The slave ship
“Boston in England?”
“New England. That’s the country for me!”
I regarded his long, lank frame and his thin and sickly face.
Everything about him languished. “Why do you stay in Africa?”
He answered with a weak and boyish violence. “Because I can’t help
myself! I got into trouble with the law--it wasn’t so much my fault,
I can tell you, as ’twas that of others!--but I can’t go home. My
father’s part owner of the _Indian Maid_ that trades here, so here
I was shipped! New England ships come, and I can’t go back in them.
Back home. I’m homesick, I tell you. I’ll die presently. If there’s a
melancholy hell it’s Africa!”
“It’s the trade you’re not liking?”
He took me up dully. “The trade? No, it’s not the trade I’m objecting
to. But at home now the snow’s beginning to fall, so white and pretty,
and directly they’ll be thinking of sleighing and Christmas.”
We were walking now over the hard sand to the road that led to the
factor’s house. “Does every one here hate Africa?”
“Oh, no!” he answered. “The factor has been at Daga twenty years. He
likes it well enough. He’s got his comforts around him--he doesn’t miss
his family.” He said the last in a curious tone, and I afterwards found
it to mean the two Mandingo women and the children that looked now like
them and now like Samuel Lace. “As for Mr. Markham the surgeon, he’s
an old hand too. He’d find verjuice wherever he went, so what does the
place matter? And to listen to some of the others you’d think it the
finest place! Of course you can have a good deal to drink and all the
women you please. Only I don’t like whisky, and for the other----” he
made a vague gesture of dismissal. “There’s a farm out Concord way that
I see forever.”
By this we were even with those native huts and that irregular trodden
ground of gathering where smoked and reddened and flared the bonfire
and where moved and sat and kept up a great laughter and noise a number
of dark people. We saw between stems of cocoanuts and other trees
whose names I did not then know.
“Let us stop for a moment and watch.”
He asked wearily, “Do you find it interesting? That’s long ago over
for me, if it ever began.” But he stood still and I with him under the
heavy cocoanut fronds and the clusters of nuts the size of men’s heads.
A voice behind us spoke. “Listen to old Osuma holding forth! He’s
boasting now about how the King received him in Dahomey.”
Andrews said, “This is Mr. Scott, Mr. Rathbone, who’s kin to Captain
Bartram and came in the _Janet_.”
“Glad to know you, Mr. Scott! I’ll go along with you up to the house.
I’ve been on the _Fancy_ and so missed your landing. So ‘Holy
Bartram’s’ well and fortunate still?”
“Do you call him that here too?”
“Oh, yes! Behind his back. But no offense, Mr. Scott! He likes it when
he hears of it. And coming in, just now, I admired the _Janet_,
too, for the fiftieth time. The others in harbor can’t touch her!”
There was still light in the sky, and also the back flare from the
bonfire. I could make him out; rather tall, with a short beard and red
cheeks, with a wide, straw hat and white clothes. His voice had oil
in it, but also iron. Oiled iron. Between Bartram and Colley, I knew
well enough the white inhabitants of Daga. So now I said, “Mr. Rathbone
Lace?”
“The same,” he answered. “Have you had enough of this? But if you will
wait longer, I am at your service.”
“They are traders who have brought in slaves?”
“A hundred yesterday. Small traders--Osuma and Banno and their men--and
they’ll feast and dance here till late. I see it’s your first voyage.
From Kingston?”
“No. I am a Scot, but I have come from Virginia.”
“Ah, Virginia! I have been in Baltimore and New York. That’s the one
thing we miss in Daga, not seeing the world.”
We went up the hill. It was low, rising from a wooded plain that
stretched far inland. But there were mountains and great ones in
Africa. I had noted them from the sea. We went up the hill in the hot
dusk, the ocean faintly booming against the reef and the drums sounding
behind us. I asked my question that was growing wearisome, even to
myself. “Do you like your trade?” And Rathbone Lace’s was the first
full assent.
The others had misliked and inveighed and cursed though they stayed,
or had found reasons for refusing to consider if they liked it or did
not like it, or had seemed unthinking, or indifferent, or apathetic, or
too dull to have tastes. But Rathbone Lace said, “Why, it gets hold of
you! Yes, I like it.” I was to come to know not a few who felt as he
did, but he was the first. To like it for itself and in itself. To like
black power as black power!
We went up the low hill. Lights were shining out of the factor’s house.
Andrews now left us, murmuring something about some errand and taking
a side path with a small, lighted house at its end. We went on a few
steps. Something came hurriedly from the bush and would have flitted
across the way and been gone, but “Lalla!” he shouted and made after
and seized and brought her back upon the white road that yet gleamed
under a sky yet lighted. She twisted this way and that in his hands,
then stood, a slight, dark-skinned girl, dressed in a scanty white robe
with chains of beads about her neck. He spoke to her gibingly in a
tongue I did not understand, and she answered thrillingly, with passion
and complaining. He grew angry and shook her as he might have shaken
a child or a dog; only needed a free hand perhaps to have struck her.
She broke into a passion of speech, confused, hurried, and charged with
some kind of woe, then putting forth a sudden, unexpected strength,
dragged herself free, turned, and with a cry was gone into the thick
darkness and matted growth. He thundered after her some threat, but
there only came another cry and then silence.
He cursed, then laughed. “The devil! I’ll pay her out!”
