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The Prinses Albertina had sailed into Port Royal with a smashed jib, a halved cargo and a story about the English pirates who’d robbed them. Few had any sympathy: Dutch merchanters made handsome profits even from half their goods. The South Seas attracted pirates as carrion drew flies; only fools risked travel without military protection. English privateers who actually stuck to the terms of taking only half the goods of their pillaged ships, half to the Crown and half to the crew, were rare but not unknown.
What set this raid apart was Jakob the helmsman, a talkative youth with a bandaged arm. Splinters from the jib that had been blasted as a warning shot from the pirates, he said, and he surely would have lost that arm if not for the dokter aboard. Yes, a real dokter on that pirate ship, not just a brute with an axe and a sailmaker’s kit. That Englelsman had taken the splinters out and cleaned the wound and stitched him. What a good fellow to travel with such bastards!
A good fellow.
Several men in several taverns nodded. And sent messages: What privateer harbours a doctor who’d treat an enemy?
And that was how Captain Moriarty learned that his mutinous ship’s doctor, John Watson, compassionate to a fault, was a refugee aboard the Baker.