Jinx Schwartz
Amazon
Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Jinx Schwartz
ISBN-10: 193269546x
Type: Fiction
Pages: 294
Another adventure in the Hetta Coffey series.
Hetta Coffey, a globe-trotting engineer with attitude, a penchant for trouble, and a yacht, is back, and this time she s steering us into hot Mexican waters. Miffed that vacation plans with her chronically absent boyfriend Jenks Jenkins have gone awry, she accepts a job in Baja. So what if she and her friend Jan are spectacularly unqualified to take her yacht on a thousand mile cruise in the eastern Pacific Ocean in the middle of hurricane season? Hiring a handsome, if somewhat fishy captain for the trip might keep them off the rocks, but probably won t do the same for her future with Jenks. Meanwhile, a little eye candy on board can t be all bad. Hetta s unmanageable independence impels her to tackle the very profitable, if environmentally and politically incorrect project south of the border. True to form, her irreverent nature and disregard for danger soon swamps her in a sea of inconvenient bodies, illegal aliens, a pesky whale, and a menacing Mexican machinator. And without her usual arsenal of firepower. Set sale for Baja Mexico s Magdalena Bay as Hetta Coffey leads us once more into a morass of intrigue that will keep you laughing, breathless, and wanting more. To quote Lord Byron, Hetta would much rather sink beneath the shock than moulder piecemeal on the rock
Excerpt
West Coast of New Spain 1600
Five months into the voyage, rats took over the ship and the ship’s cats fled for their lives.
To get to precious fresh water in the holds, rodents gnawed tops and stoppers off jugs. Then they fell in, drowned and rotted.
They chewed into food jars, ate their way to the bottom, and died because they could not escape. Without leaving a crumb, they consumed twelve quintals—fifteen hundred pounds—of already wormy hardtack and cassava bread.
Chickens were devoured in their cages.
Twenty-four hour guards were posted, a search party set out to bludgeon and hack to death as many ratas as possible. Frantic squeals reverberated throughout the ship day and night. The cargo holds ran thick with stinking blood. A thousand of the sharp-toothed marauders were slaughtered before the guards quit counting, gave up, and conceded defeat.
For months, Gómez Pérez Comacho and his family survived aboard the hobbyhorsing, rat infested vessel dubbed a “flying pig” because of her rotund shape. Comacho thought of her as a fat pig. With her round belly engorged with over two tons of cargo, and a forty-foot draft, the galleon was a nightmare to navigate. Because she could not sail into the wind, San Carlos, as well as the other galleons in their fleet, first voyaged north and east from the colony, striving to stay as near thirty degrees north latitude as possible. On this voyage, however, they had been driven far to the north in their quest for favorable winds. They were badly off course and schedule before finally sighting land and turning southward. Now, plodding along the shore, they could only pray for northerlies to push them safely to Acapulco.
Nao de la China, these ships were called, because even though they sailed from Manila, most of their cargo originated in China. They left in a fleet of three for this treacherous nine thousand mile voyage, now they were but one. What happened to the others the crew on San Carlos would never know.
Many dangers waited in ambush for galleon fleets. Uncharted reefs and shoals lurked and even the exact positions of known hazards were uncertain. Storms forced many a galleon ashore, as had happened to San Agustine five years before this voyage. And then there were the English. Although Sir Francis Drake, the infamous English pirate who plagued the galleons for years, was no longer alive, others followed in his bloodthirsty wake. And like Drake, they held a special thirst for Spanish blood and treasure, sacking entire settlements, and especially their Catholic churches, for plunder. Spain’s flying pigs were no match for pirates’ swift ships and slaughterous crews.
Comacho, standing on the high stern castle of San Carlos, shivered at the thought of the dreaded Englishman. Gazing eastward, he could make out an occasional mountain peak on the horizon. This was not Comacho’s first voyage along the galleon route, so he knew they were not really lost as long as they headed south and kept land to their port side. He did, however, know they were in grave danger. With all the delays, food and water would already be in short supply, and now with the rats….
He wiped salt spray from his face and uttered a curse. Unless something changed drastically, they would never reach their destination. He wondered if the other ships had fared better than themselves, perhaps were already in Acapulco.
Acapulco! Such a place. Comacho visualized their arrival, when small boats would rush to meet them, bringing all manner of exotic fruits and sweet, fresh water. He ran his tongue around his parched mouth and wiggled a loose tooth. His first, but with certainty not his last. He was fortunate, for so many had already lost not only teeth, but limbs as well. He sighed and went to check on his family.
