The Sea Hawk

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The Sea-Hawk

by Rafael Sabatini

NOTE

Lord Henry Goade, who had, as we shall see, some personal acquaintance
with Sir Oliver Tressilian, tells us quite bluntly that he was
ill-favoured. But then his lordship is addicted to harsh judgments
and his perceptions are not always normal. He says, for instance, of
Anne of Cleves, that she was the "ugliest woman that ever I saw." As
far as we can glean from his own voluminous writings it would seem to
be extremely doubtful whether he ever saw Anne of Cleves at all, and we
suspect him here of being no more than a slavish echo of the common
voice, which attributed Cromwell's downfall to the ugliness of this
bride he procured for his Bluebeard master. To the common voice from
the brush of Holbein, which permits us to form our own opinions and
shows us a lady who is certainly very far from deserving his lordship's
harsh stricture. Similarly, I like to believe that Lord Henry was
wrong in his pronouncement upon Sir Oliver, and I am encouraged in this
belief by the pen-portrait which he himself appends to it. "He was,"
he says, "a tall, powerful fellow of a good shape, if we except that
his arms were too long and that his feet and hands were of an uncomely
bigness. In face he was swarthy, with black hair and a black forked
beard; his nose was big and very high in the bridge, and his eyes sunk
deep under beetling eyebrows were very pale-coloured and very cruel and
sinister. He had--and this I have ever remarked to be the sign of
great virility in a man--a big, deep, rough voice, better suited to,
and no doubt oftener employed in, quarter-deck oaths and foulnesses
than the worship of his Maker."

Thus my Lord Henry Goade, and you observe how he permits his lingering
disapproval of the man to intrude upon his description of him. The
truth is that--as there is ample testimony in his prolific writings--
is lordship was something of a misanthropist. It was, in fact, his
misanthropy which drove him, as it has driven many another, to
authorship. He takes up the pen, not so much that he may carry out his
professed object of writing a chronicle of his own time, but to the end
that he may vent the bitterness engendered in him by his fall from
favour. As a consequence he has little that is good to say of anyone,
and rarely mentions one of his contemporaries but to tap the sources of
a picturesque invective. After all, it is possible to make excuses for
him. He was at once a man of thought and a man of action--a
combination as rare as it is usually deplorable. The man of action in
him might have gone far had he not been ruined at the outset by the man
of thought. A magnificent seaman, he might have become Lord High
Admiral of England but for a certain proneness to intrigue.
Fortunately for him--since otherwise he could hardly have kept his
head where nature had placed it--he came betimes under a cloud of
suspicion. His career suffered a check; but it was necessary to afford
him some compensation since, after all, the suspicions could not be
substantiated.

Consequently he was removed from his command and appointed by the
Queen's Grace her Lieutenant of Cornwall, a position in which it was
judged that he could do little mischief. There, soured by this
blighting of his ambitions, and living a life of comparative seclusion,
he turned, as so many other men similarly placed have turned, to seek
consolation in his pen. He wrote his singularly crabbed, narrow and
superficial History of Lord Henry Goade: his own Times--which is a
miracle of injuvenations, distortions, misrepresentations, and
eccentric spelling. In the eighteen enormous folio volumes, which he
filled with his minute and gothic characters, he gives his own version
of the story of what he terms his downfall, and, having,
notwithstanding his prolixity, exhausted this subject in the first five
of the eighteen tomes, he proceeds to deal with so much of the history
of his own day as came immediately under his notice in his Cornish
retirement.

For the purposes of English history his chronicles are entirely
negligible, which is the reason why they have been allowed to remain
unpublished and in oblivion. But to the student who attempts to follow
the history of that extraordinary man, Sir Oliver Tressilian, they are
entirely invaluable. And, since I have made this history my present
task, it is fitting that I should here at the outset acknowledge my
extreme indebtedness to those chronicles. Without them, indeed, it
were impossible to reconstruct the life of that Cornish gentleman who
became a renegade and a Barbary Corsair and might have become Basha of
Algiers--or Argire, as his lordship terms it--but for certain matters
which are to be set forth.

Lord Henry wrote with knowledge and authority, and the tale he has to
tell is very complete and full of precious detail. He was, himself, an
eyewitness of much that happened; he pursued a personal acquaintance
with many of those who were connected with Sir Oliver's affairs that he
might amplify his chronicles, and he considered no scrap of gossip that
was to be gleaned along the countryside too trivial to be recorded. I
suspect him also of having received no little assistance from Jasper
Leigh in the matter of those events that happened out of England, which
seem to me to constitute by far the most interesting portion of his
narrative.