“What is the matter with her?”
“She’s Fullah; that is, she’s part Arab. Old Banno brought in yesterday
five or six Fullah men whom he got from the King of Dahomey who had
them as a gift from some Senegal chief. She’s heard of it, and has
taken a notion that among them is a member of her family.”
Her cry still echoed in my ears. “Couldn’t you release him to her?”
He stared, then burst into laughter. “Well, I confess _that_
hadn’t occurred to me! I’m more like to sell her to go along with
them--the vixen!”
“Then she belongs to you?”
“Yes,” he said, as indifferently as you please. It seemed to suffice to
him to explain all things, for he immediately with profound unconcern
began to talk of the trade goods that the _Janet_ had brought. By
now I knew as well as he that the _Janet’s_ port before Norfolk
in September had been Bristol where she had refitted, and where the
Company had loaded her heavily with wares for Africa. Only a small
space of that slave deck was cavernous and empty, boxes and bales
being stored through all the rest. To-morrow would begin the unlading
and Daga be furnished for a year. And I knew that Rathbone Lace was
supercargo or receiver here. He was speaking of trade rum, trade
muskets, kegs of powder, tobacco in cask, hatchets and axes and small
tools, beads and looking-glasses and figured handkerchiefs, kettles
and pans and cottage crockery. I knew as he knew that the muskets were
none of the best, nor the axes and hatchets and knives; nor the tobacco
which we had taken on at Norfolk, nor the rum, nor the powder, nor the
cloth, nor the more trifling articles nor anything else. They were
manufactured in England for Africa, and if the muskets burst and the
powder was dampened and the axes would take no edge and the cloth would
tear like paper, and if the tobacco was leavings, and if rum and sugar
and salt were adulterated, what were the odds? Africa was not critical,
or if critical gained nothing thereby.
“A man,” I thought, “to pay for a dull ax. A woman for a glass necklace
for another woman.”
I could think as my fellows were not thinking, but I did as they were
doing.
We were now before the factor’s house, low and rambling, untidy and
yet comfortable. He himself called to us from the verandah. “That you,
Rathbone? Is Mr. Scott with you? Supper is ready.”
We went in. Bartram was here and Colley and the captains of the
_Sherwood Oak_ and the _Fancy_, Berry the assistant and
Markham. A table was spread--there were English dishes and African
dishes, rice and fowl and pepper, cassava, yam. Two black women
waited--there were candles--it was warm. A vast bowl of punch was
brought and set before the factor. Tasted, one found it as strong as
Hercules.
The captain of the _Sherwood Oak_ was a man I should not wish
to sail under. He drank hard and he would drink with each one, round
and round. The captain of the _Janet_ would not be tempted. “No,
no, Captain Garth! You know my custom. But I wish your health all
the same. Prosperous voyage, sir!” The captain of the _Fancy_
was sailing before dawn. He said, “No, I must keep sober, Lace,” and
took but three cups of the punch. He was a talker, swinging from one
subject to another, especially engaging Rathbone Lace, but bringing in
Colley. The elder Lace, the host, promoted all as best he could and
urged the punch. Bartram was speaking in his slow, reasonable voice to
Berry the assistant. Garth drank with me again. The talk became general
and grew thick with ports and prices, African and West Indian names,
Company policies and niggardliness or the reverse, Bristol, Liverpool,
captains, ships, fair weather and foul, storm, wrack, sickness, mutiny,
loss and gain! In at the open windows came rhythmically the sighing,
hot breath of Africa; the candle flames bent aside, there seemed
wraiths in the room, then nothing but the punch bowl, big as a tarn,
and the good, strong, West Indian rum.
Supper was over, I saw that, and the captain of the _Fancy_
bidding Daga good-by, and it occurred to me that it was no loss to see
him go. He departed, Berry seeing him from the house. Then the others
drank again. Markham the surgeon appeared at my corner of the table,
seated there, watching me. “You’re drunk,” he said, “but you carry it
as though you were not.”
“That’s the way to be happy,” I said, and indeed was so. I was “happy.”
And I sat quietly and did not seem to be drunken. When we got up from
the table I did not lose balance or walk crookedly. I sat in a window
and watched the room and its occupants, and it all seemed very large
and filled with shifting colors and music. Time passed and sometimes I
talked and sometimes did not. Time too had expanded and deepened till
there seemed much of it and all worth while. And what we were talking
of I really did not know, but at last I understood that the night was
getting old and that we must go to bed. I thought that Colley was
drunk, he and Markham drunk together, and going together out into the
night, to Markham’s house. As for myself, I proposed to return to the
_Janet_ just so soon as I should see William Bartram my kinsman
safely installed in the room next the factor’s, he in one bed and the
captain of the _Sherwood Oak_ in the other. I felt a joy of old
romance when I thought of the _Janet_ and the cool sea around and
the star-powdered night looming above and between her bare masts. If
they did not expect me to go and had not provided me a boat, I could
swim.
Bartram and Garth and the factor had disappeared. Rathbone Lace had me
by the elbow and was laughing. “Come on! I’ve quarters for you in the
smaller house.”
The smaller house was set behind and to the left of the greater one.
There were trees and a roof and stars, a verandah, a door, a room. I
thought that Lace had questioned me as to what book I had been reading
lately, and I began to speak of Herodotus and his journey into Egypt