One of the oldest Spanish cities in the Americas is Cumaná, located on the coast of Venezuela, about three hundred kilometers west of the mouth of the great river Orinoco. The city, founded by the Spanish in 1520, lies at the entrance to a deep bay and is protected from the Northeastern trade winds by a long peninsula. Due to its favorable location, it immediately became a leading center of administration and commerce and a base of conquistador expansion. Great military expeditions set out from here to subdue Indian tribes and seize their land. And great religious missions to “save Indian souls” and found mighty religious colonies—which pretty much came to the same thing.

There are many churches and monasteries in Cumaná, and within their thick walls, they house numerous ancient documents, chronicles, and treaties. To this day, they preserve many valuable manuscripts that illuminate the country’s history and its people.

Now, several score kilometers northeast of Cumaná lies the island of Margarita, first discovered by Columbus and famous for its pearl fisheries and the rebellion of the last madman conquistador, the cruel Aguirre. Between Margarita and the mainland lies another island, much smaller, Isla Cocha, deserted for many centuries. Some people settled there in the mid-eighteenth century, but the settlement did not last.

One of the Cumaná libraries preserves a report by a certain Franciscan friar who lived on Isla Cocha during the failed attempt to settle it and described how the residents discovered in a large cave on the island a boat hidden behind a stone wall. It bore an enigmatic inscription on its side: JOHN BOBER POLONUS, and below it, the year—AD 1726. The Franciscan tried to discover the secret of the boat and its mysterious inscription but—in vain. All he was able to learn was of another case, supposedly related, reported to him by his associate: a report of a once famous expedition of two dozen Spaniards from Margarita, who, chasing after some fugitive slaves in that same year 1726, disappeared in the vicinity of Isla Cocha and were never seen again.

So much the Franciscan.

Other contemporary documents found in the book collections of Cumaná speak of an unusual white man who, shortly after the year 1726, appeared among one of the Indian nations—the Arawaks—then living in the forests around the mouth of the river Orinoco; and who rose to great prominence among them under the name of White Jaguar. His Spanish name was Juan—corresponding to English John. He managed to unite a number of tribes under his leadership, and possessing a good quantity of firearms, he successfully defended their independence for many years. Only after his death did the Spanish manage to break the resistance of the Arawaks.

It may be worthwhile to recount the story of this man’s stay on Isla Cocha on the basis of the few surviving notes made by this unusual man.

*

“But you know how to row, don’t you?” sailor William, my friend, asked me in a whisper.

“I do,” I whispered back.

“Well, then, by the Grace of God, do it!”

Having felt in the darkness for the edge of the boat, I jumped in, found my seat, and set down at my feet the small bundle which contained all my earthly possessions. I reached for the oars. William pushed the boat away from the shore and took place at the helm. Finding myself on the water, I finally breathed a sigh of relief: I was a wanted man.

After we glided on the river a few hundred feet, we were picked up by a strong current—the tide was going out—and we began to speed towards the mouth of the James River.

It was barely past midnight. A fine drizzle fell on the fog-covered river and the coastal granaries of Jamestown. There was no sound except the muffled splash of our oars and the gurgling of water behind us. Virginian January cold chilled us to the bone.

Suddenly, William started to cough. The sailor tried in vain to stop. Warmed up by several glasses of grog, with which I had plied him at a waterfront tavern, he now choked cruelly on the cold air. Between one bout of coughing and the next, he cursed the world and tried to stop up his mouth with his sleeve but this helped very little. I became afraid that the noise might bring the river guard upon us and thwart our getaway. Fortunately, my companion stopped coughing soon.

Before us, on shore, there appeared a single light: the customs house. I stopped rowing. The current was carrying us forward in the right direction, even without me rowing, out to the mouth of the river, where a ship lay at anchor—the destination of our overnight flight.

We now heard distant voices calling out from somewhere onshore, but they weren’t shouting about us. Unnoticed, we sailed past the customs house, and when we went beyond a bend in the river, and its light disappeared, we both sighed a sigh of relief. The danger was behind us; in front of us lay our ship.

William grunted and, interrupting the silence, said:

“Well, the worst is behind us. Two more hours of rowing and…”

And he bent forward towards me with concern and kindness, which I had never noticed during our two-day acquaintance, and asked:

“Johnny-boy, ain’t you scared?”

“Why? Why should I be afraid?” I pouted, offended.

