St. Eustatia, Caribbean
Maarten had expected the various captains he had summoned to arrive in bunches, being familiar with how the vagaries of currents and oarsmen made it nearly impossible to maintain perfect punctuality when calling a council aboard a single ship in the midst of a wide anchorage.
Nonetheless, just after the first bell of the afternoon watch, the coronet blew only two blasts, the second no more than a minute after the first. Five minutes later, the entire collection of summoned officers were asking Willem for admittance. As soon as the young officer put his head in the door, Tromp made a waving-in motion and spread out the charts he had prepared, the top one being a general map of the Caribbees and the Spanish Main. The precision of its outlines and scale marked it immediately and distinctively as a high quality copy of a map from Grantville.
Cornelis Jol—who was known to all his peers simply as Houtebeen, or Peg Leg—came stumping in first. Immediately after came the big Dane, Hjalmar van Holst, with a broad smile on his face. Although two more dissimilar men would be hard to find, he and Tromp had taken an immediate liking to each other in the years before the disaster at Dunkirk. And that relationship had evolved into personal and political support of the admiral on more than one occasion over the year just past.
After that came his nominal superior, Dirck Simonszoon Uitgeest, who was considerably older and was as taciturn and spare as van Holst was gregarious and expansive. He, and one other attendee, young Pieter Floriszoon, had been in Recife when Tromp arrived. All the others—Klaus Oversteegen, Johan van Galen, and Hans Gerritsz—had escaped from the disaster at Dunkirk. Willem nodded the gentlemen in, then bowed to the admiral, halfway back out the door as he did so.
Tromp shook his head. “Willem. You are to join us and take notes. But fetch Kees, first. If something should happen to me, he must know the role the Amelia is to play in the action to come.”
Willem looked like he had swallowed a pickled frog. “At once, Admiral,” he croaked and rushed off to get Kees Evertsen.
There weren’t quite enough chairs for everyone, but it didn’t matter. Van Holst planted his feet, crossed his arms and looked ridiculously Norse and good-natured. Simonszoon had already slunk into a bench beneath the transom-spanning stern windows. There were seats enough for the others, but the room began to grow uncomfortably hot. That it was midday in the currently cloudless tropics did not help matters.
Tromp tugged his collar a bit wider and pointed at the map. “You’ve all seen one of these now, yes?”
Floriszoon leaned forward, admiring it. “No, Admiral. Not I. The precision is extraordinary.”
“Yes. And quickly becoming universal. I would be surprised if the Spanish have not acquired their own copies. Although they are among the slowest to innovate in such ways. However, we must presume their charts are now as good as ours.”
Van Galen looked eager. “So we sail against the Spanish? Finally?”
Tromp looked at Johan van Galen and reflected how the fleet’s long period of inactivity made some men less aggressive, but made a few more so. For the latter, it was as if waiting to weigh anchor and sail into battle was some interminable itch that they simply could not scratch. “Some of us have been sailing against the Spanish all along. And their leader will begin by telling us of any changes he has encountered.”
Peg Leg Jol thumped forward with a grin that he swept around at all the gathered captains, and hunched over the map with positively conspiratorial glee. The Spanish considered Jol an out-and-out pirate, and in that moment, Tromp had to work hard to remember that his countryman was, technically, still a “privateer.”
“So, news from the Main, fellows. Hunting continues to be good there. Took a barca-longa just before coming up here. Shot it up too much so we had to give her to the sea, but there was a fine haul aboard.”
“Gold?” asked van Holst loudly.
“Better than gold. Letters. She was a mail courier. From what we read, the Spanish are still spending the majority of their time arguing over regional responsibilities. The Cuban governor doesn’t like footing the whole bill for general naval protection, the Armada de Barlovento, against pirates and privateers throughout the Antilles, whereas the viceroy of New Spain is unwilling to spend on more than his own garda costas—half of whom seem to be freelancing as buccaneers as soon as the Silver Fleet finishes touching their respective parts of the Spanish Main every year.”
“Anything about us?” asked Simonszoon quietly.
“Only mistakes. Their entire focus seems to be on Thijssen’s seizure of Curaçao. There’s a lot of speculation that we met him there after abandoning Recife. The governor of Venezuela has been trying to gather ships together to mount a counterattack, but his colleagues in the other coastal audiencias of the Viceroyalty of New Spain seem less than enthusiastic in helping him with that project. However, he has been gathering what forces he can in Puerto Cabello.”