Chapter 21: East Isle

I cannot describe the relief I felt when I realized what that cloud meant. We had just shy of fifty ships out here carrying more than eight thousand men, and every one of them was going to die of thirst if I fucked up my navigation and we couldn’t find our way home again. Now, that wasn’t a problem. A lot of them may well die in combat here in the Isles, but they had a chance now.

Our fleet was still all strung out, a couple hundred miles from end to end. We needed to get all the commanders together. We had had several conferences as we sailed north and west before we spread out and we had several plans that depended upon what we found. We needed to meet again to decide which plan we would use.

If this was East Isle or North Isle, our initial plan was to simply close on any dock, building, or anything built of wood within striking distance of the shore, and burn it. Any point of resistance would be reinforced or abandoned as seemed appropriate to the officers on the spot. Ships could be captured or destroyed as convenient.

Supplies that were easily loaded -especially food, water, and valuables- could be taken. Anything not easily taken should be destroyed. The idea was to, first, give the islanders a taste of what a pirate raid was like, to see if it was the sort of thing that they enjoyed. Second, whether they liked it or not, we wanted to completely destroy their ability to send ships against us. Any loot was secondary to destroying ships, docks, and marine supplies.

We may not finish the job this time, we may need several expeditions, but we gotta start somewhere. We can see how we do here before we move on to one of the larger Isles. And, whatever we do, it will reduce the pirates’ strength for the next time. Of course, it will also warn them, so we want to do as much damage as we can this trip.

Naturally, Tom, Eric, and Tony were concentrating on the Damsels, the women from Cassandra. From their point of view, this whole expedition was merely support for their rescue. For everyone else, though, the women were strictly secondary to eliminating the pirates and collecting some loot.

Our commanders were spread out through the whole line. Eric was at the south end on Lion and the Commander was at the north end on Vengeance. I was in the middle. King Tom was halfway between the Commander and us on Flying Arrow, Filo had the middle of the south side on Wrong Place, and Sir Tony was somewhere north of us on Thunder. Still, it should take no more than a day for us to gather again.

It was late afternoon when I joined the gaggle of ships hove-to with an island on the horizon to the southwest. Filo was there and immediately passed command to me once I showed up. (Hey, thanks, man! Think nothing of it!) All I did was repeat Filo’s order to stand by. I did add an order for every ship to hang a lantern from a masthead for the night, to help the rest of the fleet gather.

We had several more ships join us in the night. We could tell because as they came close and recognized our ships under the lanterns, they hung lanterns on their own mastheads as well. A lot of the ships hung back once night fell, though, so we didn’t get the rest of the fleet until morning. Or maybe they were just so far away that it took that long to reach us.

By noon on the next day we felt that we had probably gotten all the ships we were going to get. We were still missing three transports with about five hundred men between them, but no one knew where they were. One on the south side had disappeared several days before, when we first set up the line, while the other two had been together to the north. We hoped they were simply slow to run down to the south and join us.

From descriptions and the chart, this was East Isle. East Isle was northeast of Central Isle, the largest one and the supposed capital. Central Isle was the one with their king, but each of the Pirate Isles was effectively independent.

East Isle was supposed to be well-developed, with two cities and several towns. According to Sir Tony’s briefing materials, East Isle owned about twenty-five ships. That was down from more than thirty several years ago, before we started hunting them down. Fine. It’s a good place to start.

Here, Mr. Black was the expert. He could take one look at the horizon and say “Yes, that is East Isle. It used to have twenty or more ships and there were three yards that could repair or build a ship but I don’t know what has changed over the years.”

While Tom wanted me to tell him what we were going to do, I had to defer to him as the expedition commander. We finally agreed that ships that fought could be sunk if we wanted, but any ship that surrendered would be allowed to. I wanted our faster ships to place a cordon around the island to catch escaping ships. Those could be simply sunk if desired, as we didn’t want to be burdened with too many prizes and prisoners. We would not be taking prisoners back to Hunter Island with us. We would take anyone we ran across who wanted to be rescued, but we weren’t going to guard prisoners any longer than we had to.

We finally agreed that everyone we captured would be released onto the island when we left. We would release them naked but free. That included any female prisoners. Women would be naked, but they would be unraped and free. We weren’t dealing with people who sailed over to us to cause trouble, we were dealing with people who were defending their own homes. They may well be outfitting their ships to go raiding next month, but for now they were just defending their homes and they would be set free when we left the island.

Of course, we had no way to guarantee that the women wouldn’t be raped the minute we had our backs turned. All we could do was shrug and say “not our problem”. It didn’t happen on our watch.

We took our time with our conference, since we were hoping that the last three ships would show up, but eventually we decided that it was time to act. Our warships were divided into four squadrons of three or four each, and the transports were divided into six groups of five ships. We really didn’t know what to expect, so we put all our warships in front for the approach.

If we were approached by ships, we would deal with them. If we reached the island without being approached by pirate ships, our warships would split to go around the island and try to catch all escaping ships. That was my task, managing that. We would leave a couple of escorts to protect the transports, but most of the warships would spread out.

The transports would continue on to land their soldiers and let them do their thing, under Sir Tony, Eric, and the Commander’s direction. I’d wanted to see that, but I had to do my job.

There was no way to surprise the island. They had to have seen us gathering on the horizon for the last day. When we got close, maybe two miles out, we were greeted by a small fleet. There were three ships in the lead and four more that hung back some. All were typical pirate ships, the cross between the medieval cog and viking longship that everyone here used for everything.

I don’t want to say that I was arrogant, but we’d been doing this for more than five years now. We’d captured or sunk somewhere close to a hundred and twenty of their ships. Some had been taken into our own fleet, most had been sold, and a few were simply salvaged for their materials. Some had been sunk, and a couple had foundered after the battle while being brought back to port. In all that time, we’d only lost one ship.

