One Star in a Constellation
219 years ago, a man stood close to this spot, gazing out into Vermilion Bay. Tears still stained his cheeks. His blue frock coat was full of salt, but the engraved silver buttons shone proudly in the morning sun. His name was Evan Roskilly, thirty three years-old, and one of the Royal Navy's star captains.
Evan Roskilly was the only son of a well-respected Cianwood gentleman, Edward Roskilly. In the mid-18th century Cianwood Island was one of the Middle Kingdom's poorest counties, and indeed the Roskillies were perpetually in financial trouble despite their social status. Evan's father had to be resourceful, marrying off his first daughter; the second became a priestess; and for his son, Edward used the last of his savings to send Evan to sea.
It was another clear, blustery morning, probably not unlike that morning 219 years ago. Today I was in neat, suburban Vermilion on the Bay – less of a jigsaw city than Chesilby, but still distinctly maritime. Speaking of maritime, it was from a little Heritage Trust shop on the Old Gunwharf that I picked up an abridged copy of Evan Roskilly's diary. It's funny what history ends up forgetting. Roskilly's surviving diaries cover almost his entire career, missing only his teenage years as a ponytailed Midshipman, and later Lieutenant, aboard the 64-gun HMS Formidable. It's an unusually vibrant insight into a gentleman's life on the waves.
"I never saw a more wild and free a landscape as this. Our first sight of this country was a deep sea inlet sided with lofty snow-capped mountains that the Sinnovards call gjos. It was a country that affected me deeply, at once reminiscent of the Cianwood heath and something autarchic and untameable."
In the summer of 1780 Roskilly was cruising off the western coast of Sinnoh, serving as 1st Lieutenant aboard HMS Pidgeot, a frigate of twenty eight guns. This was his first real taste of command responsibility. Pidgeot was originally posted to the Sinnovard station to provide an escort for incoming convoys, but in the spring of the following year the posting was enlivened by bloody chaos of the Bishop's Uprising.
After the loyalist victory at the Battle of Aikenkirk, Pidgeot, along with her sister ship HMS Interceptor (32), was ordered into the Hailie Gjo to cut off the rebel's escape. The squadron reached the port of Roke Cross to find the town already in loyalist hands. Seeing the violence of the rebellion first hand seems to have shocked Roskilly:
"… the rebels having taken the abominable resolution to cut their prisoners to pieces in the main square, the flagstones of which were now awash with the forlorn and clotted blood of those who, in their savage passion, the rebels had massacred in cruellest revenge the day before."
The day would not get any less grim. About a hundred rebels had been captured when the town fell. As second-in-command of the Pidgeot, Roskilly was obliged to be present at the executions:
"There not being sufficient gallows to hang them as traitors, they were taken out by tens and destroyed by means of the Interceptor's electabuzz. After they were dead, the rebels were stript and flung into the sea. All this was most distressing to endure, for"
Roskilly seems to have redacted his diary here, later insincerely adding:
"Not the slightest degree of pity nor concern was shown to them at their deaths, theirs was a vile and beastly act not having advanced their cause one step."
Evan Roskilly was still a young man, twenty three years-old, when he was ordered to cruise the tropical seas of Ultramar. This time he was hunting for pirates, and this time he was given command of a ship of his own – the sloop HMS Seafoam. She was a very typical ship for an officer of his rank, armed with eighteen nine-pounder guns and carrying half as many pokémon, but Roskilly was delighted anyway:
"I think she is the finest vessel of her class I ever saw. Her copper is very good, and she sails like a fish against the wind."
This was no empty posting. Roskilly made landfall at Muscavade to find Port Kanto buzzing. Two days previously, a West Lemuria Company merchantman was ransacked and burned within sight of the harbour. Only a handful of survivors were allowed to escape in the ship's jollyboat to tell their story. The townsmen of Port Kanto were scandalised and titillated to hear that the pirate captain was a woman from Chaochang (潮昌). She was none other than Su Yanqiang (苏艳强), better known to myth as Marigold Sue.
Su was to become one of the most infamous pirate captains on the Ultramarean Sea. The Saffron newspapers would continue to scandalise and titillate polite society with stories of her brutal violence and flamboyant gallantry. It's hard to say what shocked society more – that a woman would sail beneath the black flag, or that she wore male clothes while doing it. What the columnists didn't know they gleefully invented for their readers. The Saffron Times later claimed she always wore a red damask waistcoat daringly stolen from the Governor of Melaço's own wardrobe. That was probably untrue – Roskilly personally saw Su when he doggedly pursued her brig for twenty two hours in September 1785. His diary mentions no famous waistcoat:
"[She was] a most striking creature, perhaps the most beautiful I had seen since I left Kanto; she wore double cutlasses and a brace of pistols about her slender hips."