Isabel, his wife, lay vacant-eyed and listless in her woven hemp hammock. Frightful bruises covered her paralyzed arms and legs. His girls, ten and eight, lay propped against beams, their thin bodies swaying lethargically with the wallowing ship. They had, thus far, fared better than their parents, mainly due to parental sacrifice of what little water and food was available. Only Comacho’s secret stash of nuts, raisins, and honey, which they ate in scant portions, in secret, had saved them thus far. But now, even those rations dwindled, some stolen by rats in the night despite Comacho’s attempted vigilance.
A rat scrambled over one little girl’s foot, but she hardly took notice. Comacho, infuriated by the animal’s impudence, drew his sword and gave chase, but the rodent scurried to safety. The rat was, Comacho noted grimly, sleek and fat, while his children sickened.
Shaking with anger and frustration, he scooped the girls into the relative safety of their hammocks, posted a guard on them and stormed off to confront the ship’s captain.
Capitán de Vevero, a Spaniard given the ship’s command because of his aristocratic roots rather than his sea experience, had not been on deck in weeks. Rumor had it Vevero was ill, but Comacho was not prepared for how ill. After storming into the captain’s quarters, intent on a showdown, Comacho lost his anger when confronted with what was undoubtedly the face of death itself.
“Ah, Comacho,” the young aristocrat, who looked to be ancient, managed to croak. His toothless gums bled and his hair had fallen out in uneven clumps. Not one ounce of extra flesh remained on his once-handsome face, a face covered in horrible sores.
“Yes, it is I, Capitán. I, uh, am reluctant to disturb you, but what I have to say is important.”
Vevero managed what might have been a smile, but was more the grimace of a death mask. “Disturb me? My dear Comacho, Iwish you would slay me.”
Tears sprung into Comacho’s eyes, not something easily accomplished in his dehydrated state. He blinked them back. “I have come to seek your permission to send a launch ashore, perhaps to find water. I have discussed this with the ship’s maestre, but he is reluctant to do so without your approval. He is, also, unwell.”
“What says the pilot?”
“I have not as yet spoken with him on the matter. He is weak, but alive. I thought to first consult with you.”
“Señor Comacho, it seems as though you should take charge of this ship, as her crew has failed you. Do what you will. I, for one, would just as soon ground her. Take our chances on land. Send in the pilot and I will tell him you are in authority now. Maybe you can save yourself, at least.”
“Thank you, sir. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Pray for my soul. As for the ship? Do what you will,” the Spaniard repeated, then sank into unconsciousness.
Comacho returned to the main deck shaking his head at the irony. He, the grandson of a cagayan, a ship building slave, had just been handed the responsibility of commanding one of Spain’s most valuable cargo vessels. If he could, by some miracle, successfully bring her into Acapulco, he would be wealthy beyond his wildest dreams.
Not that he was poor. Far from it. He and his family, taking with them a fortune in jewelry, silver coins, silks, Chinese porcelain and spices, were on their way to live and trade in la Nueva España. In the severely overladen holds of San Carlos lay exquisite jewelry fashioned by his own Chinese artisans, pieces commissioned by Spanish royalty and made of Mexican gold, oriental pearls and Burmese rubies. Comacho’s number one jewelry designer, Yee, was on board and thus far still alive. His ten Indian slaves, however, had not fared so well. Only four still lived, but it was to be expected; each voyage took its toll on the slave class.
Like Comacho, the navigator was a mestizo, the offspring of a Spanish and Filipino intermarriage. When Comacho found him, the sailing master was on deck, trying to figure out where they were. As the sand glass measured one minute, the knotted rope a sailor had tossed over the side into the glassy water slipped slowly through the navigator’s fingers. He counted aloud the number of knots. When the sand ran out, he estimated their speed and the approximate number of leagues they had traveled. His curse confirmed Comacho’s fear that they were actually losing ground.
Her sails hanging limply, the galleon was turned broadside to the swell and rolled from gunwale to gunwale. Even seasoned sailors became sea sick, but in their starved states only managed empty heaves.
At noon, using his backstaff, the navigator gave Comacho the unwelcome news that they were far north of Cape San Lucas, and the only known source for fresh water. And they were drifting toward shore.
He and the navigator went to find Juan Guzman, the pilot. Comacho, after discussing their perilous situation added, “I know you have traveled this route many times. Have you ever heard tell of any place this many days north of San Lucas where we could find water and food? Water, at least?”
The pilot closed his rheumy eyes and Comacho feared he’d breathed his last, but the old man was just thinking. “What do you think is our latitude now?”
