The slave ship
One first night and morn from land are much the same as another. So
with this time on the _Janet_. The only woman who did not fare
quite as the other women was the girl Aja or Fanny, who was known to
belong to me. She wore her cotton dress; at night when the others were
herded below, she curled herself upon the deck upon a coil of rope
and slept there. But throughout the day she was with them all, men,
women and children. They were hardly strangers to her, for they had
been collecting for weeks and months into Daga barracoon, and at times
parties from Daga village might go to the stockade and watch and talk.
The fate was so common all over Africa--one might hear news and see
known faces from tribes and villages with which one had acquaintance.
Each time the traders brought in parties, Fanny went with old Bembe to
see if there were Fullahs.
From the poop deck, from time to time, I marked her in the crowded
waist, finding her by her scanty white dress among the unclothed
forms. She was there all day. The weather was good, the ship sailed
steadily. Bartram had followed his wont and standing with the cargo
before him had assured it of good treatment, as long as it itself was
good, of safety and food and just as much water as could be spared,
and of ultimate content in the Island of Jamaica. Colley had made his
round and sent two or three into hospital. We kept a store of native
drums and castanets and several of these were tossed down to them with
the suggestion that dance and song were good for the body and spirit.
When I looked that way again, she was dancing. A small space had been
cleared; two men, seated on the boards, were beating drums with a
rapid, insistent and wild rhythm. Aja, another girl and two or three
boys danced. The shackled men, the women, watched absorbed, squatted or
standing close together around the cleared floor which must be small,
small, in so thronged a hall. Hardly smaller, though, than I have seen
in some Highland gatherings. Highland dances mean something, and I
thought that this one did also. The boys ceased to dance, the girl
stopped, but Aja danced on. She had now a castanet in her hand; the
drums and that sounded all the time, continuous as water falling or
wind on a roaring day. The noises of approval or indifference ceased;
all became quiet. Those who could not see appeared to take the sight
from others; all could hear the drums and the castanet. I began to feel
a tension and to pick the meaning. The first dancing had been ancient
love dancing, mating dancing. This had ended. The woman dancing in the
cotton dress was expressing another theme. Bartram came beside me on
the poop deck.
“That’s a religious war dance.--Mr. McNaughton!”
“Aye, sir, I understand!” McNaughton went forward.
“David, you’ll tell that wench the eve the kind of dances we’ll have
here and no other!”
“I’ll speak to her.”
I did, when the sun was underneath the sea, and the west all a carmine
flare, and the five hundred below, and the usual dull sound and stench
coming up through the gratings, and the now darkened sails of the
_Janet_ flapping like bat wings in a fitful and sunken breeze. I
came to her where she was sitting, her knees drawn up and her hands
around them, her eyes fastened, not on the flaming west but on the east
that we were leaving.
“Fanny!”
“Yaas.”
“Don’t let us have any more dancing like that! All these Coromantin and
Mandingo men are to be quieted, not stirred up. You have sense, and
you’ve lived long at Daga and understand.--You understand, Fanny?”
“Yaas.--I did not mean to do wrong.”
I left her seated there, not far from a grating. An hour or two later
I marked her in her corner, apparently asleep, her arm under her head.
As I turned toward my own quarters, I met the boatswain Wheeler whose
watch it was. “A hot night, sir! One of those nights for African
dreams.”
“African dreams?” I answered. “Just what are they?--But I think I know,
boatswain.”
“They’re when you seem a considerable way back upon the road.
You’re yourself, but you seem a considerable way back. The road’s
familiar--that’s the kind of dread in the dream----”
“Yes, I know them,” I said. “European or Asian or African.--Good night,
Wheeler!”
The next day was again a hot and listless day. Only among the Negroes
did there seem much life, but there went on jabbering and dancing and
singing and a good deal of laughter. It was quite beyond what was
usual--but each voyage provided its own difference. Each five hundred
that we conveyed struck, so to speak, an altered note, or--despite
its being classed as all of a hue--changed in color. It depended in
great measure upon the natural leaders within the swarm, but also on
the subtle variations within each breast. What seemed evident after the
first day and night was that the _Janet_ had not, this passage,
the woebegone and listless crowd that sometimes she carried. But all
this day the drumming and singing and movement, in so far as there
was room for movement, remained cheerful. From the morning on, Fanny
was with and of it. I remember thinking, “It’s a good part she’s
playing--to help them on so.”
So light was the wind that three nights out from Africa the mountains,
faint and blue, yet kept the eastern sky. It was hot, the ship foul to
the nostril; again to my sense, and this time to Colley’s also, was a
haze, a smoke, a cloud about her of what she was. All sound above man
height was fallen to a droning and a flapping. All Negroes save Tom
and Don in the cook’s galley, and Fanny, stretched motionless in her
appointed nook, were under the gratings. No more complaint than was
usual came up through these. Rather less than usual. I heard McNaughton
say, “We’ve got a quiet, jolly lot this making--just a wheen too jolly
maybe----”
The strong watch was set. McNaughton himself had the decks to-night.
