The slave ship
and the coming in of slave ships and the tallying and recording. But
so I should have changed naught, being still with the Royal African
Company.
I might become clerk or bookkeeper or overseer to some planter--be as
Barget or Williams.
Somewhere on these mountains, on unoccupied land, I might build for
myself a hut and thatch it with palm, plant yams about it, and there
live as a hermit, a solitary, an eccentric; now and then earning a
little from some greater neighbor, enough to buy rum with, a little
meal, a gun, a suit of clothes a year. And I liked that better, but not
well enough.
I could earn somehow doubtless--enough to live doubtless--and somehow
keep a still tongue doubtless--and the years might pass like heavy
lilies, growing on the edge of mire, falling, falling, one by one, upon
the mire.
The sea and Bartram. The sea and Bartram and the _Janet_. Turning
in bed, I made that choice, flung my arm over my eyes and went to sleep.
But waking in the night, I heard as though it were the echo of a deep
voice. “There are other ships than slave ships coming, going, and you
might go upon one.”
I said back, “I should not be so advantageously placed. I should be
under much more restraint.” And turned upon my side and went to sleep
again.
Before dawn I woke once more and that same deep voice was saying,
“God.” Just that, just the one word. It should have been enough. But
I at once grew deaf to it, putting what I thought to be David Scott’s
needs between me and it.
CHAPTER XIX
The beginning of the second year on the _Janet_ saw a change in my
relations with rum and brandy. The body had its reasons doubtless that
only reached the mind as recognition of an alteration in taste. I began
a course of drinking not at all or more sparingly even than Bartram,
for something like three months precisely. That time out, I then with
deliberation drank myself into a kind of lucid drunkenness in which I
saw a strange world and did strange things therein. For the better part
of a fortnight I moved in this perpetually renewed mirage. Then I slept
two nights and days on end, and came out of the cabin of Philip Smith a
sober man. Three months of the one state, a fortnight of the other, and
over and over again. Out of the cabin of Philip Smith, or out of the
small house back of the factor’s house, deep shaded by palm and pepper
trees, on the low hill at Daga.
On the _Janet_ I became accepted for what I was. At Daga there was
that latitude that no one cared. Rathbone Lace liked me better drunk.
Then I was like a sleepwalker, and sleepwalkers did all manner of odd
and entertaining and daring things without winking. When he suggested I
followed, though now and then I did the suggesting myself.
But on the _Janet_ obtained a different version of latitude. And
nothing in the world but Affection caused Captain William Bartram to
keep David Scott upon his ship. He did good work and was satisfactory
throughout the three months, but those two weeks might come down at
sea, in storm or danger, or in good conditions and make a danger. And
if the stuff were shut away from him, he grew more of a madman than
with it. So Geordie was told off to watch him, and Colley kept an eye
over him, and William Bartram suffered him where with another he had
hardly waited for port to say, “Begone this ship!”
Bartram looked grim upon me but I answered him out of another world.
Then I slept twice around the clock and came to supper like a lamb. He
kept me after McNaughton and Colley were gone and said, “So you’re hame
again with your better man?”
“Is he a better man?”
“He’s got the power to ask questions anyhow. David, you’re like your
grandfather. I’ve heard about him. He was verra responsible and somehow
big, except just once in so often when he sold himself to the devil.”
“Just once in so often? I’m not certain that I’m so like there,
Bartram.”
He answered dryly, “For all your way of looking at it, I don’t hold
that you’ve sold yourself entirely. Your grandfather sold himself like
you, for short terms. But in one of them he took a torch and fired
his own barns and byres, and it spread to the whole house and it was
burned. He tried to get through to a room where was a child, but the
rooftree fell and slew him.”
“I’ve heard the story.”
“Then I wish you’d lay it to heart. For you’re like him, David. I’ve
seen his picture.”
But I did not wish to talk about torches flung in barns and byres, and
even as I thought that, saw the flaming barn of Sandy Scott, smelled
the smoke, and marked the cover and the leaves of Helen Scott’s Book
begin to move and curl. I said, “What are you reading now, Bartram?”
For it was the voyage out, and he had time to read.
“The ‘Odyssey’ again,” he said, and fell to speaking of the Phæacians.
One year, two years, into the third year upon the _Janet_.
Counting that first involuntary one from Norfolk, five voyages.
Pomeroy was dead, knifed by a seaman--Eldred--whom he had thrice
flogged. Bartram hanged Eldred. Hamilton, the surgeon’s mate, was dead
of smallpox in Barbadoes, Davis the boatswain of flux at Daga. Of the
forty seamen whom I watched that first day out from Norfolk, more than
half were sunk away from view. Dead, disabled by disease or accident,
or simply gone, vanishing in port towns, saying that they would
reappear but never doing so, spirited away by their own desires or by
those of others. Bartram accepted losses, filled his number as best
he might and sailed on. More than other merchantmen slave ships must
be forever renewing their crews. Even the _Janet_ with William
Bartram for captain.
Her second mate now was Edward Black, and he was more than a little
like Pomeroy. Wheeler was the boatswain, and a better man than Davis.
Out of the seamen a dozen would bear watching.
