Nobody's Slave (35 page)

For three hours the Spanish pinnace followed them, keeping the same course, slowly, unhurriedly gaining. At times it seemed impossible that they had not been seen - yet suddenly, inexplicably, it bore up and headed inshore, a mile or so across their stern, and vanished from sight among some trees.

‘Maybe he's looking for palm-nuts,’ said Tom, raising a short laugh. But the matter was too serious for much laughter now. The timbers of the raft were becoming waterlogged, sinking beneath their feet, so that even when the waves did not swamp them most of the raft was an inch or two underwater.

For some time now there had been an island ahead, its green wooded cliffs staying oddly steady above the rocking waves, about two miles from land. They had been steering to pass between it and the shore, but wind and current had been taking them steadily out to sea, and it began to look as though they would be swept the other side. They were rowing as well as sailing now, but it looked as though they would never make it.

‘Pull harder, lads, if ye can. If we don't make that island soon we're sunk! Tom, I'll take your oar. Come aft and steer as hard to larboard as you can.’

Tom did so, watching the others rowing as best they could; but again and again the waves swamped them up to their chests. As the island came nearer, the raft wallowed deeper in the water, and it became a question of whether they would reach it at all, before they sank.

No, they would not make it. Tom saw Madu’s eyes on him looking up from where he sat, straining desperately with Pedro at his oar.
I'm sorry, Maddy,
he wanted to say
, it’s no use, you'll never make it now. And I can't swim with you, all the way to that shore. And it's my fault you’re here, from the beginning.

But Madu grinned back at him, and there was such determined wild courage in that black, salt-encrusted face, that Tom had to smile back. He even laughed as his courage returned. What did it matter, what did anything matter? If he died, at least he was free and among friends! If Madu was happy to be here, Tom was happy to be with him.

‘There! A sail! The Spaniard has come again!’ Pedro left his oar and stood up, clutching the mast in his excitement as a wave nearly washed him overboard. Tom followed the line of the wet, glistening snake that was Pedro's arm. Sure enough, there, dipping out of sight in a trough and then rising again, was the little lateen sail of the Spanish pinnace as it put out from the shore. It must have sailed a mile or so along the shore out of sight. But this time, it was heading directly towards them.

‘So - we shall have a fight on our hands after all! ’Tis a better way to die than drowning. ’Vast rowing, lads, and prepare your weapons.’

Their bowstrings were wet, their pistols soaked, but they still had some swords, spears, and knives. For Madu it was a relief just to let go of the clumsy, useless oar, and stare over the sea at the swiftly approaching pinnace.

‘I'm sorry, Maddy,’ said Tom’s voice in his ear. ‘It's my fault you're here.’

Madu looked at Tom’s exhausted red face, and remembered how he had first seen it, that day long ago outside Conga. It was the face of the boy who had killed his friend Temba; the face of the boy who was his friend now. He smiled, and shook his head.

‘Not this time,’ he said. ‘I came because we fight together, and the fight must be finished. After this, no-one in village can say I never been on raid.’

Tom laughed, his mind free of a burden. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s take this ship, so Nwayieke can have a hero for a husband!’

Or no husband at all, Madu thought, but it was bad luck to say it. But at least he was not a slave, or a coward - he felt no fear or hesitation now, any more than he had in the raid. Just a calm eagerness for the fight to begin.

I won’t be captured again, he thought. We must win, or die. I am nobody’s slave. Tom, standing beside him, felt the same.

The pinnace was much closer now; they could see the white spray bursting over her bows as she sliced through the waves. There was a cluster of men around a long brass cannon on her foredeck. Any moment now, Tom thought, it will fire.

Then Francis began to laugh.

Tom glanced at him oddly. No-one could ever suspect his cousin of being a normal, cautious man, that was true; but to laugh like a clown at a time like this seemed insane. But that was what he was doing. Francis stood there, up to his knees in water, clutching the mast and roaring with helpless laughter. Then he waved his sword in the air.

‘Ahoy! Ahoy! John Barker! Miles Davis! Put her about and come under our lee, you lubbers! And mind ye don't scrape the paint!’ He laughed again, at the astonished faces of the sailors and Cimarrons around him on the raft. ‘’Tis all right, lads, no danger! That’s no Spanish pinnace at all – ’tis one of ours! We’re saved!’

