The slave ship
Moreover, after that talk with William Bartram, I had collared Geordie.
“Geordie, a dram in the morning and a dram at night, but no dram in
between!” and thought that I had done well and killed the snake. I
looked at Geordie severely, and he was a queer imp. He said now,
“Forgive me my sins, sir, and I’ll try to do better!” and so elfish
was he with light-gray eyes and flaxen locks and slim as a reed in a
bog, that it passed, as did all his comments, for elfishness and not
impudence. So I drank less, though I lusted for the foregone cups.
When I had been a week upon the _Janet_ my kinsman tried me out
with a blank book and a pen and a paper of figures and other matters.
Now it chanced that I had done some clerkly work for that uncle with
whom for a time I had lived, and that he was particular and taught
me thoroughly. I could have clerked in Virginia as well as Gervase
Morrison, but I was bought for a tobacco hand and woodcutter. But now
Bartram was pleased. “You’re a better man than was Philip Smith! I
see that you may be very helpful to me, David, if you’ll leave strong
drink alone. There’s nothing like kindred if everything else is
provided.”
After that I had an hour or two of work each day. He was upon--in the
great blank book--a transcript for his owners of all the voyages of
the _Janet_. In a month I became deeply learned in her fortunes
and her trade. I had a kind of gift for this kind of thing. I could
do it well and with the mind. I saw the pictures of all I was putting
down, but I began to see them coolly. Even then, even so soon, feeling
was dulling, Self-Interest, the promising devil, sitting fast upon my
shoulder!
The _Janet_ ran on, piled with canvas, through fair weather. A
week, two, three, four, five. Sometimes at night, before I fell asleep,
there filed before my eyes James River and Amory Hall and Old Mill
quarter and Daniel Askew’s and tempest-tossed forest wet as the sea
and Christian Todd’s boat under a sycamore. Going off, I heard now his
flute and now a Scots pipe screaming a pibroch in a glen. I slid into
dreams, some good and some bad. Once I dreamed that I lay in Sandy
Scott’s barn, and it was afire, and Helen Scott brought me a great
book, and I said, “Now this will show me the way out for it is the book
of Holiness.” And I clasped it, but it turned into Eboe Sam, and we
wrestled and tried each to throttle the other, and a great voice like
thunder cried “The soldiers are coming!” And the fire that was laying
hold of the straw and the rafters began most awfully to laugh. I woke
and lay trembling, bathed with sweat. There dawned a morning. I went
on deck. Pomeroy, leaning against the rail, turned his bull head and
spoke. “Africa, Mr. Scott----” I followed his nod and saw the mountains
of Sierra Leone.
We coasted south by east, turned the great hump at Cape Palmas and
coasted east. There were days and days of this, so huge is Africa. We
passed the grain, the ivory, the gold lands. They all dealt in man-gold
likewise; slaves might be acquired in any bight or river mouth. But
the Slave Coast proper was our end, where rose by the ocean the most
factories or forts or castles, French, Portuguese, Dutch and English.
Daga was one of ours, built seventy years before. I knew much about it
now from the great book and Colley and McNaughton.
There came a day. The sea was strongly blue and flowed in long waves.
We had been standing in to land, were close now, could see the fringing
cocoanut palms and the low land behind and then hills, blue and
emerald. Turning a white prong of shore, we sailed into a deep and
narrow bay where emptied a sizable river.
“Daga Bay,” quoth McNaughton at my shoulder. “Yon is Daga.”
The sea ran into surf against a shore of dazzling sand. Drawn up
on this lay a row of sharp-prowed, narrow boats. The burning sand
stretched on and was met by palm trees. I, who had never seen a palm
tree, knew them well enough. Stretched on and met palm trees and some
low, green growth, hard and staring in the sun, and a big square of
whitened masonry, big and low, with gateway and embrasures and guns
in these, and under its shadow a huddle of huts. Only there was no
material shadow just now. The sun stood at noon and all was blindingly
light. Behind the walls rose a kind of keep, and from this floated the
British flag.
_And David Scott, an escaping prisoner, was back in Edinburgh on a
wild night, a witches’ night._ There, there, I had seen Daga that
lay now in my path!
CHAPTER XII
Lace was the factor at Daga, a corpulent man with a red face and a
watery eye, and he had for assistant Berry, who looked for all the
world like whom but Williams at Amory Hall? Under these were three
clerks or handy men--Andrews, Hyde and Graves. The surgeon was Markham,
a man of fifty and sour as a green grape. He was kept at Daga years
and years, only, I think, because he was fearless. There are no more
fearless men in this trade than in any other, and they are needed
and are at a premium when found. Baker was the storekeeper, and he
had Brown for helper. There were other white men at Daga, filling
small offices of kinds. And there were four or five who filled no
office, hangers-on, men with some claim on some one, or with no claim;
sea-drift, withering and growing sapless of all that man might be. And
there was Rathbone Lace, the factor’s brother, a man of about my age.
Daga fort carried fifteen guns, but they were of old times and nowadays
never used. But they could be used; shot was piled beside them, and
Daga had an ammunition chamber, powder and muskets and cutlasses.
