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more boats approaching. That would mean sixteen ships. The rest of the buccaneer captains must be on shore, or late getting into their boats.
    Sixteen would be enough. It was just a question of waiting for the five boats to get alongside, and then telling all the captains what he proposed. Not that it was a very complicated plan: he did not know enough to be able to give them details.
    As he stood waiting, he noticed the smell of Leclerc’s ship. The Frenchman was an odd fellow. Ned knew from previous visits that Leclerc’s own cabin was scrupulously clean, but the rest of the ship looked like a back street: scraps of meat and bits of fruit and vegetable were lying rotting in the scuppers, which obviously were only cleaned when a heavy sea swept the deck.
    Ned thought back to the legislative council meeting. A dozen councillors, the governor and the deputy governor, all crowded into that tiny office which used to belong to Major-General Heffer, the former acting governor and now Luce’s deputy. A small room with one window: hardly suitable for Jamaica’s legislative council – although, to be sure, if there were many more meetings like today’s Luce would end up with only four or five members attending, the usual residue of sycophants.
    Of course, Luce would always have two or three allies on the council: the optimists who wanted to trade with Spain, which they saw as a source of slaves. But trade with Spain was just a dream: there would only be smuggling, which had been going on for years and which Gottlieb and Coles were doing when they were – for reasons quite beyond Ned’s comprehension – captured.
    The whole affair of supplying the Dons with what they needed and their own merchants could not provide depended on trust. So few ships ever came from Spain now and the Spaniards living on the Main and on the Spanish islands were short of everything – pots and pans for cooking, thread and needles, cloth to sew, wine and olive oil, spades to dig with and rakes and hoes… All they had were the vegetables and fruit they could grow – and gold and silver from the mines. You could not eat gold and silver: the Dons were in the ironic position of having gold in their pockets but no pots to cook with and only threadbare shirts on their backs – except for what they bought from the smugglers.
    Although trade with other countries was officially forbidden by the Spanish authorities, there was no way they could stop smuggling: with many hundreds of miles of open coastline, the smugglers of many nations brought their ships in at night and unloaded whatever the Spanish wanted and could pay for in gold, coin or specie. Most of the Spanish – mayors, commanders of garrisons, customs and excise officers – were involved in the illicit trade. For all the regulations that came from Spain, the fact was that people had to live, which meant that officials had to look the other way when the smugglers came. Look the other way and pocket bribes.
    Which made it all the more puzzling that Gottlieb and Coles should suddenly be met with trouble in Riohacha. A new mayor? Had the Viceroy received new and strict orders from Spain? Was this the first hint of a new policy towards the smugglers? Even a straw in the wind that the Spanish planned an attack on Jamaica?
    As soon as all sixteen captains were on board, Ned jumped up on to the breech of a gun and waved the men to gather round. They were, he reflected, a desperate-looking crowd. Some, like Brace and Secco, were dressed with fastidious tidiness, hair and beards neatly combed, jerkins and breeches clean, hose without holes, shoes polished. But the others: they looked as though they had all sat round in a circle, stripping and throwing their clothes in a tub, and when someone gave the word, reached into the tub and donned what came to hand. One captain wore the old seaman’s apron of a century ago; another’s jerkin had more holes than material. Most of them wore scarves round their