I looked down at it just before the hatch gratings went on, and it was an indiscribable sight. Row upon row of black bodies, packed like cigars in a box, naked and gleaming, the dark mass striped with glittering dots of light where the eyes rolled in the sooty faces. The crying and moaning and whimpering blended into a miserable anthem that I'll never forget, with the clanking of the chains and the rustle of hundreds of incessantly stirring bodies, and the horrible smell of musk and foulness and burned flesh.
My stomach doesn't turn easy, but I was sickened. If it had been left to me, then and there, I'd have let 'em go, the whole boiling of them, back to their lousy jungle. No doubt it's a deplorable weakness in my character, but this kind of raw work was a thought too much for me. Mind you, sit me down in my club, or at home, and say, "Here, Flash, there's twenty thou for you if you'll say 'aye' to a cargo of black ivory going over the Middle Passage", and I ain't saying I'ld turn you down. Nor do I flinch when someone whips a black behind or claps on a brand — but enough's enough, and when you've looked into the hold of a newladen slaver for the first time, you know what hell is like.23
I mentioned this to Sullivan, and he spat. "You think that's bell, do you? First blackbird voyage I made, as a young hand, we took three hundred coons from the Gallinas, and we were setting out for Rio when a Limey sloop tacks on to us. It was a Portuguese flag we carried, with a yaller-black Dago skipper in command; he saw sure enough they were going to take us." He looked at me with his head on one side. "Can you guess what that Christian Angolese son-of-a-b—-h did? G'wan, have a guess."
I said I had heard of slave cargoes being thrown overboard, so that when the Navy came up all the evidence had gone. Sullivan laughed.
"There wasn't time for that, our skipper figures. But we were carryin' palm oil as well as slaves, and had a good deal of trade powder left over. So he set the ship on fire, an' we took to the boats. Navy couldn't get near her, so she just burned out an' sank — with three hundred niggers aboard. I wouldn't care to guess how many of 'em were lucky enough to drown." He laughed again, without any mirth at all. "And you think that's hell, down there? I guess you also think that Mr J. C. Spring is a real tough skipper!"
Well, I did, and if there were bigger swine afloat in the earlies I'm only glad I never met them. But Sullivan's story gave me the shudders all right, for it reminded me that the next stage of our voyage was the notorious Middle Passage, with all the dangers of pursuit and capture, to say nothing of hurricane and shipwreck.
"D'you think there's any chance of … of that happening with us?" says I, and Sullivan snorted.
"I'll say this for Spring — he don't lose ships, or cargoes. He believes in keeping the sharks hungry. Any Navy coaster that comes up with us is in for a h—l of a chase — less'n she's a steamer an' catches us in a flat calm."
Here was a fearful thought. "What then?" says I.
"Then — why, we fight her," says he, and left me prey to a nausea that had nothing to do with the heat or the slave-stench or my weariness. Having lately been at grips with fighting nigger women, I could see myself shortly assisting in a running-sea-battle against the Royal Navy — just what was needed to liven up the cruise. And by jove, it nearly came to that, too, and on our very first hour out from that abominable coast.
We dropped down river early the next morning, to catch the ebb tide, I believe, and it seemed a piece of lunacy to me to try those shoals and islands in the half light. However, Spring knew his business; he took the wheel himself, and with only the foretopsail spread we drifted slowly between the green banks, the leadsmen chanting quietly, and the first hint of dawn beginning to lighten the sky over the black jungle mass astern. It was a queer, eery business, gliding so silently along, with only the mumble of the slaves, the creak of rope and timber, and the gurgle of water to break the stillness, and then we were clear of the last banks and the sun shot a great beam of light ahead of us across the placid surface of the sea.
It was all very beautiful, in its way, but just as Sullivan was roaring the watch up to set more sail the idyll was marred by the appearance round the southern headland of a small, waspishlooking vessel, standing slowly out on a course parallel to our own. It happened that I saw her first, and drew my commander's attention to her with a sailor-like hail of: "Jesus! Look at that!"
Spring just stared for a moment, and then says: "Foresail and main-tops'l, Mr Sullivan," before getting his glass out for a look.
"White ens'n," says he presently, without any emotion. "Take a look, mister. Twenty-gun sloop, I'd say."
Sullivan agreed, and while my bowels did the polka the two of them just stood and watched her as though she'd been a pleasure steamer. I didn't know much about sailing, as you're aware, but even I could see that she was moving more briskly than we were, that there was nothing but light airs stirring the surface, and that she wasn't more than two miles away. It looked to me as though the Balliol College's voyage was over before it had rightly begun, which merely shows how ignorant I was.
For an hour, while my gorge rose steadily, we watched her; we were doing no more than creep out from the coast, and the sioop did the same, only a little faster, and converging gradually all the time on our course. I could see that eventually we would be bound to meet, if we held our courses, and I had an idea that in light wind the sailing advantage would be all with the smaller vessel. But Spring seemed unconcerned; from time to time he would turn and survey the coast behind us, and the sky, converse shortly with Sullivan, and then go back to watching the sloop, with his hands stuck deep in his pockets.
He was waiting confidently, I now know, for a wind, and he got it just when I had finally given up all hope. The sails flapped, Spring barked an order, and at a shout from Sullivan the hands were racing aloft; in the same moment the boom of a shot sounded over the water, and a pillar of spray rose out of the sea a few hundred yards from our port bow.
"Burn your powder, you useless son of a Geordie coaster skipper, you!" bawls Spring from the wheel. "Look alive, Mr Sullivan!" And he sent out a perfect volley of orders as the Balliol College heeled gently and lifted to the first puffs of wind, and then I found myself tailing on a rope with the others, hauling for dear life and wondering what the d—-l would happen next.
If I were a nautical man, no doubt I could tell you, but I'm not, thank God; the mysteries of ship handling are as obscure to me today as they were fifty years ago. If I were Bosun McHearty I daresay I could describe how we jibed with our futtock gans'ls clewed up to the orlop bitts, and weathered her, d'ye see, with a lee helm and all plain sail in the bilges, burn me buttocks. As it was, I just stuck like a shadow to a big Portugal nigger of the deck watch, called Lord Peabody, and tailed on behind him with the pulley-hauley, while Spring and Sullivan bawled their jargon, the men aloft threw themselves about like acrobats, and the Balliol College began to surge forward at greater speed. There was another shot from the sloop, and an ironic cheer from our fellows — why I couldn't imagine, for our pursuer was soon cracking along famously, and I could make out her ensign plainly, and the figures on her deck, all far too close for comfort. I saw, in the intervals of scampering about after Peabody, and hauling on the ropes, that she would be able to fire in earnest soon, and I was just commending my soul to God and wondering if I could turn Queen's Evidence, when Spring let loose another volley of orders, there was a tremendous cracking and bellying of sails overhead, and the Balliol College seemed to spin round on her heel, plunge over with a lurch that brought my breakfast up, and then go bowling away across the track of the sloop.