We were all still pissed about Eagle, but it was a lesson learned. Ships foundered in storms, they wrecked on shores and reefs, they took water and sank when their hulls rotted out or if the hull got holed. Ships might be scuttled after a battle, if the victors didn’t want to deal with the captured ship. Ships just didn’t sink in battle, though, unless something went horribly wrong, like having a tree-trunk shot through the hull. Having one sink in the middle of a battle and drag another one down was something that the men just hadn’t considered seriously until it happened to Eagle.

Anyway, we led the warships to meet with the islanders and we had a short conference.

“What fleet?”

“This is the Hunter Island Royal Fleet, escorting enough soldiers to conquer the Pirate Isles. Do you wish to surrender, or would you rather fight?”

“We will never surrender. We will all fight to the death. You will never take our islands.”

“Very well.”

Short conference. I had my speaker, a young man with a bull voice, use a trumpet to pass on the order “Sink these three, then we will talk to the others.” I really should have gotten the signal flag system working.

That wasn’t much of a fight. They expected a boarding fight, and I just didn’t want to deal with it. We would take casualties, we would get tired out, we didn’t need it. When we got close enough, we turned our ships enough to launch missiles at their hulls and then just passed them by. We had enough ships that not all of them had anything to do.

The second group probably couldn’t hear the conference, but they saw the results. They turned around and tried to row away. By the time we reached them, our launchers had been reloaded and the first group was on its way down. One of them was still floating, but men were taking their armor off and jumping into the water.

This time we were able to capture two of them. Thunder was still the fastest ship in the fleet, unless we were rowing, and it caught one of them first. We could hear the call to surrender, an outraged ‘Never!’, and then see the ship shudder.

By the time we caught up with the other three, that one was on its way down. One of the ships insisted upon trying to get away and it got sunk, but the one Shark caught and another one both accepted that ‘surrender’ was better than ‘sunk with all hands’. Most of our ships were down by a couple of missiles, but we hadn’t taken any casualties.

The warships all gathered round for orders while we were dealing with the prizes. In this case, both ships were undamaged and the crews were intact. When Thunder and Flying Arrow came up, I sent a polite order to Tom to stay out of these fights and keep his royal ass back with the transports where it was safe. We did NOT need to get him killed by accident! I also told Sir Tony to move to one of the escorts that was staying with the transports, as they needed him and I needed Thunder.

The officers and men of our two prizes were in shock. They didn’t know how we were doing it, but they’d seen and heard the other ships refuse to surrender, and then sink. And where had we come from? Why were we here? Of course by the time any of them got a good look at any of our warships, our missile launchers were safely under canvas again.

I didn’t have time for that. Tom and the fleet needed me to be an admiral, not a captain or boarding-crew leader. I had one of our escorts take charge of them, with instructions to strip both ships of any weapons and clothing, then leave a small prize crew onboard to monitor the naked pirates. Any pirate who wanted to fight would be allowed to. Any pirate who wanted to swim would be allowed to. Any pirate who wanted to stay alive and dry, though, though, had to strip and accept being naked until released.

Once that was dealt with, I split the warships and escorts again and gave them instructions to find and capture or sink every ship. If there were ships they couldn’t reach, maybe pulled up into a creek or on land and too well defended, they were to just keep an eye on it until our soldiers could reach it. All prisoners would remain on their ships naked until we were done with East Isle, and then they would be put ashore to continue their lives.

I took half of the ships and went around to the north in Shark to circle the island counter-clockwise, and I put Filo in charge of the other half in Wrong Place to head south and circle the island clockwise. It may take us a couple of days, we may run out of ships first as we left individual ships to watch things, but hopefully we will meet at the other side of the island and compare notes.

Meanwhile, Sir Tony and Eric and the Commander were going to take the transports and land wherever they wanted and burn, pillage, and loot to their heart’s content. I wasn’t there for it, but once the initial landing had been done Tony also split the transports under Eric and the Commander and had them take ten transports each and follow me and Filo. Sir Tony kept the last ten transports to help out as needed and keep an eye on our prizes.

Right off the bat we discovered why the pirates all had flat-bottomed ships with no keel. The tides here at East Isle were absolutely insane. The water rose nine or ten feet between low tide and high tide.

I asked some of our captured crewmen and they said all the Pirate Isles were like this. High tide was right at noon, so it was easy to track the tides, and all the Isles had the same problem. The cities and some keeps had stone piers with stairways and a watchman could adjust the lines to keep the boat moored there, but everywhere else they had to beach their ships at high tide. And the ship could be ruined if the watchman fell asleep.

There was no way to safely moor a ship to a pier and walk away. The locals had to either anchor their ships out in deep water and take a boat in to shore, or they had to beach them at high tide and tie them to a piling or a tree. They would be stranded far from the waterline in a couple of hours, but if they weren’t tied to something they would float off at midnight!

The next week was just a continuous piracy raid. Some things were defended, and we had to fight from our ships or land the soldiers before we could pillage and burn. Other things weren’t defended at all, whether abandoned or merely seen as indefensible. It was only a couple of days before the transports caught up with us, and as soon as Eric arrived where we were and told me their instructions I left them to it and took all the warships on to try to get ahead of the news.

If they were fast enough, someone could have gotten ahead of us and taken a ship to another island. If that happened, every other island would be ready for us when we showed up. It would be nice if we could prevent that. We did catch several ships leaving the island. We even caught a few going to the island. No, being from New Isle doesn’t make you a neutral in this fight. All of the Pirate Isles participate in your raids, all of the Pirate Isles are getting their reward. Strip, swim, or die.