R. S.

CONTENTS

PART ONE

SIR OLIVER TRESSILIAN

CHAPTER

I. THE HUCKSTER

II. ROSAMUND

III. THE FORGE

IV. THE INTERVENER

V. THE BUCKLER

VI. JASPER LEIGH

VII. TREPANNED

VIII. THE SPANIARD

PART TWO

SAKR-EL-BAHR

I. THE CAPTIVE

II. THE RENEGADE

III. HOMEWARD BOUND

IV. THE RAID

V. THE LION OF THE FAITH

VI. THE CONVERT

VII. MARZAK-BEN-ASAD

VIII. MOTHER AND SON

IX. COMPETITORS

X. THE SLAVE-MARKET

XI. THE TRUTH

XII. THE SUBTLETY OF FENZILEH

XIII. IN THE SIGHT OF ALLAH

XIV. THE SIGN

XV. THE VOYAGE

XVI. THE PANNIER

XVII. THE DUPE

XVIII. SHEIK MAT

XIX. THE MUTINEERS

XX. THE MESSENGER

XXI. MORITURUS

XXII. THE SURRENDER

XXIII. THE HEATHEN CREED

XXIV. THE JUDGES

XXV. THE ADVOCATE

XXVI. THE JUDGMENT

PART I

SIR OLIVER TRESSILIAN

CHAPTER I

THE HUCKSTER

Sir Oliver Tressilian sat at his ease in the lofty dining-room of the
handsome house of Penarrow, which he owed to the enterprise of his
father of lamented and lamentable memory and to the skill and invention
of an Italian engineer named Bagnolo who had come to England half a
century ago as one of the assistants of the famous Torrigiani.

This house of such a startlingly singular and Italianate grace for so
remote a corner of Cornwall deserves, together with the story of its
construction, a word in passing.

The Italian Bagnolo who combined with his salient artistic talents a
quarrelsome, volcanic humour had the mischance to kill a man in a brawl
in a Southwark tavern. As a result he fled the town, nor paused in his
headlong flight from the consequences of that murderous deed until he
had all but reached the very ends of England. Under what circumstances
he became acquainted with Tressilian the elder I do not know. But
certain it is that the meeting was a very timely one for both of them.
To the fugitive, Ralph Tressilian--who appears to have been
inveterately partial to the company of rascals of all denominations--
afforded shelter; and Bagnolo repaid the service by offering to rebuild
the decaying half-timbered house of Penarrow. Having taken the task in
hand he went about it with all the enthusiasm of your true artist, and
achieved for his protector a residence that was a marvel of grace in
that crude age and outlandish district. There arose under the
supervision of the gifted engineer, worthy associate of Messer
Torrigiani, a noble two-storied mansion of mellow red brick, flooded
with light and sunshine by the enormously tall mullioned windows that
rose almost from base to summit of each pilastered facade. The main
doorway was set in a projecting wing and was overhung by a massive
balcony, the whole surmounted by a pillared pediment of extraordinary
grace, now partly clad in a green mantle of creepers. Above the burnt
red tiles of the roof soared massive twisted chimneys in lofty majesty.

But the glory of Penarrow--that is, of the new Penarrow begotten of the
fertile brain of Bagnolo--was the garden fashioned out of the tangled
wilderness about the old house that had crowned the heights above
Penarrow point. To the labours of Bagnolo, Time and Nature had added
their own. Bagnolo had cut those handsome esplanades, had built those
noble balustrades bordering the three terraces with their fine
connecting flights of steps; himself he had planned the fountain, and
with his own hands had carved the granite faun presiding over it and
the dozen other statues of nymphs and sylvan gods in a marble that
gleamed in white brilliance amid the dusky green. But Time and Nature
had smoothed the lawns to a velvet surface, had thickened the handsome
boxwood hedges, and thrust up those black spear-like poplars that
completed the very Italianate appearance of that Cornish demesne.

Sir Oliver took his ease in his dining-room considering all this as it
was displayed before him in the mellowing September sunshine, and found
it all very good to see, and life very good to live. Now no man has
ever been known so to find life without some immediate cause, other
than that of his environment, for his optimism. Sir Oliver had several
causes. The first of these--although it was one which he may have been
far from suspecting--was his equipment of youth, wealth, and good
digestion; the second was that he had achieved honour and renown both
upon the Spanish Main and in the late harrying of the Invincible
Armada--or, more aptly perhaps might it be said, in the harrying of the
late Invincible Armada--and that he had received in that the twenty-
fifth year of his life the honour of knighthood from the Virgin Queen;
the third and last contributor to his pleasant mood--and I have
reserved it for the end as I account this to be the proper place for
the most important factor--was Dan Cupid who for once seemed compounded
entirely of benignity and who had so contrived matters that Sir
Oliver's wooing Of Mistress Rosamund Godolphin ran an entirely smooth
and happy course.

