The Green Flag and Other Stories of War and Sport - Captain Sharkey - I - How the Governor of Saint Kitt's Came Home

Arthur Conan Doyle (0:25)

HOW THE GOVERNOR OF ST KITTS CAME HOME.

When the great wars of the Spanish succession had been brought to an end by the Treaty of Utrecht, the vast number of privateers which had been fitted out by the contending parties found their occupation gone. Some took to the more peaceful but less lucrative ways of ordinary commerce, others were absorbed into the fishing fleets, and a few of the more reckless hoisted the Jolly Roger at the Misson and the Bloody Flag at the Main, declaring a private war upon their own account against the whole human race.

With mixed crews recruited from every nation, they scoured the seas, disappearing occasionally to careen in some lonely inland, or putting in for a debauch at some outlying port, where they dazzled the inhabitants by their lavishness, and horrified them by their brutalities.

On the Coromandel coast at Madagascar in the African waters, and above all in the West Indian and American seas, the pirates were a constant menace. With an insolent luxury, they would regulate their depredations by the comfort of the seasons, harrying New England in the summer, and dropping south again to the tropical islands in the winter.

They were the more to be dreaded because they had none of that discipline and restraint, which made their predecessors, the Balconiers, both formidable and respectable. These ish males of the sea rendered an account to no man, and treated their prisoners according to the drunken whim of the moment. Flashes of grotesque generosity alternated with longer stretches of inconceivable ferocity, and the skipper who fell into their hands might find himself dismissed with his cargo, after serving his boon companion in some hideous debauch, or might sit at his cabin table with his own nose and his lips served up with pepper and salt in front of him. It took a stout seaman in those days to ply his calling in the Caribbean Gulf.

Such a man was Captain John Scarrow of the ship Morning Star, and yet he breathed a long sigh of relief when he heard the splash of the falling anchor and swung in his moorings within a hundred yards of the guns of the citadel of Base Gier. St. Kitts was his final port of call, and early next morning his bow spirit would be pointed for old England. He had had enough of those robber-haunted seas. Ever since he had left Maricabo upon the main, with his full lading of sugar and red pepper, he had winced at every top sail which glimmered over the violet edge of the tropical sea. He had coasted up the windward islands, touching here and there, and has sailed continually by stories of villainy and outrage.

Captain Sharkey of the twenty-gun pirate bark Happy Delivery had passed down the coast and had littered it with gutted vessels and with murdered men. Dreadful anecdotes recurrent of his grim pleasantries and of his inflexible ferocity. From the Bahamas to the Maine, his coal-black bark with the ambiguous name had been freighted with death and many things which are worse than death.

So nervous was Captain Scarrow with his new full-rigged ship and her full and valuable leading that he struck out to the west as far as Bird's Island to be out of the usual track of commerce. And yet even in those solitary waters he had been unable to shake off sinister traces of Captain Sharkey.

One morning they had raised a single skiff adrift upon the face of the ocean. Its only occupant was a delirious seaman who yelled hoarsely as they hoisted him aboard and showed a dried up tongue like a black and wrinkled fungus at the back of his mouth. Water and nursing soon transformed him into the strongest and smartest sailor on the ship. He was from Marblehead in New England, it seemed, and was the sole survivor of a schooner which had been scuttled by the dreadful Sharkey.

For a week Hiram Evinson, for that was his name, had been adrift beneath a tropical sun. Sharkey had ordered the mangled remains of his late captain to be thrown into the boat as provisions for the voyage, but the seaman had at once committed it to the deep, lest the temptation should be more than he could bear. He had lived upon his own huge frame until, at the last moment, the Morning Star had found him in that madness which is the precursor of such a death. It was no bad find for Captain Scarrow for, with a shorthanded crew, such a seaman as this big New Englander was a prize worth having. He vowed that he was the only man whom Captain Sharkey had ever placed under an obligation.