The slave ship
stayed on this. Three years. I’ve even paid the worst of the damned
creditors and mean to pay them all.”
“Shall you spend your life on a slaver?”
“No! No, indeed. Just two or three more years till I get clear. The
pay’s higher than elsewhere if you can stand the game.”
“Stand the game?”
“Africa’s a hot country,” he said, “with strange, old diseases. There’s
all the chances of the sea--and there’s Africa.”
“I never gave all this a thought till lately,” I said. “There are
worlds within worlds like Chinese boxes. I suppose it _is_ a sickly
trade for all concerned.”
“Grain Coast, Gold Coast, or Slave Coast; it is only a question of
degrees. If you’re merchant for inanimates--ivory, beeswax, palm oil,
dyewoods, Malaguetta pepper or what not--still there’s sickness. Of
course it’s worse in the _Janet’s_ trade.”
“Yes, of course.”
I looked toward the forecastle. “Yet he seems to have a healthy crew.”
“These are the seasoned and the new hands. We lost fifteen men voyage
before last.”
“And how many black men?”
“Eighty,” he answered. “There was a kind of pestilence. But all that’s
unusual. He’s got an extraordinary record for a clean ship and little
trouble.”
“‘Holy Bartram,’” I said, and then repented, for he had pulled me out
of the river and I was going along with him. Colley’s bright blue eyes
flashed my way. “He’s told you that? He’s proud of it; he keeps it like
a pot of balm on the shelf of his conscience.”
I broke into laughter. “Then we’ve all got a conscience! You, too?”
“I’ve got a surgeon’s conscience. I do my best.”
I said, “I was not visiting a Virginia planter. I was a Stuart man
at Culloden and was sold into slavery. I’ve got a personal, not a
hearsay, knowledge of what it is to be bound. How much balm for my
conscience should I have to have if I persisted upon this ship? At the
moment, of course, I have a pot upon my shelf. I did not know what was
the _Janet_ when I came aboard, and I cannot go knock down the man
at the wheel and alter her course.”
He turned with vivacity. “I knew McNaughton was holding something back!
So you’ve had a history too! Aren’t there a lot of them? And you’re to
be considered as just a bird of passage? I understood that you were to
have Philip Smith’s place. McNaughton said that the Captain had taken
a personal liking to you and that as he’s daft on family anyway, your
fortune might be considered to be made!”
I laughed again. “What fortune?”
His blue eyes half closed. “Oh, all things are relative! But of course
if you’ve got great ambitions----”
“I do not know how great they are,” I answered. “But greater than this.
I’ll go the first port I can.”
“That won’t be an African port,” he said.
I reminded him of the ships that traded only for ivory and palm oil and
gum copal and so forth. I might transship to one of them.
“It isn’t,” he answered, “the easiest thing in the world to do that!
They aren’t always in the same river mouth with us, nor are their times
our times. From Sierra Leone to Camaroons is a long, long way, Mr.
Scott. And you’ve got to go in parties in Africa. It’s not a place for
single souls to be trotting around! You’ll have to wait, I’m thinking,
for Jamaica. And maybe you’ll change your mind in Jamaica. Unless you
have influence with the Governor, or with some great sugar planter who
buys what the Royal African Company has to sell.”
I sat in silence, looking at the blue sea. Colley yawned and stretched
his thin limbs. “Africa gets into the blood and bone. It’s the climate
and the sea and, it sometimes seems to me, an old, strange rhyme and
routine. At first there’s a kind of horror in the life, but at last Use
comes in--though when you think of it there’s a kind of horror in Use
herself. But you grow indifferent. If there’s any tremendous wrong in
enslaving black barbarians it gets to be as invisible between Whidah or
Calabar and Kingston or Bridgetown or Charleston as it is everywhere
else in the world.”
Colonel Amory rose before me and how invisible it had been to him and
his easy and amiable like. How invisible it was to Judith Amory. How
invisible it was to Scotland, whose merchants and wandering sons were
everywhere. How invisible to England, with her ships upon the seas and
her “royal” companies.
Something out of old school reading entered with violence into my mind.
_The dyer’s hand subdued to that it works in._ I left my seat
and moving to the rail stared at sky and sea, then returned. “A little
more or a little less of misery--good ships and bad ships--I’m not
talking about that! It’s the whole damned business, root and branch,
white and black alike, that I’m meaning. Men enslaved and men enslaving
everywhere, and they’re twin brothers in wretchedness!”
He opened those intense blue eyes. “Oh,” he said, “if you’re a
Quaker----”
But I was nothing like so complete a man. I was an unhappy person with
an imp upon my shoulder that was going to strangle me.
CHAPTER XI
I liked Colley, McNaughton and William Bartram. I did not like
Pomeroy. I liked Geordie and the mulatto cook, Tom and his quadroon
helper Don, which was short for Adonis. These two were free men,
manumitted on his death bed by the planter their owner. They made a
deal of it, carried it written as it were about them. Yet were they
bound to the _Janet_, year after year, for one told me that they
rarely went ashore in any port. I did not like Davis the boatswain. I
liked Llewellyn the carpenter. Of the seamen whose names were quickly
learned, I liked certain ones and certain ones I did not like and to
others I was indifferent. There were no saints among them, but on the
other hand few forthright scoundrels.