So, then, Sir Oliver sat at his ease in his tall, carved chair, his
doublet untrussed, his long legs stretched before him, a pensive smile
about the firm lips that as yet were darkened by no more than a small
black line of moustachios. (Lord Henry's portrait of him was drawn at
a much later period.) It was noon, and our gentleman had just dined,
as the platters, the broken meats and the half-empty flagon on the
board beside him testified. He pulled thoughtfully at a long pipe--for
he had acquired this newly imported habit of tobacco-drinking--and
dreamed of his mistress, and was properly and gallantly grateful that
fortune had used him so handsomely as to enable him to toss a title and
some measure of renown into his Rosamund's lap.

By nature Sir Oliver was a shrewd fellow ("cunning as twenty devils,"
is my Lord Henry's phrase) and he was also a man of some not
inconsiderable learning. Yet neither his natural wit nor his acquired
endowments appear to have taught him that of all the gods that rule the
destinies of mankind there is none more ironic and malicious than that
same Dan Cupid in whose honour, as it were, he was now burning the
incense of that pipe of his. The ancients knew that innocent-seeming
boy for a cruel, impish knave, and they mistrusted him. Sir Oliver
either did not know or did not heed that sound piece of ancient wisdom.
It was to be borne in upon him by grim experience, and even as his
light pensive eyes smiled upon the sunshine that flooded the terrace
beyond the long mullioned window, a shadow fell athwart it which he
little dreamed to be symbolic of the shadow that was even falling
across the sunshine of his life.

After that shadow came the substance--tall and gay of raiment under a
broad black Spanish hat decked with blood-red plumes. Swinging a long
beribboned cane the figure passed the windows, stalking deliberately as
Fate.

The smile perished on Sir Oliver's lips. His swarthy face grew
thoughtful, his black brows contracted until no more than a single deep
furrow stood between them. Then slowly the smile came forth again, but
no longer that erstwhile gentle pensive smile. It was transformed into
a smile of resolve and determination, a smile that tightened his lips
even as his brows relaxed, and invested his brooding eyes with a gleam
that was mocking, crafty and almost wicked.

Came Nicholas his servant to announce Master Peter Godolphin, and close
upon the lackey's heels came Master Godolphin himself, leaning upon his
beribboned cane and carrying his broad Spanish hat. He was a tall,
slender gentleman, with a shaven, handsome countenance, stamped with an
air of haughtiness; like Sir Oliver, he had a high-bridged, intrepid
nose, and in age he was the younger by some two or three years. He
wore his auburn hair rather longer than was the mode just then, but in
his apparel there was no more foppishness than is tolerable in a
gentleman of his years.

Sir Oliver rose and bowed from his great height in welcome. But a wave
of tobacco-smoke took his graceful visitor in the throat and set him
coughing and grimacing.

"I see," he choked, "that ye have acquired that filthy habit."

"I have known filthier," said Sir Oliver composedly.

"I nothing doubt it," rejoined Master Godolphin, thus early giving
indications of his humour and the object of his visit.

Sir Oliver checked an answer that must have helped his visitor to his
ends, which was no part of the knight's intent.

"Therefore," said he ironically, "I hope you will be patient with my
shortcomings. Nick, a chair for Master Godolphin and another cup. I
bid you welcome to Penarrow."

A sneer flickered over the younger man's white face. "You pay me a
compliment, sir, which I fear me 'tis not mine to return to you."

"Time enough for that when I come to seek it," said Sir Oliver, with
easy, if assumed, good humour.

"When you come to seek it?"

"The hospitality of your house," Sir Oliver explained.

"It is on that very matter I am come to talk with you."

"Will you sit?" Sir Oliver invited him, and spread a hand towards the
chair which Nicholas had set. In the same gesture he waved the servant
away.

Master Godolphin ignored the invitation. "You were," he said, "at
Godolphin Court but yesterday, I hear." He paused, and as Sir Oliver
offered no denial, he added stiffly: "I am come, sir, to inform you
that the honour of your visits is one we shall be happy to forgo."

In the effort he made to preserve his self-control before so direct an
affront Sir Oliver paled a little under his tan.