Five voyages. Twenty-five hundred Africans, men, women and children,
taken on at Daga. Twenty-two hundred delivered to Company agents in
Kingston, Bridgetown and Charleston. Three hundred dead and given to
the sea somewhere in the Middle Passage, or dead in port before they
could be landed. It was all down in the great book, how they died and
when, the most of that smallpox which we found among us the third
voyage. On the whole, for five voyages, the fortune was good.
The _Janet_ had been a long while from Bristol in England, from
her berth there and any true overhauling and renewing. Under Bartram
what could be done at sea, at Daga, at Kingston, was always being done,
but for all that she was growing old and worn and sere and foul. When
the next lading had been delivered at Kingston, he would take her home
to Bristol and give her full time there in which to be made new again.
He himself would go then into the country, or even, it might be, to
Scotland. He would rest through those months, repose himself, forget
what it was to be captain of a Slave Coast ship. And Colley would go to
London--pay his last creditor--and like enough settle there and return
no more to the hot, blue sea between Africa and America. McNaughton
would surely go to Scotland, to Stirling where he was born. But he
would come back to the _Janet_, or to William Bartram, for the two
were interlocked in McNaughton’s mind.
What should I do--what should David Scott do?
It was eight years since Culloden, and if I changed my name and grew a
sailor’s beard, should I not move in safety, even if--even if--I went
to Scotland?
“Aye, you may, man,” said Bartram, “if only you’ll time your veesit.
It’ll never do, David, to choose the time when the devil has you.
That’s the day you should seek the _Janet_ or at the worst a
Bristol lodging house I’ll give you the name of. There, with Geordie at
the door, you can bide till Auld Nick and you are weary, the tane of
the tither. But if you meet him in Scotland, he’ll betray you to the
Whigs, or you’ll betray yourself and it’s the same thing!”
He looked at me with an anxious fold in his broad brow, sunburned into
the hue of one of his old brown books. “I’d feel safer about you,
David, if you’d bide in Jamaica that while. Leave you at Kingston, find
you at Kingston--and the old berth on the _Janet_ and the books
and the sea and all----”
“I want to lie on the green grass by Arthur’s Seat once more.”
“Well, I’m saying what I think is best, but you’re your ain man.”
The full moon that night made of the _Janet’s_ sails mountains
of pearl and caverns of ebony. We were going toward Africa. The ship
was clean, was silent save for the ever music, where we gave it harp
strings, of the wind that put us forward, and the sound now and again
of seamen’s voices; was spacious. A full sea was running and under the
moon there were crests of light and caverns of night. I watched them,
and Bartram’s words kept running through my head.
“My own man. I am my own man.--David Scott, you are your own man.--Then
why the devil am I so unhappy?”
It was not necessary to show that I was unhappy. Before Bridgetown
in Barbadoes I overheard--a great water cask on deck hiding me from
them--the steward Benjamin describe me to Black, the new second
mate, just signed with the _Janet_ and a former acquaintance of
Benjamin’s. The latter had doubtless been picturing Captain and first
mate and surgeon and all. I came in only for myself. “And there’s Mr.
Scott----”
“Who’s he?”
“He’s kin of the Captain. God knows, I think he’d been in some horrid
strait in Virginia where he picked him up! Killed a man maybe, or maybe
’twas a woman.--He’s a stark, tall Scot with a glint of the Captain
about him.”
“What does he do?”
“He clerks for the Captain--and the Captain’s been always a perfect
sea lawyer about putting things down. But he can handle a ship too. He
wa’n’t no novice there when he came aboard, though he might be what you
call rusty. If he’d ‘a’ wanted it he could have been second mate after
Mr. Pomeroy was killed.”
“Well, seeing that you are aboard, Benjamin, I’m glad that he didn’t
want it!”
“We were nearer Cape Verd than we were to the Indies when Eldred killed
Mr. Pomeroy and was hanged for it. Then up comes all of a sudden a
terrible blow, regular small hurricane! Mr. McNaughton gets struck by
a boom--knocked senseless and didn’t rightly come to himself for two
days. Enduring that storm Mr. Scott was mate and there’s no denying he
did well. The _Janet_ never had any one do better. He’s rash and
he’s not rash--that kind.”
Mr. Black demurred. “Give me the kind that’s steadily not rash.”
Benjamin, who had a turn for analysis, would not relinquish me. “Yes,
poop and forecastle have got a liking for him, but he’s got curious
ideas about slaves.--Yet he has a slave girl at Daga and he stays quite
calm upon this ship.”
“Curious ideas?” said Black and spat. “My only idea is they’re cattle!”
“About every two months,” continued Benjamin, “he gets drunk in the
entirest way. The strange thing is that you don’t know if he is drunk
or is an extraordinary person doing extraordinary things. You tell it
at last because there doesn’t anything useful come of what he does.
They’re just fantastic.”
“Well, if he drinks that way, he oughtn’t never to be mate.”
“He’s the kind that’s more like to be captain, and God knows there are
drinking captains enough in the trade!”
“Captain of the _Janet_, you mean?”
“Why, no captain’s immortal! If Captain Bartram was to go, he might
say to the Company, ‘I recommend my kinsman for my place,’ and they
might listen to him. Mr. McNaughton don’t want it. He’s been first
mate so long that he’d rather die as he’s lived. I talk that way,”
said Benjamin, “but Captain William Bartram ain’t like to die yet, and
his kinsman will have to stop his particular kind of drinking before
_he_’ll put him over the _Janet_. That’s _his_ care for
seamen and slaves.”