“Between twenty-four and twenty-five north.And within sight of land.”
“Ah, then we are indeed drifting ashore. There is a strong current. This might not be a bad thing, for there are many miles of soft sand beaches. And there is a bay, but not easily spotted until right at the entrance. It is a treacherous entry if you are lured to the false approach. Fetch my journals, por favor.”
As they waited for the journals, the old man appeared to fade and Comacho prayed he would last just a few more minutes.
The navigator returned with ten bound journals, one for each time the pilot had made this journey. These leather covered daybooks, every sailor knew, were worth more than all the treasure in the hold. With the passing of Juan Guzman, vast and valuable nautical knowledge would be lost.
When handed his books, the old pilot rallied, reverently stroking one journal and then the next. Picking one out, he held it close to his face and frowned. “Take me into the light, so I can see,” he croaked. They carried him onto the top deck, where he breathed deeply, sniffing the air. After a toothless smile, he opened the journal and squinted in the bright sunshine. “Here,” he said, after turning a few pages, “a bay, to the southeast, if your sightings are accurate. Look,” he tapped a rough drawing with a crooked, bony finger, “an outcropping and a long spit. Do not attempt to enter here. It is the false entrance of which I spoke. You must follow the coast northward, heedful of a strong onshore current, until the true entrance reveals itself. Once in the bay, I have heard tell of date palms, always a sign of water. But beware, for the entrance and bay are treacherous and shallow.”
Comacho stared at the drawing. “Treacherous? How?”
“There is little protection from west and south winds and it is easy to ground. Only launches have dared go in so far as I know. Even some of those were lost.”
“As we will be if we do not find water. And these damnable rats!”
“Eat them.”
Comacho’s dark eyebrows shot up. “What?”
A wave of nausea churned Comacho’s stomach as he listened to the pilot’s demented suggestion. He whirled to find a place to vomit when a commotion from the aft deck caught his attention. Led by sounds of cheering and laughter, he rushed back to find three Burmese slaves hauling in nets full of large golden fish. Dorado! They were saved!
Later that evening, after feasting first on raw, then cooked fish, Comacho and his children sat huddled around the failing Isabel’s hammock. Surrounded by guards and slaves to stave off rats, the family did not share the festive air that swept the ship with the Dorado catch. They feared it was too little, too late, to save Isabel.
Earlier, when the nets full of Dorado were hauled onto the main deck and salted strips were hung everywhere to dry, the smell had drawn hoards of rats onto the open deck where they were swiftly dealt with. It was a momentary triumph, lifting the spirits of all on board who could still stir. No longer would the people starve, but they still desperately needed water. A decision had to be made soon, all knew, but not this night.
Lulled into a sound sleep by the dim hope that his children might survive, Comacho was startled awake by a howling wind. At first he thanked the saints, for now they could be on their way to San Lucas and water, but then he sensed something amiss. Rushing onto the top deck, he soon realized the wind blew from the south.
San Carlos’s crew, unable to sail south into the wind and building seas, reversed course and sailed northwest. When they felt they were safely offshore, they turned eastward. Their plan was, when the wind once again became northerly, to reverse again and zigzag ever southerly, until they reached San Lucas. But clouds had moved in, obscuring any navigational stars and even the moon. It wasn’t until the ship lurched over a sandbar that they discovered they were practically on the beach.
Dropping all sails, launching all anchors, plus cannons tied to lines, they hoped to slow their disastrous progression toward land, but they continued to slip, occasionally touching bottom. The storm rocked the ship so badly her yardarms dipped into the ocean. Some sailors jumped overboard, taking their chances on swimming ashore rather than being dragged to the bottom with the overloaded vessel. All night, crew and passengers alike fought nausea and fear, holding on to whatever they could while water swept the decks and filled the holds.
Then suddenly, just as first light brightened the horizon, the wind dropped. Comacho, when he could get his bearings and see his surroundings, sucked in his breath and whispered, “Milagro.” And it was a miracle, for San Carlos was not only intact and afloat, but inside a large bay. At the entrance behind them, breakers boomed, but the ship sat in relatively calm water.
Dazed men and women, slave and master, officers and crew, all made equal by right of their very survival, began to fall to their knees and thank their individual gods for their salvation.
In no time, Comacho and a crew were rowing ashore in search of fresh water. The pilot, who did not survive to see his last successful pilotage, had told them to look for date palms, but all day they searched in vain. That night they camped on a dune and, after chewing on barrel cactus pulp to soothe their parched throats, they roasted a raccoon whose curiosity proved his undoing. Eating meat again was such a luxury that they temporarily put their troubles aside to enjoy the moment.
