The slave ship
“The marvel is that they do not all see, having used one another for so
long for money, that the day will come to each when he shall be used in
like fashion.--But we do not see that either, in Europe.--It is like
shipwreck, or plague aboard. Each seaman thinks, ‘They die, but I shall
escape!’ Africa and Europe and Asia and America. Four seamen.”
“You philosophize,” he said. “I’ve never had time for it, nor for
poetry. Negroes are Negroes and born to wait on their masters.”
The five boatmen had among them a little English--all the Africans
attached to Daga had so much or so little--but if they understood or
did not understand was all one to Lace. They pulled the boat and had
black bodies and faces, with hair unlike a Christian’s.
David Scott had never dreamed of the trees and flowers and beasts and
flitting birds and insects of these lands. Overpowering beauty and
strangeness now were around him, up the Daga. Wonder came upon him,
and a clutch of the land upon his heart. The Negroes began to sing.
He knew that too--that there never were any people who loved singing
more. Rathbone Lace yawned, drew his wide straw hat over his face and
went to sleep. David Scott sat in a kind of dream between the pinions
of strangeness and beauty. All along his life had been beginnings
of sensibility here, but now on the upper Daga these gathered to a
head, burst and expanded. Beauty! I came over the frontier, into Her
kingdom--but yet was I unprofitable to Her--an unprofitable servant.
The moments passed, green and gold and purple. I could not follow the
words of the boatmen’s chant, but the air was now richly cheerful and
now a wailing plaint--but from the one end to the other ran music.
It broke and ceased. The man in the prow said something in his African
tongue, then all seemed to listen. Rathbone Lace took the cover from
his face and sat up.
“Drums. They sound like Gambo’s.”
The Negroes acquiesced. “Gambo’s.”
“He’s bringing in,” said Lace, “the balance of your lading. Row on,
boys, to the opening yonder.”
We shot from a deep, gold-spangled shadow into full sun. It shone upon
a narrow, grassy plain but little raised above the water, with a brown
path running beside it. Now I heard the beating, as of quite a little
host coming.
“Do they bring them in with drums?”
“Why, they come more quickly so,” he answered. “Everybody walks
better to drums and horns. They keep time. And then, it’s for Gambo’s
importance.”
A long, wooden trumpet blared as though in confirmation, and out of
the shadow of cotton trees and palms and bamboo emerged into the tawny
meadow a procession headed by Gambo with his musicians and tailed
by half a dozen of the trader’s armed men. In between moved perhaps
seventy men and women and children, divided into three squads and tied
one to another with rope. Each squad had for guard a couple of men with
muskets and cutlasses. They came on without at first seeing our boat
masked by a clump of canes. The great sun lighted their almost naked
bodies, their faces, intelligent and unintelligent, the rope about
their necks and their wrists. Only the children were unbound. Nine, ten
and twelve-year-olds, they trotted beside their elders.
Slaves under thirty are the valuable slaves. Men and women, most of
this band were young, though Gambo had acquired a few at middle age.
They seemed of different tribes, for some were charcoal black, and
others deep brown, and others light brown with almost straight hair.
Some were low-browed, flat-nosed and thick-lipped, with a great,
protruding jaw, and some had by no means that coarseness but were well
featured, with a black or brown comeliness. The figures of many were
strong and fine. The young boys and little girls had grace, forlorn or
impish as the case might be.
The drums had ceased to beat. All moved a few paces in silence, when a
woman with a high, quavering voice, burst into a chant of parting. A
man joined in, then a woman, then others, men and women, till all the
company of bondfolk were singing as they marched to the slave ship.
They sang upon the brown, African road an eerie, wild and tragic chant.
David Scott sat in a dream listening, for it linked to that perception
of Beauty. And again he was hearing Negroes singing at Amory Hall,
singing at dusk, in the quarter, after work, singing before and after
the white parson’s religious instruction, singing at funerals. The
tongue was changed but the music was the same. All the rolling ocean
was an illusion, this land and that neatly joined.
The chant broke. One viewing the river had made out our boat. Gambo’s
powerful, unctuous voice rolled out a command; all halted. The armed
men made motions with their muskets. Lace, standing up, shouted, “Daga,
Gambo!”
The boatmen pushing the boat head into the bank, we jumped out, Gambo
and his lieutenant Big Man--I never knew his real name--affably
assisting. The company of slaves was no longer afoot but sitting and
lying amid the grass, instantaneously resting where rest was to be had.
Lace and Gambo talked in a fearful mixture of English and African that
I could not as yet completely understand. I gathered that the trader
was discoursing troubles and expenses.
Big Man moved back to the sunken troop and I went with him. A woman
with a child beside her, roped as she was, managed to fling herself in
the dust and grass before me. Her hands touched my ankles, she laid
her face against my shoe, then gathered herself to her knees and cried
to the white man to be let to go back with her child to her village
and her hut, where two children screamed for her. Big Man, when I
asked what she said, got through to me with that much. He also offered
to beat her away. I prevented the blow that was falling, but I said,
“Tell her it’s useless--that I can’t--that I have no power,” and I drew
myself from her grasp and removed a few steps, when a man began to cry
to me, “White man master--white man master!” There followed gibberish
to me, wildly and energetically spoken. I turned and found Lace beside
me. “What is he saying?”
