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Post by keith on Feb 16, 2022 3:44:08 GMT -5
Strange things happen on the internet. I'm not sure why Helen Tavrel - Part 3 is unobtainable, but I have it on file and here are the first few paragraphs. If anybody wants the rest and it's okay with SWORDS, I can post it.
THE PERILOUS HELEN TAVREL PART THREE The dandy of the longboat stood before me. Faith, he was smaller than I had thought, though supple and lithe. Boots of fine Spanish leather he wore on his trim legs, and above them tight breeches of doeskin. A fine crimson sash with tassels and rings to the ends was round his slim waist, and from it jutted the silver butts of two pistols. A blue coat with flaring tails and gold buttons gaped open to disclose the frilled and laced shirt beneath. … Now I looked for the first time at the face. It was a delicate oval with red lips that curled in mockery, large grey eyes that danced, and only then did I realize that I was looking at a woman and not a man. Robert E. Howard, “The Isle of Pirates’ Doom”
The year was 1669. Port Royal, the buccaneer’s haven in Jamaica, buzzed with gossip about Roger O’Farrel’s adopted daughter. On a voyage with Captain Hilton, one of the most ruthless men afloat, she had shown she took after the redoubtable O’Farrel, and at the end she had departed quickly, for she did not trust Hilton an inch and thought he might give her to the English governor. This displeased Hilton, of course, as her giving him the slip made him look something of a jackass. Henry Morgan roared with laughter over the tale, though he would have handed Helen and O’Farrel both to his friend Governor Modyford without hesitation, could he lay hands on them. “Bog-trotting rebel in bed with the double damned Dons,” Morgan had said alliteratively of O’Farrel. O’Farrel had left Havana after a quarrel with its crooked Captain General, and settled in Santiago on the southern coast, a city with a Captain General no less peccant. The two officials loathed each other, but Santiago’s administrator for the sake of appearances had to send back the ship with which O’Farrel had absconded and assure his rival the impudent Irish pirate would be arrested and chastised, then returned to Havana to answer charges. These assurances cost only the breath behind them. O’Farrel was quick to acquire more pirate craft, beginning with a couple of cedar piraguas able to carry half a hundred men each, and then a fast sloop like Hilton’s Wyvern. Helen worked with her beloved foster father as he smuggled, dealt with ranchers inland in southern Cuba, and engaged in other sorts of illicit trading, but he had largely abandoned piracy, and perhaps Helen saw him as getting older and wishing to settle down; he was nearing fifty. Youthful, wild as the sea and restless, Helen sailed with other captains besides O’Farrel – “Hilton, Hansen and le Ban between times,” as she said to Harmer later, and added, “Gower is the first captain to offer me insult.” I imagine Captain (Arnaud?) le Ban as a gaudy, extravagant stallion from Provence, in a crimson coat with silver slashes, lace and a splendid cocked hat, with a ready cutlass. His preferred haunt would have been Tortuga, his preferred ship, a heavily armed square-rigger. As for Hansen – Troels Hansen, perhaps – he could have been Danish, a moody, hard-drinking rogue who favoured akvavit distilled with amber and caraway over rum, hard as the former would have been to get in the Caribbean. Nor was he subtle. I suspect he hacked down his victims with an axe or blew them in half with a blunderbuss. “Sots, murderers, thieves, gallows birds,” Helen said of them to Stephen Harmer, “all save Captain Roger O’Farrel.”
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jan
Wanderer
Posts: 15
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Post by jan on Feb 21, 2022 12:03:36 GMT -5
Dear Keith, will be very thankful, if you can share the missing parts of THE PERILOUS HELEN TAVREL story.
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Post by keith on Mar 1, 2022 7:07:54 GMT -5
Pleasure. Here's some more of it. I'll check if all the other parts of my Helen Tavrel posts are accessible online. If they're not, and it's OK with Swords of Robert . Howard, maybe I'll put them online.
