Scourge of the seven seas, terror of the Spanish Main, a name to make honest men fall a-quivering in their beds - all these names and many more have yet to be shown to have an ounce of applicability to the little Cormorant bobbing at her mooring alongside the harbour wall in squalid Tortuga. Yet there may be time enough for that, belike.
See her, there - a mean little schooner, in want of canvas, cordage, nails, powder and shot, for all the grand dreams of "Almost Blind" Ezekiel Bones, he with the vision of the Perfect Ship in his head. Yet she be still afloat, for all that, and that may be enough for the present. A little plunder, a sea-fight or two won since she changed hands over a greasy deck of cards in a waterfront tavern, when a drunkard who believed in gambling systems played "Double or quits!" once too often with the foppish, dangerously debonaire "Razor" Roger - a skirt-chaser beyond all hope of correction, yet a better hand with that keen-edged sabre of his than a man might believe, by the powers.
And at the least her mean crew be adequately fed and free o' the pox, which is as much as a man dare ask in a pesthole such as this. That Tuck be a rum 'un, along o' his pet snake Saturday, and if a man said the only way to tame one of Satan's own pit-vipers like that was to be in such a state that he didn't care if he died of snakebite, I'd not say him nay - yet the man's a hand for rustling up some eatables out of next to nothing, and it's a brave man who'd miscall his cooking in any case. As for Doctor Iron Bonney, 'tis said that some of his patients don't die.
And as for that mysterious figure skulking in the shadows below - he of the clever fingers and the flashing rapier - well, more of him later, perhaps...
For now, in the heat of the mid-day sun, a shadow falls across the Cormorant's foredeck, from a grim-faced man near on as black as Tuck himself, but dressed in the heights o' fashion such as "Razor" might aspire to. A gentleman then, of some quality - yet one who walks un-afeared along the Tortuga waterfront, unheeding of the scores of cutthroats and plunderers that haunt its every nook and cranny. He speaks in measured tones, as one who expects a civil answer; and perhaps he counts on those gorgeous pistols belted at his waist to enforce such, or some o' those cutthroats a'ready mentioned have his back covered:
"Who commands this schooner?"