Even now separating out the truth from the legend is nigh-impossible. West Lemuria tended to encourage big personalities, and Marigold Sue was no exception, with a larger-than-life persona fit for a legendary scoundrel …
… Off the coast of Île Paladin, Marigold Sue pounced on a Kalosian brig carrying a rich cargo of Decolore saffron and indigo worth more than 1,000 doubloons (About $60,000 at today's values). To the astonishment of the crew, she ignored the dyes, taking only the captain's oricorio-feathered hat before letting her prey go, apologising sheepishly for the inconvenience.
… In December 1785, Marigold Sue was locked up in a Muscavadean jail. Her luck had apparently run out – the Admiralty Court had convicted her of piracy. It wasn't usually Imperial policy to hang women, but the infamous Marigold Sue had earned herself an exception. The Lieutenant-Governor of the island shrewdly ordered that Su be attended only by female jailers, rightly assuming she would try to save herself with an eleventh-hour pregnancy. His decision to visit Su's cell was not so shrewd. Within a couple of days she'd seduced him thoroughly, playing on his lust for her money (And his lust for her body). Somehow believing he could clear her name, the Lieutenant-Governor arranged for her escape. The plan spectacularly backfired when Su recruited a skeleton crew in Port Kanto and sailed off with the finest Royal Navy sloop in the harbour.
… In the Bahía de Lâmpada, Marigold Sue captured the Braisilon Volant as she lay at anchor in the best-defended harbour in West Lemuria. Su led the boarding attack from the boats under cover of night, crossing more than half a mile of sea to get to the anchored galleon. The pirates overwhelmed the crew in a matter of minutes. Aboard, they found the back pay for the Joãozinho garrison, and none other than Antoine-Maurin Aubert de Bellegarde, the incoming Governor-General of Kalosian Lemuria.
The pirates had hit the big time. When the sun rose the next morning, Joãozinho awoke to find their new Governor-General a hostage. Sū's demands were simple: she would spare Aubert's life in return for safe passage out of the bay. The captain of the garrison had no choice. Aubert de Bellegarde lived, but Su sailed away with an estimated 15,000 doubloons.
1786: Golden Opportunities
In the Spring of 1786, the colonies of Sunset Unova rose in armed rebellion – and for the pirates of the Ultramarean Sea, the golden years were beginning. Civil war meant a distracted Royal Navy, under-defended convoys, and plenty of smuggling opportunities in the colonies.
During this time Marigold Sue – still brazenly sailing her stolen HMS Challenger – began to keep company with the Anne Gallant, captained by Esteban el Rosado. Esteban was ambitious but none too smart, which probably explains why Su was prepared to sail alongside him. For half a year they plundered their way across West Lemuria, quitting the Ultramarean Sea at the start of the hurricane season, making landfall in the Orange Islands in mid-July. That cruise brought only middling success, so they were back in Lemuria by October. While Su set a course for the Nectarine Cays, Esteban sailed to Decolore to buy arms to smuggle into Unova.
Because he was ambitious and stupid, Esteban was also a braggadocio, crowing about sailing with the infamous Marigold Sue. His crowing reached the ears of a Royal Navy spy, who straight away rode to report it to the nearest warship in the islands – HMS Seafoam.
Roskilly immediately made sail for Wayfarer Island, determined to capture the pirates before they could disappear into the Great Western Ocean. Esteban fled the island too late. After a short and merciless chase Seafoam caught the Anne Gallant off the coast of Grand Spectrala. The wind was gusting towards the shore – Seafoam bore down on the Anne Gallant's port quarter, trapping her to leeward. Now the pirates were forced to either fight or risk the gallows.
The ensuing action was brief but fierce. Seafoam engaged from a distance of about 50 yards, braving the Anne Gallant's guns to stop her from escaping to windward.
"The blackguards gave a very spirited resistance, but we opened such a fire upon her as brought down her foremast within a quarter hour. I therefore ordered them to strike their colours, or else I would send them to the bottom."
