THE TALE OF THE JACOB – PART 2

(This post is a continuation of The Tale of the Jacob – Part 1. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read that post before continuing on here.)

After John Cooke and David Jones, two of the young English seaman aboard the Jacob, had brained the janissary Commander with the bilge pump handle so that he fell back into the storm-tossed sea, dead, John Cooke turned and raced to the stern deck of the ship, where the Captain’s cabin was. Six or seven janissaries stood clustered before the cabin, grasping at stanchions, or railings, or each other to stay on their feet, staring wide-eyed at the heaving sea—soldiers, not sailors.

They all shouted at John as he came rushing up the deck stairs. He skidded to a stop uncertainly… but then pressed ahead. Ignoring their calls and the grasping hands they reached to him, he elbowed a way through  and into the Captain’s cabin.

High on a shelf in the back wall of the cabin, John knew, the English Captain (now in chains in the hold of the Algiers corsair ship that had captured the Jacob) kept a pair of cutlasses. John had raced to the cabin in the hope that the corsairs had not found them.

They had not.

With the cutlasses in this arms, still in their scabbards, John burst out of the cabin, through the startled janissaries, and down onto the main deck.

The other young English sailors were clustered there, uncertainly. John held up the cutlasses with a triumphant flourish. For a long few moments, nobody moved. Then William Ling grabbed one of the cutlasses and yanked it from the scabbard. John did the same.

Together, the two of them rushed the janissaries still waiting on the Jacob’s port side for the signal to haul away on the mainsail halyards.

Neither of the young sailors had any training in how to use a sword. But a cutlass is a straightforward hacking weapon, and this was not swordplay. It was more like butchery. They swung the curved blades as they would have swung an axe at a tree bole, feeling the steel cut into flesh and grate jarringly against bone. The janissaries shrieked and tried to draw her own blades, but it all happened much too fast. And they lacked the shipboard agility the young sailors had.

The janissaries bled out their lives sprawled on the heaving deck, their eyes wide in disbelief at what had happened to them.

The other two young seamen grabbed up the butchered janissaries’ scimitars, and the four of them rushed the stern deck.

This proved to be a harder fight. The element of surprise was gone, for one of the janissaries in front of the Captain’s cabin saw them coming up the stairs and warned his fellows. When the young Englishmen reached to stern deck, the janissaries were already drawing their scimitars.

John Cooke leaped forwards. They others hesitated a heartbeat, and then followed.

The janissaries were all seasoned soldiers. In anything like a normal fight, they would have cut down the young Englishmen in short order. But this was not a normal fight. They were on the deck of a heaving and pitching ship, in the dark, rain hammering down on them, able to see clearly only in brief spasms when lightning sizzled and boomed across the sea. And they had nobody to get them properly organized, for their Commander was gone.

The young English sailors might not have known how to properly use the swords they held, but they knew their ship and instinctively anticipated the upwards or sideways heave of the deck. They swarmed the janissaries with desperate energy, agile as monkeys, trying to do as much damage as they could before their charge lost momentum.

In hardly more than an eyeblink, they cut down two of the janissaries and wounded several others.

The janissaries broke and fled.

The young sailors chased them across the deck, whirling their swords over their heads, howling like wolves, terrified and exultant and half mad.

The janissaries took shelter belowdecks, crowding down through one of the hatches.

The young sailors fasten that hatch down, then raced about the ship and fastened all the other hatches until they had the janissaries safely trapped belowdecks.

Then they collapsed to the deck, gasping, too drained even to feel the cold rain on their faces.

“What do we do now?” one of them said when they had enough breath back to speak.

The storm was easing off, and the horizon showed the first pale light of dawn.

“The whipstaff,” John Cooke said.

The four of them headed to the Jacob’s stern. (This was in the days before ships’ wheels, and the helmsman steered the ship by using a long pole, called the whipstaff, attached to the rudder.) When they got there, they discovered that the janissaries, from their position belowdecks, had disengaged the whipstaff from the rudder, and the Jacob was beginning to tumble and role unguided in the still boisterous sea.

The four young men looked at each other.

“The muskets,” John Cooke said.

They scrounged up some of the janissaries’ muskets, packed away in various parts of the ship. It took them some time to get the guns’ barrels and priming pans cleaned and dried, and to find powder that hadn’t been soaked by the storm. But eventually they had several of the muskets properly primed and loaded.

John Cooke and William Ling walked to the nearest hatch, stuck the muzzles of their muskets through the grating, and fired.

A volley of surprised shouts came from below.

They loaded and fired into a different hatch, and then another, over and over, racing from one hatch to the next, until their arms ached and their ears rang.

Eventually, one of the janissaries called out in broken English that they were willing to reconnect the whipstaff and surrender.

By this time, the morning was well advanced. The storm had broken up, and swaths of blue sky showed overhead. The rain-soaked deck steamed in the morning sun. The four young sailors looked at each other and smiled wearily.

“Now what?” William Ling asked.

“We set a course,” John Cooke said, “for the nearest Christian port we can find,” .

That port proved to be Saint Lucas, Spain. As Englishmen, they were treated at first with the deepest suspicion. But after they had told their story, and brought the captive janissaries up in deck, they became far more popular. The local Spanish authorities offered to buy the janissaries and put them to work as slaves on one of the armed galleys of the Spanish navy.

The four young Englishmen took the money, bought supplies, and headed home, triumphant.

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For those who may be interested, the tale of the Jacob and the four intrepid young English sailors can be found in Chapter 6 of Volume VI of Purchas His Pilgrimes: Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells by Englishmen and others, by Samuel Purchas (Glasgow University Press, 1905). The Pilgrimes was originally published in 1625.

I have taken some liberties with the original text to make the story more coherent for modern readers.

It is hard to know how accurate the details of this story might be. It was likely based on true events. But it was also likely modified to make the young Englishmen look especially courageous and staunch. In the ongoing struggle in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries between the European states and the Barbary corsairs, stories such as this with triumphal happy endings were no doubt needed to keep people’s spirits up.