Chapter 25: South Isle

Not as exciting as a huge melee with seventy or so ships all boarding each other, but I thought it was a much better result. Only one ship sunk, and the only casualties would be those sailors on Avenger who had never learned to swim. Breaker and the other nine ships had all surrendered, or hopefully would as soon as Mayor Michael talked to them.

I got to report to King Tom and the other commanders that the enemy commander had reached the correct conclusion from Wrong Place’s little demonstration, and that they would be surrendering and joining us. By the time I got to Flying Arrow I’d already changed my mind, though, about what to do with them.

It would be better to keep them apart and well clear of the fighting, but I didn’t want to give them a chance to sail off and escape. We wouldn’t need our warships in the harbor. The escorts and the transports could deal with everything they found there. I could assign all the warships to herd the surrendered fleet.

That should work. Flying Arrow would stay with the transports and Shark could supervise the pirate fleet. That would work fine. We’d use Eaglet to pass messages back and forth between the two groups.

Sir Tony and Eric and the Commander could manage the city and the citadel without me and King Tom would be right there if they needed political guidance. Meanwhile, I could talk with Mayor-to-be Michael and figure out what we were going to do with the rest of the island. The Mayor didn’t rule the whole island, just Safety Bay, but Safety Bay was the largest city with the best fortifications. Ergo, the Mayor of Safety Bay wasn’t necessarily the Prince of the Isle but being Mayor of Safety Bay was pretty much a required first step.

King Tom and the others rubber-stamped my decisions, plans, and agreement with Michael. That concerned me, since I’d pretty much pulled it all out of my ass while I was talking, but none of them had any better ideas. We were going to remove the current government, and the one that replaced it may well be worse unless we stuck our noses into the succession.

My view was that Senior Captain Michael had personal courage; he had volunteered his own ship to be sunk if I was telling the truth. He also took responsibility for his men’s welfare; he had knelt and bowed his head for the chopping-block to save his men. We probably weren’t going to find a better candidate for Prince of the Isle without a major talent search. If a good candidate just happened to fall out of the sky into our hands, we should take advantage of it and ensure that the next Mayor of Safety Bay and Prince of South Isle was someone who both trusted us to be honest and knew what would happen if any of his ships came our way.

As long as Michael was running South Isle, it would be out of the pirate business just as surely as North Isle and East Isle were. He might even be able to conquer New Isle for us, but I wasn’t going to bring that up. It had to already be on his mind.

Once Michael and his officers got their deal explained to his fleet, they all gathered together and let our fleet by. Our warships stayed with them, and we put a ten-man squad on each one just to keep them from getting any bad ideas. Ten Marines weren’t going to win a fight against a whole crew, but they’d make enough noise to ensure that the crew didn’t get away with anything.

As usual, I didn’t see any of the land campaign. I shouldn’t complain, since I saw one at close range when the pirates attacked Widemouth. Still, I wanted to watch! Comes of growing up with TV and movies, I guess. The escorts and transports moved into the bay and we could occasionally hear some noise carried on the wind. We also saw some fires that I hope our people hadn’t started, but when a city is being fought over things go wrong.

After a while we started having ferry crews bring us captured ships, and they brought us the news as they heard it. A few had captured crewmen, but most just had our people onboard to bring them out. The first one we got I sent right back in with a request that any ships coming out bring food and water for Senior Captain Michael’s ships. After that they all brought food and water and loot.

Michael tried to thank me, but I told him to wait some. I had no idea where the supplies came from, and if some of it turned out to be poisoned I preferred that his men found out for us. He was sure that his people wouldn’t do that, which was fine, but I’d rather be safe than sorry.

We ended up with eighteen more captured ships out with us. They had all belonged to the Mayor, or at least to people who lived in Safety Bay and were supposedly loyal to him, so they all belonged to us now. After we selected our ten favorites, the rest would go to Michael and his men.

The fight for Safety Bay was surprisingly short. Five or six thousand experienced fighting men don’t take long to go through three or four hundred men even when they are behind walls. Even when some of the city folk help the defenders.

