The slave ship
“He’s as good a man as you’ve got. It wasn’t his fault, the losing of
the _Thistle_.”
He went with me to the door. “Have you come into a fortune or been made
a lord, or what? I’ve known you for more than three years, but you’ve
hardly looked as you do now----”
David Scott stood for a moment, looking out upon the town and the sea
and the morning sun. “Trevannion, there’s a lass named Happiness. She
hasn’t a penny, yet the world’s her dower!”
“Oh, well, if you’re happy----!” said Trevannion, and we parted.
That money! I drew it out in those days, leaving just enough to keep
David Scott from want until he knew what course he would shape. It was
not so much after all--Bartram’s and mine together--about six hundred
pounds. There was a merchant I knew in Charlestown, not in the trade,
or gaining by it more than another, where all were touched. He managed
matters for me. Out of the sum now in his hands I drew as I needed
it for the purpose I had in mind. It had first occurred to me to buy
and free as many Negroes as I might out of the _Janet’s_ lading
this last voyage. But then I saw that I could not. I was by no means
powerful enough to see them shipped back to Africa, sent there to their
own people and released. How could I get that done, who would become
outcast by the very mention of it to owners of ships and factories?
And if I bought and freed them here in America? They were barbarians,
free to fall into, and to cause, all manner of trouble in a world not
theirs. At once they would meet the Law of the Land, and it would break
them. Nothing could be done by me here and now. I saw that last lading
that I had brought herded into the barracoons, and during a week sold,
slave by slave, at the slave block.
What I could do I did. There was a mulatto shoemaker who sat in a hutch
of a shop upon a half-road, half-street, and worked at cobbling and
making. I used to pass him, coming and going from Trevannion’s, and
several times I had stopped for a cast of his trade. At first I thought
he was a free Negro. But no, he said, Mr. So-and-so was his master and
owned this hut. One half of what he earned he took each week to Mr.
So-and-so; on the other he lived. Later, stopping again to speak to
him, in a burst of confidence he let it out that from this half he was
slowly putting by. “To buy myself.” There was pride in his voice.
“Will Mr. So-and-so sell you? You must be profitable.”
“Yes. He’s a good man. When I have the money he’ll free me.”
“How long will it take you?”
He mentioned a term of years. His plans after that included freeing
in succession his wife who was owned by another family, though in
Charlestown, and his son and daughter owned by the mother’s owners. He
would be an elderly man before, barring accidents, it was all done.
Through the merchant and a lawyer I bought these four and freed them,
and bought for them the cobbler’s shop and tools. I found other men
and women whom I bought and freed, working quietly. It hardly took a
month to bring David Scott, so far as money was concerned, within a
few pounds of where he was when on an autumn eve in Virginia he first
cried, “_Janet_, ahoy!”
All this went on quietly, very few knowing anything about it. Carraway,
it proved, had some arrangements and a short journey to make before
he took over the _Janet_. For ten days still I was Captain and
dwelled on my ship. When at last Carraway appeared I removed to a
small inn by the shore.
Those ten days were strange, meditative days to me, whose life had
changed its road. I was not unhappy; I was happy with some ache and
bewilderment at the new taste of the happiness. And I think that it is
the sense of growth, saying forever, “Listen! Here is again something
new under the Great Newness,” that makes one feel one’s self a child.
The _Janet_ rode quietly in harbor, and I was aboard her much of
those ten days. There was regret, I know, that I was departing, and yet
the seaman’s nature is like the sea, and a new Captain, said to be a
not unkindly man, was coming, and they would weigh anchor, and new days
would cover the old, and novelty is novelty. But Michaelson and Wheeler
and two or three others and Tom and Don did grieve. As for Olafson, I
could not make him out in those days.
I felt Bartram, I felt Colley and McNaughton, and when I left the
_Janet_ I took them with me.
I left her. I went one eve when the sunset burned around her.
Carraway slept in the Captain’s cabin and walked the poop deck. If he
in no wise equalled Bartram yet he was honest and strove to be just and
had the name of a good captain. The _Janet_ would shake out her
sails and be gone in a week.
The dawn in which she was to leave harbor I rose while it was yet
night and stole from my inn and walked the shore road till I came to
a point whence I could see her sail. I sat down under a pine tree,
and a pale light being now in the east, watched them making sail. The
_Janet_! I watched her forth, the _Janet_. She went in the
glory of the dawn, in the slant, golden light of the sun. I never saw
her again with these bodily eyes, but ah! often and often by the inner
light.
I returned to the inn. My affairs were nearly done. The money I had
kept for David Scott would allow him short time before he must begin
earning. Going by the waterside I looked at the ships in harbor, and
when I reached the inn, there was Olafson sitting, waiting for me.
“Olafson!”
“I’ve left it too, sir.”
We sat down. He spoke of the _Bright Nancy_, Captain Cobb,
carrying sugar to Philadelphia. She had put in here for some need or
other, and, he had heard, wanted seamen. Olafson knew her, a decent
ship, with a decent captain and mates. He proposed now to sign with her
as far as Philadelphia. He knew folk in that city who would help him
to a mate’s berth again--on some ship that was not for Africa. When I
told him of my own lack of money and the ideas bred by it, he proposed
that I also become seaman for this voyage upon the _Bright Nancy_.
