Art:AADM/Second round/Scurvy's Cure

The Short
= The Entry = It was a time when great sailing ships ruled the high seas -- frigates and brigs as grand and massive as islands in their own right, with crews so diverse as to seem like mini cities upon these islands, ruled by learned captains who frequently disputed how best to equip their ships for many months spent at sea, among the most pitched arguments being whether straight rum, grog, or swill most efficiently kept the unruly crews happy, and which of these complemented that happiness with health -- for everyone knew that the dread disease scurvy might be but an ill wind away, and that what was found in a ship's wooden casks might mean the difference between a successful pirate pillage and a miserable puke-fest, and arguments such as "rum is the best -- it goes straight to the bloodstream" fell on deaf ears to those who believed "grog has the highest concentration of vitamin C," which was further set aside by the inevitable clincher, "swill is the cheapest;" thus the debate raged on, through blockades and brigands and kraken attacks and sword fights, until one man stepped forward with an idea that was to forever alter the nature of these arguments -- nay, indeed, the nature of pirating itself.

The whole thing started with a gab session in the inn on Beta Island. The usual nightly debate over the effectiveness of rum vs. grog vs. swill was being carried on by Captains John Morgan, Jonathan Bushman, and “One-Eye” Pearce. Each was defending their own preferred drink as always - Morgan favoring fine rum, Bushman speaking up for grog, and Pearce loudly proclaiming the superiority of swill. My own crew was taking their ease, and blowing the proceeds of our pillage in the same old way -drinking contests, cards, fistfights, and the usual run of parlor games. But I noticed that our quartermaster, Henry, was listening to the debate over rum types with unusual interest.

I should put a word in here about Henry. He had a head for figures, as a good quartermaster has to, and he was a damn fine hand at keeping order amongst the lads. But he had a few points out of the ordinary. For one thing, he had a library in his house - I first saw it when he asked me over to set up a drinking contest between some o’ the mates. He’d coated the walls of one room with bookcases, and every bit of room on them had a book in it. There were towers of books stacked on top of each other, too, all over the place in there. When I asked him if he’d read ‘em all, he just said, “Of course - what else are they for?” He was a dab hand at alchemy, too - before he went to sea with us, he used to run an apothecary shop on Beta. Had a good business before he got bored and came to sea with us.

Well, seeing Henry listenin’ to the usual rum debate as if they were giving out directions to a treasure cache, I was curious and drifted over to cock an ear myself. As I sat down near Henry, Morgan was starting in on his usual list of arguments in favor of fine rum:

“I tell ye, lads, fine rum is the best. Ye can sail farther with less in the hold, and ye have more room for loot and ammunition. It tastes the best by far, and keeps the crew happier. And I’ve not had a ship’s man catch scurvy since I started sailin’!”

Bushman broke in, saying, “Belay that! Grog’s the best all ‘round! ‘Tis cheaper than the rum, tastes about as good, and it’s a damn sight better than swill! And I’ve never had a man ill with scurvy either!”

After this, as always, Pearce interrupted. “Hah! Ye can waste yer money on fine rum or grog if ye like, but I’ll stick to swill! It’s not as bad as ye make out, if ye mix it right, and it’s cheaper than either! And I’ve never lost a man to scurvy, nor had any complaints neither!”

I wondered what Henry was listenin’ for, since this was the same runaround that this lot had every time they were at the inn together. I could have repeated their arguments from memory by now. I was about to shove off and watch the fistfight at the other end of the inn, when Henry spoke up. “Who d’ye buy your rum from, gents?”

Each captain answered at once, trying to get in ahead of the others. Morgan named John’s Distillery, Pearce said he used Nathan’s Rum, and Pearce shouted Honest John’s Brew.

“And why’re ye askin’?,” said Pearce. “Had trouble with the scurvy?”

Henry shook his head. “Not this cruise, thank the powers! Ye’ve all had good luck in avoidin’ it, though, and ye can’t ever have too many places to find good rum.”

The captains all agreed in chorus, and turned back towards one another to continue their debate. Henry stood and strolled towards the door. After having a look around the inn, I decided to follow him. There was nothing exciting going on that night, except finding out what was gnawing on Henry’s brain. I caught up to him just outside the door.

“What’s going on up there, Henry?” I said. He was staring at the sign of the tailor shop across the street as though he were looking at something about a league past it and through it. I knew the look - he had something on his mind, all right, and was giving it his full attention. An annoying habit, but it has its benefits. You should see him at work at sea! A cannonball could go through the side of the ship next to his head, and he wouldn’t even notice until he was finished with the hole he was patching. If he hadn’t learned to snap out of it when he heard an officer’s whistle, he’d probably stay at his post for hours after the ship got back to port.

Oh, right, the story. Sorry, mates. Anyhow, Henry blinked and turned to look at me. “Aye, Captain?” he said.

“What’ve you got on your mind tonight?” I asked Henry. “We’ve heard that old debate over fine rum, grog and swill ‘till I want to stuff my ears with cotton whenever I think about it! Why listen to it again?”

Henry coughed. “Well, sir,” he said, “I have just the start of an idea. It’s a bit silly, but I still want to check it out.”