Besides the above rovers, and historically known ones like Roche Brasiliano and Henry Morgan, there were other fictional pirates of REH’s apparently looting in that decade. Black Terence Vulmea is due a series of his own, but I deduce he was about 22 years old in 1669 and had but recently turned pirate, after a couple of voyages to the Slave Coast in West Africa. Actually, I believe he was then sailing with the Dutch sea-robber Laurens de Graaf. Another Dutch pirate mentioned by Vulmea and Wentyard in “Black Vulmea’s Vengeance” was van Raven, “a bird of passage”. There were also Harston of Bristol, and “Tranicos”. (L. Sprague de Camp brought a “Bloody Tranicos” into “The Black Stranger” when he rewrote it for the Conan series, as “The Treasure of Tranicos”, but that was the sort of recycling REH often did himself.) I assume the “Tranicos” referred to in “BVV” was a Greek who first saw daylight by the bay of Piraeus, Gregor Tranicos, and before reaching the Caribbean he had served in the Ottoman navy during the reign of Sultan Mehmed IV (“the Hunter”). In 1669 he was nearing thirty-five. Guillaume Villiers appears in “Swords of the Red Brotherhood”, which comes chronologically (I think) about four years before “BVV”. But Villiers was not yet a pirate in 1669. I surmise he was a junior officer in the French navy. Dick Harston of Bristol, the same age as Vulmea, was a young pirate, with years to go before he rose to captain, and may have sailed with Hilton, le Ban or Hansen on one of the same cruises as Helen. There were the brothers John and Tobias Gower, brutal even among the buccaneers, who had been with l’Ollonais on his last voyage, but deserted before the final disaster. Pierre le Picard had done likewise. Another French buccaneer, de Romber, whose name appears in “The Isle of Pirates’ Doom” may still have been on the scene in the West Indies, or he may have perished. Surely it was while mixing with such men, and O’Farrel’s rovers too, that Helen first heard the legend of Mogar. It’s a curious name that sounds unlike any Carib or Arawak word, and may be a corruption that became current among the pirates, but as Helen says, “ … when the Spaniards first sailed the main, they found an island whereon was a decaying empire … The Dons destroyed these natives … ” Naturally the story of a vast treasure arose, the sort of tale fortune-hunters always want to believe. John Gower eventually came to the island and searched for it, in “TIoPD”. Her suspicion, if she had really entertained one, that O’Farrel was getting past the age to raise hell, proved untrue. The Irishman took his sloop among the south cays of Cuba, which he knew intimately, and waylaid a pirate who was careening his own ship, the Jezebel. O’Farrel lifted her and added her to his sloop and brace of piraguas. With this little fleet he was ready to quit his Spanish affiliations before the Captain General of Santiago also double-crossed him – a likely event – and carry out a final big coup as he departed. For some time he had kept Tortuga in mind as his next haven if he should need it. His target was the Tierra Firme treasure fleet bound from Cartagena to Havana. Helen went with him on the venture, which she would not have missed for anything. O’Farrel set his ambush with care, hoping for prey that straggled or was separated from the main body of ships by bad weather, and his hopes were realized. He captured one treasure vessel and an escort warship. (The details are given in The Superb Roger O’Farrel, Part Five.) Then he and Helen made for Tortuga. The famous pirate base had been officially governed in an uncertain see-saw between French and English in the past, besides being retaken by the Spanish now and then; but by 1669 it was French. Governor Bertrand d’Ogeron presided there for Louis XIV. The escort ship O’Farrel had beaten foundered on the way, battered by cannon fire, and he sold the treasure vessel in Tortuga after sharing out the loot. Bloody Hilton happened to be in Tortuga harbour at the time, and Helen, restless, went on the account again with him as captain. Hilton captured a merchant ship from England, headed for Jamaica with would-be settlers aboard, and would have burned it to the waterline after taking the cargo. Helen gainsaid him and urged that the settlers and crew be set afloat in boats with food and water supplies. Hilton guffawed and refused. Helen put one hand on her rapier and the other on a pistol. She said gently, “Then let’s go ashore on a sandbar and argue the issue. Whoever comes back alive may decide what happens to these people, and be captain too.” She added softly enough to be heard by Hilton alone, “Remember the lads here know me now, and consider me lucky. They might prefer me.” The Manxman knew Helen as well, at this