore could not sell her, was unimportant. He was now determined to own her.

  Having read the letter for the third time, Barnes went to his office window, as if to assure himself that Black Joke was still moored behind the islets. Since there was no employment for her that he knew about, he had not expected to see the Spences at work fitting her out. The sight of the activity aboard her was unsettling. He decided he had to know what was afoot, and it was this which prompted him to visit her in his motorboat.