"You will understand, Peter," he replied slowly, "that you have said
too much unless you add something more." He paused, considering his
visitor a moment. "I do not know whether Rosamund has told you that
yesterday she did me the honour to consent to become my wife...."

"She is a child that does not know her mind," broke in the other.

"Do you know of any good reason why she should come to change it?"
asked Sir Oliver, with a slight air of challenge.

Master Godolphin sat down, crossed his legs and placed his hat on his
knee.

"I know a dozen," he answered. "But I need not urge them. Sufficient
should it be to remind you that Rosamund is but seventeen and that she
is under my guardianship and that of Sir John Killigrew. Neither Sir
John nor I can sanction this betrothal."

"Good lack!" broke out Sir Oliver. "Who asks your sanction or Sir
John's? By God's grace your sister will grow to be a woman soon and
mistress of herself. I am in no desperate haste to get me wed, and by
nature--as you may be observing--I am a wondrous patient man. I'll
even wait," And he pulled at his pipe.

"Waiting cannot avail you in this, Sir Oliver. 'Tis best you should
understand. We are resolved, Sir John and I."

"Are you so? God's light. Send Sir John to me to tell me of his
resolves and I'll tell him something of mine. Tell him from me, Master
Godolphin, that if he will trouble to come as far as Penarrow I'll do
by him what the hangman should have done long since. I'll crop his
pimpish ears for him, by this hand!"

"Meanwhile," said Master Godolphin whettingly, "will you not essay your
rover's prowess upon me?"

"You?" quoth Sir Oliver, and looked him over with good-humoured
contempt. "I'm no butcher of fledgelings, my lad. Besides, you are
your sister's brother, and 'tis no aim of mine to increase the
obstacles already in my path." Then his tone changed. He leaned
across the table. "Come, now, Peter. What is at the root of all this
matter? Can we not compose such differences as you conceive exist?
Out with them. 'Tis no matter for Sir John. He's a curmudgeon who
signifies not a finger's snap. But you, 'tis different. You are her
brother. Out with your plaints, then. Let us be frank and friendly."

"Friendly?" The other sneered again. "Our fathers set us an example
in that."

"Does it matter what our fathers did? More shame to them if, being
neighbours, they could not be friends. Shall we follow so deplorable
an example?"

"You'll not impute that the fault lay with my father," cried the other,
with a show of ready anger.

"I impute nothing, lad. I cry shame upon them both."

"'Swounds!" swore Master Peter. "Do you malign the dead?"

"If I do, I malign them both. But I do not. I no more than condemn a
fault that both must acknowledge could they return to life."

"Then, Sir, confine your condemnings to your own father with whom no
man of honour could have lived at peace...."

"Softly, softly, good Sir...."

"There's no call to go softly. Ralph Tressilian was a dishonour, a
scandal to the countryside. Not a hamlet between here and Truro, or
between here and Helston, but swarms with big Tressilian noses like
your own, in memory of your debauched parent."

Sir Oliver's eyes grew narrower: he smiled. "I wonder how you came by
your own nose?" he wondered.

Master Godolphin got to his feet in a passion, and his chair crashed
over behind him. "Sir," he blazed, "you insult my mother's memory!"

Sir Oliver laughed. "I make a little free with it, perhaps, in return
for your pleasantries on the score of my father."

Master Godolphin pondered him in speechless anger, then swayed by his
passion he leaned across the board, raised his long cane and struck Sir
Oliver sharply on the shoulder.

That done, he strode off magnificently towards the door. Half-way
thither he paused.

"I shall expect your friends and the length of your sword," said he.

Sir Oliver laughed again. "I don't think I shall trouble to send
them," said he.

Master Godolphin wheeled, fully to face him again. "How? You will
take a blow?"

Sir Oliver shrugged. "None saw it given," said he.

"But I shall publish it abroad that I have caned you."

"You'll publish yourself a liar if you do; for none will believe you."
Then he changed his tone yet again. "Come, Peter, we are behaving
unworthily. As for the blow, I confess that I deserved it. A man's
mother is more sacred than his father. So we may cry quits on that
score. Can we not cry quits on all else? What can it profit us to
perpetuate a foolish quarrel that sprang up between our fathers?"

"There is more than that between us," answered Master Godolphin. "I'll
not have my sister wed a pirate."

"A pirate? God's light! I am glad there's none to hear you for since
her grace has knighted me for my doings upon the seas, your words go
very near to treason. Surely, lad, what the Queen approves, Master
Peter Godolphin may approve and even your mentor Sir John Killigrew.
You've been listening to him. 'Twas he sent you hither."

