THE TALE OF THE JACOB – PART 1

In the autumn of 1621, a merchant ship named the Jacob, out of Bristol, England, set sail for the Mediterranean. She was a modest-sized vessel, with a carrying capacity of 120 tons, about 85 feet (26 meters) long, lightly armed with a few cannon, and with a crew of about a dozen or so.

She made good time through the English Channel and down past the Atlantic coasts of Portugal and Spain. But at the mouth of the Strait of Gibraltar, the Jacob had the bad luck to run into a fleet of corsair ships from Algiers. The crew put up a fight, firing off their cannons, but it was no use. The corsairs overwhelmed them, and all the men aboard the Jacob were taken captive. The corsairs combed through the ship, stripping away anything of value they found, no matter how small. The crew was transferred to one of the corsair ships and manacled in the dank recesses of the hold.

The Jacob was a stout ship, though, and, after some discussion, the corsairs decided that, instead of scuppering her, they would put a skeleton crew aboard and have them sail the Jacob back to Algiers, where they could re-outfit her as a corsair vessel. The corsair captain appointed thirteen men from among the contingent of janissary soldiers aboard his ship to man her. But these men were soldiers rather than sailors, and the Jacob was a new and unfamiliar ship to them. So the corsair captain chose four of the Jacob’s crew—the youngest and therefore least likely to pose a threat—to manage the sails on the voyage back to Algiers.

The corsair fleet sailed on in search of new prey, and the Jacob began the voyage to Algiers.

The four young English sailors—John Cooke, William Ling, David Jones, and Robert Tuckey—were in despair. The janissaries aboard the Jacob were all armed with flintlocks, scimitars, and long knives. Their Commander was a squat bull of a man, implacably stern, unyielding as an iron post. If the young Englishmen didn’t do as they were ordered quickly enough—and none of the janissaries spoke proper English, so the orders were always unclear—they were slapped and punched, thrashed with ropes, or pricked with the wickedly sharp point of the janissary Commander’s knife.

And they had only worse to look forward to. They had all heard stories of what it was like to be a slave in Algiers, to be chained and beaten, to labor continuously from sunup till dusk, fed only on coarse bread and water, to have nothing but damp, hard boards for a bed. Or… cruelest fate of all, to be assigned to one of the corsair raiding galleys as a slave at the oars, to row for hour after hour, day after day, endlessly… until they collapsed and died of exhaustion or sickness and were slung overboard like so much unwanted rubbish.

If the young Englishmen had come from well-to-do families, they might have been able to count on being ransomed. But they were all poor. There was no chance of ransom for any of them.

When they were not up in the shrouds managing the sails, the four young sailors sat about listlessly, staring mutely at each other, overwhelmed by the horror of what awaited them.

For five days things went on like this, with the young sailors growing more and more despairing.

And then, in the black middle of the fifth night, a storm struck the Jacob.

When a storm hit like this, the ship’s sails had to be shortened quickly, or they risked being ripped to shreds by the violent winds. Worse, with all her canvas up, the Jacob would be blown charging blindly before the wind… to be smashed to bits on any unseen rocks that might lie ahead in the dark. So the four young English sailors rolled out of their hammocks and clambered quickly up into the shrouds to haul in the topsails. This was no easy task. It was black dark, lit only by the occasional flash of lightning. They had to work by feel, straddling the yardarms fifty feet (fifteen meters) up in the air, the ship rocking and heaving like a live thing under them. But they  had done this task before. And they knew their ship. They soon had both the main- and the foretopsail furled.

It wasn’t enough.

The Jacob still had too much canvas up, and she was hurtling forward blindly into the darkness, driven by the howling stormwind. The mainsail had to be taken in. But that was the largest sail on the ship, and its rain-sodden bulk was too much for the four young sailors to handle by themselves.

So they called on the janissaries to help.

Janissaries were soldiers rather than sailors, and they were of little use up in the shrouds of a storm-driven ship. But they could haul rope. The young sailors scrambled down to the deck to organize some of the janissaries. They managed to explain by shouts and signs what was needed and set two men to haul on the starboard mainsail halyards. Moving to the port halyards, John Cooke and David Jones found only one man there: the janissary Commander. They looked about for others, but there was nobody in sight anywhere on the pitching deck.

The janissary commander stood braced awkwardly against the gunwale, trying to keep his balance. He pointed aloft, stabbing his finger upwards angrily, and shouted something that the howl of the stormwind drowned out.

John Cooke and David Jones looked at each other. The deck in this part of the ship was still empty—just the two of them and the janissary commander.

The man who for five long days had bullied them and tormented them with the knife he still carried at his belt.

Without a word, they rushed him, grabbed him up by the belt, and heaved him overboard.

The janissary Commander was a strong man, though, and agile for all his bullishness. He managed to grab hold of a trailing rope as he fell and started to haul himself back on board. John Cooke sprinted to a nearby bilge pump, tore the handle off it, and flung it to David Jones. As the janissary Commander pulled himself up over the gunwale, shrieking in fury, Jones smashed him across the head with the bilge pump handle with all the force he could manage, cracking the man’s skull open and sending him toppling backwards into the sea.

John Cooke and David Jones stood as they were, frozen, gasping for breath. A bolt of lightning lit the ship. They could see the dark, tossing sea, the white faces of William Ling and Robert Tuckey across from them on the deck.

“Stay here!” John Cooke shouted to his companions, his voice barely audible over the stormwind. Then he turned and sprinted towards the Jacob’s stern.

For the conclusion of this story, see The Tale of the Jacob – Part 2