One of the men cocked his head. “Oye! Singing dogs.” The men stopped sucking marrow and chewing bones and listened to eerie coyote calls echoing through the cool clear air.
“Are they dangerous?” asked a man who had heard of, but never seen, killer dingoes in the Philippines and wolves in China. “Not to full grown men, I hear. I also heard,” said the navigator, “they can sniff out water faster that any other animal in the desert.”
“Not as fast as our rats, I’d venture,” another complained.
An exultant Comacho jumped to his feet. “Rats. That’s it. Let us return to the ship, and quickly.” The others feared he had a fever of dementia, but he was in charge now, so they obeyed.
After an intense and bloody roundup, a cage of thirst-frenzied rats were set free. They scattered, willy-nilly, dogged by the most able-bodied sailors. In only six hours, a tracked rat scampered through a break in a rock pile, into a cave harboring an underground pool.
Ironically, as soon as the stranded voyagers discovered the cave pond, a thick fog moved in and they captured even more water by spreading mats designed to catch rain at sea. To warm his children against the misty chill, Comacho sacrificed a bolt of fine fabric, swaddling them in silk once destined for kings. Slave and seaman alike feasted on fish, clams and lobster seasoned with exotic spices foraged from the hold.
Gold, silver, Chinese porcelain and jewels, the only things safe from rats, were left in the ship. Everyone but a skeleton crew moved ashore. The plan was to rid the vessel of every last rat before re-boarding the ship and resuming their journey to Acapulco. The rat slaughter aboard San Carlos went on for days, while the hunt for game onshore replenished their provisions. Isabel Comacho, and others like her beyond recovery, died in spite of renewed rations and water. Enough crew still survived, however, to sail San Carlos to San Lucas once the rats were eradicated, and their water jugs refilled with cave and caught water.
It was on the morning of their third week ashore that they noticed San Carlos listing to starboard. Alarmed, Comacho and his sailors searched the ship high and low, finally discovering that a great store of silver coins, fashioned in the Far East for use in Mexico, had spilled and shifted to one side of the ship during the storm. With hands and spades, the men worked frantically to balance the load, but the ship continued to lean further as more water poured in from a breach in the hull. The bilges were filling and if nothing was done, the ship would roll on her side.
In a Herculean effort to save their ship, every man, woman and child who could still stand, kedged, rowed, and maneuvered San Carlos into a position where, at high tide, she only had a fathom below her round bottom. Planning to start repairs at low tide when her keel settled to the bottom, their hopes were once again dashed. A fierce offshore wind howled down on them, the ship slipped anchor and floated toward the middle of the bay.
The crew on board fought valiantly to re-anchor their ship, but as the waves topped her decks and she listed further and further, San Carlos’s hold flooded and she went down.
From shore, Comacho watched helplessly as his fortune, and therefore his future, slid beneath several fathoms of seawater. For years the fifty survivors would occasionally snag, with very long lines, a piece of ship or even a small cache of coins, but for the most part San Carlos and her vast treasure, were out of reach.
Two years after the sinking of the ship, as Comacho sat watching a huge pod of whales spouting inside the bay, he spotted the billowing sails of three ships outside the entrance. They were Spanish, he could tell, and they sailed northward. He briefly considered building a signal fire on a tall dune, but then he looked around his little village of San Carlos and counted his many blessings.
His eyes fell on his new wife, Delores. She had been a sailmaker on her way to a galleon maintenance facility in Mexico when San Carlos went down. The two survivors had forged a new life. Watching her bathe their baby boy while his daughters played nearby with a couple of little Yees, he daydreamed of the two families uniting some day. As his friendship with Yee grew, they soon forgot that one was a former employee. What did it matter anymore? The lost fortune was all that had kept Comacho from being just another peasant in Acapulco and Manila, and Yee’s skills as a jewelry maker were no longer of any importance. They were just two men who had survived a terrible ordeal to find unexpected contentment.
“Manila Man,” Yee said as they watched the sails disappear to the north, “should we try a signal next time?” He spoke in Spanish, their common language.
“Pienso no, Chino. I think not.”
“I agree. Look at what we have attained. Not riches, but then, where would we spend them? Here we are safe and healthy. Our children do not know the stigma of class. We have fat babies and young wives and we never have to worry about our next meal.”
They sat in silence for a moment and then Comacho chuckled. “And to think, Yee, we owe it all to rats.”
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