So van Hoek orders Minerva to come about and point herself toward England. The men who’ve been manning the guns are told to make like Cincinnatus, walking away from their implements of war at the very moment of their victory so that they may apply themselves to peaceful toils: in this case, spreading every last sail that the ship can carry. Tired, smoke-smeared men lumber up into the light and, after a short pause to swallow ladles of water, go to work swinging wide the studdingsail booms. This nearly doubles the width of the ship’s mightiest yards. The studdingsails tumble from them and snap taut in the wind. Like an albatross that has endured a long pursuit through a cluttered wilderness, tediously dodging and veering from hazard to hazard, and that finally rises above the clutter, and sees the vast ocean stretching before it, Minerva spreads her wings wide, and flies. The hull has shrunk to a mote, dragged along below a giant creaking nebula of firm canvas.

Teach can be seen running up and down the length of his sloop with smoke literally coming out of his head, waving his cutlass and exhorting his crew, but everyone knows that Queen Anne’s Revenge is a bit crowded, not to mention under-victualled, for a North Atlantic cruise in November.

Minervaaccelerates into blue water with power that Daniel can feel in his legs, crashing through the odd rogue swell just as she rammed a pirate-boat earlier today, and, as the sun sets on America, she begins the passage to the Old World sailing large before a quartering wind.

There is, doubtless, as much skill in pourtraying a Dunghill, as in describing the finest Palace, since the Excellence of Things lyes in the Performance; and Art as well as Nature must have some extraordinary Shape or Quality if it come up to the pitch of Human Fancy, especially to please in this Fickle, Uncertain Age.

-Memoirs of the Right Villanous John Hall, 1708

MOTHERSHAFTOE KEPT TRACKof her boys’ ages on her fingers, of which there were six. When she ran short of fingers-that is, when Dick, the eldest and wisest, was nearing his seventh summer-she gathered the half-brothers together in her shack on the Isle of Dogs, and told them to be gone, and not to come back without bread or money.

This was a typically East London approach to child-rearing and so Dick, Bob, and Jack found themselves roaming the banks of the Thames in the company of many other boys who were also questing for bread or money with which to buy back their mothers’ love.

London was a few miles away, but, to them, as remote and legendary as the Court of the Great Mogul in Shahjahanabad. The Shaftoe boys’ field of operations was an infinite maze of brickworks, pig yards, and shacks crammed sometimes with Englishmen and sometimes with Irishmen living ten and twelve to a room among swine, chickens, and geese.

The Irish worked as porters and dockers and coal-haulers during the winter, and trudged off to the countryside in hay-making months. They went to their Papist churches every chance they got and frittered away their silver paying for the services of scribes, who would transform their sentiments into the magical code that could be sent across counties and seas to be read, by a priest or another scrivener, to dear old Ma in Limerick.

In Mother Shaftoe’s part of town, that kind of willingness to do a day’s hard work for bread and money was taken as proof that the Irish race lacked dignity and shrewdness. And this did not even take into account their religious practices and all that flowed from them, e.g., the obstinate chastity of their women, and the willingness of the males to tolerate it. The way of the mudlarks (as the men who trafficked through Mother Shaftoe’s bed styled themselves) was to voyage out upon the Thames after it got dark, find their way aboard anchored ships somehow, and remove items that could be exchanged for bread, money, or carnal services on dry land.

Techniques varied. The most obvious was to have someone climb up a ship’s anchor cable and then throw a rope down to his mates. This was a job for surplus boys if ever there was one. Dick, the oldest of the Shaftoes, had learnt the rudiments of the trade by shinnying up the drain-pipes of whorehouses to steal things from the pockets of vacant clothing. He and his little brothers struck up a partnership with a band of these free-lance longshoremen, who owned the means of moving swag from ship to shore: they’d accomplished the stupendous feat of stealing a longboat.

After approaching several anchored ships with this general plan in mind, they learned that the sailors aboard them-who were actually supposed to be on watch for mudlarks-expected to be paid for the service of failing to notice that young Dick Shaftoe was clambering up the anchor cable with one end of a line tied round his ankle. When the captain found goods missing, he’d be sure to flog these sailors, and they felt they should be compensated, in advance, for the loss of skin and blood. Dick needed to have a purse dangling from one wrist, so that when a sailor shone a lantern down into his face, and aimed a blunderbuss at him, he could shake it and make the coins clink together. That was a music to which sailors of all nations would smartly dance.

Of course the mudlarks lacked coins to begin with. They wanted capital. John Cole-the biggest and boldest of the fellows who’d stolen the longboat-hit upon another shrewd plan: they would steal the only parts of ships that could be reached without actually getting aboard first: namely, anchors. They’d then sell them to the captains of ships who had found their anchors missing. This scheme had the added attraction that it might lead to ships’ drifting down the current and running aground on oh, say, the Isle of Dogs, at which point their contents would be legally up for grabs.

One foggy night (but all nights were foggy) the mudlarks set off in the longboat, rowing upstream. The mudlark term for a boat’s oars was a pair of wings. Flapping them, they flew among anchored ships-all of them pointed upriver, since the anchor cables were at their bows, and they weathercocked in the river’s current. Nearing the stern of a tubby Dutch galjoot -a single-masted trader of perhaps twice their longboat’s length, and ten times its capacity-they tossed Dick overboard with the customary rope noosed around his ankle, and a knife in his teeth. His instructions were to swim upstream, alongside the galjoot ’s hull, towards the bow, until he found her port side anchor cable descending into the river. He was to lash his ankle-rope to said cable, and then saw through the cable above the lashing. This would have the effect of cutting the galjoot free from, while making the longboat fast to, the anchor, effecting a sudden and silent transfer of ownership. This accomplished, he was to jerk on the rope three times. The mudlarks would then pull on the rope. This would draw them upstream until they were directly over the anchor, and if they hauled hard enough, the prize would come up off the riverbed.

Dick slopped away into the mist. They watched the rope uncoil, in fits and starts, for a couple of minutes-this meant Dick was swimming. Then it stopped uncoiling for a long while-Dick had found the anchor cable and gone to work! The mudlarks dabbled with rag-swathed oars, flapping those wings against the river’s flow. Jack sat holding the rope, waiting for the three sharp jerks that would be Dick’s signal. But no jerks came. Instead the rope went slack. Jack, assisted by brother Bob, pulled the slack into the boat. Ten yards of it passed through their hands before it became taut again, and then they felt, not three sharp jerks, exactly, but a sort of vibration at the other end.