Ramage and the Freebooters (24 page)

‘Good luck, then, and don’t forget to salute the Admiral if you find him in Barbados!’

Half an hour later the
Triton’s
boat was back and it was being hoisted on board,
La Merlette
began setting sail and getting under way. As Ramage watched, the surgeon came up and commented:

‘Appleby’s first command! He must be excited!’

‘I suppose so,’ Ramage grunted. ‘He’s the dullest dog I’ve ever met. Has no – no push, if you know what I mean.’

The surgeon nodded. ‘Still, he tries – and he’s very young.’

‘Yes, about fourteen months younger than I.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir, I didn’t–’

Ramage laughed. ‘It’s a compliment, Bowen.’

‘This French captain,’ Bowen said, hastily changing the subject. ‘What sort of man is he? I mean, how can someone trade in human lives? It seems – well, against everything their Revolution was supposed to stand for.’

‘I’ve been wondering the same thing. He reminds me of a typical French grocer: cheerful, fat and sharp as a needle.’

Bowen said, ‘I must admit I’m an Abolitionist, sir. I’ve never done anything about supporting Wilberforce, but I admire his work.’

‘So do I. At this very moment I feel like resigning my commission and offering him my services.’

‘A laudable spirit, if I may say so, sir,’ Bowen said seriously. ‘But at the moment the country faces worse enemies than slavers. While we condemn a cruel slaver we mustn’t forget the first three years of the French Revolution saw more cruelty performed by Frenchmen against Frenchmen in the streets of Paris alone than there’s been in the Bight of Benin in the last fifty years.’

Ramage nodded, thinking of the thousands who’d been led to the guillotine merely because they had been born in the upper or middle classes, not because they opposed the Revolution. And they’d been followed by hundreds of people falsely denounced to the Directory by their enemies to pay off old scores.

‘Well, one way we can find out what the Frenchman thinks is for me to invite him to dine with me tonight. The idea isn’t very appealing – I’d sooner heave him over the side. But it’s customary for the captain to make such an invitation – though hardly to a slaver.’

The Surgeon did not try to hide his interest.

‘Perhaps you would join me, Bowen. I can’t ask Southwick as he’ll be on watch.’

The French captain, Jean-Louis Marais, spoke good English, ate heartily (though hinting that a clove of garlic would have improved the meat) and sniffed delicately at the brandy. His chubby face was non-committal; then he glanced over the top of the glass and said: ‘Good – yes. But M’sieur Ramage, I hope you won’t think me impolite if I regret that I forgot to make you a present of my spirit locker before we parted company with
La Merlette
?’

Ramage, who found himself liking the Frenchman’s irrepressible cheerfulness – he could keep grinning within a few hours of finding his ship captured and himself a prisoner of war – couldn’t resist saying: ‘I hope you won’t think
me
impolite, M’sieur Marais, but by that time it was hardly yours to give…’

‘
Touché!
But your King wouldn’t have begrudged it.’

‘I fear he would; in fact his regulations particularly forbid taking anything out of a captured ship until she has been “adjudged lawful prize” in some Admiralty court–’

‘A barbarous regulation!’ Marais exclaimed. ‘Why–’

‘Another says that “None of the officers, mariners or other persons on board her shall be stripped of their clothes, or in any sort pillaged…”’ Ramage added dryly. ‘Now
that
is barbarous.’

‘My shirt is of little value, but my heart is of pure gold.’

‘We’ll have that, then – don’t you agree, Bowen?’

The surgeon nodded. ‘Yes – I can remove it without spoiling the shirt.’

‘Ah, what an evening,’ Marais said, still sniffing the brandy between sentences. ‘A good dinner, good company – and a good surgeon to do whatever the host requires, quickly and painlessly!’

Bowen said evenly, ‘Since you owned a slaver, I imagine not only your heart is made of gold.’

‘You overestimate the profit,’ Marais said blandly, ‘and you flatter me. I regret I am not the owner – was not the owner,’ he corrected himself. ‘Merely the captain.’

‘But surely it’s a profitable trade,’ Ramage said.

‘It’s a gamble. When you win, you make a lot of money. When you lose, you lose heavily. There’s no – how do you say? No “happy medium”.’