And as the ship came closer, Tom saw that it was true. The flag at the masthead was that of England, not Spain; and the bearded faces on board were beaming down at them with smiles of friendship.

T
HAT NIGHT, they returned in the pinnace to pick up the treasure and other sailors. Then they sailed north and west, and by daybreak had reached the harbour where the ships were hidden. A party returned to look for the buried silver, without success; but even without it, the fortune of every man was made, many times over. The pinnaces were dismantled and stowed in the holds, and the ships made ready for sea.

The night before they left there was a feast, with wild pigs and deer roasted whole in fires on the shore, and wine and song flowing free. Pedro was presented with a golden scimitar which Francis had had from a Frenchman, who in his turn had had it from the King of France. Pedro gave Francis gold plates from his share of the booty in exchange. The English danced hornpipes and sang sea-shanties, and the Cimarrons sang songs of Africa, which made Madu feel sad and alone, in the midst of friends.

Towards the end of it he walked away, along the beach in the quiet, horse-shoe shaped cove, listening to the murmur around the distant glow of the fire. He came to the headland where the wind blew free and the dark rollers crashed in luminous spray along the shore.

Over that sea was his mother, perhaps, and his sister, and the village he had once called home. He would never go back there again. His people had not the power or the cunning to build ships; and even if they had, they could not bring the past to life, except in their songs. No, his mother and sister were probably dead: it was better to think so. His home was here now, with Nwayieke. He fingered the gold ring he had found in the booty, which he would give her when they were married; and turned, quietly, back along the shore to the fire.

A group of sailors were still singing, drunkenly, on the ship; but around the fire most men were snoring, or talking quietly. Madu saw Tom sitting by himself, with his back to a treestump. He sat down beside him, gazing at the distant embers of the fire.

‘So, you have your gold now. What you buy with it?’

‘I don’t know.’ Tom slurred his words, he was so tired. Waves of sleep were beginning to wash over him like an incoming tide. ‘A horse, perhaps – a house, ship of my own. Hadn’t thought.’ But a dream began to fill his sleepy mind: of himself, on the quarter-deck of his own ship, calling orders to the mariners as they sheeted home the sails. He could feel the roll of the deck underfoot, hear the cry of the gulls overhead. But in his dream the ship was leaving port, setting sail, perhaps for Africa - no, that was wrong, that was not where he wanted to go!

The vision changed, to one of himself and all the others, sailing safely into Plymouth harbour, seeing the fields above the town come closer, the red earth, gulls and rooks following the ploughman's team ...

‘I'll go home first, anyhow. Then I'll decide.’

‘Tell me about your home.’

It was a question Madu had never asked until now. Always before he had felt too threatened by the red-faces’ power, too full of scorn and fear and hate, to wish to know where they came from. But now he had seen the Spaniards beaten, and Tom had fought by his side as Temba once should have done. Tom was his friend now, not Temba. And Tom would soon be gone forever.

Tom lay on his back and gazed up through the trees to the stars, so bright and close here in the velvet tropical night, like lanterns almost low enough to grasp.

‘The stars are fainter in England, for a start. And 'tis colder, far, at nights ...’

He spoke of snow, and cold, and the fall of leaves in autumn, as one remembering something he himself could no longer fully believe in. He told of his mother, gathering apples in her apron in the orchard, scolding the sheep when they got into her walled garden; of his two younger sisters, learning to spin and weave and sew in the great stone-flagged kitchen - how big they must be grown now, quite young ladies! And he spoke of his father, riding around the steep cobbled streets of Totnes on his roan mare, seeing to the business of the sheep farm and the wool trade ...

‘I thought ‘twas fine stuff before, but not now. Maybe I’ll do it for a bit though, trade across the Channel to Flanders, before I set out on the high seas again.’

‘Will you come back here? To help us in our fight against the Spaniards?’

Tom rolled over and looked at his friend, sitting beside him on the grass. But the black face was invisible in the night.

‘Perhaps. I heard Francis talking to John Oxenham in the ship, t’other night. Seems if we and you took over the land together, Nombre de Dios and Panama, the Spaniards would never get their gold and silver across from Peru at all. That’d be a voyage worth going on - not just a raid, but a conquest! All of it would be ours!’

