Chapter 13: Life Goes On

Time passed, and before long all three of Hunter Island’s cities had their own warships out on the ocean helping clean things up. Small Cove had two, Bridgetown had three, and Widemouth had one. It was a bad time to be an independent man of fortune, a pirate.

Lord Jason of Topeka, me, had a whole fleet based out of Jayport. By the following spring I had Shark, Wrong Place, and Thunder for front-line warships, plus two more second-line warships that we mostly used to escort our cargo ships. I usually commanded Shark.

Once we had worked all the bugs out of the topsail concept on Shark, we added topmasts to Wrong Place and Thunder, giving them even more speed. Also, the added sail area allowed us to use larger sideboards without losing speed due to the added drag, and the two working together allowed the ships to sail even closer to the wind.

Also, over the winter we pulled the three ships out of the water, one at a time, to do whatever maintenance and cleaning we could. The cleaner the hull was, the faster the ship would be. We also installed a pair of bilge-keels on each one. They only went down half a foot or so, but that was far more keel area than the ships had had before. The bilge-keels gave the hull a bit more drag, making them slower all the time, but the ships were far more stable when sailing cross-wind. The difference wasn’t much; we had to do a couple of runs on known-distance courses before we were sure.

They also made more headway on a close tack, too. Reaching or tacking, they sailed closer to where they were pointed, with less leeway than before. That right there made the bilge-keels worth it as far as I was concerned. The small loss of speed was more than made up for by the better performance on close tacks.

We pretty much stopped using the sideboards on the three ships. We kept them in case we changed our minds, but we stopped using them. I would have had them pulled off as dead weight, but when they were raised they made good shields for our crew. No arrow launched by a hand-held bow was going to penetrate them!

It also didn’t take long to realize that the ships rolled differently, too. The bilge-keels provided added drag when the hull was moving sideways, and that included rolling. It didn’t much change how far the ship could roll, but it really spread the time out, and that usually helped. By the time the ship had started to roll to one side, the waves wanted it to roll to the other side. Usually, that meant the ship didn’t roll as much. Sometimes it meant the roll was even worse, but that wasn’t often.

We had five cargo ships, too. We would have more, but we had trouble manning the ships we had so we mostly sold our new captures at the mainland ports. Two of the ones we kept were fairly nice and we used them for passenger service and high-value cargos like metal goods. The other three that we kept were more general-purpose bulk cargo. We made whatever improvements we could to all of them as we got them and sent them out to get supplies and make money.

Steven had found a town that had access to a large grazing plain and more cattle than they needed. They would sell him all the cattle he could carry for cheap. The first time that Dolphin pulled into Bridgetown with a cargo of cattle, Queen Eleanor directed her friend the Lady Philipmina to go get more with her ships, with the king’s treasury paying for it. A lot of the cattle ended up just given to farmers, one per farm. As long as a bull was available for occasional service, a cow could give birth to a calf every year, and give milk almost year-around whether it had a calf or not.

A farm could also use a cow for labor. For some tasks like plowing, it did the same work as two or even more men and all it ate was grass. And, if times got bad, the cow could always be eaten. A farm with a cow was more productive than one without a cow, and the difference was far more than the cost of a single cow when we were buying dozens of them at a time on the mainland. It was a cheap way to improve everyone’s lives. Besides, the cows made wonderful fertilizer for the vegetable gardens.

Between the improved plowing, the other work it did, the milk, and the fertilized gardens, an average family farm with a cow produced enough extra food each year to pay for the cow. At the same time, many of the farms were also raising more cattle. Just giving a farm a single cow made that farm much more productive, and each farm that was raised past subsistence made the food supply much more stable.

It also freed up manpower. Some of the freed-up people just wanted their own farms, and King Tom and I both supported that as well as we could. More farms meant more food and more redundancy when things went wrong. Other people were glad to get away from the farms and sought out work in the towns.

Naturally, the warships paid better than anything else they could do, so those with the temperament to serve at sea kept us supplied with crews. Most of the farm boys we got were long on muscle and short on brains, but that was fine for most of the crew positions. The topmen and the gunners needed their wits about them, but the deck seamen and the Marines and the rest of the launcher crews could be barely functional morons as long as they did what they were told.

The next couple of years were fairly quiet. Shark, Place, and Thunder could all be sent out on their own without worrying about them getting into trouble. We kept capturing pirate ships whenever we found them, unloading any cargo we wanted to keep and then either converting them for our own uses or selling them to whoever would buy them.

I claimed 15 percent of the sale price for any ship and cargo captured by one of my warships. The Captain got 10 percent, and the ship’s home port got 10 percent. The rest of it, 65 percent, got split between the crew. My wealth went past obscenely rich to where it was just a number to keep track of. The crews, from the captain down to the cooks, all got wealthy as well. And Jayport could afford anything we decided it needed.

So could all the cities. I had no say in Bridgetown or Small Cove, but I made sure that Widemouth invested most of its income in the future. Both of ‘my’ towns welcomed refugees from the mainland, and every ship that moored brought us more people. Craftsmen, shopkeepers, farmers, ranchers, and seamen. And women, too. Women who wanted husbands, women who wanted jobs, women who were willing to work in a tavern.

Having the fleet of cargo ships meant that people who wanted to be sailors could get their start on a cog where the work wasn’t too hard, neither difficult nor complicated. We treated the cogs as school ships for those who wanted to serve on our warships where the pay was so much greater. The volunteer sailors were mostly men but occasionally a woman volunteered and I refused to discriminate based upon gender. If she could do the work and she wanted to serve on a ship, I welcomed her.

