“Are you off your skull? They’ll obliterate us!” said Jukes.

“Do as I say and hoist the damn sails, and when I say so, fire straight at those barrels next to the golden cannon!” And here is where James’s uncanny luck came into play—the sky suddenly exploded with lightning that was so loud the men ducked, thinking the Dreaded Queen had fired its cannons. The wind stirred, thrashing the ship against the waves, and rain poured down in sheets.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about! We should be firing at their haul!” Jukes looked as if he didn’t know what was more terrifying, the storm that hadn’t fully reached them yet or the Dreaded Queen.

“Do you want your friends to die? Do as I say!”

Smee was very proud of James in that moment, and it seemed to Smee that James went up in Jukes’s estimation, standing up to him in that way.

“You have your orders, Jukes, or do you want to go overboard and fend for yourself like your brothers?” said Blackbeard with an intimidating look that sent Jukes running.

“You heard the captain, hoist the sails!” yelled Jukes to the other men. They struggled to pull the riggings and raise the sails, which immediately caught the wind and moved them forward at a tremendous speed. If Smee believed in such things he would have thought it was all due to magic. How else did they have such high winds just as they needed them? He could almost hear the sounds of laughter on the wind, peals of it swirling all around them, and the ship was propelled toward the Dreaded Queen as it started to fire its cannons. All Smee could think of was how frightening it must have been for the men in the boats to be between two ships firing at each other. And then he heard James’s voice echoing through the wind, rain, and thunder, and even louder than the cannons.

“Fire now! Aim at the barrels!” he said, pointing at the Dreaded Queen, and at the moment of impact there was an enormous explosion scattering the entire starboard side of the ship in every direction.

The rest was chaos as the men got back aboard the Silent Wraith, and the remaining crew of the Dreaded Queen scrambled onto boats, fleeing for their lives as their ship sank slowly into the sea.

When all the men were safely back aboard, they hoisted Jukes onto their shoulders as they carried him around the ship in celebration, praising him for saving their lives. Skylights got out a barrel of grog, and started passing out tankards as they celebrated. Smee watched James and Blackbeard standing back watching the others celebrate, and he knew the captain was praising James for his quick thinking. Smee only wished that it was James on the shoulders of those men, because it was he who’d won that day.