Reborn as a Pirate Captain – My Journey to Build a Pirate Republic

Word went around Concordia that very afternoon, and by nightfall half the township knew the date and had already decided which side it meant to stand on.

Concordia had discovered politics, which is a thing settlements do whenever they have enough people to disagree and not quite enough sense to keep it quiet.

James spent the days till the assembly by doing his best, walking around and letting people talk to him. Down among the mudflats, a farmer drew ditch lines in the wet dirt with a stick and swore over every Saint he could name that dyked land grew corn thrice the normal size.

Near the docks, a merchant’s wife caught him beside a crate of indigo in a poor excuse of a shed. She told him plainly that a town who could not build an actual warehouse had no business in trade or commerce.

Twice, while passing the smithy that was not a smithy yet, merely four posts and a promise, some lads shoved a broken nail into his hand and proclaimed their point. There was no forge within three days’ sail, and the settlement’s tools were rusting for want of one.

By the fourth day James figured every soul in Concordia had developed a powerful stance about dirt, and he found the spectacle considerably funnier than the people that constantly argued over it appeared to find. This was perhaps because he had not yet found a way to lose an argument with a ditch.

James’s own house was no quieter.

Milagros had claimed residency the second she stepped through the door and had never behaved as though the idea might be temporary.

By the second day she had driven a peg into the wall at exactly the height of her eyes, hung her coat and knife belt from it, and shot such a look on anyone who put so much as a hat there that most visitors suddenly discovered other places to hang their coats.

Both she and Anne shared his nights now, as naturally as breathing, and neither woman had treated the matter as a question worth asking twice.

What still puzzled James, though he never quite bothered to solve it, was how close Anne and Milagros had become since that evening aboard the Rose.

He could not tell whether Anne was so entertained by Milagros’s bratty temper or whether she had simply enjoyed the challenge, and he saw no particular need to figure that out.

The pair had fallen in with Meg and Mary as well, heads together over most days. Somewhere inside that pleasant new company, James realized that Milagros now knew exactly what the entire island had failed notice.

One night when she called across the table, as casual as anything, ’Pass the bottle, Mary,’ and didn’t so much as blink when Mark looked up and answered to the name.

By the morning of the assembly, the harbor was telling its own story.

The Rose and the Fortune stood easily at their moorings, the Marianne lay alongside, and the Grand Dame rode apart from the others and lower in the water.

Between the ships, more small craft moved through, dories and dugout canoes that went about their business with more fishermen than ever before.

Concordia, it seemed, had acquired both commerce and public affairs, which are generally the two things that make a place difficult to keep peaceful.

James walked from the docks toward the assembly hall and felt very nearly like loss at the thought that his days of holding court from a flat grey rock at the crossroads were truly over.

The sentiment lasted until he admitted that the hall was plainly the better place for it, at which point it had the decency to go away.

There, his position was on a platform at the head of the hall, its new-sawn boards pale beneath his boots. It was raised high enough for every soul packed into the hall, along with the crowd in the plaza beyond it, to see him without twisting their necks.

He had dressed for the occasion, too. [Discretion] sat heavy and fine across his shoulders, and his hat rested at an angle he had practiced twice in his house mirror.

James expected no trouble today. Still, a man asking a town to trust his judgment was wise to look as though he trusted it himself.

Around him, the crowd hadn’t mixed, not really. Near the steps, Anne, Milagros, Meg, Mary and a considerable number of courtesans had claimed their own patch of shadow and were trading insults while they watched everybody else arrive.

Cudjoe stood nearby with a knot of the Rose’s crew, while Jim was already halfway through a story that had acquired three more shipwrecks since Havana. Kit was loudly maintaining that his kill count from that very city ought to earn him some consideration here. Ned and Tomás stood among them, more reservedly.

Cudjoe watched the crewmembers with dry patience. It was common knowledge one quartermaster could survive a great many things if he learned not to interrupt fools while they were entertaining themselves.

Farther along, Sam and Williams kept the Marianne’s people in a knot considerably tighter than the Rose’s loose sprawl.

Bonnet’s Fortune crew stood apart altogether, and somehow the sailors had become some remarkably well-mannered knot of men who doffed their hats and whispered pardons even while the crowd shoved them from every direction.

One of them even apologized to a pig that had wandered between his boots. The pig, having made no complaint, seemed willing to let the matter rest.

Fenwick’s folks were near the streets that led to the marsh, sun-browned and plain in their broadcloth, as though standing close to the mud might persuade the vote to follow them home.

Adrienne’s frenchies were nearby at the benches, better dressed and quicker with figures, while Adrienne herself stood a little apart from both camps with an odd dull but sharp expression.

At the other side of the hall stood a substantial group of freed men and women. Their talk kept coming back to the forge and the promise of work that required skill rather than luck.

Isaiah stood among them and said very little, but when he spoke, people listened.

Near the direction of the chapel, the larger group of Spaniards kept together. More than a few eyes watched them, with curiosity mixed with the older suspicion that had not yet learned to die. Mateo and Elena stood at the front of the group.

Their loyalty to any of the three causes was still plainly theirs to give, and nobody could claim otherwise.

Scattered between all these groups were the newest arrivals, belonging to nobody yet and therefore possessing the most troublesome thing a politician can find.

Votes nobody has bought with friendship.

Even then, the point stands, not one faction in the whole plaza had made any serious effort to mix with another.

Whitlock stood near the doorway, exactly where a man would expect him to be. This time, there was a small knot of clerks beside him, and a stack of tally boards and vote pebbles sorted into neat piles.

The cautious hands that kept the Fortune’s books were now keeping the whole town’s as well.

James let his eyes wash over the plaza, and for once he took the trouble to consider what many hundred people looking to him for guidance actually meant.

Beneath the general roar he caught bits and pieces.

A Frenchwoman muttered about warehouses that ought to have been built weeks ago. An old man among the freedmen spoke quietly to a younger one.

Near the chapel came a Spanish curse followed by laughter. Off to the left, Fenwick’s flat voice went over the rest.

Then the chapel bell rang, clean and sharp across the plaza.

Once.

Then again.

The many conversations broke apart at once, and what remained was close to silence.

Whitlock stepped forward to the edge of the platform. "This assembly is called by petition of three voices out of the founding five, and it stands open now to any citizen with a mark to cast."

He glanced down at his tally board, then back at James.

"Captain James Calloway will be the chairman for this assembly. We begin now."

Whitlock stepped back and gave James the floor.

James looked out over the waiting plaza.