South America, in the Republic of Rococo. I had got mixed up with one of their revolutions, but if I were to tell you all about that the dawn flighting would be over before I had begun. The long and the short of it was that my friend, Porfirio Broll, came out on top: he wasn’t a bad chap at all; we used to call him Little Brolly at college, and I believe he really did have some sound notions about liberty. Anyway, he was President, and he made me a full-blown admiral. Now that was very kind, and it would have been kinder still if Rococo had ever got around to building a navy, but it had not. I pointed this out to Porfirio, and he gave me the choice of being Postmaster-General, Ambassador to Luxemburg or Minister without portfolio: I said that we would call it quits if he would give me the right to work a guano island that I had sighted off the coast. He jumped at the idea, and gave me a nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine-year lease of the island, all written out on a fine piece of parchment and covered with seals.
‘As soon as I had got my lease I set sail for my island. It was only a couple of sheer rocks stuck in the sea a hundred miles from anywhere, and nothing lived on it but sea-birds. There was no anchorage to speak of, and there was no water, but the guano had never been touched, and it lay twenty feet thick all over the island – it is the droppings of gulls, you know, and the best fertiliser in the world. It was a very valuable find indeed, and I was in a fair way to make my fortune. I put some convicts ashore – Porfirio had provided me with his predecessor’s cabinet – and left them to provide a cargo against my return while I went off to arrange about selling the stuff. The first cargo was all ready according to plan, and I began to work out how many voyages it would need before I could buy Long Island and the county Mayo, where we came from.
‘But the next time I went back to the island for a fresh cargo I found a ship lying there, and all my convicts busy loading her up to the Plimsoll line with my guano. In Rococo, Porfirio had got in the way of a bullet, and he had stopped being a president the moment he had begun on his new career as a corpse and a national martyr. There was a new president – they can’t rest easy without one in those parts – and he had leased the island to a group of businessmen in El Liberador. All this seemed very unjust to me, so I waited until their ship was laden, and then in my capacity as Lord High Admiral of Rococo I confiscated ship, cargo and all. It is true that I did it in the dead of night, in rather an unofficial way, but it was foolish of them to get so annoyed. They called me a wrong-doer and a man of wrath and all sorts of unkind things, including a pirate, until I persuaded them to stop with a belaying-pin: I put them ashore on the Spanish main and told them to consult a lawyer. They would find one, I said, by marching through the jungle for a month or two towards the north: but I assured them that it was hardly worth the trouble and expense, because I had a perfectly good and legal lease, which could not be upset by their President, who was only an upstart rebel.
‘Some time later I heard that they had got home, and that the rebel government had proclaimed me a pirate. They had even offered a reward to anyone who should catch me, and they had ordered the entire navy of Rococo, which consisted of the Presidential pleasure-launch and one confiscated dinghy without a bottom, to search for me on the high seas. I wrote to them and said that my nine hundred and ninety-nine years was not up yet, but that when it was, I would resign the islands to the next comer: I thought that was fair enough. But the new company fitted out another vessel, stuck guns all over it, and came back to my island. I lay hull down on the horizon, watching them from my cross-trees, and when they had loaded her and fixed her hatches I confiscated her again. It was rather more boisterous, but I had a mixed crew of Solomon Islanders and Irishmen, and we overcame their objections.
‘When the company heard about this, they were hopping mad: they hired a tough skipper with his own crew to get the guano. I had heard a good deal about this man. They called him the Hellbender, and they said he used railroad ties for toothpicks.
‘He came to my island a good while before I was expecting him, and half my men were ashore when he hove up out of the mist. I had to cut and run for it, leaving the cargo ready on the little wharf we had made. I slipped round behind the island, got my men off in the night, and then came round to try conclusions with him. But the current was setting very strong, and the wind was against me, so I was delayed longer than I could have wished, and by the time I had worked round the island I could only see his tops’ls over the rim of the sea to the west. That made me think a bit, for nobody but a first-rate sailor could have picked up my guano and turned around so quickly. I cracked on everything we had, and by the evening he ran into a calm, so that I could see his vessel clearly in the distance. She was a tops’l schooner, with lovely lines, and she was being very well handled. My ship, the one I had then, was a good sort of a ship in her way, comfortable and beamy, but she would not come as close to the wind as he could, being in ballast; and with a weedy bottom too, having been so long at sea, we were as slow as a dead porpoise compared with him. Presently he got the wind again, and it was our turn for the calm: he went away straight into the eye of the breeze, and we were left there without a sail drawing.
‘The next day we never saw him at all, nor the next, and I had to resign myself to the loss of that cargo. But it galled me. It galled me very much, and the more I thought of it, the more it galled me. It was my island: I had discovered it and I had first worked it, and I dare say that an international court, working on the broad principles of equity, would have upheld my lease. Anyway, I was determined to uphold it, and I set a man ashore to tell me when the tops’l schooner next set out.
‘When I got the signal I kept her just in sight, and then I doubled back to the mainland. I hid the ship up a lonely creek, and we marched overland to the mouth of the river – El Liberador is some way up the Rococo river, you know, and they have a tug to bring vessels up the narrow part to the city. I had kept her in sight until she had started loading, so I knew we would not have long to wait. Sure enough, three tides later, the tug came down. We stopped her in mid-stream and invited her crew to take their ease under hatches for a while.
‘Then, when the tide began to flow, the tops’l schooner came in over the bar. It was pitch-black night when we went down into the estuary and hailed her. They never suspected a thing, and threw us a line: we got the tow aboard and made all fast. Then, very gently, and stopping every now and then as if we were having trouble with our engines, we edged her round and towed her out across the bar. I had arranged to have the shore-lights doused – a few dollars can work wonders there – and I reckoned that a man who did not know the river very well would never know that he had been turned about. But we had not got very far before a great voice came bawling through the night, telling us to heave to. We did not reply, and presently we heard them working on the hawser. I flashed the searchlight on to them, and said that I would shoot the first man who touched the tow: that stopped them for a bit, but then a bullet came whipping across and smashed the searchlight. I rigged up another, but by that time they had brought a hatch up for’ard as a shield, and they were busy casting off the tow, so we boarded them.
‘They were a tougher crew than I had expected, but we were fairly evenly matched. There was no light for shooting, which was a good thing, or we should have destroyed one another entirely, like the Kilkenny cats. It was their skipper who gave us the most trouble. He rushed up and down the deck with a capstan-bar in each hand, laying about him like a man threshing beans in a hurry – only the beans were my men, and by the time the moon rose they were getting a little discouraged. I got at him once or twice, but each time we were pushed apart by other swabs getting in the way: at last I did reach him, and we set to very briskly. He had either broken his capstan-bars or thrown them away by this time, and we went to it with our fists, hammer and tongs. He was a heavier man, I found, and he packed a terrible punch, but I had a longer reach, and I spoilt his face for him. But banging his face did not seem to do much good, and when he got in close he paid it back with interest. He had me up against the rails and thumped away at my ribs like a steam-engine. I knew I could not hold out much longer, so I grabbed him by the neck and flung myself backwards over the rails into the sea, still holding him. I had learnt to swim before I could walk, and I felt that maybe I could deal with him better in the water. I lay there for a moment, getting back my breath, and he floundered about like a grampus, blowing and bellowing. He went under once or twice, and as far
