Explore "The Privateer" by Josephine Tey on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
'It's a good thing we're five hundred miles from Port Royal,' Jack said, watching the pay-queue snake along the beach at Isle of Pines, 'or we'd never get a man of them to the mainland of America.'
The ransom from Puerto Principe had worked out at fifteen pounds a head, and to men whose only coin for months was either a luck-piece or a dud this was riches. Balked of the opportunity for immediate spending, they fell back on their second love, and gambled from morning till night. If they won they celebrated, if they lost they drowned their sorrows; and there was not one of the nine captains who did not breathe a sigh of relief when at last the anchors came up and the ships filed out on their long journey to the mainland.