The Captain's Treasure

Trouble in Port Royal and Welcome to Singapore.

Book Three

Port Royal

The East India Company flag flaps above the town of Pert Royal. As rows upon rows of people are walked by armed soldiers up to a row of gallows, seven at a time.

Charlotte and Elizabeth Swann would not recognize this cold, gray miserable place as the lively beautiful Jamaican paradise they grew up in. The parlor of Cuttler Beckett and the East India Trading Company has sucked all of the color and life from the once bright streets the Swann girls played on.

At the edge of the gallows a wigged official stands and reads a list of new proclamations. "In order to effect a timely halt to deteriorating conditions, and to ensure the common good, a state of emergency is declared for these territories, by decree of Lord Cutler Beckett, duly appointed representative of His Majesty the King. By decree, according to martial law, the following statutes are temporarily amended: right to assembly, suspended. Right to habeus corpus, suspended. Right to legal counsel, suspended. Right to verdict by a jury of peers, suspended. All persons convicted of piracy, or aiding a person convicted of piracy, or associating with a person convicted of piracy, shall be sentenced to hang by the neck until dead."

Piles of boots, looted from the corpses of not only men but women and children pile up and wagonloads of the bodies are hauled away.

Standing on the gallows there is a boy, no more than ten years old who is marched up to a hangman's noose. The executioner places his small frame on top of a barrel so that his neck can reach the rope. In his hand he holds something...shiny... A single piece of eight, the sliver Spanish coin has a skull and crossbones on the back.

A pirate piece of eight. 

He begins to sing.

"The king and his men,

stole the queen from her bed,

and bound her in her bones.

The seas be ours,

and by the powers,"

The man next to the child picks up the song.

"Yo, ho, all hands,

hoist the colors high."

The rest of the people on the gallows join in.

"Heave ho, thieves and beggars,

never shall we die."

An officer run up to Lord Cutler Beckett where he sits overseeing the slaughter and reading through a stack of papers.

"They've... started to sing, sir."

Beckett smiles smugly, "Finally."

The whole courtyard is now singing.

"Yo ho, all together,

hoist the colors high.

Heave ho, thieves and beggars,

ever shall we die."

The sound of a leaver being pulled and trap doors dropping finally stops the singing.

A coin drops. The faintest hum can be heard from it.

Elsewhere a similar coin falls to the surface of a table and is picked up by the hand of a pirate who holds it to his ear, listening to the sound. 

Captain William Teague looks at the coin in his hand, The Brethren Court has been called.

Singapore