Birds of Prey

The pi

At last the full steely light of day struck as the sun rose from the eastern ocean. Hal gazed down the fiery path it threw across the waters. He felt his spirits slide as he found the ocean empty of a strange sail. just as on the sixty-five preceding dawns, there was no Dutchman in sight.

Then he looked northwards to the land mass that crouched like a great rock sphim, dark and inscrutable, upon the horizon. This was the Agulhas Cape, the southernmost tip of the African continent.

"Africa!" The sound of that mysterious name on his own lips raised goose pimples along his arms and made the thick dark hair prickle on the back of his neck.

"Africa!" The uncharted land of dragons and other dreadful creatures, who ate the flesh of men, and of darkski

"Africa!" The land of gold and ivory and slaves and other treasures, all waiting for a man bold enough to seek them out, and, perhaps, to perish in the endeavour. Hal felt daunted yet fascinated by the sound and promise of that name, its menace and challenge.

Long hours he had pored over the charts in his father's cabin when he should have been learning by rote the tables of celestial passages, or declining his Latin verbs. He had studied the great interior spaces, filled with drawings of elephants and lions and monsters, traced the outlines of the Mountains of the Moon, and of lakes and mighty rivers confidently emblazoned with names such as "Khoikhoi', and "Camdeboo', "Sofala" and "the Kingdom of Prester John'. But Hal knew from his father that no civilized man had ever travelled into that awesome interior and wondered, as he had so many times before, what it would be like to be the first to venture there. Prester John particularly intrigued him. This legendary ruler of a vast and powerful Christian empire in the depths of the African continent had existed in the European mythology for hundreds of years. Was he one man, or a line of emperors? Hal wondered.

Hal's reverie was interrupted by shouted orders from the quarterdeck, faint on the wind, and the feel of the ship as she changed course. Looking down, he saw that his father intended to intercept the Gull of Moray. Under top sails only, and with all else reefed, the two ships were now converging, both ru

As the two ships came within hailing distance the crews swarmed into the rigging and lined the bulwarks to shout ribald banter across the water.

The numbers of men packed into each vessel never failed to amaze Hal when he saw them in a mass like this. The Lady Edwina was a ship of 170 tons burden, with an overall length of little more than 70 feet, but she carried a crew of a hundred and thirty men if you included those now ma

Every one of those fighting men would be needed if they were to overwhelm one of the huge Dutch East India galleons. Sir Francis had gathered intelligence from all the corners of the southern ocean from other Knights of the Order, and knew that at least five of these great ships were still at sea. So far this season twenty-one of the Company's galleons had made the passage and had called at the tiny victualling station below the towering Tafelberg, as the Dutch called it, or Table Mountain at the foot of the southern continent before turning northwards and voyaging up the Atlantic towards Amsterdam.

Those five tardy ships, still straggling across the Ocean of the Indies, must round the Cape before the southeasterly trades fell away and the wind turned foul into the north-west. That would be soon.

When the Gull of Moray was not cruising in the guerre de course, which was a euphemism for privateering, Angus Cochran, Earl of Cumbrae, rounded out his purse by trading for slaves in the markets of Zanzibar.

Once they had been shackled to the ring bolts in the deck of the long narrow slave hold, they could not be released until the ship docked at the end of her voyage in the ports of the Orient. This meant that even those poor creatures who succumbed during the dreadful tropical passage of the Ocean of the Indies must lie rotting with the living in the confined spaces of the "tween decks. The effluvium of decaying corpses, mingled with the waste odour of the living, gave the slave ships a distinctive stench that identified them for many leagues down wind. No amount of scouring with even the strongest lyes could ever rid a slaver of her characteristic smell.

As the Gull crossed upwind, there were howls of exaggerated disgust from the crew of the Lady Edwina. "By God, she stinks like a dung-heap."

"Did you not wipe your backsides, you poxy vermin? We can smell you from here!" one yelled across at the pretty little frigate. The language bawled back from the Gull made Hal grin. Of course, the human bowels held no mysteries for him, but he did not understand much of the rest of it, for he had never seen those parts of a woman to which the seamen in both ships referred in such graphic detail, nor knew of the uses to which they could be put, but it excited his imagination to hear them so described. His amusement was enhanced when he imagined his father's fury at hearing it.

Sir Francis was a devout man who believed that the fortunes of war could be influenced by the god-fearing behaviour of every man aboard.

He forbade gambling, blasphemy and the drinking of strong spirits.