Sacred Hunger (41 page)

‘Paid back to him?”’ Blair said. “What became o” Bibby then?”’

‘He retired shortly after. He had put savin’s by. He went to live in Kent, with his unmarried daughter. He was a Kentish man, d’you see, Captain Bibby.”

“I have seen blindness spread on a ship,”

Wilson said. “There is a skin grows ower the eyes. Tha wakes up in the mornin” an’ tha cannot see owt. The negroes come aboard with it already about them, an’ it gets among the crew. I were on a ship once when everyone were goin’ blind with it, skipper an’ all. We were out in the Gulf o’ Guinea when it started, bound for Barbados, but we had to put back to San Tome. I were talkin’ to the bos’n, name of Billy Fox, talkin’ away one minute, next he says, “Christ, give us a fin, mate, my eyes have gone.”

‘Did he get better?”’ Calley, whose sleep would be troubled, had been following this story with round eyes.

“Get better? He didn’t have no chance to get better. Billy couldn’t keep off the women. He went to a crackhouse back in San Tome an” fell down some steps an’ broke his neck. There were a canary on board an’ that went blind as well.

Soon as it went blind it started singin’—it were dumb before.”

There was a pause at this. Wilson was an unpredictable man and no one felt inclined to risk provoking him by seeming not to believe it. After some moments Libby gave it out as his opinion that Africans were able to put an end to themselves by holding their breath, this being the only explanation for deaths among fed slaves with no injuries or marks of disease.

‘A man canna kill himself just by holdin” his breath,” Blair said, with some beginnings of the confused anger he always showed at contradictory or illogical statements. ‘If he holds his breath, he’ll fall down in a faint, an” when he falls down in a faint, he’ll start breathin’ again.

If you dinna believe me, try it for yourself.”

‘no use askin” me to try it.” Libby laughed and spat over the rail. ‘I’m a Englishman, ain’t I?”’

“A Englishman cannot do it,” Tapley said.

“Only these here blacks can do it. They are closer to animals than what we are.”

“If they are closer than what you are, Tapley, they must be amazin” creatures indeed,” Blair said. “I agree with what Barber says. It is melancholy kills them.”

“I will be dyin’ of malincholly meself aboard of this ship,” Sullivan said. “I am playin” me fiddle for them blacks ivery mornin’ an’ the sound of the clankin’ they make is drownin’ out me notes. I am goin’ to have a word with the captain about it.”

‘The only word you’ll ever have wi” the captain is “aye-aye, sir”,” Blair said.

‘allyou said the same thing about me buttons, but I spoke up to Haines.”

“Aye, an” wha’s still got “em? Speakin” up to Thurso is a different matter. You have only to look at him wrong, an’ it’s bread an’ water in the bilboes.”

‘A man with justice on his side will always be listened to,” Sullivan said.

“Ye’re all gab, Sullivan,”

McGann said. “We might tak ye more serious if ye’d put money on it. Will ye tak a bet in even shillin’s? My shillin” says ye’ll never hae the brash to speak up to Thurso.”

‘The Scotch were always doubters,” Sullivan said. “My shillin” says I’ll speak to him, man to man. Billy, you are me witness.”

With the slaves” numbers now so much increased, the enforced periods below decks rendered their quarters noisome; it was Paris’s duty to see the platforms well washed down and the area between decks smoked for some hours to purify the air. Relations with the coast negroes had worsened. The Frenchmen’s yawl had driven ashore at Little Bassa and been smashed and plundered, and her crew roughly handled, by the natives.

The news had perturbed Thurso, who was afraid that this success would encourage other attempts.

“These villains will copy any bad example,” he observed to Barton, “but show them a good model of behaviour and they will sheer away from it as if it were the devil. They are inclined by nature to every kind of mischief and evil-doing.” The thought of losing the ship’s boat worried him a good deal; there was no trade anywhere along the Windward Coast without a sloop of some sort. “You can trade with ‘em for twenty years,” he said, “then some other white man does ‘em an injury and they pretend to believe we are all tarred with the same brush.”

“They are wrong there, Captain,” Barton said. “It is them what have been tarred.”