It wasn't Esteban el Rosado who gave the order to surrender, but the Master Fernão Fernandes – sometime after the opening salvoes Esteban had been smashed overboard by a Water Pulse. Fernandes was much quicker on the uptake than the average pirate, quickly offering to turn King's Evidence in return for Su's whereabouts. Two words bought him his pardon – Isla Cangrejo.
Meanwhile, in the Nectarine Cays, Su was hiding out on Isla Cangrejo. This little-known cay was where Su came to careen her ship and stash her share of the plunder. After their disappointing cruise in the Orange Islands the pirates threw a rum-soaked beach party, complete with prostitutes brought over from Decolore, and Marigold Sue lording it over them like a barbarian queen.
HMS Seafoam arrived at the cay in the dead of night. Challenger was careened up on the north side of the island with those few men who had the unenviable job of scraping the weeds and barnacles off her hull. The rest of the pirates were raucously gathered on the beach, getting rascally drunk and probably contracting chlamydia. Roskilly wasted no time in springing his trap, dispatching thirty men under the 1st Lieutenant to seize HMS Challenger while he landed the marines and his forty best sailors on the eastern shore, under his personal command. Roskilly led his men into the tropical forest, intending to attack the pirates from the cover of the trees. The sounds of sixty men picking through the undergrowth were ignored. Each assumed the noise was just their fellow pirates, tired of barnacle scraping.
The Seafoam's crew were almost in position when one of the pirates realised their 'shipmates' were armed. He raised the alarm – the wrong alarm. The pirates lurched to their weapons, believing they had been betrayed by the Anne Gallant. Their drunken anger turned to panic when Roskilly's marines opened fire. In the midst of the rabble Su cursed and screamed at her crew, a drawn cutlass in each hand.
Her screams and curses did her no good. The fight soon went out of the pirates with nine dead, twice as many injured and their pokémon either dead or fled. Su meekly surrendered at the point of Roskilly's sword. Playing the longer game she tried to pull the same trick that sprung her from jail on Muscavade. It didn't work this time. Roskilly claimed his duty kept him loyal, but I suspect the lad didn't know what to do with a woman like Su. He had been at sea since he was thirteen, an environment typically lacking in assertive women.
On the 6th December 1786 Su Yanqiang was hanged from a short rope below the low-water mark at Stonebeach. The atmosphere that day was celebratory. Pirates were the not the rock stars of their day, glamorous bad boys who antagonised authority in exciting but harmless ways; they were more like the terrorists of their day, elusive and savage murderers who preyed on the innocent. The Kantoese public might have paid to be scandalised and titillated, but they still mercilessly cheered as Su was escorted to the gallows. There she was left to swing, washed by the grey winter tides of Vermilion City. Not even the infamous Marigold Sue of Chaochang left a beautiful corpse.
Roskilly was twenty six when he received the promotion – from Master and Commander to Captain. Thanks to the ongoing war his new command was not to be some third-rate battleship, but the frigate HMS Galatea. On paper she was a sweet lum, a newly refurbished fifth-rate mounting a main battery of twenty six eighteen-pounder guns, fitted with a blastoise embrasure at the forecastle. Unfortunately for Roskilly, her crew was less than spectacular:
"We are very indifferently manned. There are almost forty on the sick list, in general affected by casual maladies the consequences of their unsupervised drunkenness and debauchery in port."
Roskilly immediately wrote to his friends in the Admiralty, begging to be allowed to transfer his crew from Seafoam. His request was predictably denied – Seafoam was now a crack ship after all – but he was allowed to keep twenty of his best men to help make up the shortfall.
His success as Master and Commander of the Seafoam would come back to bite him. Every frigate captain's hope was to be posted to the Storm Island station, but Roskilly was ordered back to Ultramar. In the eyes of the Admiralty, a successful pirate hunter with three year's experience of West Lemuria was too useful to waste in Medi-Terra.
If you stand in the midst of Chrysanthemum Square and look west, you'll see two interesting sights. First, the Customs House, now an incongruously handsome pub for the likes of the Old Gunwharf – and second, a trio of masts peering up over the skyline. If you follow the path between the pub and the condominiums on your right, you'll come to a park by an eighteenth-century ship in dock. Take a look at the name painted neatly on the stern, and you'll see why you're here. This is HMS Galatea, a little restored and repaired, but appearing more or less as she would have done when Roskilly was in command.