“Hell and damnation, my boy! You’re going on a privateer, Johnny! I told you already—we don’t play nice. We fight and plunder, and if the Spaniards catch us, we’ll dance the hempen jig, as sure as Amen, and maybe they’ll toy with us first—and real good, too.”

I stopped rowing.

“No. I am not afraid of fighting. I have done a bit of it already. Willie, you try to frighten me in vain.”

“Well, if you ain’t scared, then you should be, my foolish friend! Our old man is a blackguard and a hangdog! The worst scoundrel of a captain in the whole Caribbean! Life on that tub is pure hell. Damn hard to take it sometimes.”

“But you’re holding up somehow? And others, do they not hold up?”

“Fiddlesticks! We’re a different set of gents! We’ve all been on the water since we was children. But you’re a landlubber, kid.”

Touched to the quick, I shot back:

“Hey, Willie, do not insult me with this landlubber talk! I have seen enough trouble on the frontier and have looked death in the eye more than once. You know why I’m running.”

“I know, I know.”

I was running away from the revenge of the Virginian gentry—the English lords, the cavaliers.

Nearly thirty years earlier, my pioneer father shipped out to America in search of cheap land. He wandered off with his family to the western outskirts of Virginia and, over there, deep in the wilderness, at the foot of the Alleghenies, built himself a cabin. Clearing the forest, constantly under the threat of Indians and bandits, struggling with wild animals and hostile nature, he survived many arduous years until, in the end, he began to reap the fruits of his labors. Following in his footsteps, others came and settled nearby. The valley grew in abundance and began to flourish.

And then, a year ago, a thunderbolt from the blue sky! Agents of lord Dunbury showed up, telling us that the land was his. They flashed in our eyes some royal grant or other from a dozen years earlier, allegedly granting our land to the Dunburies. We complained to the authorities in Jamestown, but the government there was all in cahoots with the lords and cavaliers, all henchmen of lord Dunbury, and we were unable to obtain justice. But hell if we were going to take it lying down, and when the greedy lord’s wetboys returned to the valley to clear us out, we gathered together several dozen frontiersmen like ourselves and put up a fight. And I was among them.

The cavaliers, afraid that the thing could get out of hand, like it did half a century earlier in the days of good old Bacon, immediately threw against us an overwhelming force. They blasted us into smithereens, and exemplary reprisals followed. They did not go easy on the hemp. I fled, but they put a price on my head. There were only two places for me to flee: into the mountains, to the Indians, or to Jamestown and then out to sea. I ran away to Jamestown, and I hid in an inn near the shore.

Obliging people put me in touch with William, a hand on a privateer standing at the mouth of the James River. Ships always needed sailors, and William liked me and readily agreed to smuggle me onto the ship. And so, one rainy night in January, we found ourselves on a boat quietly gliding down the river.

More than two hours passed when William’s voice woke me up from my musings:

“Somethin’s ahead.”

It was our ship, for sure. We announced ourselves by hailing, and someone threw us a rope, which we climbed onto the deck. William led me down to the forecastle and ordered me to sleep. At dawn, he woke me and took me to the Bosun. The Bosun, a shaggy, ugly beast, threw me a grim glance, poked my arms and calves doubtfully, spat with contempt overboard, and, mumbling, ordered me to follow him.

“What is it, boy?” he asked me over his shoulder. I did not understand what he meant.

“What is your name, you piece of—?” he boomed.

“Yan,” I replied, giving my Polish name because that’s what my family called me, as did the rest of our forest neighbors.

“Say what?” the Bosun grimaced.

“John,” I said, giving my English name.

“Well, talk like a Christian, damn you!” he growled.

He led me down to the captain’s cabin and shoved me rudely inside. The captain, an obese hog with bulging, staring eyes, was sitting by a table on which his breakfast was laid, but he was not eating. Before him stood two young Indians, his slaves—as I later found out. The captain was furiously whipping the elder of the two, a youth of about eighteen, over the head, with a cat-of-nine-tails. When we came in, he stopped but did not lower his hand and just glowered at us.

“Our new sailor, John,” said the Bosun stressing “sailor” with irony.

The captain nodded angrily, swore, and sent us to the devil. The Bosun dragged me out, closed the cabin door quickly, and said:

“You’re one lucky son of a bitch!” he rasped. “The old man was kind to you.”

The question pressed itself onto my lips: how I was lucky—or the captain kind—and why he was whipping the Indian, but the Bosun shoved a bucket and a brush into my hands and ordered me to scrub the deck.

And thus, I started my service on the privateer.

But I was glad to have left Virginia and slipped my pursuers.