We sometimes had trouble with crewmen who couldn’t tell the difference between a town whore, a crew-slut who lived on the ship with the crew, and a fellow crewmember who just happened to have tits and a slit. Generally the crewmember with the tits could handle an unwanted lover on her own, though. All she needed was to know that we, the ship’s officers, would back her up.

That got ugly a couple of times. We had to hang a couple of our own men for rape before they got the idea. If she says yes, sure, its none of our business. If she says no, though, it’s rape and you already know what we do with rapists.

The road past the Narrows was eventually completed, and that meant that we could get supply wagons up to our upper outpost and build some ships and barges. That opened up the entire valley of the Long Lake for settlers. I thought of that valley as something like California’s Imperial Valley. It was huge, it got constant sun with plenty of rain, the land was fertile and with cattle on each farm it would stay fertile, and it could feed an entire nation.

It took us a while to fumble through how to exploit the Lake. I started setting up farms. Actually, I started setting up farms everywhere I controlled. All around Jayport, all around Widemouth including up the road on the north side of the river, and up on the Long Lake.

The farms weren’t big, mostly only forty or fifty acres each. That was big enough to feed the farmers and their extended families, plus have some left over to sell. We didn’t want huge estates for this. We used our captured pirates as a labor force to set the farms up. Clear the land, build a house and barn, bring in some tools and animals. When they are ready for use, turn them over to good men who aren’t needed at the moment.

The farm itself, the land and the buildings and the tools, belongs to me. When we started this it was me personally, but eventually my position got formally recognized as the grand high Poo-Bah for the area and the farms all belonged to the government, but at first they were mine directly like my ships were, because I was the one who paid for all the labor and all the tools and all the supplies.

The farm’s produce, on the other hand, belongs to the farmer. The government farm will only be taxed for manpower, for the Island’s armed forces. Raise a big family because good men and women are one of your crops. Every 10 years, provide a man for the army or navy or other government service. You, one of your sons, your brother, one of your daughters if she wants, we don’t care as long as he or she is willing to serve the country.

No, that’s not much of a force now, but what about in 20 years when we have several thousand of these farms? They should all be doing well, with no taxation on their crops. Five thousand farms give the island five thousand career soldiers or sailors or officials, every ten years. Sure, they still have to be paid and fed while they serve, but it ends the problem of finding men to serve.

The idea was that we could use these men for a general public labor force any time they weren’t needed to fight enemies. They could build roads. They could build fortresses. Hell, they could build more farms. That should solve any food problems the island may have. And population problems, too.

Once we figured out what we were doing we blew through my immense fortune just as fast as I could authorize it. It didn’t matter, it was just a number on a ledger. I certainly couldn’t eat all the money the bank said I had.

Jayport wasn’t a normal fishing village, slowly growing over the centuries. It was a purpose-built naval base, and it grew quickly because I was paying people to come and work. The town got its own bank within a year of its founding. I watched the numbers, but I didn’t do anything to affect them like making half of the craftsmen and shopkeepers live on the other side of the river. I was curious what would happen.

One day a man I didn’t know came and asked for permission to build a bank in Jayport. I didn’t think he was a local, from Chaos, but he had the look and sound down pat. He was dressed as a local and he spoke like a local, but something just wasn’t right. I figured he was from Cassandra, or wherever the Crossroads people recruited from. Sure, no problem. We’ve set aside a place for your building right over here...

They used mostly local labor and materials, but a suspicious person who kept a close eye on progress would occasionally notice that some parts of the construction got, um, helped along some in the middle of the night when no one was looking. I didn’t ask any questions, as having a bank would be very helpful in some ways. Full of danger in other ways, but helpful.

I figured that if I assigned a night watchman to sit in the bank building all night ‘to make sure that nothing is stolen from the worksite’, the bank would never get finished. And what would he report, anyway, if they kept working? “I was looking out the back at some dogs and when I turned around there was a big box that wasn’t there before. I swear it!” No, there was no point in trying to watch them.

Before long the bank was finished and open for business. That made life easier for everyone in Jayport. Filo or one of our other captains could take a captured ship to one of the ports on the mainland and sell it, depositing all the money in our main Jayport account at that town’s bank, and the funds would show up immediately there in Jayport. We could pay the sailors who had captured it, and everyone was happy.

Most of the officers and others that got multiple shares just had their portion of the prize money transferred into their accounts, but a lot of the common seamen wanted to hold their share in their hands. No problem. Having the bank right there made everything easy.

Some of our immigrants knew how to work with stone. We put them to work right away, along with a work force they could teach. We had them put a stone shell around each of our lookout towers first, just as a simple exercise that they could use to train their work force.

The lookout towers themselves had become nicer as the men assigned to them improved them. Being up there wasn’t much fun, as the wind was constant. The west wind was pretty reliable even down at the ocean, and once you’d climbed up to the headland and even further up into the tower, it was stronger and steadier. A man could dehydrate just standing in the wind all day. It was a concern that the men had nowhere out of the wind to rest.

I’d thought of adding partial walls, setting one or two timbers beside each roof support, but I wasn’t sure that the windbreak would be worth all the effort. I told the crews that if they wanted to try that I was fine with it.

One improvement I hadn’t thought of but would have approved if I’d been asked first was an in-the-floor bunker. The floors were just dirt with sand and gravel and rocks tossed in, and the towers were huge, far larger than needed. I wanted them to last and I didn’t know at the time how to build smaller and still be solid.

One of the lookout crews started digging the floor out, and when they got down to the rock again they put in a smaller set of log cabin walls, about ten or twelve feet square, right in the middle of the floor. The dirt was only about four feet deep, so they ended up raising the walls another three feet or so past the tower floor, but that gave them an enclosed cabin of sorts inside the tower. The dirt they’d pulled out just added to the dirt in the tower and raised the floor a little.