The slave ship
weeks, and half the cargo was gone, and out of fifty white men aboard
were left not thirty-five. The dead calm held. The sea was brass and
the sky was brass, and the sharks swam beside the ship.
It was middle of the night. It had been my watch; Olafson had relieved,
and I came to my bed, to throw myself upon it and sink into dead sleep,
forgetting for three hours the stench and the cries and the heat. But
as, half-naked, I touched it, I heard Bartram’s voice at the door,
“David!”
I knew, I knew, what it was. I knew it in his voice. When I reached
him, he was supporting himself against the table. “It’s the number and
the star, David! They’ve come again--they’ve come again!”
I got him to his bed and went for Colley, who presently stood beside
him. “Captain, Captain! You’re stronger than us. You pull through! We
need you.”
But Bartram regarded us with strange eyes. “You’ve got
McNaughton.--William Bartram is sending in his papers, and crisscross
and blotted and torn they are!”
We gave him water which he at once began to call for as they all did,
and McNaughton came quietly and took his orders which were short. “The
best you can, McNaughton, the best you can!”
It was to be kept from the _Janet_ as long as might be, which was
short enough, we knew. There were three dying men in the forecastle.
Colley, thin as paper, with hollows and shadows under his eyes,
returned to his enormous work; McNaughton to his. I stayed beside
Bartram. His speech was rapid and dry; now and then he groaned, and his
hands moved over the bed or with strange signallings in the air. “Is it
dawn? Is it dawn?”
“It’s coming, Bartram.”
“There was to be a wind at dawn. A right wind. And land at dawn! Land,
land, land!”
He struggled to sit up. I pressed him back. “Lie down, Bartram, lie
down!”
His wits came back. “Ah, David, man, a sair trouble--but we’ve known so
many! I’m fortunate in McNaughton. That Dane, too, is a good man.”
“Yes, he is,” I said. “But you’re the best man here, Bartram.”
“Na, na!” he said. “And I’ve got a star to fight.”
With that he began again to toss and speak at random. Colley returned
and looked at him. “No worse and no better than the others. The same
boat, we’re all in the same boat, captain and crew.” But by dawn he was
worse. The very strength and bigness of him seemed, when it turned, to
aid that direction. He fell into a stupor. When the sun rose and poured
light about him, it was seen what ravage the one night had made. When
Colley came again he said, “He’ll go, David, and it won’t be long.”
It was not. At sunset Bartram died.
At dawn we buried him--and the _Janet_ seemed dead with him, the
_Janet_ and the sea.
McNaughton was captain. We had no time for grief or for memory,--time
for nothing but a dull, eternal struggle with the pestilence.
Then McNaughton was taken, and in twenty-four hours followed Bartram
into the sea.
Olafson came to me, with him Wheeler and Michaelson and others.
“We’re come, Mr. Scott, to say that I do not wish to be captain of
the _Janet_, sir. I’ll do my duty as your first mate, but you be
captain. All of us who are alive, and we think those who are dead, say
the same.”
So I was captain--Captain David Scott of the _Janet_.
The next day Colley was taken. For a little while he was very
clear-headed. “I’m dead tired, David--too tired really to suffer. I’ll
go quick.--They never should have been!”
“You’ve done the work of a dozen, Colley. And always you’ve doctored
and helped us----”
“Yes, maybe. But they never should have been--the errands of the
_Janet_. Leave her now, David--I’d leave her if I were you.”
“Oh, Colley!” I cried. “Little fear but I shall be leaving her! Look
around soon and you’ll see me--and Olafson and Michaelson and all!”
He turned his head and turned it again. “And I’ll be seeing, too, don’t
you think, David, the black folk?”
I was summoned for something, and when I returned he did not know me.
As he said, it was quick and he suffered little. Colley died, and we
dropped him into the sea.
We were a month from Africa, but because of the calm not a third of the
way over. Of five hundred slaves the _Janet_ held now a hundred
and forty; of fifty white men there were now twenty to man her. And I
was captain and Olafson was my mate.
CHAPTER XXIV
I stood by the man at the wheel and looked at the glassy sea. Then afar
there seemed upon it a little darkening. It spread. I felt an elfin
stroke upon my brow, my hand; a rope hanging near swung, though ever so
slightly. It came again, more strongly. I looked at the man--he was a
New Englander whom we called Dandy--and he looked at me. “That’s wind,
Dandy!”
“Praise God!” he said, and the water stood in his eyes.
The _Janet_ started from her dream, shook herself and began to hum
and move. Life! It was life again!
That day we had but five deaths and four new cases, three among the
Negroes, one in the forecastle. The next day saw further lessening; the
next it dwindled still. There came a day when was no death and no one
struck down. The plague departed. It left alive upon the _Janet_
one hundred and two Negroes and fifteen white men.
That day when with a great and weary breath we saw that it was gone,
there came up with us the _Sharon_ that had left Daga twenty-four
hours after us. She was built for speed, and she packed close, carrying
between six and seven hundred Negroes, though I know not how she did
it. Now as she neared, there poured down the wind upon us her stench.
We lay to; she came on and hailed us.
“_Janet_, ahoy!”
“Ahoy, _Sharon_!”
“The plague! Have you the plague?”
