Chapter 181 - A Sudden Storm (2/2)

There was no way to be certain. He kept having his nagging feeling that he’d missed something about that carrack, but he had nothing to go on. He would just have to wait for Vincent to complete the translation of the notebooks to see if he could get more information from them.

For most people, this sudden storm burst was just a brief interlude in a lengthy voyage. Very soon, the pirates on the ship turned their attention to other things, such as the person who always slipped into the kitchen at night stealing bread, or where they should go once they docked.

The Jackdaw was drawing closer and closer to Nassau, and Zhang Heng had no inkling that another storm awaited him on the shore.

Carina’s secondhand business was blooming on the island. There was never a shortage of pirates at the warehouse’s doorstep. On top of that, she possessed an uncanny boldness and willfulness that was uncommon for her gender at that time. She never turned away used goods. As long as they weren’t completely worthless, the tradeswoman was willing to purchase it. This won her the favor of the smaller pirate gangs.

Captain Malone bid goodbye to his time in the brothel and resumed his busy life. The Gentle Breeze started to travel back and forth from Nassau to the colony’s port, exchanging covertly acquired goods for bags of gold coins. Although most of the income was used to subsidize the secondhand business, Carina offered a very high price, and it turned out to be ideal in terms of profit. This was nothing like the time when her father, Fegan, was on the island.

Nevertheless, they were all still profitable. At least everyone was not bored out of their minds when the Jackdaw went out to sea.

However, nothing lasted forever; for all good things, at least. Not long after that, the secret about Carina using the secondhand business to cover-up the under table trade was soon exposed. In a single night, the news was made known throughout the entire island.

It was followed by the news about her father being detained in the colony. This wasn’t a secret among the black-market merchants, though. Some of the more well-informed people on the island heard about it too, but the fact that it was so suddenly made public told of a malicious intention behind it.

The captains who traded with Carina were getting overwrought, having only wanted to earn some extra money. Of course, they did not want to be tied to this sinking ship that was Carina. Every one of them insisted that it wasn’t their men who had exposed the secrets. They even suspected that Carina herself was the one who did it. They believed that if their relationship with the black-market alliance was ruined, the one benefiting from it at the end of the day was Carina.

Carina had to personally go up to each of them, attempting to convince them that their black-market alliance wouldn’t fulfill the sanctions on the statement. Doing that would just be pushing the pirates to her side. In the end, however, only two captains agreed that if Carina could solve the problem of the leak, they would continue doing business with her.

Malone shook his head. “There’s no way to solve this problem. We’ve already done a fine job here. We had people guard the warehouse, and even our sailors didn’t know what cargo we hauled on each trip. There’s no way the leak came from our side. The other pirates, on the other hand, are mouthy. As the saying goes, never trust pirates to keep secrets–especially when they are drunk.”

Carina shook her head in protest. “Most of their men didn’t know that they sold the goods to us. This must be the work of our trusted aides. Everyone else only cares about the money that they would get in the end. The black-market alliance might have caught wind of it, but they couldn’t have investigated it that quickly.”