Chapter 209: Packed to the Gunwales

If anybody had told James, the night he walked out of The Cockpit, what sort of crew he’d be walking with a week later, he’d have laughed the man off the dock and bought him a drink afterward for having told such a good joke.

What followed was the better part of seven days, each piled on the last, until five strangers and every soul they dragged into a ship’s crew began to feel like herding bulls.

The Bonebreakers came first. Thirty-six of them marched down to the wharf behind Ox, Barrel, and Anvil like a parade not a soul had planned or could have stopped.

Bonnet met them at the docks himself, with all the pleasant surprise.

He spent the better part of two days teaching grown men who could break a jaw which side of the ship was which. Larboard and starboard went into thick skulls with patient, courtly repetition.

More than one hammock tore loose from its hook, and Sawyer, called down twice to reinforce the beams, muttered about building a separate deck for these wardrobes, walls, barrels and crates that pretended to be sailors.

Anvil, gentlest of the three by a country mile, spent every spare hour looking for a fin or a spout.

By the fourth day the whole crew had taken to asking him, with perfectly straight faces, whether he’d found his whale yet.

"Might be today," he answered, with hope and complete sincerity.

It never stopped being funny to anybody but him.

The gunners arrived in silence, and stayed that way longer than expected. Fourteen men under a wiry, sun-cracked gunner’s mate named Josiah Croft, every one of them flinching whenever some sailor raised a voice for the better part of three days, bracing for a lash that never came.

Mark was the first to break through, taking all fourteen under her wing at the guns without a word on sympathy. She drilled them hard and fair and treated every one of them like a competent hand instead of a broken one.

Enzo finished what she’d begun, feeding them for the first time in longer than any of them cared to admit. James watched one grown man break down completely over a salted fish that tasted, admittedly, really good.

By the week’s end they sung with the rest of the deck instead of flinching at its noise.

Don Rodrigo arrived all at once and considerably louder than a body his size had any right to be.

He mistook Tomás for some long-dead comrade twice in his first two days aboard, correcting himself each time with complete and untroubled dignity, as though it were the sort of mistake that happened to other people, not him.

Once, memorably, he called James Your Excellency through nearly an entire conversation before catching himself and demoting him, with visible reluctance, to mere captain.

He adopted a ship’s parrot within an hour of boarding and spoke to it only in old campaign Spanish, insisted on personally inspecting every gun on deck despite needing both hands on the rail to manage the walk between them, and challenged Kwaku to a duel over some insult neither man could later agree upon.

Kwaku declined with such complete and formal courtesy.

"I find no honor is served by breaking an old soldier’s wrist."

Don Rodrigo declared him the most honorable man he’d met in thirty years and forgot the insult before sunset.

Beneath all of that, though, Grey watched the old man read a set of soundings once, correctly, and faster than the navigator’s eye could manage it.

He said nothing afterward except to look at James in a way that needed no explanation.

Bran and her six-and-twenty Crows came aboard like a small, cheerful invasion, claiming the best hammocks, the driest corner of the fat belly, and a card game.

She and Kit took one look at each other and became instant, inseparable rivals, trading kill counts and boasts that grew taller by the day.

She and Doyle nearly killed each other in a drinking contest neither would admit defeat, though Doyle was the one who had to be brought below afterward.

James permitted her a place aboard simply and without ceremony, telling her she’d serve as the ship’s boatswain. No title beyond the plain fact that sailors already listened when she spoke was needed.

"Boatswain, is it," Bran snorted, pleased with the rank.

Roberts signed on last and most cautiously, exactly as expected.

He and Cudjoe watched each other warily for one afternoon before stopping into an easy, mutual respect.

Cudjoe handed over the ship’s rough accounts with more relief than warning.

"Ye’ll have this back tae me corrected within a day or I’ll eat the whole bluidy articles myself."

Roberts returned it a day later, corrected and itemized, in a hand so fine that half the crew began finding excuses to stand nearby and watch him write.

He drew up new articles within two days, every clause fought over with real and stubborn care. To the point one mischievous soul, who never confessed to it, spiked his tea with rum on the third night.

Roberts stared into the cup as if it had personally betrayed him

"Whoever did this has made an enemy for life."

Sawyer patched together a better coat for him from good, simple cloth, and Roberts wore it with gratitude and no small amount of visible longing for the crimson one still waiting in his future.

Behind all five of them, the ship filled up further still.

Close to low hundreds more hands arrived within the week, delivered by a boarding-house keeper the whole dock knew as Mother Tull. Some signed on individually for nothing more than a fair wage and a captain’s word.

By the time the tally was done, the Grand Dame had three hundred and forty-six souls, a good deal more than any shipwright had ever intended her to hold comfortably, and every deck aboard her showed the crowding.

Departure day found James on the quarterdeck rather than at the wheel, arms folded as he watched a week’s worth of chaos finally move like a crew.

He glanced toward the helm from pure habit more than doubt, expecting to find his own hands there.

He found Don Rodrigo instead, hands steady on the spokes, his voice low and sure as he called a course correction that had the whole rigging answered.

It wasn’t luck.

James watched him work the harbor’s narrow passage with ease, and whatever else the old man’s mind had lost along the way, his instinct had never forgotten a single thing they had once known.

Across the rest of the deck, Bonebreakers hauled rope under Sawyer’s patient direction, gunners stood easy at their stations beneath Mark’s watchful eye, and Bran traded fresh insults with Kit over a coil of rope neither of them actually needed.

Roberts stood near Cudjoe with an accounts book already open between them, and beyond the pair Enzo moved among the new gunners with hot soup in a pot, feeding them as he’d begun.

James took in the whole loud, crowded, mismatched company at once and found that, for all its strangeness, it looked exactly like a crew instead of a collection of strangers.

Port Royal shrank behind them into haze and green water, its noise already lost behind the wharves.

James let himself feel, for one clean moment, just how far this ship had come from the fat, undermanned prize he’d first sailed out of Havana.

He was still smiling when the shimmer gathered in front of him, familiar in the way it always was just before it said something he’d rather it hadn’t.

🏴 [GRAND DAME - STATUS]

Hull Condition : Good

Armament : 46 Broadside Cannons

Gunpowder Supply : 40 Casks

Provisions : 30 Days

Crew : 346 / 280

Morale : Steady

Loyalty : Untested

Perks : [Coastal Giant]

I had projected losing a fair portion of the crew to the pit before the anchor ever came up. That so few were lost tells me either your own leadership has improved, or this whole city was simply more desperate than my figures allowed for.

James grinned at the number and let the rest go unanswered.

There’d be time enough to argue with the voice in his own head once he’d brought the rest of his fleet together and pointed every ship he owned back toward Havana.