stage, and that she was not trifling when she talked of death on a sandbar. He backed down. The people were taken aboard an honest ship later, by happenstance with Stephen Harmer as one of the crew. He heard a woman among the survivors testify that Helen had saved their lives, and was to remember it later. As for Helen, she decided she had her fill of Hilton and would not ship with him again. There were other captains. Henry Morgan carried out his big-scale expedition with hundreds of buccaneers to attack Cartagena and Maracaibo in 1669, but Helen never sought to be part of it. Like O’Farrel, she did not trust Morgan one quarter-inch. Besides, she knew about Morgan’s blunder of October 1668, when he and his crew had managed to blow up their own flagship, the 34-gun frigate Oxford, after a night-long rum-soaked carouse. Both the coarsely magnificent Captain le Ban and the brooding Dane, Hansen, were more careful than that. Helen sailed with the man from Provence and his crew. Arnaud le Ban made a run to the Virgin and Leeward Islands, where he intercepted a number of prizes, among them merchant ships from Europe with manufactured goods of the sort not produced in the Carribees. They were generally exchanged for sugar and slaves. There was profit, but not a great deal of fighting, for the merchants surrendered once le Ban had outsailed them, and he let them go, less their cargoes, to fleece them again some other day, which he reckoned better policy than Hilton’s indiscriminate terror and massacre. It was more to Helen’s liking, also, but the unexpected occurred, as always in the pirate life. An English warship hove in sight, part of the Jamaica Squadron. It was only a light frigate, carrying twenty-five guns, two in the bow, three at the stern, and ten to a broadside, none of its cannon overwhelmingly heavy. Le Ban’s three-masted vessel had twenty light guns, though it could have carried more, but powder was expensive and his gun crews lacked the skill and discipline of the navy men. Besides, except the ship itself there was nothing about the frigate to make it a prize worth the risk and losses involved. Le Ban showed French colours and pretended to be an honest vessel. The trick did not work, though, since the frigate’s captain had a description of le Ban’s current ship. He demanded that le Ban surrender. The Provencal corsair’s answer was, “Venez au diable!” The result was a sea-fight.
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Post by keith on May 28, 2022 10:17:56 GMT -5
Here's the last bit of "The Perilous Helen Tavrel - Part Three."
Helen had been involved in such an action before – with her foster-father O’Farrel. That English vessel had been unusually big and well-armed for the badly financed Jamaica Squadron, though, a forty-gun frigate. O’Farrel’s smaller, more agile ships had only succeeded in making the frigate withdraw, partly disabled, to Jamaica. In this case the light English frigate, recently careened at that, was stiff and weatherly, fit in most respects to outsail le Ban. Nevertheless, his three-master’s hull was clean enough, and despite his gaudy ruffling, le Ban was a good seaman. He had the better of the frigate, at one point, in the exchange of cannon fire. After loosing a broadside, le Ban turned up into the wind, backing astern and filling his sails, thus being able to follow his first broadside with a second, quickly. He didn’t rake the frigate’s decks, but instead sent his broadsides through the rigging, ripping it to shreds and bringing down the foremast. After that he withheld any more cannon fire; like most pirates, he did not have enormous reserves of powder, and his buccaneers’ long muskets were more economical. They were expert and accurate with these firearms, too, having hunted wild cattle with them for a living before they turned pirate – the source of the name buccaneer. They picked off many of the frigate’s crew before boarding her, and as ever, Helen Tavrel was among the first over the rail. Her laughter was wicked, her rapier flashed and bit, and she moved on the smoke-clouded, obstacle-strewn deck as though she had eyes in her feet. Men died for confronting her. As Jack London, whose work REH loved, wrote in THE STAR ROVER, “It is easy, most easy, to kill a strong, live, breathing man with so crude a weapon as a piece of steel. Why, men are like softshell crabs, so tender, frail and vulnerable are they.” But the same applied to Helen, and she might have been killed as well as any of her adversaries, if the luck had gone against her for an instant. She reminded herself of that whenever her conscience spoke against her, as it sometimes did, in quiet moments when her wild blood was not racing. In her view the navy men of the Jamaica Squadron were little better than