“He says he is from Calabar and was in the employ of the factory at
the mouth of the Camaroons River. He says he has favorably known white
men and white men have favorably known him, and that he was their
interpreter when any journeyed up to the mountains. Then he went
home to Calabar, and there happened a great war--three years ago, I
gather--and since then he has been a slave of a king on the Benwe. The
king sold him to an Arab slave merchant--he escaped and swam a river
trying to get home--a second caravan captured him--he escaped again,
and has been far up Daga River for a long time in a village, the same,
he says, that the woman who has spoken lives in. Then lately there fell
a war, what war he does not know, but it was for slaves. The village
was burned and its strong men and women carried away. It was all in
the dark, and the leaders in the war quarreled, and one marched away
with no more than a dozen out of the village and he among them. That
was a month ago, and a week ago he was sold for a knife and some powder
to Gambo. The moral of it all,” said Lace, “is that having worked
for white men and done, he says, his best, he thinks that white men
can hardly mean to put him on a ship.” Lace laughed. “_I_ don’t
listen to their stories, bless you! But you are new to it, Scott, so I
translate.”
“Have all of them stories?”
“Any one can make up a tale. I have known funny ones in my day! But
many are as dumb as cattle.--Pshaw, they _are_ cattle!”
He looked the company over with the supremest indifference as to
certain things, but with merchant keenness upon others. “Gambo’s
done pretty well! They’re a mixture. He’s bought from King Timbu who
collects from all quarters. But they seem sound.--Big Man, club that
fellow if he will not hush!” The man from Calabar subsided. The woman
with the child sat with her head upon her knees. “A lot of them have
been slaves before. Gambo says that there are two witches also and
three women sold by their husbands and a thief or two.”
I looked at the witches, two young, thin, great-eyed women, more
heavily bound than the others, as though for stigma. Their companions
seemed in part to shrink from them and in part to feel a dim
enchantment and a hope that if they were propitiated something to the
good might yet happen. Their village had sold them for the good of
the village and for rum. The three wives seemed much as other women.
Perhaps they had brought scandal and commotion and strife and adultery
into the family and were justly punished, or perhaps newer loves
and jealousy and revenge had somewhat to do with it, or perhaps the
husbands merely ached for muskets and tobacco and rum. What the couple
of thieves had stolen did not appear, but here they were, going to
the sugar islands. I have known in England of a boy hanged for taking
loaves of bread, and it’s not so long since in Scotland we burned three
women for witchcraft.
The woman and the man were not the only ones to find voice. Two thirds
of the troop were making appeal--a distressful noise of many in
trouble. There was a clamor around us until Gambo, Big Man and two or
three of theirs began to lay about them with whips and the butts of
muskets.--David Scott turned and walked away. He went back to the boat
and sat there with a stony face.
Lace returned at last. “Gambo’s a jewel! With a little direction he’d
make a great merchant. There’s a small world of native traders in
Africa and he’s of the best.”
“Are they going on now?”
“Yes. There are the drums.”
They were beating and the long, wooden trumpet blared. I looked through
the cane and saw the squads in motion.
“How many are bought or caught and shipped overseas in a year?”
He considered. “If you take all the factories from end to end of the
Coast--British, French, Portuguese, Dutch and so on--it’s a big number.
Seventy thousand or a little above, I should think.”
“A year!”
“A year. We British have any number of factories, a few large like Daga
and many small ones, and more than half the trade. All the English
ports together may send out not so far from two hundred ships, big
and little. Perhaps the British total may be between thirty-five and
forty thousand Negroes a year. Ships and seamen, manufactured goods,
establishments on the Coast and so forth--I don’t know how many
million pounds are invested, nor the number of investors. It’s very
great.”
The drums beat, beat, beat. Gambo and Big Man and the armed others,
the drummers, the trumpet man, the three groups of slaves for the
_Janet_, passed across the meadow and vanished into the shadow of
gigantic trees. “Get on, boys!” said Lace. “It is hot here in these
canes. More rum, Scott?”
That afternoon we reached Oil Palm village, named so by Daga of old
time because of its many of these trees and the oil they furnished.
For long it had been a kind of pet place, rendezvous of traders,
depot at times for merchandise for the interior, provider of guides
and go-betweens, center of intrigues, under the protection of two or
three factories, a supple favorite of many years. The chief or head
man was a creature of Daga, the four or five hundred villagers bowed
with the chief, and the surrounding clans kept hands off the “white
man’s people.” Daga maintained here a big clean hut, and had often on
the ground a clerk or other emissary. Oil Palm village flourished to
the eye and grew sleek and prosperous, without fear of damage, under
the gracious shadow of that great tree, the British. A good many vices
grew up with its prosperity. It had somewhat the function, for wearied
traders and men from the factories, of a Capua. A bland, suave, dusky,
noisy place.