“We have had it. It is over.”
“How do you stand?”
“One hundred and two Negroes living. Fifteen white men. Captain Bartram
is dead, McNaughton and our surgeon.”
“Who is that?”
“David Scott, Captain of the _Janet_. How is it with you?”
“Dying. We are dying! Do you know anything to do?”
“Nothing. We could do nothing. You’ve got your surgeon?”
“Yes, but we’ve never seen this thing before.”
“It has gone from us. It will from you.”
“If it isn’t too late---- We’ve thrown overboard half our
Negroes.--Good-by, the _Janet_!”
“Good-by, _Sharon_!”
She sailed swiftly. In an hour she had left us quite behind. The sea
ran dark blue and in hills and vales; the warm wind behind us pushed
us on, straight into west. But we were hardly half through the Middle
Passage, and we had fifteen to handle the ship and our freight. David
Scott regarded the latter, knowing by now every face, and seeing in
them, when all is said, only Universal and Eternal Man. By now he
had enough of their tongue roughly to understand and be understood.
They had endured the plague and in some sort tended one another and
had buried in the sea their host that was gone. Of those able or
compassionate or higher men of their own who had at last stood out to
serve, three or four remained alive. Over all rested as it rested upon
us fifteen the shadow of something gigantic behind and over-topping
life that was small. I went among them and talked, and it was to me as
if I were at Old Mill Quarter, discoursing in the dusk after work with
Old Hannibal and Eboe Sam and Pickaninny and Joe and the others.
I offered, the weather resting fair, to let them sleep upon deck--they
having a great horror of below, where in the blackness companies of
them had died. They would have had space enough down there now for some
sort of comfort, but they had that horror. They might stay upon their
deck--they should be unshackled--they should have abundant food and all
the water we could safely give. What we could do for them we would. In
return would they undertake obedience to orders? We had the guns, the
cutlasses, the great guns, and always we could sink the _Janet_.
And lastly, I wanted six to help clean the ship and carry the food.
A great black man--one of the helpers from the first--stood forth. I
will put his words into plain English.
“Where are you taking us?”
“To an island named Jamaica.”
“Are you going to kill us there to please your god? Some of us think
that.”
“No. If a man has bad luck in Africa he becomes a slave. You know all
about being slaves to head men and chiefs and kings. You know about
going into far countries to be slaves. In Jamaica you will just be
slaves to white chiefs.”
“Are there other black men there?”
“A great many. You will find folk who have been your neighbors.”
“What will happen to us? How shall we be treated?”
“You will work to make sugar and rum and tobacco, or to cut down trees.
If you will not work or if you run away, you will have hard treatment.
If you work and stay where you are and make no trouble you will be
treated differently. Some of you will be treated very kindly.--You know
a great deal about it, though you have never been out of Africa.”
His face seemed to work. He looked at every man of us armed, and at
the ship and the piled sails and all the matters that were foreign and
marvellous to them, and at his people. Something solemn, something
of rest awhile after that Death Cloud, was upon them as upon us.
Something of resignation, something of muteness before Destiny. After
a time there might manifest among them, even here, that cheerfulness
that was theirs by nature--but to-day was other coloring. The speaker
for them, and he was tall and big and black as night, but his head was
well-formed and his countenance showed homely strength, looked at sky
and sea, the _Janet_ and us.
“We cannot help ourselves. If we fight we just die and gain nothing. We
do not know for what evil we are here and are going into a far land to
work for others. Maybe it is for evil, and maybe it is for some good at
last. We do not know. Maybe somebody bigger than you is taking us. We
won’t make trouble.”
The good weather held, we cleaned the ship, the plague made no return,
though we had a degree of other sicknesses, due chiefly to exhaustion
and desolation. Our Negroes as a whole remained tractable, and helpful.
God knows, by this time David Scott knew the good qualities and those
not so good of Negro folk! On the _Janet_ this disastrous voyage,
the good rose, the bad sank away. There is in this people a Philosopher
who is over and over again slain by Passion and who over and over again
rises from the dead. He had, in this voyage, an exemplar in the big,
black man, and the rest were guided.
We fifteen white men, divided into two shifts, under captain and first
mate, had our work, being so short-handed.
There was scant time for musing grief. I _saw_ Bartram and Colley
and McNaughton and others.
A week--ten days--went by of steady westward going. Then befell another
calm. I heard Wheeler the boatswain say to Michaelson, “Somebody’s gone
to war against this ship.”
“Aye, I’m thinking myself somebody has a scunner against us.”
The third day of it Olafson and I went secretly and examined the water
casks. We were only in mid-passage who should have been nearly to
port. A hundred and twenty now drank water as against an expected five
hundred and fifty. But for very need and mercy we had been free with it
during the pestilence, giving the sick and dying what they cried for.
That first dead calm had lasted long, and this, for all we knew, might
equal or outgo it. Our faces were grave when we saw what we had--and
the lift of any land so far away. Said Olafson, “Something less than
the old allowance?” and I nodded.
David Scott and the black man together made the hundred understand and
acquiesce. For the most part our fifteen and Tom and Don in the cook’s
galley met the stress with courage. We shared equally, black and white,
captive and free. As captain, I said it should be so. At first there