Chapter 27: Selling Our Prizes

Once the pirates were gone we could go on about our business. Some of the soldiers stayed at the shipyard to watch us, but most of them left with the pirates. We got to talk to the shipyard people about what we wanted done.

Frankly, getting Flying Arrow pulled out of the water was the only thing that was urgent. We were selling three damaged ships so they probably all needed to be unloaded and then pulled out for repairs, but I didn’t know if repair or sale would happen first. The one ship we weren’t selling didn’t need any repairs and we would shift back to the town piers once the three prizes were sold.

I had to explain that I was new to this and hoped that they knew more about it than I did, but the three damaged ships were all pirate ships that we had captured. We didn’t need them and we wanted to sell them. Queen Eleanor had told me that King Tom wanted to fight pirates so she was going to buy Flying Arrow, the one that needed pulled out immediately, while her advisor Lady Philipmina wanted to buy the other two for use in trading.

Once I started throwing names around the shipyard people became far friendlier. I’d already noticed that King Tom was big business around here. Everyone wanted to be his friend, and anyone who could claim to already be his friend was a great guy.

They agreed that we needed to unload Flying Arrow as much as possible before pulling it out. They could do it and charge us for it, or we could do it ourselves if we wanted. Could they warehouse everything? They could put it in a shed near the ways. It would be out of the rain and off the ground, but it wouldn’t be heated in the winter.

I agreed to have them do it as I had other jobs for my crew, and I’d try to get the King and Queen to pay for their labor. Meanwhile, it was our job to guard the ships and all the stores until they were sold. I asked if they could pass the word to Queen Eleanor and Lady Philipmina that their ships were here if they wanted to come look at them, figuring that the labor charge would be a good deal lower if they were involved. Instead of gouging the strangers they would be trying to keep the local government happy.

We spent the rest of the day moving things we wanted to keep from the Flying Arrow back to the Wrong Place, while the yard’s people unloaded the mundane things like food, water, and ballast. I kept waffling between the Arrow and the Fortune as to which one would make the better warship for the king. It probably didn’t make much difference. The Arrow would need less repairs, and it could be sent out for training very soon. The Fortune might be faster, but so much of that depended upon hull condition and rig that it was pointless to argue. Conversion to a real warship would cost about the same for either one.

The Blue Wave was a tub, a round cargo carrier. It held a lot of cargo but it was never going to be as fast as the other three ships. It would make a good trading ship for Lady Philipmina. The other one would do fine as well. Maybe, if we took another tub, we could trade it in for the Fortune and give it a real overhaul and conversion.

It occurred to me that we probably weren’t going to get full value for our prizes. We paid nothing for them and wanted full value. People who wanted a ship, on the other hand, would only come to us if they could get a good deal. We got them for free -if you forget the blood we’d paid- and they would want us to sell them for nothing.

The meeting point there was half-price. We would get half the value for a ship we’d paid nothing for, while the buyer got the whole ship for half the price. Well, I could hold out for a higher price, but they had no real need to buy from us. They could just sit there until we starved. It would be better to simply agree on ‘half price’ at the outset and then haggle over the true value of each ship.

Now, if Lady Philipmina was smart, she’d take her two new ships to some place that had cargos but was short on ships and sell at least one of them at a profit. I’d be annoyed, though, if I ended up capturing the same ship from the pirates two or three times. We’d have to talk about that. It would be nice if my friends weren’t arming my enemies behind my back.

By evening we were also stripping everything we wanted from the Fortune and the Wave. That included food, as we all agreed that a little variety would be good. For that matter, we went back to the east ways and raided the Arrow’s shed for most of the food stored there, as well as some more water barrels. Until the ship was sold, it was still ours. If we ended up being out at sea for a longer time, I didn’t want us running out of water. Besides, we’d need more water if we took more men with us when we left port.

Some time in the afternoon, while we were moving stores around and finding good places for our new water barrels -which were not the same size as our mounts, of course- we got a messenger from Joshua asking if I could speak to the town council this evening. They wanted to know what we were doing and why we thought the king needed ships. Sure. The messenger said he’d send a wagon to collect me and my guards. Sure.

Why did they care? What was it to the Bridgetown council if the king had a warship? I guessed I’d find out when I got there. Meanwhile, I asked Filo to join me, as well as the Commander and two shieldmen. I was getting used to having a couple of them around, and it made me feel nervous to be in a strange town without them. As Eric had said when we first stepped out of the bank, this was all Injun Country.

Donna wanted to go, too. She didn’t have much choice about the delay in her rescue, but she didn’t like letting me out of her sight. I wasn’t sure that was a good idea. Take my wife Millie? Sure. My mistress Ceecee? Maybe, if it wasn’t too formal. However, someone who was going to leave me the second I got her pregnant? How would I introduce her?

I was sure the Monty Python people would know the exact best way to explain her presence. Something that included ‘bimbo’ and ‘knocked up’, I was sure. How did they describe the Lady of the Lake? ‘Strange women throwing swords at people are no basis for a system of government’ or something like that.

I allowed her to come with us, but only after she had promised to follow my lead on when and what to talk about.

Our water barrels were a standard size around here, called ‘butts’. I thought they were probably about 100 gallons or so. The barrels we took from the Arrow were much smaller, on the order of half the size of a butt. They were a lot easier to deal with, though.

Since we didn’t use the drinking water for anything beyond drinking and mixing with dried foods, estimating usage at two gallons per man per day seemed to be very conservative. It had taken 81 of us about three days to empty our two barrels. After that, half of our crew was on the Fortune so it got hard to calculate usage, but I could assume ‘100 man-days’ per barrel and be close. If anything, that would give us a cushion.