I knew now that that numerousness of her seamen which had struck me at
the first belonged to her as slaver. She must have enough to allow for
sickness and death, and enough to handle and cow those five hundred
that would be brought aboard. I learned that many seamen signed for
Slave Coast ships when they were muddled with drink or otherwise
deceived. Llewellyn the carpenter told me this. “Wherever there’s a
sail and a mast and a hull, there’s danger. Seamen know all that.
Britain’s got her ships of war, and the Newfoundland trade and the
North American trade and the regular West Indian and Bermudas trade,
and the East Indian trade and the Grain Coast and Ivory Coast and Gold
Coast trade and the Slave Coast trade. Seamen don’t wait to get old to
die--not on any ship! But seamen die quicker and in more ways in the
slave trade than in any going. And if they don’t die outright, they
move ashore at last with some bad disease. And so they die anyhow. I
_have_ seen old ones sitting watching the sea that were on a slave
ship in their youth and manhood, but they aren’t many. No, they’re few!”
But Llewellyn, too, said that the _Janet_ was a good ship. No
man--no captain nor anybody else--could have helped that sickness
voyage before last. “Yes, fifteen seamen--God rest them!”
It was the first time I had heard that word aboard. “Do you believe in
God?”
“Oh, aye!” he answered. “Most carpenters do.”
“You lost eighty Africans.”
“Aye,” he said. “God rest them too!”
Days and days went by like beads on a string, easily slipping beads.
As I had read Gervase Morrison’s books on the _King William_, so
now I read my cousin Bartram’s. He had as many as fifty, the most of
them the Greeks and Romans done into English. But there were also
modern books, poets and philosophies and histories, and full in the
middle of his shelf a Bible. It had his name written in it and the fact
that it had been given him by his mother, on his tenth birthday.
In boyhood I had read every book that came my way and would go far out
of my way to get one of which I had heard. Then another life rushed
upon me and spoiled the old life. And then I came to Virginia. One
didn’t read at Old Mill quarter nor at Daniel Askew’s. But now the
hunger returned and I read and read.--And do not think I do not know
that reading is an opiate!
I read Herodotus, Tacitus and Livy, and I read Homer in George
Chapman’s version. It was so good a place to read--the _Janet_
going, not coming from Africa! Very clean she was, with the salt air,
warm not cold, searching all her empty spaces. Cabin and poop deck
were free to me, and I had also the diminutive room that had been
Philip Smith’s. I wondered sometimes about this man, and why he left
the _Janet_ at Philadelphia where apparently, once or oftener,
she had touched. I had space and sea quiet, with all the sounds of
good weather. I read and I read, and my hand went out for the dram
that Geordie brought. Or Colley, his fever now only a memory, came and
talked, his intense blue eyes aiding. Or in the cabin after the sudden
dusk, when the yellow lanterns were lighted, William Bartram talked.
We talked in the cabin there about many things, but not about the slave
trade. Early in the passage he had set his great foot upon that topic.
“It’s my business to sail this ship and see her laden and deliver
her cargo as undiminished as may be. I’m no thinking of resigning. I
loved the _Margaret_ that I had so long, but she’s dead and now I
have married the _Janet_. And you’ll please leave your reasoning
and objecting alone! If I’m no for listening, I’m no for listening.
And you’ll kindly, David, do no preaching nor you-know-what-kind-of
questioning among the officers and crew. It’s not healthy for them
nor any. I’ll be obliged if you will take it that those are Captain’s
orders. I’ll have no mutinies, David, even from one man.”
He was captain of the _Janet_. I recognized that. “I’ll make no
trouble,” I said, and saw not, indeed, how I could make it. And I spoke
to my conscience that was not in robust health. “_It’s but this
voyage; we’ll make a change when we come to Christian lands. We’ll go
ashore and stay ashore._”
“And I’m noticing, David,” he said, “that there’s a lure for you in the
wine and the dram. You’re too Scots not to know that a hard-drinking
Scot throws his soul away. I’d advise you to put the ship about while
there’s time.”
“Have you seen it affect me, sir?”
“Why,” he said, “not precisely ‘affect.’ But you’ve a way of setting
it to solve problems and I never heard of a one that it solved!”
I answered with moodiness. “It may not resolve but it makes one forget.”
“It’s better not to wish to forget. Face your life! At any rate don’t
make a dram your angel!”
He spoke with vigor, and Colley told me afterwards that he had a strong
feeling upon the subject.
“He’ll take wine after supper, but if it wasn’t that there _would_
be mutinies, I don’t believe that he’d have a drop of rum or brandy in
the spirit room! Drunkenness anywhere, land or sea, is to him the king
viper. He’s capable, if he didn’t have the _Janet_, of going on a
crusade to deprive the beast of his head. Sometimes he’s funny----”
David Scott thought, “Because the presence of some viper is on his
soul. He’s striking at it over yonder, when it’s by his ankle, under
the log.”
But I ceased, in cabin, to question the backgrounds of trade, and when
I spoke with Jack Dannet and his like I did not again ask, “How do you
like it?” or “What do you think of it yourself?” Colley and I sometimes
disputed, off to ourselves, with the wind singing and the blue sea
sheering away. But one day he said, “You’re here and I am here--on the
_Janet_. Unless we are prepared to jump into the sea let’s stop
the argument! You’re just easing your soul with it, anyhow.”
And I saw that I was, and that it was taking the place of action. Then
I said to myself “Hypocrisy!” and ceased to assert that there should be
no slave ships nor slavery. When I left this ship then I might begin
once more.