The slave ship
extent you’d hardly believe. In all lands and all ranks. You ask the
first merchant or lawyer, aye, or teacher or parson you meet! Planters,
of course--but everybody beside planters. Fairly anybody.”
“Custom and Gain.”
“Aye, precisely. Custom and Gain. They’re Rulers. As for me, I’m a
plain sea captain, with my bread and salt to earn. I don’t set up to
be wiser or more moral than quarter-deck and forecastle of Society and
they that own my ship!”
I said, “Yet you would scorn, for gain, to become a pirate.”
He answered with violence. “You’re daft! It’s not the least the same!”
And I was so muddled in those years that I did not know if it was. The
comparison would never have come into my mind but for Culloden and
thereafter. And Culloden and thereafter were already fading away. I
said dully, “I have been a slave, overboard in the rough sea, while the
ship you call Society sailed by.”
He answered, “You were a white political, sold into limited servitude.
Africans are black barbarians, and all the reasoners will tell you that
in the end if not just at the beginning, it’s a happy exchange to the
West Indies, let alone Virginia, New York and New England!”
He came back to the table, and suddenly he was entirely the reasonable
and weighty person he had appeared in our earlier intercourse. “I would
ask you, David, did you not see a good deal of happiness among them in
Virginia?”
I saw Pickaninny dancing, and heard Old Joe fiddling and the negro
women laughing, and the children squealing and tumbling about, and I
thought of the suave self-importance of Colonel Amory’s house servants,
and of real contentment in good work in field and shop, and of
religious ecstasies that I had witnessed. Even at Old Mill quarter that
was the black books’ quarter, I could remember jollity.
“Yes,” I said. “I have seen what you may call happiness. But I never
saw or heard of a black man or woman who had not been enslaved and
brought from Africa against their will. They or their parents or
grandparents. And if I have seen what looked like contentment, I have
seen misery too. Always against their will and like animals, and still
they are bought and sold and worked like animals. But they are men and
women.”
He poured wine and put it at my hand. And yet I know that he did not
then know that this way lay one of my cities of destruction. I pushed
it aside, and then I took it back and drank. And straightway the false,
smirking lights began to play.
“You see, it’s not the life I would have chosen,” said my cousin. “I
don’t say that I greatly like my errands, for I don’t, but I do them.
And I would have you observe, David, that my work begins and ends with
the handling of my ship and cargo. The Negroes are already enslaved
and in barracoons up and down the coast. It’s the factors that collect
and deliver them. The captains but see that they’re brought as safely
as may be across the water. And look you, if I were not sailing the
_Janet_, another would be--and likely a rougher man, David, likely
a rougher man! For look you another thing, David. D’ ye know what I am
called at Whidah and at Daga and Calabar and Bonny? ‘Holy Bartram!’
And that because the crew that sails with me and the blacks I carry
are _not_ ill-treated. Just as far as my power goes they are well
treated, and that’s more, man, I grant, than can be said for all slave
ships and captains.”
“I’m thinking,” I said, “that I must go this voyage because I am here
upon the ship. But at your return port I will leave you, thanking you
for great kindness and hoping some day to repay it.”
“You will do about leaving the _Janet_ as you please,” he
answered. “As for thanks and payment, I’m not asking them, David. But
I would not swear I was going until I had looked things over a bit.
You’re not very safe on land, and the sea gets a grip. If you took
another vessel you’d have to give some account of yourself and to ship
before the mast. Here you could render me a deal of help as my cousin
and maybe clerk at times, with the sea to live with and my collection
of books if you like them. McNaughton’s got his points beside being a
good officer, and our surgeon, Colley, that you haven’t seen yet, for
he has a touch of fever, is a man of parts. The old Guineaman isn’t so
bad, you know.”
He ended quietly--asked if I would have more wine--said it was a braw
night and that it might be six weeks and more ere we sighted the coast,
and took up his cap to go outside.
CHAPTER X
The sun rained gold, the sea ran blue, the wind in the rigging sang the
very oldest song. I moved about the ship. The covers of the hatches
were raised. I saw with a kind of shock that the openings beneath
were grated. So were other apertures about the ship. I went to one
of the hatches and looked down, but the strong light above showed
little save darkness. I asked a man how much room would they have down
there between floor and roof. “Six feet clear,” he answered. “But the
platforms divide it, you know, so each tier has almost three feet. The
_Janet’s_ roomy compared to most. Roomiest Guineaman I know!”
“How many Africans does she carry?”
“Five hundred.”
I stared at the darkness below the grating. The seaman--it was Jack
Dannet--went on swabbing the deck beside me. I said, “Do you like
bringing slaves from Africa?”
“I’m not paid to like it,” he answered. “At first I didn’t like it, I
remember. But I got used to it. A man gets used to anything.”
I thought, “There’s always a little of him that creeps away.”
Dannet, washing the deck, continued, “I’ve been in ships that I didn’t
like--any more than hell! Free English sailors get banged about in
Guineamen as if they had been born without a rag on them, up the Oil
River! But the _Janet’s_ got a reputation of being a regular old
mother.”
“But the Negroes--how do you feel about them?”
“Oh, them! I don’t feel about them at all. Used to, maybe, just at
first, but it don’t last.”
