The slave ship
nudity! In an hour the slaves were clothed; they only needed now to be
baptized.
We entered Kingston harbor, that is a goodly one. Ships large and small
rode at anchor, and before us, flat upon the plain, sat a fairsized
town, all embowered in tropic trees. There are shoals and reefs and
spits of land. A pilot came to us, and he was white but his boat held
black men. Ah!--and ah!--and ah! Africa to Africa.
The town enlarged before us. There showed a wall and a long and low
stone building and a wharf that ran out toward us like a giant’s
finger. All grew until we could see the moving crowd that watched
us--watched the _Janet_, known to Kingston, coming in with
hundreds of Negroes. Her wings were folded.
“Oh, heave her down,
Oh, heave her down,
Heave her down----”
Her anchor grappled the white sea floor. Another boat appeared under
our bows. It had in it a medical man who stood up and flourished a
fine hat. “Good day and welcome, Captain Bartram! Have you smallpox,
or any plague?”
“Good day, Doctor Cawthorne. We’ve no smallpox and no plague.”
“Then I’ll come aboard,” said Cawthorne, and doing so, greeted Bartram
and Colley standing beside him. “_We’ve_ the yellow fever,” he
said. “But that’s a matter of course.”
A third boat appeared. “That’s North, just behind me.”
Mr. North came aboard. Geordie put wine and glasses on the cabin table.
Captain and first mate, the port doctor and Colley and the Company’s
agent and Mr. David Scott, cousin to Captain Bartram, drank to one
another, to the _Janet_ and Jamaica and the market and so forth.
Cawthorne and North both were tallish, thin, yellowish men, somewhat
drawling and weary in speech. They asked of the voyage and the cargo
and the luck, and gave the news of Jamaica and of England from a
man-of-war in harbor.
We went on deck, to find small boats enough around us, chiefly oared
craft. The rowers were Negroes, naked to the waist, with cotton
drawers, and some with a shirt beside. They had fruit and wares for
sailors, and all around the ship pulsed a chanting, shouting noise.
The four hundred and seventy from Africa were not silent neither. A
strong light beat, the plain shimmered, the mountains behind melted
into misty greens and colors of heather. Bartram and the others were
talking, talking. David Scott thought, “How old is the world, seeing
that this has been going on since old time, and yet is but a moment?”
And it seemed to him drawn out like a long, long violin note, yet there
was silence on all sides of it.
That very day we transferred cargo to the long building that was the
Company’s barracoon. The Company had a fleet of boats. Load after
load the four hundred and seventy were ferried ashore. They left the
_Janet_ without seeming reluctance. A man, standing up in the
first boat, shook his clenched fists toward her and shouted something
that Pomeroy translated for me. “‘Stinking hell!’ he’s saying. ‘All
evil to you, stinking hell!’ If I had him here, I’d flog him to a mask
of blood for that!”
Pomeroy’s red face grew redder. And David Scott too had a kind of love
for the ship--left from her outgoing--and resented the black man’s
words. But then he had not spent his nights on the slave deck.
CHAPTER XVIII
North’s house, a commodious enough one, built of plastered stone, had
a verandah that commanded Kingston harbor much as the factor’s house
had commanded the far smaller haven of Daga. The climate was not so
different, nor for the matter of that the landscape and the tree and
the flower, save that tree and flower in Africa were vaster and more
varied. And the ocean struck here and the ocean struck there. Ocean,
Ocean, Ocean, just the same, striking Virginia, striking Scotland.
Colley and I stayed with North but went back and forth to the
_Janet_. Bartram stayed with the _Janet_, but came and went
ashore and to North’s. McNaughton I met at times in the street. Pomeroy
had, they said, a wife or a mistress in a tiny, deeply shadowed house.
And for our sailors, there existed the waterside and the town at large
and the Seaman’s Delight.
The uneasy spirit within drove David Scott to the sunbaked slave market
beside the barracoon. I saw our cargo sold, and only long usage could
make that selling less than frightful. Back I was upon the _King
William_, and they were selling me!
At North’s there was always punch or brandy neat, and servants and
servants to wait upon one. Colley and I slept in a great airy room,
with a net over the bed to keep out mosquitoes. North had no wife,
but a brown housekeeper. His table groaned, and at supper was always
company. Down by the water stood the house of the Company, with clerks
and ledgers and a great lounging place. North’s days were spent there,
and this was the place to find ship captains and traders and outfitters
and often sugar planters.
I saw little of Bartram these days. He seemed willing to give me sea
room in which to make decisions.
With Colley or alone I saw the scambling, hot and dusty, not so big
town that was Kingston. We were put in the way of getting horses and so
rode over the plain, between sugar fields and through untrimmed forest
to Spanish Town, where was the King’s House and the Governor, and some
kind of Parliament, and an Assembly room and a theater and a great
church and an inn. We put up at the latter and saw the sights. Spanish
Town was once, they said, St Jago de la Vega, before Cromwell put the
Spaniards to the sword and took the island. The old port town was Port
Royal that a great earthquake swallowed only sixty years ago. Then up
came Kingston in its place. Earthquakes still happened, earthquakes
and hurricanes and yellow fever and the pox, and threats at times from
Spain and from the French in Santo Domingo; and pirates infested the
surrounding seas.
There were British soldiers in Spanish Town--two or three companies, I
should guess. In the inn we found their officers gaming and drinking.
