There, on the bow of a ship cutting across the ocean, stands Captain Garmón, his face hardened by weather and life, flecked with salt water that soaks his cheeks. The storm bears down on the María Galante, the carrack he stole from a port of the Crown of Castile. In those days, Garmón is the most feared pirate of his age, at a time when piracy flourishes across every sea in the world.
The captain commands a band of rough, sullen sailors—at least, those who have survived so many raids. The equatorial Atlantic is more violent than they have seldom seen it; great waves pound the hull to port and starboard. They have made good their escape from Castilian waters, passing Tenerife and now venturing into an unknown stretch of sea far from Africa.
"Lower the saaaails!" Garmón roars, his powerful voice defying the storm itself and the thunder of its waves.
A group of men, among them Yves, Marc, and Françoise, hurry to obey the order at once. Garmón then turns aft and heads straight for Hassan, his helmsman.
"Hard to port! Hard to port!" he bellows.
Hassan, his thick beard and mustache drenched by rain and spray, works his hands swiftly over the wheel to turn the carrack and alter course. The maneuver succeeds: the hull narrowly misses an irregular, vaguely conical rock that would have torn it apart.
Garmón makes his way toward Hassan, clinging to the ship's rails as they pitch from side to side.
"The treasure, Hassan—are you certain it's secure in the chest?" the captain demands of his helmsman.
"Two padlocks and three heavy chains, Captain," Hassan replies, straining to make himself heard above the wind.
His words are cut short by a solid, ponderous shot. It smashes through the starboard rail, tears across the whole deck, ripping the legs from sailors in its path, and blasts the port rail into splinters. At last it vanishes, leaving wounded men strewn across the deck. The captain longs to go to their aid, but his gaze fixes on two swift frigates flying British colors amid the storm's ocean mist.
"Shall we throw the treasure overboard, Captain? That's what they're after," Hassan asks, deadly serious.
Garmón looks him in the eye, rain and bow spray streaming down his face. He turns aside and sees his mutilated men being helped by the others. Blood from their wounds drenches the deck despite the rain and the waves breaking over it. In the distance—though not distant enough—the enemy frigates seem to fly over the raging sea.
"Hold our course. Do not let go of that damned wheel, and never suggest such a thing to me again. The treasure is everything," Garmón says, turning back to meet his eyes.
"Your men will die if we give them nothing, Captain," Hassan insists.
"Far more than our number will die if we fail to keep the treasure aboard this ship. Hold the damned course, Hassan. Do not stop or turn aside for anything in this world."
With that, Garmón climbs back to the foremost height of the bow. He watches the frigates dodge jagged rocks that threaten, like a minefield, to destroy the enemy vessels' splendid hulls.
As more shots fired by the British frigates strike the water near the pirate ship, some find their mark here and there. They tear splinters from masts, bow, stern, and starboard side. The María Galante flees as best she can through the immense waves of the merciless storm bearing down upon her.
"Those frigates are packed with well-fed, well-watered men, driven by the queen's riches and armed to the teeth, Captain. They're too close behind us. We won't shake them, not even in this storm," Hassan argues, forcing his voice through wind and rain.
"My head commands a high price just now," Garmón says, favoring him with a smile. "I like that. Whoever captures me will win fame and instant riches. Unless you mean to surrender me, carry on as I ordered, helmsman."
Hassan says nothing more. He faces forward and fights to hold the María Galante on a straight course through the torrential downpour and the rain of cannon fire.
Then Garmón hears a mighty shout from the crow's nest, the platform high atop the mainmast. The lookout is pointing ahead, directly along the line of the María Galante's bow. Garmón whips his head around and searches the seascape in that direction.
He strains to see through mist, waves, and rain. At last he makes out a great, jagged mass of rock—an island.
"Make for it, Hassan. Straight toward that island of black rock."
"But, Captain, there are sure to be—"
"Do it!"
No sooner is the order given than another cannonball strikes the wooden hull of the María Galante squarely. As they draw near the island, the relentless frigates have closed to a range from which any shot could not merely reach them, but finish them with a mortal blow.
The crew redouble their efforts. Some form a line to bail with wooden buckets while others tend the wounded. Those who pause for breath are terrified by the size of the British frigates looming so near, a single cannon shot away from sending them to heaven. Yet they fear even more the strange clusters of black rock ahead—jagged and unnaturally geometric.
The bow of the María Galante drives straight toward an island with no shore, vegetation, beach, or life of any kind. There are no birds, nor do there seem to be fish in the waters around that vast mass. Only high cliffs confront the pirate ship, strange waterfalls pouring down them, formed from all the water the storm casts out of the clouds and driven sideways by the furious wind.
Amid that formation of impossibly shaped rocks lies an irregular opening Garmón has been watching for some time. Hassan looks at him nervously, waiting for the order to turn to port or starboard. He grows desperate as the bow bears down upon the rocks.
"Captain?" he says at last.
"Straight in, Hassan. Take us into that cavern."
"But, Captain, this is a carrack, and her mast—"
"Now, helmsman! Take her into the damned cavern, or give me the wheel and I'll do it myself!"
Hassan obeys.
With the towering cliffs of that rocky mass almost hemming them in, Hassan calls upon all his skill to guide the María Galante into the strange tunnel leading toward the island's heart. Smaller than the frigates pursuing her and driven onward by the storm surge, the carrack manages to enter the cavern.
The stalking frigates do not follow them inside. Instead, they circle the island, intending to catch them when they emerge from the tunnel on the far side. In desperation, one frigate fires into the rock itself, hoping to bring debris down upon the pirate vessel. But the cannonballs rebound from the island with a metallic clang and drop into the water like marbles, without dislodging so much as a grain of dust.
At last, her masts broken, her timbers riddled by cannon fire, her lower hull taking water, and several men wounded among a crew already thinned before this pursuit, the María Galante passes fully into the tunnel and leaves the storm behind. An inner current draws the ship into the island. For now, neither Garmón nor anyone else can see a light at the tunnel's end.
The current is powerful and sweeps them onward so swiftly that Hassan more than once needs the captain himself beside him to keep the ship from striking the cavern walls and ending in disaster. Sooner than expected, they begin to see a murky light at the end of the tunnel—brighter, even, than any of the crew imagined it could be.
When they finally emerge on the other side, there is no storm, no raging sea, no torrential rain. There is not even any wind. The crew stare at one another, exchanging bewildered looks. A sun at its zenith shines with a force they seemed to have forgotten. The ship, however, is doomed to sink at any moment.
Garmón gives the inevitable order: everyone must abandon ship, even if it means drifting in the open water. The worst of the wounded cannot escape the María Galante in time. Garmón loses sight of Hassan and the others as the carrack's timbers collapse into the deep ocean, but he flees—he swims. He and the other survivors of the wreck see that, on either side of the cavern from which they have emerged, there stretches a lush, paradisiacal, and uncannily beautiful island.
END OF AVAILABLE CHAPTER