Thurso regarded his first mate with a displeasure he took no trouble to conceal. He was an enemy to jokes, feeling an energy in them beyond his controlling.

“Barton, I do not like levity,” he said. “You know my feelings and still you go on with it. I advise you to be careful.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

“We will be going on round the coast very soon, down to the company fort. We will do our private business for the gold dust there, upriver, as we did before. This voyage will be our last together. What course you set afterwards is no concern of mine, but while you are mate on my ship you will keep to my mood. I was remarking on the fickleness of these dogs and their readiness to follow any bad example.”

Then the yawl returned from six days’ trading upriver, with eight slaves, a tusk weighing nearly forty pounds and two quintals of camwood —and with Johnson in the waist half conscious and shivering with fever and True hardly able to stand to his oars.

It was this that decided Thurso. Two of the crew were dead already and one had run; any more, and he could not keep the yawl manned and the negroes guarded at the same time and so would not manage to bring off slaves anywhere on this side of the cape. Next morning he sent ashore for water and more rice; they had more than a thousand pounds of it aboard now. Later he sent Haines and four men with twenty fathoms of remnants to exchange for yams, plantains and palm oil, but these supplies could not be brought aboard till next day, as there was so great a sea across the bar that Haines did not dare to venture over.

When they came they brought with them also a single slave, a well-grown boy of fourteen or so, bringing the total number to ninety-seven, of which thirty were women.

In the course of the day the ship’s sails were loosed and aired and the spare sails brought up and overhauled.

It was found that the rats had done some damage to these; the ship was by now overrun with them, as the three cats they had brought out from England were all dead, and they had been quite unable to find one ashore. Under Barton’s supervision—Johnson being too ill—the small arms were discharged and reloaded. With nightfall, the slaves were herded to their quarters below and the hatches fastened down on them, Thurso knowing from old that to leave slaves on deck, men or women, when the ship was leaving their home shores, was to invite trouble of the most serious kind.

“I have seen it happen,” he said that evening to Barton and Paris, whom he had invited to sup with him on this eve of departure. “They become desperate when they see the ship putting out to sea. They will sometimes throw themselves over the side, chained as they are. And in their shackles, d’ye see, they cannot long stay alive once they are in the water. They are gone under before you can lower a boat for ‘em. I have known ‘em shout and laugh with the joy of cheating us. It is a dead loss to the owners, since we are not underwritten for suicide.”

They were sitting over brandy after the meal. Thurso was in a more than usually expansive mood this evening, with his trading done here and half his cargo already purchased. Since hearing Paris’s report he was less troubled at the thought of being left undermanned.

Johnson was still weak and complained of racking pains in head and limbs; but True’s fever had left him.

Both men had been drinking heavily and sleeping in native huts on shore. It was the surgeon’s opinion that they had exposed themselves to malignant ground vapours and thus contracted marsh fever, though it seemed of an ephemeral kind.

“If the men have to sleep away from the ship,” the surgeon said, “they should be sure to have a fire lit in their close vicinity, just sufficient to raise a gentle smoke. This would render the night airs less noxious.”

“Aye, it is the same practice we use aboard ship,” Barton said, “to clear the air between decks.”

Thurso looked from the mate to the surgeon. He could not suffer men to show any accord in his company without prior reference to himself. “You may be right, Mr Paris,” he said. “But you will never get any discipline or good governance from these men. They will take no notice of advice that might tend to their good. Hard labour aboard, debauchery ashore and an early grave—that is the way of it for nearly all of ‘em.”

Thurso paused for a moment, looking closely at the surgeon, feeling the customary irritation of moral constraint the other put upon him, by his silences as much as his words. “We are living in the real world, Mr Paris,” he said. “We have to shape our course to the weather.”

“The measure I am suggesting is practical enough, sir,” Paris said mildly.

Thurso raised a blunt forefinger and tapped slowly at the side of his head. “It is in the mind,” he said. “You have got to bring ‘em to the right frame of mind. And when you have animals to deal with, it is done by fear, sir, not persuasion.”

There had been a jibe contained in this and Thurso saw it register—the surgeon’s face had lost the look of youth but there was no concealment in it; what he felt changed the expression of his eyes and moved the corners of his mouth.