In any other port Galatea would be a star attraction. Here she's just another museum ship, so under regarded that the Heritage Trust doesn't even try and charge admission. I couldn't help but have a look. Scale does strange things aboard a tall ship. All the space is vertical, masts towering like conifers, draped in the bewilderingly complex cobweb of rigging. Lonely and deserted though it is, the weather deck nonetheless feels narrow, claustrophobic. Even the embrasure on the forecastle looks barely wide enough for the blastoise it once housed.
I wandered below to the gun deck, trying to imagine what it would have been like to live, work, and fight here. The ceiling loomed oppressively low. Almost half the deck space was taken up by the rows of cannon. There were fold-down tables slung in the narrow gaps between the guns, a couple of benches squeezed into what space was left. Ten square feet for at least four men to eat and sleep in. I made my way towards the midshipmen's berth at the back of the gun deck – twice the space, which they shared with the pokémon locker.
But right at the stern is the captain's cabin, flooded with light from the stern gallery windows, a stateroom in miniature. Most of the furniture is a modern restoration, with the notable exception of the writing desk. A real antique, worn smooth by age, tethered to the deck to stop it from sliding about in high seas. I ran my palm over the dark wood. This is where he wrote in his diary, almost every night for seven years:
"… men of simple and modest manners, who have gained the offices they hold, by their hard service and skill in the essential duties of their profession: to see such men made the sport of such reptiles, as are most apt to make them feel their deficiencies, fills me with indignation."
"… the part of a rejected lover, whose vanity led him to think a pretty woman had some love for him, when the utmost she felt was a friendship founded on long acquaintance."
"… While we lay at Ginger Point I had the displeasure to find it absolutely necessary to flog four men. They had got beastly drunk and behaved in a mutinous manner."
Seven years was a long time to serve in a frigate. HMS Galatea was at the Siege of Oswego, where the Royal Colonial army retreated from the besieging rebels; she was at the Battle of the Numbers, where Imperial and Kalosian ships clashed between the Sevii Islands; she intercepted and sank the frigate Belliqueuse, temporarily preventing news of the Imperial defeat from reaching Medi-Terra. Apparently without realising it Roskilly forged Galatea into a crack ship, another Seafoam.
But even a star captain wasn't truly in command of his own destiny. On 12th August 1795 Roskilly received orders to return to Vermilion City, where he was to leave Galatea and take command of the 74-gun third-rate HMS Dragonfell.
On the morning after making landfall at Vermilion Roskilly called the men to the weather deck to give them the news.
"… [I told them] that I believed I had the most gallant, the most dutiful, and the most skilful crew as could be wished for, and I believed the man who superseded me would be the luckiest officer in the service. I was so affected in my leave taking that I burst into tears while addressing them, and when I recovered myself I saw many of them were as affected as myself. My sentiments were interrupted by their declaration that they would serve as diligently as if I were still their master, after which I was saluted with three such cheers as went to my heart."
Later that day I stood looking out into Vermilion Bay, much as Roskilly did 219 years ago. I was thinking about the story Galatea's curator told me. Sometimes, in the brief hours of twilight, you can see the ghost of Evan Roskilly on the dockside, gazing at the ship he once commanded.
Author's Notes: The character of Evan Roskilly is heavily inspired by the life of Captain Sir Graham Moore (1764-1843). Moore's diaries of his life as an officer in the Royal Navy offer a fascinating insight into the life of an officer who was the contemporary of Nelson, when the Royal Navy was reaching the zenith of its power. Though I don't think he realised it, Moore was one of the star captains of the period, though he has been overshadowed by the likes of Lord Thomas Cochrane or Sir Sidney Smith. Moore's talents lay in his ability to lead men through the daily grind of naval life; his sense of fairness, respect for the common sailor and attention to duty were qualities that made for not only cheerful but effective ships.
Unlike Roskilly, Moore was born to a respectable if not rich family. Though he did achieve some notable successes (Acquitting himself well at the Battle of Tory Island, for example), Moore didn't have a glamorous bone in his body and was often blighted by bad luck during his career. Roskilly's career is therefore heavily inspired by the real careers of Navy officers of this period. My main sources have been The Star Captains and Frigate Commander by Tom Wareham.
Su Yanqiang is something of a pastiche of piratical characters. I have tried to capture the spirit of those larger-than-life characters of the so-called "Golden Age" of piracy, with a bit of 17th century highwayman thrown in for good measure. Her brief career and sticky end are entirely authentic - very few of the most famous pirates ever managed to escape a violent and ignoble death.