By degrees they began to speak to us at our small table, and when they
found an intelligent ship’s surgeon and his companion, to draw us in
to the general company. We did not meet the consideration which would
have been ours had we come from the man-of-war in the harbor, nor the
consideration due to a stately East Indiaman, nor even to a general
merchantman in the American Trade. The slaver had a dark mark over
the world, though the world demanded that she persist. She was like a
prostitute.
So they used a certain freedom and condescension of tone. It irked
Colley, I saw, but God knows it seemed only to put me back into
Virginia, where I had been a servant and laborer.
They wished to know of the sea and the cargo and Africa, and if we had
seen so and so who was upon the Guinea station. Colley would hold his
gentility and so minced in and out. But David Scott did not care. For a
moment he had been in the great parlor at Amory Hall, where there was a
fire burning, and a dance and young men and women laughing. And then he
sat thinking.
There entered a couple of men who also had been riding and who, greeted
by and greeting our officers, seemed folk of consideration, Jamaica
owners of the neighborhood, sib to English squire or Scots laird. One
seemed an amiable man enough, languid and drawling like North, but with
an educated tongue. The other was of coarser stuff. They drank and
the talk went on. The Captain of soldiers--a fine young buck such as
I might have found opposed to me at Culloden--mentioned our names to
Mr. Dalrymple and Mr. Crabtree, “Doctor Colley and Mr. Scott. From the
_Janet_ in harbor.”
They seemed to know the _Janet_ and asked of Captain Bartram,
“Holy Bartram,” said Mr. Dalrymple with drollery. A military man of
superior rank entered the room; the officers present rose and saluted
and then all sat to drink again. The newcomer proved an authoritative,
talkative person, just back from Kingston and from dinner aboard His
Majesty’s sloop of war _Nemesis_. Wishing to talk about the
posture of affairs at home--they all, Dalrymple and Crabtree and the
soldiers, called England “home”--he talked and the others deferred
or put forward just the starters he wished. He talked of the French
and Prussia and Austria and the Ohio Company and Pelham and Pitt and
Ireland and Scotland. His remarks upon the last-named were intemperate.
I said, “I am a Scot, sir. The country is poor but not villainous.”
He swung himself around in his chair and stared at me.
“And who the devil, sir, are you?”
“I am from the _Janet_,” I answered. “The country is poor but not
villainous.”
Mr. Dalrymple intervened. “A nephew, I believe, Major, of Captain
Bartram of the Guineaman _Janet_. You know how are the Scotch,
sir! He means only properly to stand for his own.”
“I mean,” I said, “that the country is poor but not villainous.”
The Major swallowed. “Well, sir, it is villainous in part. You,
doubtless, are an exception.”
“Every land is villainous in part. For instance, England----”
He suddenly roared. “Yes, England too! Haven’t I just been saying so?
In short, I don’t feel like quarreling, Mr. whoever you are from the
Guineaman!”
“David Scott, sir.”
“Well, Mr. David Scott, I don’t think the _waur_ of you for
finding good under your own rooftree! I’m supposing, of course, that
you were not ‘out’--as the saying is--in ’45, or that you were ‘out’ on
the right side?”
“I was ‘out’ on what I considered the right side----”
Colley’s voice, that was a clear, penetrating one, made itself heard
with suddenness and completeness. “A soldier with the yellow fever. As
we came into Spanish Town----”
“Another!” exclaimed the Captain.
“I don’t think I could be mistaken,” said Colley. “He had every sign
and was making for the hospital. Have you ever thought, sir, of moving
the men bodily to a mountain top? The higher you go, the less of the
fever.”
Mr. Crabtree followed him, though certainly without any notion
of serving David Scott. “I’ve thought the same. I’ve thought of
balloons--and I tell you what I’ve thought too, Doctor. I’ve thought it
is the mosquitoes.”
“The mosquitoes!”
The soldiers laughed and no one picked up again the former topic. As
for Colley and me, our eyes met and said, “We’ll sit just long enough
to show that we’re not chased, then pay and depart.” The company now
was upon a ball to be given at King’s House in honor of the officers of
the _Ariadne_, upon the ball and the fever and the sugar crop and
the Maroons, which last word I think I first heard here. We were about
to rise when a young white man in a very poor dress, who seemed to have
been riding, entered the room. He had in hand a package, and standing
by the door he coughed twice and at last attracted the attention of Mr.
Dalrymple.
“Bulkeley! What are you doing here? Oh, did I leave that behind?”
“Aye, sir. Mr. Robinson, he sent me after you with it.” Advancing to
the great table, he extended the package, which seemed of papers. The
planter took it.
“All right, Bulkeley! Wait outside. I’ll have a note to send back to
Mr. Robinson.”
Bulkeley in his poor dress touched his forehead and went out. He was,
I saw, a white bondsman, indentured servant in Jamaica like those in
Virginia. Dick Merry rose before me.
When Colley and I had bowed to the company and paid our score and left
the inn’s big room, we found him leaning against the wall outside. I
wished to stop to talk, but Colley said, “For God’s sake, David!” and
whistled to the black hostler who brought our horses. We mounted and
rode through Spanish Town, past the cathedral and the other wonders.
At last we found ourselves out upon a road running between groves of
logwood in blossom and the harvest field of a fabulous number of bees.