Open Door

      I know not what to call this, nor will I urge that it is a secret overruling decree, that hurries us on to be the instruments of our own destruction, even though it be before us, and that we rush upon it with our eyes open.

      —Daniel Defoe,

       Robinson Crusoe (1719)

      1

       The Author finds himself at the mercy of dire and bloody circumstance.

      I awoke to the slaughterhouse smell of blood and the sulfur stink of gunpowder. There were muffled cries and a cold internal voice told me, “Your hearing is nearly gone from standing too close to a twelve-pound cannon, and those are cries of the wounded, and when you open your eyes you will wish you hadn't.”

      I did open my eyes. The deck of the brig was carnage. Fiercely armed men rushed about, blood flowed from the scuppers, spars were shattered and splintered, a mast and sail had crashed onto the foredeck, and a score of wounded and dead were scattered about.

      I could not see out of my left eye, and I reached up expecting the worst to find that I merely needed to wipe a clot of blood from the lid. There was a painful cut above my ear, most likely caused by a flying splinter. My last memory before fainting was of a ball smashing the frame of a nearby gunport.

      Any relief I felt at finding my skull intact immediately vanished as a large fellow in a patchwork coat loomed over me, aiming a pistol between my eyes. He wore a grin that would have been rakish if he hadn't cocked the pistol.

      “Hold ye,” said a voice from behind me. “They say this one's the surgeon.”

      A tall man limped into view, long of leg and pigtails, gripping a cutlass. There was grey in his beard and blood on his black coat. He pushed aside the other's weapon and leaned over me, speaking in a loud fashion, as if he kenned my fuddled state. “You can live, if ye'll stitch and dose our wounded.”

      I don't know where my courage came from, since I thought I'd left my honor back in England. “I'll physic your men if I can physic my own,” was my response.

      “You can.” The tall man glanced about the deck. “What's left of —’em.”

      That is how, reluctantly, I came into the service of Captain Baltizar.

      2

       A duel with an unexpected outcome, flight, and a voyage.

      I came to be on a floating slaughterhouse amidst the Caribbees due to a lack of five hundred pounds a year and a misplaced pistol shot.

      I had faced William Brucknell on the Downs; two gentlemen of honor, two pistols, two seconds, two rivals, two fools. The Brucknells owned the Downs and most of the land nearby, and William was the first son and heir of Lord Brucknell; magistrate, horse breeder, and drunkard. I was the son of nobody, but had been to University and learned natural history, the mathematics of medicine, and the arts of surgery. William had five hundred pounds a year, and would inherit more soon, considering the gross state of his father's liver. I had a practice worth forty a year, a small cottage, a bay horse, and my own wits. William was less bright than his horses, and also nearsighted, which was why, in that moment of malice when he challenged me, I had chosen pistols.

      It was over a woman. Penny had chosen to affiance wealth over wits, and I had said so in front of witnesses. And so misty dawn on the Downs, dew on our boots, pistols loaded, and each of us awaiting the order to fire. Grass before breakfast.

      I had not slept the night before, knowing what the outcome must be. I was a fair marksman—well practiced in collecting animals for study—and by dawn I decided that I did not wish to kill William. As we turned towards each other, pistols raised, I decided to shoot him in the right shoulder after he had missed, to cause minimal harm and yet satisfy honor.

      William panicked and immediately upon the command to fire, shot off my right earlobe. I pulled the trigger in shock.

      I saw the blood gout from above the bridge of his nose. He was dead before his second reached him, and I was on my bay riding towards Portsmouth before they had his corpse home. It does not do to kill the son of a magistrate and peer.

      It would be a poor physician who took long to find a craft willing to take him on. Ships often have surgeons who began their careers as barbers, apothecaries, or butchers. In Portsmouth I had offers of positions and berths within two hours of my arrival. I chose the privateer Worcester—a trim eighteen-gun brig—not because of the obvious ship-shapeness of the vessel and the cheerful authority of the captain, but because they sailed on the next dawn to the Spanish Main. Our business would be to harass and take the shipping of Spain and battle buccaneers and other enemies of His Majesty King Charles wherever they could be found.

      I spent the rest of that cool, bright spring day at the port selling my horse, completing my medical kit and sea chest, dodging doxies, and writing three letters to Penny, each in turn torn up, all in a mood of general remorse. I set sail with such remorse the next morning, despite the fine wind, the wine-dark sea, and the prospect of new experiences.

      3

       Of ships and surgeries and an accidental amputation.

      Captain Jonathan Hakes was insane, by any standard other than that of the fighting men who sailed. He would attack a ship of double the Worcester's guns, since he had long before decided that the fighting qualities of an Englishman were worth thrice that of a Spaniard or free booter. By the time we had reached our cruising ground on the Main, we had already taken four ships, and there had been much work for my needle, scalpel, and bone saw.