Giving everyone a cup from my ale barrel with dinner every evening just made it harder to figure out, but that problem was solving itself as the barrel ran out. It was almost empty now. We needed to drain it into a keg so we could rinse it out and refill it with water. The keg would go in my cabin, yes. Meanwhile, I bought a couple of kegs of ale from one of the taverns. It was overpriced and a very poor substitute, but it was better than nothing.

So, twenty of our original barrels and seventeen of the smaller ones would give us a hundred times twenty-eight and a half or twenty-eight hundred and fifty man-days of water. With eighty-one men, that would last ... I had to get a waxboard and write it down. I wasn’t up to that sort of long division in my head. It came out to thirty-five and a fraction days. We’d probably run out of food before that.

If we had forty more men, that much water would only last twenty-three or so days. I could hire forty more crew, both sailors and soldiers, and we could stay out for three weeks or so. We’d have to see how fast we went through the supplies.

No, dammit. There are no weeks here. There are no months. Sooner or later I would get acclimated enough to stop thinking in weeks and months. This place had days and years, nothing else. Although, every time I screwed up and said those words I could explain that they were terms for ‘seven days’ and for ‘thirty days’.

Naturally, if we took any prizes part of our crew would be drinking and eating the prize’s supplies. What I really needed was more than one ship, so that one could stay on station while another escorted prizes back home. Maybe they could bring more supplies back with them?

One thing was that we could use a couple of the Arrow’s barrels for our in-use water. We had several small barrels, maybe four or five gallons, that were set out by the masts, by Cookie’s station, and in the main cabin. They didn’t last long with everyone drinking what they wanted when they wanted, and they had to be constantly refilled from the big storage barrels down in the hold. We left the small one in the cabin, but replaced the others with one from the Arrow at Cookie’s station and another one at the foremast. They would only have to be swapped out with full ones every other day or so.

I would much rather the crew struggled with one fifty-gallon barrel once a day or so instead of refilling one of the five-gallon barrels every couple of hours. Refilling the small ones was always a mess and a lot of water got spilled. And, if we used all of the fifty-gallon barrels first, it would be a couple of weeks before we had to broach one of the storage barrels. If nothing else, using the Arrow’s barrels as long as we could would cut down on the water in the bilges.

The wagon came while I was thinking and figuring, so we left Jono and Matto to figure out where to put all the water and food barrels and went to the council meeting. Let me state for the record here that a wooden wagon with solid wheels and no suspension on a rough road is a miserable way to travel.

They called upon us to speak immediately when we showed up. Either they had manners, or they needed our testimony to decide something they were discussing. The first real question was what was I doing and why?

That was easy; I was hunting pirates for fun and profit. I explained that the destruction from their raid on Widemouth had caused me distress, and I wanted to prevent it from happening again. If I could sink or capture all of the pirate ships, they wouldn’t be able to raid us any more.

That answer satisfied them, but it led to their next one. Why did King Tom need a warship if I was doing that for them?

I tried to use the analogy of a single warrior going into a forest to clear out the bandits. No matter how good he was, not even the well-known Sir Tony could get them all. As soon as he started clearing out the bandits in one forest, they would all just move to another forest until he left. Or, maybe gang up on him and surround him so that one of them could shoot him in the back while he faced the others.

And, what if he captured some? Was he to keep an eye on the captured bandits while he fought others? No, even Sir Tony would need help. He would take several men with him. Some would cook and keep the camp, some would scout for him, some would watch his back, some would help him fight, and some would watch the captured bandits.

The same way, one ship like mine could never clear the whole ocean of pirates. The island needed several ships. One could patrol the shipping lane south of the island, while another patrolled between the island and the mainland. A third ship might escort captured pirate ships to Bridgetown to be unloaded and sold. Perhaps we might retain a captured cargo ship to carry supplies to the warships so that they could stay on station longer.

And, I was going to try to build a squadron, a group of warships that worked together. This was needed because when the Pirate Isles heard about what I was doing, they would gather up a fleet to try to catch me. If we were surrounded by enough pirate ships, they would be able to board and capture my ship before we could sink them all. If I was going to succeed in getting rid of all the pirates, I had to have enough ships to win that big battle when it happened.

Hopefully, that would be a few years in the future because it would take time for them to hear about me, decide that they had to deal with me, and get organized. So, it wasn’t a crisis yet but sooner or later we would have a big battle between all the surviving pirate ships and all the warships that the island had. We had a better chance of winning that big battle if we started preparing for it now, right?

So, since King Tom thought the same way as me and had mentioned to several people that he wanted to start doing what I was doing, Queen Eleanor had offered to buy one of our captured pirate ships and outfit it for hunting pirates. We expected to give that ship all the help we could and try to work together when possible. If we worked together it would be easier to capture pirate ships.

Unfortunately, we would have to split the profits from any ships captured by the two ships working together, but that was okay as we hadn’t paid anything for either the ships or the cargos. Since I had paid for all the expense of raising my ship, repairing it, and outfitting it to fight pirates, and I was paying the crew whether we caught any pirates or not, I was getting one quarter of the price of any ship we sold as my share. One tenth of the price would go back to Widemouth as their portion for helping us and for providing the Guardsmen and militia and crew who made it possible. The rest of the price, about two thirds, was being split between the crew.

I would recommend that King Tom’s ship work the same way, with the king’s treasury getting one quarter of it so that he could do things without taxing the people too much. His men should get the rest. Whether Bridgetown got a tenth for their share would probably depend upon whether the town helped or hindered the king’s plans.