His continued swabbing put distance between us. The second mate,
Pomeroy, came by. “Looking at our accommodations, Mr. Scott?”
“They’re scant for five hundred,” I said. “They’re shallow for five
hundred or for fifty or for five or for one.”
“Why, there you’re mistaken,” he replied. “The ship has a name for
commodiousness. At Whidah and Calabar and elsewhere you’ll see them
that I do think are scant.”
He was a short, black-haired, bull-necked man with a fishy and prying
eye. I liked Bartram and I liked McNaughton but I did not like Pomeroy.
He was curious about me and I let him be curious. “Jamaica and
Barbadoes are our usual ports. But we’re just from Bristol where we’ve
been refitting, and the captain had a fancy for anchoring by Norfolk.
It’s pleasant that we hit in with your plans, sir! I believe you have
been on a visit to a relative who’s a Virginia planter?”
That was Bartram’s story! I laughed, I doubled up with laughter, but
inwardly. “Just so,” I said. “I’ve been visiting, Mr. Pomeroy. It’s a
good thing to see the world and all that’s in it.”
“That’s a sailor’s opinion, sir,” he answered. “And you’ll doubtless
find things to interest you in Africa and the West Indies.”
He went on about his business, and David Scott, being tired of standing
and peering down through the gratings into the darkness of the empty
slave deck, moved aft and found a place where he could sit and think,
or not think but only stare at the sea that was growing more blue.
We are foreigners. I made the remark to myself that life was strange,
and many other men have made, are making, and will make the like
comment. For me, I was indolent and befogged and held in a Sargasso
Sea, like to that physical one somewhere in this ocean. I said to
myself that doubtless it would be difficult to leave the _Janet_
in Africa, but at the first English island I would surely do so.
And then came along Geordie with the morning dram for officer and
passenger, and he seemed to regard me as both.
I drank. The sea sparkled, the wind sang. I began to love the ship.
And was it so bad, this traffic that I had never particularly thought
of and certainly never questioned before I quitted Scotland--_on a
visit to a Virginia kinsman_? That ill gipsy Mirth, that I gave
house room to, screeched at that. But as the rum worked the wry-mouthed
started aside, and there came in General Benevolence, beaming on
the slave ship and Whidah and Calabar and Daga and Camaroons and the
other heathenish names. Then I grew judicial and thought I must wait
to judge--_wait till I got used to it_. And I never saw the imp
Self-Interest sitting on my shoulder, patting my head, his heel on my
heart.
The dram was not so deep but that in an hour Daniel Askew--Eboe
Sam--Old Mill quarter--returned upon me. But at dinner time there would
be another.
The good breeze held and drove the full-sailed ship joyously. It was
not hot or cold, but sunny and gay. And David Scott had no shackles
upon him, nor had to go into the tobacco field. He began to think of
his ambitions, and of how from, say, Jamaica, he might get to Holland,
and thence into France where were Jacobite Scots not a few. Some kind
of career--in a learned profession if he could manage that. He didn’t
want the army; not the Scots Company in the French army, not any army.
He did not like the life of an idle soldier, nor the life of a soldier
in action. He liked a book life and a life out with nature. He had,
after all, that much good out of Virginia. Memories of the morn and the
night, the sun and the air. Earth, water, air and fire, color, sound
and the trees.
Scotland--Virginia; Virginia--Scotland. The Hebrides brig--the _King
William_--the _Janet_--Christian Todd’s little boat and his
flute coming down the river! And what would one do in France without
money? Money, money, money, money. Rider without steed; sails without
wind!
A slender, dark man, very dark, with blue eyes, approached me. I saw
that this would be the surgeon, Colley, whom they had said at breakfast
would be out to-day. He came up. “It’s the Captain’s kinsman, Mr.
Scott, I believe?”
“The same,” I answered. “Sit down, won’t you? I am glad to see you
better.”
He took his seat beside me. “I got a nasty fever at Daga going in a
boat up the river after sunset. I gave myself all the bark in the
medicine locker, but it hung on. Up one day and down the next. But I’ve
been getting better for a fortnight and I’ll soon be all right. I feel
finely to-day.--How did you like Virginia?”
“Why, it’s got its good and its bad.”
“Mixed feelings?” he said. “That’s me. I regard most places with mixed
feelings.”
“The _Janet_?” I asked, then thought, “If I say things like that
forever, I shall be disloyal to William Bartram.”
He clasped his knee with long, bony, well-shaped hands--surgeons’ hands
with power and knowledge in them, and lifted those intense blue eyes
of his to the topgallants. “I went in debt to get through Surgeons’
Hall. When I was through, I could not get out of debt. Every other man
I saw seemed to be a surgeon running to a case! But I had none, or
so few that they could not get me out of debt. They seemed all to be
in debt themselves. Bread and cheese, even, grew to be a problem. At
length every creditor was threatening. So at last I said, ‘I will go
on a ship, for ships at least seem to be always wanting surgeons.’ So
I answered advertisements of East Indiamen and others, but always when
I got there each berth had just been filled. I was hungry and not far
from ragged. And there was one creditor who made himself detestable. So
I saw one morning that the Guineaman, _Janet_, wanted a surgeon.
Here I am.--The pay’s not bad, and your cousin’s a strong man and a
good captain. I would drown myself from most Guineamen I know, but I’ve