pirates anyway, and often in league with them – with Henry Morgan and his like. When the surviving English threw down their arms, le Ban put them in a longboat with supplies, told them to go where they would, and possessed their frigate; nicer behaviour than Bloody Hilton’s characteristic acts, at any rate. He replaced the ruined foremast and sailed his own ship and the captured frigate towards the Bahamas, where he meant to recruit more men. The island of New Providence was lightly inhabited then, and the township later to be called Nassau was known as Charles Town. Its population in 1670 was fewer than five hundred souls, in all likelihood, including the slaves. Privateers and pirates used it as a base from which to plunder Spanish ships. Its harbour was a fine one, and there were plenty of shallow cays suited to careening. Honest trade was limited, but ships were often wrecked in those waters and valuable cargo floated ashore. The inhabitants of Charles Town wearied of waiting for the wrecks nature caused. They had taken to placing false lights on offshore reefs to lure ships to destruction. Captain le Ban knew this; it was among the few illicit marine practices that offended him, since a pirate ship – like his own – was as likely to become its victim as an honest vessel. Instead of being fooled by the offshore lights, he used the land breeze to take him clear of danger. Then he returned in the morning. With Charles Town under his guns, he landed with fifty buccaneer devils – enough to intimidate the entire settlement. Le Ban plundered it of every last bit of scavenged loot it contained. Then he burned Charles Town to ashes, not that it had consisted of much but squalid shacks and a warehouse or two. “Think yourselves lucky I let you live,” he told its people, and sailed away. Some fifteen years later Charles Town would be burned again, this time by Spaniards. Ten years after that it would be rebuilt, and given the new name of Nassau. A storm arose and forced the pirates to shelter by Andros, the largest island in the group by far, palm-fringed and beautiful beside pristine water, with the great trench of the Tongue of the Ocean, “deeper than did ever plummet sound” immediately east of it. The shore was honeycombed with blue sea-caves. Despite its size it was seldom visited except by pirates and fishermen. Helen and le Ban, however, happened to be caught there by wind and weather just as a large band of Indians from southern Florida arrived in their long double-hulled canoes, driven out perhaps by the more powerful Calusa. What people they belonged to is uncertain. They were excellent seafarers, who by their own traditions had once dominated the sea from Florida down through the Bahamas to the northern coasts of Hispaniola. Two men, brothers, of their race belonged to Roger O’Farrel’s crew, and fought like tigers, their preferred weapons pikes and machetes. Their ancient power was gone and their tribe now a mere remnant, due to Spanish slaughters and European diseases. But the survivors were no less fierce than their forebears, and the women fought beside the men. When they encountered le Ban’s pirates, a pitched battle followed, which the pirates would not have won without their muskets and steel weapons. (The Indians numbered about three hundred.) But the pirates suffered further losses while gaining the day against the red men. Le Ban sailed back to Tortuga to recruit more larcenous sea-dogs. He arrived in time to witness the appearance of the Dutch pirate, Jacob van Raven, and see him burn O’Farrel’s ship at her moorings. (“The Superb Roger O’Farrel – Part Five”.) Van Raven blamed O’Farrel for the death of his mentor Blauvelt. Helen Tavrel, infuriated, swore to give chase and teach van Raven a lesson, but she had no ship and neither did O’Farrel, now. As for le Ban, he was disinclined to hunt down the Dutchman as a favour to O’Farrel, and when Helen became able to seek him out he proved difficult to find. As Black Vulmea later said of the man, “He’s a bird of passage. Who knows where he sails?” The Dane Troels Hansen proved more willing to take a long chance in pursuit of van Raven, for he had a score to settle with that hulking, jovial rascal. A cousin of Hansen’s, just arrived in the Indies from Scandinavia, had seen van Raven’s ship at the island of Curacao, and heard a story that he was leaving for the Netherlands. Hansen acceded to Helen’s urging, and followed across the Atlantic in the hope of catching van Raven, though he also had other plans. They never found van Raven. Either he had changed his mind, or the rumours in Curacao had been false to begin. Wherever the Dutchman was at the time, it was not the Low Countries. Hansen was not too displeased that van Raven had eluded him. He had plans of