‘But on a round voyage surely you can hedge your bet?’ Ramage asked. ‘There’s profit on the goods you carry from France to the Cape Coast, and profit in carrying sugar, spice and rum from the West Indies to France. Surely your gamble is only from the Cape Coast to the West Indies with the slaves?’

‘True,’ said Marais. ‘But that’s also where the major profit is. Don’t forget these are fast ships, well-equipped and splendidly built. You saw there’s little cargo space – no depth in the holds. And the crews have to be large and need to be paid very well – twice as much as in merchantmen. So for two thirds of a round voyage – from France to the Cape Coast, then from the West Indies back to France – they are expensive and half of them unnecessary.’

‘What’s the usual profit on a slave?’ Bowen asked bluntly.

Marais shrugged his shoulders. ‘M’sieur Bowen, be thankful that in the world of medicine you are never concerned with the words “net” and “gross”. But a fair question deserves a fair answer. We don’t buy the slaves with cash – it’s all bartering with the goods we carry out from France. But it works out at – forgive me, I must change the coinage – yes, about twenty-five guineas a slave: that’s what we pay the chiefs and traders for a male. About fifteen guineas for a female. And we sell males at’ – he paused, changing French
louis
into English money – ‘between fifty and sixty guineas each, providing we are among the first slavers in after the hurricane season ends or the last in before it starts. So our gross profit is between twenty-five and thirty-five guineas for each slave. But ten per cent might die on the voyage – it’s rarely as high as that, incidentally – or we might arrive within a week of another slaver, in which case naturally the market price is lower.’

Bowen was obviously both horrified and fascinated by the way Marais discussed the slaves as if they were sacks of sugar or puncheons of rum.

‘I don’t see how you can make a loss?’

Marais’ eyes looked up at the deckhead, shrugging his shoulders and holding out his hands, palms uppermost.

‘M’sieur Bowen, I would like you as a backer. If I had a ship but no money to finance a voyage, I wish I could meet you and persuade you to take shares!’

‘Why?’ Bowen asked innocently.

Marais was serious now: the sharp little eyes focused on the surgeon, the palms of his hands were flat on the table, shoulders hunched forward. The lamp swinging in its gimbals on the bulkhead threw shadows which changed his face from that of a jolly grocer to the captain of a slaver used to dealing with desperate situations which needed desperate measures.

‘Take your field, M’sieur Bowen, medicine. The Cape Coast is the unhealthiest place in the world. I often have to take my ship thirty miles up rivers to collect my cargo – in itself a great risk to the ship. I’ve read the burial service over more bodies consigned to those rivers than ever at sea. I sail from France with a crew of thirty-five – because I need twenty left alive for the passage from the Cape Coast to the West Indies. Many times I’ve made a passage with only a dozen… The rest have died of sicknesses for which there is no cure, only a death of the most painful kind. When you came in sight,’ he said to Ramage, ‘only twenty of the thirty-five who left France had survived: fifteen died in the Bight of Benin – one stabbed by a treacherous slave-trader, the rest from sickness.’

‘But losing crew from sickness is hardly a financial loss,’ Ramage objected pointedly.

Marais gave a sly grin. ‘I understand the implication; but there is a loss because men who ship in slavers are not gamblers. They won’t sign on and agree to collect their pay at the end of the round voyage, so if they died the owner doesn’t have to pay, which is what you are thinking. Oh no! They want a large advance before they leave France. Why, I–’

‘Come, come,’ Ramage interrupted. ‘If you paid such large advances they’d desert on the eve of sailing.’

Without saying it, Marais’ hands and a twitch of his head indicated this was proof enough of the crude way of British sailors but that French sailors were cleverer.

‘The advance, usually four months’ pay, is delivered by my agent to whoever the seaman nominates – a week after we have sailed.’

‘What do you barter for the slaves?’ Bowen asked.

‘All sorts of manufactured goods. Cloth and clothing – the brighter the better – brass and iron cooking pots, beads, knives, looking-glasses – they’re very popular – liquor, muskets, shot, powder, cutlasses–’

‘Muskets and shot?’ exclaimed Bowen.

‘Of course – the chiefs pay well for them. They’re cheap affairs, naturally; more danger to the men that fire them than their targets!’

‘And how – well, what happens when you first arrive on the Coast?’

Marais grinned at Ramage. ‘First we discover whether there are any British ships of war in the area. Then – well, let’s describe it as it was before the war, then I shan’t give away any secrets.