‘Whose?’

‘Why ... ours together, of course. We'd share it. English and Cimarrons together, like now.’

The drunken chant of the sailors on the ship became suddenly louder, ending in a splash, as though someone had been thrown overboard. The chant continued, amid curses and splashes from the bay.

‘And what about the slave-trading? What if English come and live here, like the Spanish, and need slaves to dig their gold?’

‘I ... no, that wouldn’t be fair, if you’d helped us to win.’ Tom's voice was troubled now, irritated. He knew this was important to Madu, to them both. Tomorrow he would leave; he did not want it to be after a quarrel. ‘If we needed slaves, we could take ’em from somewhere else. They could work for you too.’

For more than a minute there was silence. Tom wondered if Madu had fallen asleep; he could not know he was remembering the squalor and stench of the
Jesus’
hold, and the skin on Nwayieke’s back. When he spoke, his voice was quite flat, without passion.

‘All who take slaves are evil.’

Tom yawned, warding off the engulfing tide of sleep. ‘Well, Maddy, maybe you’re right. But men can change – we’re allies now, remember? And ‘tisn't only us that’s taken slaves, neither. What about the Portuguese, Spanish - even those black men, Sumba, who helped us? Who do you think the Portuguese buy ‘em from, in Africa? Other Africans, of course!  ’Tis the way of the world, no-one can stop it.’

‘Someone must!’ But Madu was too tired for real anger. He did not want a quarrel, now. His words floated quietly into the drowsy clearing. ‘We will not have slaves. There will be no slaves among the Cimarrons.’

‘There are no slaves in England, either. Why don’t you come home with us?’

Madu tensed for a moment, thinking of the dark, heaving ocean, and the promise John Hawkins had broken. Then he laughed - a careful, difficult laugh for him, but a laugh for all that - born of the knowledge that what Tom said was suggestion, no more. A suggestion that could be refused.

‘Because I will marry Nwayieke, don’t you remember? And we not want to live in a land with horrors like John Hawkins, or this snow and cold you tell of. I think there we grow pale, and die.’

‘Then I shall come back, and meet you again here.’

‘Perhaps.’ The words came carefully through the darkness, as though Madu thought they were the last they would have time to say, together.

‘But remember, when you back home and free in your England, that this country here is our home now, and we free in it too. Never come back if you forget that.’

‘I'll remember,’ said Tom. ‘If I ever do get home.’

He meant to say more, but before he could remember what it was he was asleep, snoring quietly on the smooth grass by the treestump.

Madu sat silently and watched him, while the sailor who had been thrown overboard clambered laboriously into the longboat, to the ribald cheers of his shipmates. Away in the trees to the right, Pedro and a group of Cimarrons were singing, softly; and far out beyond the mouth of the bay, there was the faintest lemon-coloured glow along the horizon, that just might mean the coming of dawn.

T
HIS IS a work of fiction, but all the main events in it really happened. John Hawkins’ own account of his ‘third troublesome’ slave-trading voyage is recorded in Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation,
Volume 7, which also has accounts of his two earlier voyages. Two of Hawkins’ sailors, Miles Philips and Job Hortob, also wrote detailed accounts of their experiences which can be read in Hakluyt Volume 6.

Hortob’s account has many wonderful stories, including the incident of fishing for an alligator which I have borrowed for chapter 20, and many of the details of the battle at San Juan de Ulloa, including the incident when Hawkins’ page, Samuel, brought him a silver cup of beer which was blown away by a cannon ball the moment Hawkins put it down. Both Job Hortob and Miles Philips were captured by the Spanish after San Juan de Ulloa, and many of the details of what happened to Tom Oakley are taken from their accounts. Miles Philips was a boy of about Tom’s age when he was set ashore. Both his account, and Job Hortob’s, are well worth reading in themselves.

The
Minion
eventually returned to England with just fifteen sailors still alive. Hawkins spent many years in devious negotiations with King Philip of Spain, trying to get the English prisoners released. Francis Drake, meanwhile, took a more direct approach. His raid on Nombre de Dios, and the subsequent capture of the mule train, are real events. He was helped in this by a group of escaped African slaves – Cimarrons – whose leader was called Pedro. It is not recorded that Drake rescued any English sailors though, so that is poetic licence.