Within the four walls a vast sunbaked square of court provided room
for half a dozen buildings of kinds and yet left space for a caravan
market or what not. And in the thick walls were hollowed passages and
chambers enough--places of storage with heavy doors and infrequent,
grated loophole windows. On opposite sides of the court stairs of
stone led to the top of the wall that was wide enough for a coach and
four, if ever there had been such a thing in Africa. From the wall,
ocean, sand, wilderness--wilderness, ocean, sand, except when one
looked almost immediately beneath, being then on the northern face.
Here showed a baked, brown palaver ground and a haphazard and pell-mell
assemblage of cane and plaster huts thatched with palm and sheltering
the multitude of Daga’s black retainers. Runners, hunters, boatmen,
porters and so on forever. Women too.
On the eastern face also an interruption occurred, for here rose a
sudden, small hill with what looked like a cart road to the top where,
a hundred feet above the world, stood the fairsized, broadly verandahed
house of the factor with about it its own huts for servitors. With
him dwelled his brother and he gave house room to two of the clerks.
The cart track led directly from a postern door in the wall--nothing
was more than a pistol shot from anything else. Markham the surgeon
had likewise a house on this hillock, a small house under heavy and
magnificent trees, where he dwelled solitary, a curious, bitter,
hardened man. The remainder of the twenty or so white men at Daga
lived in the fort.
This “castle”, this African village, this wilderness, this white and
sun-charged sand, this dark blue ocean! There was surf, but a barrier
reef taking the most of it left only slight foam and low thunder
for the actual shore. In the deep water beyond the surf rode the
_Janet_ and two smaller ships, the _Sherwood Oak_ and the
_Fancy_--Liverpool and Lancaster. It was now November and the
climate at its best.
The _Janet_ proposed to swing at anchor before Daga for no more
than a couple of weeks. This was an orderly, big station that knew
about when to expect the ships that used it, and that gathered and
stored beforehand the cargos. Where such establishments lacked, a ship,
if conditions were adverse, might hang offshore or in some river mouth
while weeks slipped into months before the full tale of slaves was
secured. But the proper factory made proper provision--never, in short,
was without stock. Here were three ships, but the full crop was nearly
gathered.
“Where is the barracoon?” I asked Andrews the clerk, who was showing me
around. We were on the wall looking down into the square.
“Oh,” he said and waved a hand, “there’s room enough in this place! We
keep them in the old stone rooms--dungeons, you know.”
“Do they stay there day and night?”
“From five in the afternoon to sunrise,” he said listlessly. “They’ve
just been kennelled.” The sun hung low, a red ball. He spoke in a
weary, singsong voice. “The _Sherwood Oak_ and the _Fancy_
finished their lading yesterday. There aren’t but three hundred for you
here now. But we’ve boats up the river. The rest will be down in time.
This is your first voyage and you’re kin of Captain Bartram?”
“Yes,” I said, and I looked at the sun, and I saw the Negroes in
the fields of Virginia looking at the same red and sinking sun,
straightening themselves from their toil, turning their faces to the
cabins. And I heard with the inner hearing Old Hannibal singing loudly:
“When hab I done with de trouble ob de world?
Ooo-h! trouble ob de world!
My sins so heavy I can’t get along.
Trouble ob de world!”
I stared at the _Sherwood Oak_ and the _Fancy_ and a kind of
terror came upon me, and yet I did nothing that I should have done.
Bartram and I were spending the night ashore under the factor’s roof.
I might indeed spend as many nights as I pleased, being lavishly
invited to do so. But Bartram never, they said, gave but the one and
that grudgingly. The star his foe might have traveled elsewhere in
the infinite room to journey, taking with him that unlucky number,
whatever it might be. He might have come for all time out of the belt
of darkness. On the whole he thought he had. But something nested still
in his mind, for you could not separate him from the _Janet_--not,
they said, until, every two years or so, she rested in Bristol dock
when he would go into the country for a while. But at Daga or Kingston
or any port a day at a time or a night at a time was all he could be
got to give. He trusted McNaughton whom he always left in charge, but
when pressed to stay he answered that Bartram’s place was with his ship
and walked somewhat rapidly to the boat that ever was held waiting for
him.
But first night at Daga was a custom that it was politic to maintain,
seeing that factors must be kept friendly or captains of ships might
meet a thousand petty annoyances, to say nothing of second or third
choice in goods. So Bartram, Colley and I had come ashore, leaving
McNaughton and Pomeroy with the _Janet_. Bartram was smoking and
drinking good wine and conversing with the factor on the latter’s
verandah. Colley had been claimed by Markham. Andrews the clerk would
show me, the only stranger, the sights of Daga.
The sun was going down. Somewhere a thin, small drum began to beat,
flat and fast and insistent and desperately unchanging, like the
drumming of a giant insect. “Tom-tom,” said Andrews. “The palaver
ground’s yonder. A lot of black traders are in from up river and
they’re feasting. There goes their bonfire.”
We came down from the wall and crossing the court went by the long
storehouse and the ammunition house and the house where the white men
slept, and through the dark, high, echoing passage and out at the
castle gate. And here stretched the white sand and the ocean, endless
under the red west. The west never stopped it; it came around again to
the east. It was dusk, the air heavy and warm for all that sea before
it, and the drums beat, beat, beat.--I have heard them so often; I have
heard them too often!
Andrews was speaking, “I wish I were in Boston where I was born!”