I nodded. Our whole crew knew about Henry’s ideas. They ranged from the obvious but practical things that you couldn’t believe no one had thought of before (“I think those sails will catch more wind if we adjust the ropes just a bit . . . like this. There!) to the farfetched and bizarre. (The crew was still chuckling over Henry’s attempt to train a seagull as a lookout for ships. Henry had started the gull on Navy vessels, and had faithfully pointed out every Navy ship that came within its sight ever since.)

So I was interested but wary as I listened to Henry’s newest scheme. “You know how those three always say that their crews never catch the scurvy?” Henry said. “Well, I got to thinkin’ about it, and I had a notion. There has to be something in the rum that they use to keep ‘em free of scurvy. They don’t use anything else that any other crew doesn’t, but their men stay healthy while other crews lose all their teeth. It just has to be their rum.”

I shrugged. “Aye, that sounds reasonable so far,” I said, “but what of it? Others have had similar notions before, and haven’t been able to find out what it is that makes some rum scurvy- preventin’ and some rum as useless as water. Remember Captain Hammersteiner? He sold his ship buying rum and alchemicals for tests, and he ended up a beggar.”

“I know,” Henry said, “but I think I’ve figured the way around it. Those three in the inn use concoctions that are about as different from each other as any three rums can be. If we can just figure out what’s THE SAME about each of ‘em! . . .”

“But how would you do that? Like you said, those rums are about as different as any three rums could be.”

“That’s where it gets more troublesome,” Henry said quietly. “I’ve thought about trying to use alchemy on each rum and comparing what comes out of ‘em when they’re distilled down, but even if we could separate the distillations well enough we might not be able to figure out what the critical ingredient is - distilling can change an ingredient a lot, so you’d never figure out what it was in the first place. ”

Henry took a deep breath, and continued. “The one way that I KNOW we could figure it out is to find Howlin’ McTavish.”

If it had been anyone except Henry talking, I’d have laughed and told him it was a good joke. Since it was Henry, I just stared at him in disbelief. “The same McTavish that sailed off saying that he was going to defeat the dread pirate lord Barnabas the Pale two years ago, with a crew too green to know better? The man that Captain Blight swore that he saw as one of Barnabas’ undead crewmen when he was running from Barnabas six months ago?”

Henry nodded. “Yes. The man who won the Beta Rum Binge ten years in a row, could name every distillery on the island off perfectly if you set a mug of rum from each of ‘em in front of him, and got free rum from John’s Distillery in exchange for keeping their ingredients to himself. He’s the man to do it, I know.”

I groaned. “Henry, this is a worse idea than that blasted gull of yours! No one’s ever defeated Barnabas the Pale - and, in case you’ve forgotten, Barnabas puts some kind of hex on every man in his crew. You’ve heard the stories from the ones who got away, about how all of the hands on that damned ship glow blue!”

“I have an idea about that,” Henry said.

I sighed. “You’d better come to the ship with me and talk about it then,” I told him. “If you’re going to talk about this with me all night, we may as well do it in private with some good rum.”

After we got back to the ship and had broached a bottle of fine rum (John’s Extra Fine, and fifteen years old - I can still taste it), I told Henry to explain his idea for getting McTavish away from Barnabas.

“Well, the first problem would be defeating Barnabas, of course,” Henry said.

“Which no one has ever done,” I reminded him.

“I know. But I looked up some of my old sketches for blockade weapons and defensive tactics, and I found something that I think could work. . .”

I considered his plan, and had to admit that - if it went the way he described it - it would probably succeed. “It’d take a bit of luck, but we can discuss that later,” I said. “You’d still have to get McTavish in a condition to taste anything, remember?”

“You know that old witch-doctor on Vernal Equinox? Youtl Aruoumbi?” Henry said. I nodded - everyone on Beta knew about Youtl. He was famous being able to make just about anyone short of being a corpse stand up and walk. There were even a few rumors that death itself wouldn’t stop him. . . “Well,” Henry said, “I knew Youtl pretty well - I bought herbs from him when I still ran that apothecary shop - and we used to tell stories and drink into the night. He told me that he had this recipe from his father, who got it from his father, who got it from his father and so on, a recipe for curing zombies.”

My jaw dropped. “Curing zombies?! How in the name of Davy Jones can you cure an undead thing?!” I said in incredulity.

“To hear Youtl tell it, most zombies are made that way before they die,” Henry answered. “A few are resurrected by magic, and those can only be destroyed, but those who are made zombies before they’re dead can be cured. And I’d wager that Youtl could whip up a potion that could counter even Barnabas’ hex.”

I noticed that I was actually starting to consider his plan. I quickly pointed out another flaw in his scheme, hoping to dispell the madness that was gripping us. “Our crew’s not overly large,” I said. “Even with all of us together, there wouldn’t be enough of us to take on Barnabas - not even if your plan to level the odds worked perfectly.”

“The Blood Brother’s Band is in port,” he answered. “Their frigate is still being repaired from the damage it took on their last cruise, and they’ve already spent the last of their loot from that pillage. I think that we can talk ‘em into it.”

The Brothers were some of the toughest salts on Beta - maybe the toughest of all. If we could get them aboard! . . . In a final gesture of sanity, I voiced my last objection. “How could we find Barnabas? It’s been over a month since anyone saw him or had word of him. He’s known to sail between every archipelago, and no one knows where he might be found next.”

“That,” Henry answered with a grin, “just might be the easiest problem to solve. How many carambolas do you think that we could cram onto our training sloop?”