Philadelphia was a prosperous town, full of trade; there must be there
many chances.
I sat and regarded Olafson whom I greatly liked, and the _Bright
Nancy_, and Philadelphia of which I knew a little, and chiefly
that it held many Quakers. Then I thanked Olafson, and took my hat,
and together we found and hired a boat and went out to the _Bright
Nancy_.
CHAPTER XXIX
The forecastle of the _Bright Nancy_ became for a time David
Scott’s sea home--his and Olafson’s. The seamen there were just Dory
and Dannet and others again. I was content to work so and journey so to
Philadelphia. A stormy voyage gave the less time for thinking how much
finer was poop than forecastle.
It did not trouble me. The light held for me, though with an unequal
strength. Sometimes it sank and there was almost darkness, but never
the darkness that had been. The pain was the yearning for more and more
light.
We passed Cape Fear and passed Hatteras of rough seas, and saw on a
morning the coasts of Virginia. I turned and turned again my eyes that
way. We passed Virginia and passed Maryland and entered the great bay
and river of Delaware, and sailing up the latter came to the Colony,
great as a kingdom--they are all great as kingdoms--named for William
Penn, and so anchored at last before the city of Philadelphia that held
twenty thousand souls.
Olafson and I talked it over together. The _Bright Nancy_ was a
ship considerably to our liking. A great number of things about her
might have been worse than they were. But that aside, I had determined,
before she anchored, before I trod a Philadelphia quay, to renew with
her Captain for one voyage more. To Olafson I said that I liked the
ship and that I wanted the sea for just a little longer--but I did
not say what I felt and that was that I must stay upon the _Bright
Nancy_. Each time my mind turned to leaving her here and now I felt
an arresting touch. I did not tell him, or perhaps I did tell him.
But when I said that my going just this one other voyage with the
_Bright Nancy_ must not affect him, who could surely with time get
his mate’s berth somewhere, Olafson shook his head and smiled through
his golden beard. “I’ve never been what you call an ambitious man.
She’s a tidy ship and I like her name. I’ll stay by her as long as you
do.”
So it was settled. One more voyage; we’d go one more voyage. She bought
her sugar at Havana and brought it only to Philadelphia.
We anchored. When we had unladed her and made her more tidy than
before, we seamen went ashore. Olafson and I kept together. The
_Bright Nancy_ would be ten days here, in the stately river,
before the quay below High Street. Olafson knew a sailors’ tavern, The
Good Merchant Seaman.
Here we settled ourselves, and he went off to find the man of his
own country who dwelled and prospered in this city. In two hours he
returned. “He is dead, and his family have gone into the country. The
warehouse is sold and the business wound up.--So, you see, it is the
_Bright Nancy_ for us both!”
“Just for a little while then, Jan,” I said.
He sat and drank ale and then we went out to see the town. It was a
pleasant, leafy place--the season was high summer--with good docks and
warehouses and much shipping in the river, with wide straight streets
and churches and brick dwellings in ample gardens. There seemed a
civility plain and real. I thought, “I could clerk it here--studying
and thinking when work was over. Long walks, studying and thinking----”
I thought. “Later on I might teach----”
For two days Olafson and I sauntered and gazed together, but then old
shipmates found him, and he must go with them, and I wandered alone.
The streets so busy, the many people, pleased me. I saw rich and poor,
high and low, city folk and country folk coming into town, hunters and
rangers and Indians from farther away than the planted fields, coming
to William Penn’s town on errands of their own. It pleased me to make
out in the stream men and women whom I was sure were Quakers--though
for some reason I never went to their meeting house.
Upon the streets, coming and going, I met or passed Negro men and
women--slaves. They seemed chiefly house servants or grooms or
porters, for this was town, not farms or plantations. Nor were they
anything like so numerous as they would have been in a like-sized town
in any one of the great southern, planting Colonies. Those that I saw
had evidently been born in this country, or at least been brought very
young from Africa. They were fairly clad and cheerful enough; and in
Charlestown and Kingston and Williamsburg one saw the same.
But the white man had enslaved them all and kept them enslaved. I
saw beyond the Delaware, out upon the great sea, and there were the
ships that crossed and crossed, the _Sherwood Oak_, the _Fancy_, the
_Sharon_, the _Amelia_, the _Wreath_, the _Janet_ and so many more
there was no counting them. I saw Daga, and the factories at Whidah,
and Bonny, and Calabar and where not. I saw the Sugar Islands, and the
rice and cotton and tobacco lands, and these northern towns as well.
Wandering and questioning as I did, I found that in this city there
were well-to-do Quakers or Friends who owned slaves. It came to me with
a kind of shock, remembering my Quaker and the paper he had read me.
The man that I questioned about this said that as a whole their Society
condemned the practise, and that many would not touch it, but that the
current was not yet strong enough to check and turn Old Custom.
I went up and down and my week was wearing away. Between the High
Street and the river stood a certain substantial place of business, a
merchant house of warm, red brick with trees spaced before it. This
place drew me; I would go out of my way to go by it. Through open