The slave ship
swabbing poles were used and it was dusted with purificatories. The
Middle Passage was a time of labor for all but the Negroes, and as for
risks and anxieties, slavers had them in abundance. A prime need always
was to keep the cargo well and reasonably content, or if not content,
submissive. Every interest led to kindness with firmness. Not only were
the owners served by carrying their goods undamaged, but to secure as
many lives as possible there had been devised head rights. Captain,
first and second officers and surgeon had each so many shillings or
pence out of the price of every able-bodied slave delivered to the
agents in the ship’s port. Every interest led to reasonable kindness
in Virginia. But there was Daniel Askew! And at Amory Hall, that meant
kindness and in a degree achieved it, I had not loved their kindness.
The _Janet_, to many slave ships, was as Amory Hall to Daniel
Askew. I will give her credit, and I will give Bartram credit, and
McNaughton and Colley and many more. I will give David Scott credit. We
were not demons. We were perplexed and erring men, calloused by this
work.
The first week we lost nine. The first week, they said, was usually the
worst. There was more despair, and there was the universal seasickness.
Two suddenly, at sunset, jumped overboard, and though sailors leaped
after them they were not rescued. One refused to eat and though
at last Bartram ordered the cat, and though the third day Colley
supervised the forcing open of his mouth and the pouring down of broth,
neither did any good. He determinedly died. A man and two women died
of some disease. Two children died. A boy died, apparently of mere
homesickness. The second week saw less mortality. It had its toll, as
had every week that followed, but we kept the fair side of calamity.
Time out of mind two things are most dreaded by slavers--plague and
outbreak. The _Janet_ was helpless before plague, except inasmuch
as she strove for what cleanliness was possible, and what order was
possible, and had drugs enough and a good surgeon. But as to outbreaks,
William Bartram kept the probability or the possibility of that as low
as might be. And he kept it so to an extent by being a good captain,
not a bad one.
The story was that he did not sleep on the Middle Passage. It is called
that because a ship’s original course is England to Africa--Africa to
America--America to England again. And so it is the Middle Voyage, the
Middle Passage. Bartram slept, of course, but he slept little. All
day he was wary; cool, just, according to canon, and wary. Throughout
the night, any hour, he might be found going about his ship with his
padding step, like a tawny, watching, desert lion. The watch had no
chance to grow drowsy, the man at the wheel, the mate on duty, found
him silently beside them one moment, then gone. He stood at a grating
and harkened to the sounds coming up, and gauged their importance;
he studied weather of whatever kind. Then he might go and sleep a
while and return again. A tall, robust man with tawny hair and beard,
big-nosed and keen-eyed. When he and McNaughton walked together, there
were two tall, red Scots; when David Scott was joined to them, there
were three.
He kept his seamen with his eye and his slow, full, reasonable voice,
and the character behind both. They did their work, they made or took
in sail, they sat aloft in the rigging or swabbed away the filth and
refuse of the slave ship, or stood as guards over those five hundred
prisoners; they toiled, watched, ate, slept and played, shouted, cursed
and laughed, were sick and well, grumblers more or grumblers less, as
seamen are; but they gave no fear of mutiny and the _Janet_ sailed
her way.
The _Janet_ sailed her way. It was the winter and the heat not as
it is in summer in the Middle Passage. But there was heat when the deep
wind failed and the sun stood overhead. Then the sails hung slack, the
sea became a hot blue floor which never might we cross; the ship seemed
to fester, to fester and to groan. Then the wind blew again, the sails
filled, and life revived.
Twice we met tempest, once bitter and prolonged, the greater part of
a week. A mast broke, the seas washed over the sides, the ship was
tilted and played with like a walnut in a boy’s hand. For three days
and nights the Negroes must be kept below hatches. That was frightful.
Eight were dead when the sun shone again and the waves stilled
themselves. We lost also two seamen, Jonathan West and Walter Bigger.
Barring this week of storm we had a fair and uneventful voyage, day
after day of good wind and bright, blue sky. We sighted two British
Guineamen, a Spaniard to whom we gave a wide berth, and a craft that
we could not make out. Africa now was far behind us and the great West
coming nearer, though still it, too, was far, far away.
In some sort a part of the Negroes grew reconciled. I saw brutalities
aboard the _Janet_. Pomeroy could be brutal, and Davis and certain
of the sailors. But the ship’s intention was not brutality, other than
the brutality of being there at all, a fetcher and carrier so, in the
eye of day. Harshnesses appeared; punishments and intimidations. It
is a problem of high difficulty, the ruling of five hundred barbarian
captives crowded for long weeks on a ship upon the sea. What harshness
Bartram exercised, or let the mates exercise, was always to him a
necessity, done to save from worse things. But the same plea would
be advanced by the captains of the _Sherwood Oak_ and the
_Fancy_, or by that McKenzie of evil name, men of less judgment
as to good and ill and necessity than the Captain of the _Janet_.
When it was thought to be needed the whip was used, or other punishment
such as deprivation of food and drink, detention under hatches by day
as by night, or chainings to the mast. Disobedience and turbulence were
the crimes. Some committed them, others did not, and Bartram strove
for justice. And when he could--or thought he could--he showed much
kindness. Only there was so little room for kindness on that slave deck!