"I am no man's lackey," answered the other hotly, resenting the
imputation--and resenting it the more because of the truth in it.

"To call me a pirate is to say a foolish thing. Hawkins with whom I
sailed has also received the accolade, and who dubs us pirates insults
the Queen herself. Apart from that, which, as you see, is a very empty
charge, what else have you against me? I am, I hope, as good as any
other here in Cornwall; Rosamund honours me with her affection and I am
rich and shall be richer still ere the wedding bells are heard."

"Rich with the fruit of thieving upon the seas, rich with the treasures
of scuttled ships and the price of slaves captured in Africa and sold
to the plantations, rich as the vampire is glutted--with the blood of
dead men."

"Does Sir John say that?" asked Sir Oliver, in a soft deadly voice.

"I say it."

"I heard you; but I am asking where you learnt that pretty lesson. Is
Sir John your preceptor? He is, he is. No need to tell me. I'll deal
with him. Meanwhile let me disclose to you the pure and disinterested
source of Sir John's rancour. You shall see what an upright and honest
gentleman is Sir John, who was your father's friend and has been your
guardian."

"I'll not listen to what you say of him."

"Nay, but you shall, in return for having made me listen to what he
says of me. Sir John desires to obtain a licence to build at the mouth
of the Fal. He hopes to see a town spring up above the haven there
under the shadow of his own Manor of Arwenack. He represents himself
as nobly disinterested and all concerned for the prosperity of the
country, and he neglects to mention that the land is his own and that
it is his own prosperity and that of his family which he is concerned
to foster. We met in London by a fortunate chance whilst Sir John was
about this business at the Court. Now it happens that I, too, have
interests in Truro and Penryn; but, unlike Sir John, I am honest in the
matter, and proclaim it. If any growth should take place about
Smithick it follows from its more advantageous situation that Truro and
Penryn must suffer, and that suits me as little as the other matter
would suit Sir John. I told him so, for I can be blunt, and I told the
Queen in the form of a counter-petition to Sir John's." He shrugged.
"The moment was propitious to me. I was one of the seamen who had
helped to conquer the unconquerable Armada of King Philip. I was
therefore not to be denied, and Sir John was sent home as empty-handed
as he went to Court. D'ye marvel that he hates me? Knowing him for
what he is, d'ye marvel that he dubs me pirate and worse? 'Tis natural
enough so to misrepresent my doings upon the sea, since it is those
doings have afforded me the power to hurt his profit. He has chosen
the weapons of calumny for this combat, but those weapons are not mine,
as I shall show him this very day. If you do not credit what I say,
come with me and be present at the little talk I hope to have with that
curmudgeon."

"You forget," said Master Godolphin, "that I, too, have interests in
the neighbourhood of Smithick, and that you are hurting those."

"Soho!" crowed Sir Oliver. "Now at last the sun of truth peeps forth
from all this cloud of righteous indignation at my bad Tressilian blood
and pirate's ways! You, too, are but a trafficker. Now see what a
fool I am to have believed you sincere, and to have stood here in talk
with you as with an honest man." His voice swelled and his lip curled
in a contempt that struck the other like a blow. "I swear I had not
wasted breath with you had I known you for so mean and pitiful a
fellow."

"These words...." began Master Godolphin, drawing himself up very
stiffly.

"Are a deal less than your deserts," cut in the other, and he raised
his voice to call--"Nick."

"You shall answer to them," snapped his visitor.

"I am answering now," was the stern answer. "To come here and prate to
me of my dead father's dissoluteness and of an ancient quarrel between
him and yours, to bleat of my trumped-up course of piracy and my own
ways of life as a just cause why I may not wed your sister whilst the
real consideration in your mind, the real spur to your hostility is not
more than the matter of some few paltry pounds a year that I hinder you
from pocketing. A God's name get you gone."

Nick entered at that moment.

"You shall hear from me again, Sir Oliver," said the other, white with
anger. "You shall account to me for these words."

"I do not fight with...with hucksters," flashed Sir Oliver.

"D'ye dare call me that?"

"Indeed, 'tis to discredit an honourable class, I confess it. Nick,
the door for Master Godolphin."

CHAPTER II

ROSAMUND

Anon, after his visitor had departed, Sir Oliver grew calm again. Then
being able in his calm to consider his position, he became angry anew
at the very thought of the rage in which he had been, a rage which had
so mastered him that he had erected additional obstacles to the already
considerable ones that stood between Rosamund and himself. In full
blast, his anger swung round and took Sir John Killigrew for its
objective. He would settle with him at once. He would so, by Heaven's
light!

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