Chapter 2 - The Castaway
Gibbs was never happy to be woken up, especially when there was no time for a post-nap bottle or two. He stood in the hollow on the dunes and looked at the graves.
"Could be anything Captain. Fever perhaps. We'd best just leave 'em be and make for Tortuga. 'Tis fearful bad luck to be disturbing the dead."
"Yes but where did they come from you old fool?" asked Anamaria
"A ship, where else?" A great crewman Gibbs, but not the best if it was brains you were after.
"Gibbs, how long you have been a sailor?" said Jack
"Thirty years, near enough"
"And in all that time, have you ever known a ship to stop at an island and bury a bunch of folks who died on board? They died here Gibbs, or were brought here dead. By someone who cared enough to bury them, instead of leaving them for the birds."
"And what business is it of ours if they did? They're dead, poor souls, and it don't look to me as though they're going to bother us."
Jack sometimes wondered how Gibbs had survived before he joined the Pearl, before he had people to look after him who used their brains instead of pickling them.
"This is a good landfall Gibbs. Shelter, water and not too many folks as know about it. If someone else is starting to make themselves at home, I'd like to know who, savvy?"
Gibbs swallowed and reached for his flask.
"You aren't going to dig 'em up are ye Jack?" he asked hoarsely.
"No, but I want you to rouse the crew and search the island. See what else you can find. Anamaria love, you go and tell the boys on the Pearl what's up, then meet me back here."
"The whole island?" said Gibbs looking slightly appalled.
"It's not more than two miles across and it's hardly stuffed with good places to hide. Get on with it!"
Much as he hated naval discipline and the methods used to enforce it, Jack had to admit it had a few good points.
As Gibbs set off to organise the search, Jack settled himself down, finding a place which commanded a good view of both the Pearl and the beach. The graves didn't bother him: as Gibbs had said, the occupants didn't seem the socialising sort of dead folk and he had seen enough over the years to not be unduly disturbed by the presence of a body or two.
Though the island was small, the search still took quite a time. In the first hour the team that Gibbs had assigned to search the coast turned up a small ship's boat, heavily bloodstained, but they found no sign of any occupants. Jack left Anamaria at his lookout point beside the graves and wandered along to take a look.
He smelled the boat long before he saw it. He knew that smell and it brought back a host of memories he'd much rather keep buried. The smell of a pack of men, dying by violence in a confined space. The boat was abuzz with what looked to be every fly in the whole of the Caribbean, feasting away on its crusted boards. Too much blood for one man. Maybe six would be about right.
The search party that had found the boat were clustered together a few feet away. There eyes were wide and a couple of them were obviously trying not to throw up. They led a hard life all of them, but no one needed this sort of reminder as to where that life might take them.
"Scuttle it" he said.
"Captain?"
"You heard me you dogs! Chop a hole in it, then drag it out by those rocks. What do we want it stinking the place up for?"
They scurried to comply and Jack turned to walk back to Anamaria. He was starting to feel really spooked by this. That boat looked like a slaughterhouse, but he hadn't heard word of any big engagements. They'd had contact with a fair few ships over the last couple of weeks and news of a battle normally travelled fast on the densely packed sailing routes.
Once the search of the coast had been completed with no further finds, Gibbs had his men start on the interior of the island. The soil was too thin to support more that a bit of scrub and a few palms, so the teams could quarter the ground quite quickly and effectively, without too much danger of missing anything.
The moon had risen by the time a group of crewmen approached dragging a feebly struggling figure between them. Jack straightened up a bit, so as to make an impression on their captive. If you looked fearsome enough, then they normally gave up the fight right away, saving all the bother and mess of actually doing anything.
The pirates dumped the man unceremoniously in the sand at Jack's feet. He seemed quite weak; it took him several moments to gather his breath before he hauled himself up onto his knees to look Jack in the face.
Jack jumped so violently in surprise that Anamaria caught his arm to stop him falling over.
The man kneeling before him in the sand, blistered with sunburn, hollow eyed and hollow bellied with hunger and fever, was Commodore Norrington.