“Persuasion gets you a gobful o” rice in the face,” Barton said with his lackey’s instinct for pressing home the attacks of his master.

Paris smiled slightly but he had felt his heart quicken. ‘So you think the rice in the face was a victory for the method of fear, Barton, do you? I must say I find that a strange interpretation of the event.”

“Take the negroes,” Thurso said, with unmoved face. He often behaved as if no one had spoken since his own last remark. “This mortality by which we suffer such losses is entirely owing to their brooding so much on their situation. If you want to get ‘em to market in good condition, you must change their way of thinking. I remember once, many years ago now, it was one of my first ships, we were trading in the Bight of Benin and had taken aboard a cargo of Ibo. I do not buy Ibo nowadays; they have a reputation for being unreliable and do not fetch prices anything comparable to the Windward Coast negroes, though I know of skippers that deal in nothing else as the trade is well ordered in the delta and slaves in good supply, so you can reduce waiting time on the coast, and the feeding of your negroes while you are waiting. On this occasion we had not been a week at sea when these Ibo began to fall into a fixed melancholy. They could not be brought to eat by flogging and began to die in numbers. I discovered from my linguister that they believed that by dying they would get back to their own country. So what do you think I did, sir?”’

Thurso paused to drink some of his brandy. “Do you think I tried persuasion on ‘em?”’ he said. At this moment there was a light tapping on the cabin door, but at this climactic moment of his story, he paid no attention to it. “I’ll tell you what I did, sir. I had the slaves brought up on deck and in full view of all I cut off the heads of those who had died with a cleaver from the galley. Who the devil is that knocking? Give him a shout to come in, Barton. Yes, sir, that is what I did, and do you know why?”’

In answer to Barton’s summons, the door had been pushed open and Sullivan stood wild-eyed and dishevelled on the threshold. He was in time to hear his captain’s concluding remarks.

“I did it so they might clearly understand that if they were determined to return home they would have to do so without their heads. I had no more trouble with ‘em from that day forward. What are you doing here?”’

“Beggin” your pardon, sir.” After the first glances, Sullivan kept his eyes down. He had prepared his speech and delivered it without faltering though rather too fast: ‘The captives bein” in chains, sir, they cannot move their limbs freely to the sound o’ me fiddle an’ the noise they make with the clankin’ is swampin’ me notes. There is more than thirty pairs, sir, fastened at wrist and ankle an’ all of thim jumpin’. The sound of the chains is drownin’ out me fiddlin’ intirely.”

He paused, looked up briefly, then down again —he had remembered another point. ‘An” the numbers is increasin’ all the time,” he said.

‘I’ll niver be able to hear me own notes an”

I’ll forget what it is I am supposed to be playin’.”

Thurso turned frowning to his first mate. ‘What is this man talking about?”’ he said. “Is he drunk?”’ It was an old menacing trick of his not to address an underling directly.

“What are you talkin” about?”’ Barton demanded. ‘How dare you come here with this riggermarool talk o” fiddlin’? Don’t you know you should have gone through one of the officers?”’

As often happened with Sullivan, his initial fear—strong enough to have kept him hesitating long at the door—had diminished now in the warmth and justice of his own advocacy. ‘Beggin” your pardon, sir, but I was askin’ meself if the chains could be taken off.”

‘Taken off?”’

“Just for the period of me playin”,”

Sullivan said.

Thurso’s brows had drawn together in a ferocious frown. For a few moments he said nothing. Then they saw his mouth move in a curious grimacing, stretching way, almost convulsive in appearance. He raised his face as if about to sneeze and a series of hoarse, choking sounds came from somewhere deep in his throat. After a moment or two, the others regarding him meanwhile in astonished silence—neither of them had any idea to begin with what ailed him, never having seen such symptoms in him before—he took out a capacious handkerchief and wiped his eyes.

‘By God, that’s rich,” he said. “I haven’t heard anything so rich for a long time. Did you hear him, Barton? This gut-scraper wants the chains taken off “em because the noise is spoiling his music”

“He must be out of his senses,” Barton said blankly.

Thurso turned to Paris, traces of tears still in his eyes. “Here is another fellow of the same kidney as yourself,” he said. “He doesn’t know what is the real world either.”