In the forecastle Dory was playing the fiddle--an old jig called
Money Musk. This ended, those who could sleep slept. Bartram went his
rounds with his long padding step like an old lion, then retired to
his sleeping cabin, where ran his shelf of books with the Bible in the
middle, and hung in their rack pistols and cutlass.
I was quite sober--had been so for a fortnight and would be so
throughout this passage. I lay in my small, small cabin where still
at times I felt Philip Smith. I felt him to-night, then I passed from
him to Christian Todd and his boat coming down the James River, and I
thought, “I will let his flute play me to sleep.” I slept and waked. It
was very hot. I saw by the stars out of the window that midnight was
near. I slept again and dreamed. The flute was playing--but it changed
to pipes skirling and dirling in a purple glen--and then to a hammering
and hammering that the guide that goes along in sleep informed me was
due to the putting up of Hawley’s gibbet in the Haymarket whereon to
hang, not Jacobites, but easy old Bartholomew Browne, up in the Blue
Mountains above Kingston. That seemed to frighten me, for I awoke and
the sweat upon me was cold. For a moment I lay listening to the echo
of the dream--a continuing hammering. Next I became conscious that the
sound did not belong to the inner but to the outer life. I sat up in
my bed, then left it and stood uncertain. I heard a pistol shot and a
shout, “Watch! Watch! Watch!” and then a wild yelling from a hundred
throats and knew whose throats they were.
When I reached the deck, the gratings had been forced upward from
below. There were the lanterns, and some one had fired the great
cresset provided always against trouble in the darkness. We had light
enough, though none too much. Coromantins, Mandingoes, Ashantis were
pouring up and out. In some way they had freed themselves from their
shackles; they brandished these now for weapons. They were yelling,
they came forth thick as bees, strong and furious men, and ever as they
swung themselves on deck, others pressed behind them. The _Janet_
turned into gigantic noise. Her seamen too were shouting, running for
arms. Bartram’s voice came towering.
“Are you ready? Fire!” A dozen muskets flashed. The _Janet_ seemed
to shriek. There fell almost as many Africans, but what was that to
hundreds, wholly desperate? Had those who were forth hesitated, those
behind had pushed them on, coming up as it were through the ship from
the depths of the sea.
I saw Bartram--McNaughton--Black--all seamen in their places. The
barricades were manned--cutlasses, pistols and muskets--and the boys
and Tom and Don behind to take and load and pass. The night was not
dark. It drew toward morning, there swung a quarter moon in the sky,
and the ship’s cresset and lanterns gave light beside. Bartram had one
barricade, McNaughton the other. I saw Colley with the latter; I stood
with Bartram. The air rocked with the din. Below hatches was a volcano,
belching dark lava, lava that parted and rolled upon this barricade and
upon that.
“Fire!” shouted Bartram.
We were above them and fired down. Men fell, there rose shrieks, the
torrent recoiled upon itself. “It won’t last,” said Bartram. “They’re
thoroughly up! We’ll have to kill half of them.” A huge Coromantin,
moving, gesticulating, where the light struck him, held my eye. He was
brandishing both arms, and one hand grasped the iron shackle loosened
from his ankles and the other a file!
A slave cargo comes searched and naked into the slave ship.--But there
are files enough in the stores at Daga. And as I thought that, I saw
another in a Mandingo hand, kept for weapon where real weapons were
none.--There was one slave who came aboard clothed, who even had with
her a small bundle of her toys and fineries.--I looked for a glint of
white cotton and I found what I sought.
She was with them, in the middle of the storm. Other women too. In
Dahomey the king has women soldiers, a great guard of Amazons. It is
not likely that any of these were aboard. But there were women who
came with the men out of the deeps and fought.
With a great and frenzied cry, all bore against the barriers.
“Fire!”
Crash and smoke and shrieking, and many were down and trampled. But
they came on and swarmed up and over, naked and weaponless, and
clutched and locked with men who had cutlasses, who had firearms. What
was their vision? Their vision was the seizure of the ship and the
death of all white men, save only just enough maybe to show them how to
put about the ship, how to bring her again to Africa, not to Daga but
some lonely place. Then, then, kill all and leave the ship--take the
boats, and swim, and get ashore, and burst away from the sea, inland,
inland, and get maybe to the old villages; or if not that, make a
fastness in the hills and live there. It invited from the slave ship;
it beckoned and smiled.
The vision of the fifty white men was life, even if the cargo were
lost. We slew and were slain.
But we had all manner of weapons and their spears and knives were far
off in the African villages.
Victory crossed to our side.
A cold light lifted in the east. We leaned against the barricade and
twelve men were dead, their own weapons wrested from them, turned
against them, and twenty had their wounds. But the deck below us was
a shambles. We had shot and shot them down, and what the gun did not,
the cutlass did. Under the dawn lay thick the dead and the desperately
wounded. Less than a hundred dark figures raised their hands and cried
for mercy. These and the women with children who cowered beneath the
gratings were all that were left of our lading. No great number of the
wounded were like to recover. Eight thousand guineas easily must be
thrown into the sea.
I saw white cotton, torn and blood-stained, Fanny lying dead, near the
big Coromantin with the file.
CHAPTER XXI