‘First, M’sieur Bowen, there’s a slaving season – that’s obvious, because we don’t want to arrive in the Caribbean during the hurricane season. So on the Coast the trading settlements and local native chiefs have been preparing for us by collecting slaves. When enough slave ships arrive, the slaves are taken to the market and each captain inspects them. As he chooses one, so he bargains with the owner – usually a slave-trader or the agent of the particular chief – and agrees on the price.’

Bowen asked: ‘These chiefs – where do they get the slaves?’

‘You might well ask! From many places. To start with a chief takes up any young men or boys in his own tribe who have misbehaved. Not criminals necessarily, you understand? Then, if it’s a large tribe and the chief wants a lot of muskets, or a lot of bright clothes for his wives – well, he’s likely to march some of his own people to the settlement.

‘Of course, the tribes often raid each other’s villages to capture men to sell as slaves. That’s quite usual – you can always tell by the tribal marks on the faces. If you see a chief’s agent at the market has, say, two vertical scars on his cheek and the slaves he’s offering have one horizontal scar, you know they’re prisoners of war from another tribe. If they are the same scars – well, the chief is either selling those who’ve misbehaved, or he’s getting greedy.’

‘But surely you don’t get all your slaves at the settlements?’ asked Ramage, remembering Marais’ reference to rivers. ‘Most of the settlements are on the coast, aren’t they?’

‘We get perhaps half from the settlements: the best – and the most expensive. The rest we find up the rivers, visiting small villages.’

‘You capture them,’ Bowen said bluntly.

‘Oh no!’ Marais exclaimed. ‘For a start it’d be too dangerous to send a party of seamen on shore; in fact we usually have a guard boat rowing round the ship day and night. No, a hundred seamen wouldn’t last an hour in that jungle – they’d be riddled with spears and arrows from three yards away by natives they couldn’t even see, or else they’d come back riddled with sickness.

‘Oh no, M’sieur Bowen, we arrive at a village and wait. First a representative of the chief – perhaps even the chief himself – comes out in a canoe for a palaver. He tells us how many slaves he has and the price he wants. One of my men – usually the mate – goes back with him and inspects them. When they return, we agree on the price. And usually, after dark, more canoes arrive with slaves from villages nearby.’

‘Where do the other slaves come from then?’

‘I never ask, but it’s obvious.’ Marais shrugged his shoulders. ‘You must understand that a man with two sons and six daughters considers he has six useless mouths to feed: he values only his sons. So he’s likely to sell some of his daughters. If he has little land and many sons – well, the extra sons too. Particularly if he dislikes any of them.’

Bowen groaned.

‘My friend,’ said Marais, ‘don’t be shocked; don’t judge them by
your
standards. These people live different lives and have different codes. They’re happy and they work just enough to avoid starving. And it’s difficult to starve because fruit and many vegetables grow wild in the jungle, and they catch fish in the rivers.

‘And you must remember the family is not the family as we Europeans understand the word. Before I went to the Coast I’d have been shocked if I’d known what I’m telling you now. After twenty years, I understand.

‘Incidentally, things
we
do shock
them
. The idea of spending sums of money in building enormous ships solely for fighting – that shocks them. They have large canoes – but when they’re not fighting another tribe they’re used for fishing or trade.

‘You consider government. When a chief dies, all the elders elect a new chief – the man they think is best qualified to lead them in battle, administer justice and so on. The European system makes them laugh – a hereditary king whose son’ – he glanced significantly at Ramage – ‘might be stupid or insane or otherwise totally unfit for the crown; then three or four hundred “minor chiefs” elected without qualifications by fools who were probably bribed with pints of ale… You’ll admit the results in Europe are a series of situations where nothing gets done and the minor chiefs – your Members of Parliament, the French senators – simply make speech after speech. Who’s to say which system is best? In my opinion one system suits the Cape Coast, another suits Europe.’

‘When you have the slaves on board,’ Bowen asked, ‘how are they fed, exercised, cared for?’

Marais looked at him squarely. ‘M’sieur, I think you are a supporter of that M’sieur Wilberforce. But always remember this – it would be madness for a slaver captain not to care for the slaves. For every slave that dies – pouf, there’s a twenty-five guinea investment and another twenty-five guinea profit thrown over the side. If you had hundreds of guineas invested in a company, I think you’d make quite sure the company’s goods were well cared for.