Sir Eric and the officers apparently did a fair job of keeping their men under control. Any building or property that left us alone got left alone in turn. This was a change from the previous islands; we may have friends in charge here when we left and we didn’t want to completely destroy the city.

Any building or property that attacked us, though, got cleaned out. Pillaged, looted, and burnt. Probably raped, too. The captured ships brought freed slaves from Hunter Island and the mainland, they brought any cargo or loot that the soldiers wanted to carry, and they brought more than a few women who probably weren’t rescued slaves.

I had to mentally say “not my problem” and shrug. As long as they came from places that had attacked our men as they went by, they were probably the only survivors from their homes. It was either carry them off as loot, or kill them as troublemakers.

It was getting on towards evening of our second day on station when Eaglet came out with orders to land Mayor Michael and his men, and then take the warships to sweep the rest of the island. We’d been talking about it, and Michael left four of his captains with us to help us decide what to do with each ship we found. All ten of his ships went into the harbor to land his men and take control of the city. Hopefully, his city now.

There were a dozen transports coming out to accompany us. Good. I took Shark, Thunder, Cleaver, Eagle 2 and a couple other escorts, and half of the transports to go around the south side of the island. I sent Filo in Wrong Place with the rest of our warships, a couple more escorts, and the rest of the transports around on the north side. Each of us had two of Michael’s captains, and we promised to meet halfway around the island as soon as we could.

That didn’t take long, only three days. It wasn’t a complicated job. Go along the coast. Whenever we found a ship, either capture it or destroy it, and the easiest way to destroy it was to capture it first, loot it, and then sink it far enough offshore to not be recoverable.

We had the transports to land men as needed, so the only times we had trouble were when we got to towns with fortifications. That was more complicated. Land some men including one of Mayor Michael’s captains, go talk to the people in charge, and either get them to surrender their ships or accept that when we overcame their defenses we would destroy their defenses, their ships, and everything else we felt like destroying. Like their homes and families.

The first one was close enough to Safety Bay that they already knew about the invading fleet and what had happened to Landon. It accepted the captain’s suggestion that they man their ships and accompany us back to Safety Bay. That got the new Mayor three more ships. Whether he could trust the crews or not was his problem.

The second one was a larger town or city, and they weren’t afraid of our little squadron. Fine. I left Thunder and Eagle 2 to watch their four ships, and took the rest of my group on down the coast. We were headed more north than west by then, and I was getting cranky so we just destroyed the rest of the ships we found, three or four, until we met Filo’s group.

Filo had also left some ships watching a town that was too well defended for them. We talked it over with Michael’s four captains, and decided that Filo’s was probably the easier target. If we combined our groups, we would have enough men to assault the town.

That plan got pre-empted. When we got there, we found a dozen of our transports beached beside the town, their fort on fire, and half of the town on fire as well. The town’s three ships were all setting out to sea full of loot, freed slaves, and captured women. The transports’ escort commander told us that we were done at Safety Bay, and King Tom had sent them out to deal with whatever was holding us up so that we could move on.

That’s great! Where is the fleet gathering? At Safety Bay. Good. Okay, we gotta go back to our problem, and hopefully we’ll all meet up at Safety Bay in a few days.

The next day we ran into one of our ships, coming to tell us that that town had also been reduced. One ship had been stripped and sunk as not worth saving, and the other three were on their way to Safety Bay. Well, with the winds the way they are it’s faster to just keep going on around the island.

“Reduced” was a good word. When we passed that town that had closed their gates in our faces, we could see that it no longer had gates. Or a fort, or even many buildings. There were still a lot of people around, we could see them, but they didn’t have many buildings to live in. The city had been reduced to a village among a lot of ruins. I gathered that they had objected to our assault, and our soldiers had overridden their objections.

Hopefully, our men had taken care of the looting, rescuing, and raping parts before they got to the burning and killing parts. I know, I wasn’t supposed to be condoning rape, but I would support any of our sailors who decided that they wanted a Pirate Isles wife. It isn’t rape if you’re married, right?

Michael, Mayor of Safety Bay, should have no problem getting the remaining people at that town to acknowledge his position as Prince of South Isle and ruler of the whole island.