his own, and large ones, to match the ship he had recently acquired. A beamy merchantman, she looked honest, and he had manned her with over two hundred men, the scourings of Port Royal and Tortuga. Hansen had a use for a vessel with plenty of space in its hold. Besides, it was not identifiable on sight as a pirate, an advantage in the ports of northern Europe. Helen Tavrel proved her worth to any doubters as they crossed the Atlantic. Agile as a monkey in the rigging, she never shirked any sailor’s task within her strength, and she had been taught how to navigate by her foster father. He had also instructed her in medical skills (he had studied medicine in his youth). Helen was competent to treat most ordinary injuries, and seldom indeed were men on the “red account” tended by a youthful woman who looked like an angel – whether or not she behaved like one. There was no fighting on that voyage, but some bad weather, and the normal hurts sustained by seamen. Many of Hansen’s crew, by the time they reached Amsterdam, would have fought on the instant any matelot who said an ill word of the Tavrel girl. They did not find a trace of Jacob van Raven in Amsterdam, or hear any word of his ship, although Hansen’s cousin had many sources there. But they discovered two Swedish merchantmen loading with cargoes of arms for Russia. Amsterdam was a major arms manufacturing centre, and at the time Russia faced the greatest peasant uprising of the seventeenth century, not yet successfully quelled. The great Cossack leader Stenka Razin had become a serious menace on the Volga. The Russian tsar needed weapons. The Swedish vessels were crammed with powder, shot, flintlocks, pikes and swords. To buccaneers this was more than merely interesting. They hid in wait for the arms vessels among the Frisian islands. Hansen, his long lugubrious face implacable, told his men harshly, “This is not the Caribees. The seas are narrow, the navies are everywhere, and there are too many gibbets waiting for a rover. Besides, this ship is not very swift! We leave no-one alive to tell tales.” Giving his hearers time to understand that, he added for good measure, “Let rip! Make sure to kill every man-jack.” Helen, at eighteen, had killed and killed again, but this prospect chilled her heart a little. Although she saw the sense of what Hansen was saying, and steeled herself to follow his instructions, something within her recoiled. She looked to the priming of her pistols – a duelling pair made by a master, accurate as any firearms of the day – and exercised with her rapier, to keep from thinking too deeply. And then the lookout called the news of two ships flying the Swedish flag. Hansen sailed to meet them, flying the same colours. They were heavily freighted, while his ship rode light. Hailing them in feigned friendship, he asked for news, a trick so common on the Spanish Main it would have fooled nobody, but here the other captain reckoned himself safe – unless perhaps from the English. Then the pirates opened fire, and followed their musket volley by laying alongside. Hansen sprang over their rail, triggered his blunderbuss to gory effect, and trod on the dead and dying while he swung his boarding axe. Helen, in mail shirt and flanged helmet, was instantly beside him, her rapier a dazzling strip of light in her hand. Her misgivings were quickly lost in the battle. Asking what personal wrong a man had done her was hardly a consideration when he was trying to drive a pike through her liver. Sailor after Swedish sailor, and soldier too, for some of those were aboard, she ran through when they faced her, and used her pistols at need. One man dropped before her with his brains blown out, and another took a ball in his lung. The other ship’s complement were ill-advised enough to come to their fellows’ aid, thinking the pirates fewer than they were – and another hundred savage devils boiled out of the hold where they had been concealed. The Swedes had no chance. They exacted a price before the last of them died, even a heavy one, but that was all in a days’ work to the like of Hansen’s crew. Rather than chance running down the Narrow Seas, they headed north and set a course around Scotland and Ireland. Both Hansen and Helen knew how sorely the Spanish Armada had come to grief doing the same thing, but their luck with the weather was better. They, and their prizes, reached Tortuga again. Hansen and his companions made a noble profit selling arms to the desperadoes of Turtle Island, and Hansen had even obtained a goodly supply of his favourite tipple, akvavit, while in the Netherlands. Helen, though, brooded considerably, and drank more than her usual habit – plain dark rum, ashore in her room, and alone.
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