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pickings right here in front of them? Best leave them alone, they would never get past the fort’s battery, not while the Mermaid was worm-riddled and encrusted with barnacles. Now, if they had already careened? Ah well.
    “Privateer eh?” he said with a shrug. “A British commission to legally plunder anything flying a Spanish ensign? I don’t suppose the Spanish see it that way. They’d say he was nothing but a scamp of a pirate.”
    “We don’t hold with pirates in these waters,” Vorst answered huffily, affronted at the offensive word pirate .
    “Rightly so, but the distinction between privateering and pirating depends on which side the wind is blowing from, does it not?” Jesamiah smiled, friendly, at ease. “If I were Spanish for example, I could blast the shit out of Duke and Duchess and claim I had every right to do so.”
    “Except the heavy artillery of this fort would be blowing you to kingdom come before you could get more than one shot fired.”
    Conceding the point, Jesamiah grinned, adding, “Unless the Dutch government decide to change alliance and side with Spain.” At the disapproving glare he thought it prudent to alter tack. “You said one is mad?”
    “As one of your English March hares. Dampier. William Dampier. Had too much of the sun boiling his brains if you ask me. Obsessed with detailing every living thing he comes across, always scribbling in his notebook. I saw him flat on his belly down on the beach the other day, wig askew, studying a crab would you believe? I mean, for God’s sake, the things are only fit for eating. What point in drawing the little sods?”
    Jesamiah’s eyes had lit up, glowing with excitement. “Dampier? Now him I have heard of.”
    William Dampier here in Cape Town? The most famous, most successful buccaneer to torment the Spanish – a man who had drawn a very fine line between legitimate privateering and the hanging offence of piracy! He had first rounded Cape Horn and crossed the Pacific to the East Indies in 1680, had circumnavigated the world yet again since then – three occasions if this Woodes Rogers had indeed commanded another successful expedition. Jesamiah’s copy of Dampier’s book, so well read it was dog-eared and falling apart. To meet him? Ah, the questions he would ask! He had no intention of attempting such a venture, but that did not deter Jesamiah’s enthralment of reading about it.
    Vorst was weary of the subject. He pushed himself from his chair, his hand holding the bulge of his belly. “Talking of crabs, I would not recommend too many of the blighters. Give you belly ache.” He gestured Jesamiah towards the door. “If you would excuse me, I need to sit on the comfort stool a while. If you are a follower of adventure try presenting yourself at the Golden Hind , one of our more respectable taverns. Rogers is billeted there, he will delight in boring the wax out of a fresh ear.”
    Sketching a half-hearted salute to the harbourmaster’s disappearing back Jesamiah casually rummaged through the scatter of papers on the desk, found a few documents that might prove useful in the future and stuffed them into his coat’s cavernous inner pocket. Along with a bag of coin and an attractive pocket watch left lying there on the desk for anyone to pick up.
    Outside, standing on the civilian side of the arch he considered what to do next. The brothel first or a tavern? He turned up the street, away from the range of buildings that served as slave quarters for inbound wretches. The wealth of South Africa, as with the Caribbean islands of the West Indies and the tobacco and cotton colonies of the Americas, were being built by the captive labour of Irish and British convicts and African blacks. Only on a pirate ship were men treated as equal. The Sweet Trade, where a man could be free of the law and bigotry.
    A neat, pretty town with streets set in an orderly grid pattern, the overall effect spoilt by the rough roads, wandering animals and