Yet, as I had heard laughter in the Tolbooth--as I had known men to
laugh at Daniel Askew’s--so I heard laughter among the black men and
women on the _Janet_. For such is the human spirit. Laughter at
times, weeping at times.
CHAPTER XVI
At times David Scott’s stomach turned against this work, and he waited
but for Jamaica and freedom. At such times he saw that he and Bartram
and McNaughton and Colley and Pomeroy and the others were slaves; aye,
that the Royal African Company, supporters and Parliamentary grants and
all, was a slave. Daniel Askew was a slave. Colonel Giles Amory was a
slave.--David Scott was in slavery.
At such times he sent Geordie for a dram, and then, for such a length
of time, he saw things differently. It was not so bad a life. All life
was a picture and a play and great emotions surged through it!
Again, he might be as cool and as much himself as the Tron clock. From
Africa to the Indies was a small hell. Granted! But there had been
and might be again the great empty ship from the Indies to Africa. He
liked that, and there would be the ports, the Indies and the coasts of
America, England where he might risk it, and Daga where was none so bad
company. A man must live! If there were iron walls against him where
he might wish to live and prosper, then he must even live and prosper
where he might.
_Because he had been a slave and knew, therefore he must not
enslave._
He said to himself, so cool and at himself, that he was not enslaving.
That was the Company, Daga, England, America and the earth. A man was
a puny thing and must go with the crowd! And the slaves being enslaved
anyhow, they might even profit by having for slaver among the others
one named David Scott. He saw things that even Bartram could not see,
how to combine kindness with rule. They might benefit. So he reasoned,
the losing soul, so cool and clear! Had it been a shipload of white
slaves--had he been an ancient Roman bringing slaves from Britain,
slaves enslaved in much the same ways, it would in the end have been
much the same. _He_ was not responsible, but the order of affairs.
And other moods possessed him, and chiefly, “Let sleeping riddles lie,”
and “Take it as it comes.”
The golden and blue days, the starry nights went by. Over-thronged,
foully smelling, with some sound of mourning always, the _Janet_
that I had thought so clean and light ploughed her way. Bartram gave me
work to do--kept me at it, not unwilling, for it killed the thinking
when I could not drink. Under his apparent self-sufficiency he was a
lonely man, craving his own, missing son or brother or friend. I came
to meet a need, having the same blood as himself, understanding his
liking for books, understanding his wish to be kindly, and his passion
for the native land, understanding his pride and his self-ponderings.
We could journey together, talking little, but sticking no thorns one
into the other, and on occasion giving each other help. He troubled me
no more about wine, rum and brandy, though his eye was watchful there.
Nor did he argue any more about the _Janet_ and her freight, nor
did I argue any more here. The action is the thing that has the clarion
voice. I did Philip Smith’s work. Once I asked McNaughton why he left
at Philadelphia.
The mate looked at me from under red tufts of eyebrows. “Ah, he was a
brittle chield! He developed scruples.”
“You call that being brittle?”
“If this is your wark and your living, Mr. Scott, I do. Aweel, he’s
doubtless howked himself to death in an almshouse. He wasna fit for
much when he left us.”
I slept in this man’s small, small cabin, and at times I felt him.
And at times, waking in the night, I felt the slave deck below, and
the fetid blackness, and the bodies close, close to my own, sighing,
pressing, straining for space where was none.--But then the comfortable
dwarf within me slammed the door against that silent calling.
The stars rose, crossed and departed my window. The cold dawn, the
solemn dawn, rode into the field, and then, his mood brightening,
decked himself with the violet and the rose. The golden cap of the sun
parted the purple sea. And here was the day, to better or to worsen.
At first the horde we carried had seemed all of a piece, sex and adult
or youth the only distinguishing marks. All were bare; all had a jargon
that only painfully was I learning to interpret and find a language
like my own; all were dark, dark of skin though with shades in that
nighttime. All were crowded, all were captive; the same destiny was to
all; they were already slaves. At first the one looked like the other.
But at last the observant eye parcelled out even in that swarm. David
Scott had vision to use and must use it. He watched the cargo and could
not choose but watch it.
It had been so in Virginia also. At first one had seemed like the
other. Then it had emerged that Old Hannibal was not Joe, nor Joe,
Pickaninny, nor Pickaninny, Eboe Sam.
Colley sometimes stood beside me, gaunt and hollow-eyed, for there was
something, he said, in every voyage that poisoned him. “Then quit it!”
I answered one day. “Spring to the first shore and run!”
“Take your own medicine!” he said. The sun was shining, the rigging
humming. We look down from the poop upon a corner where naked men were
playing some game with a kind of dice, bits of wood that they had
secured somehow and most ingeniously marked. “In God’s name what have
they got to dice for? They can’t even sell themselves any longer.”
A young man, all clean bronze, threw and leaned back and laughed.
Another, sitting cross-legged, cupped the bits of wood in his hand,
shook and cast them. Four others, thick-lipped, with woolly heads and