We dropped anchor in that great clearing-house of the African slavers, where Ivory Coast brigs and schooners, the Baltimore clippers and Angola barques, the Gulf free-traders and Braziliano pirates all rode at their moorings in the broad bay, with the buinboats and shorecraft plying among them like water-beetles, and even the stench of our own slave-deck was beaten all to nothing by the immense reek of the huge barracoons and pens that lined the shore and even ran out into the sludgy green waters of the bay on great wooden piers. One never dreams that such places exist until one sees and hears and smells them, with their amazing variety of the scum of the earth — blacks and half-breeds of every description, Rio traders with curling mustachios and pistols in their belts and rings in their ears, like buccaneers from a story-book; Down Easter Yankees in stove-pipe hats with cigars sticking out of faces like flinty cliffs; sun-reddened English tars, some still wearing the wide straw hats of the Navy; packet rats in canvas shirts and frayed trousers; Scowegians with leathery faces and knives hanging on lanyards round their necks; Frog and Dago skippers in embroidered weskits with scarves round their heads, and niggers by the hundred, of every conceivable shape and shade — everyone babbling and arguing in half the tongues on earth, and all with one thing in common: they lived by and on the slave trade.
But best of all I remember a big fellow all in dirty white calicos and a broad-brimmed Panama, holding on to a stay in one of the shore-boats that came under our counter, and bawling up redfaced in reply to some one who had asked what was the news:
"Ain't ye heard, then? They found gold, over to the Pacific coast! That's right — gold! Reckon they're pickin' it up fast as they can shovel! Why, they say it's in lumps big as your fist — more gold'n anyone's ever seen before! Gold — in California!"28
5
We landed all our slaves at Roatan, herding them down into the big lighters where the Dago overseers packed them in like sheep, while Spring conducted business aft of the mizzen-mast with half a dozen brokers who had come aboard. A big awning had been rigged up, and Mrs Spring dispensed tea and biscuits to those who wanted it — which meant to Spring himself and to a wizened little Frenchman in a long taffeta coat and wideawake hat, who perched on a stool sipping daintily from his cup while a nigger boy stood behind fanning the flies off him, The other brokers were three greasy Dagoes in dirty finery who drank rum, a big Dutchman with a face like a suet pudding who drank gin punch, and a swarthy little Yankee who drank nothing at all.
They had all made a quick tour of the slave-deck before it was cleared, and when they bickered and bid with Spring, the Dagoes jabbering and getting excited, the other three mighty calm and business-like. In the end they divided the six hundred among them, at an average price of nine dollars a pound — which came to somewhere between seven and eight hundred thousand dollars for the cargo. No money changed hands; nothing was signed; no receipts were sought or given. Spring simply jotted details down in a note-book — and I daresay that after that the only transactions that took place would be the transfer of bills and orders in perfectly respectable banks in Charlestown, New York, Rio and London,
The niggers we landed would be resold, some to plantation owners along the Main, but most of them into the United States, when smugglers could be found to beat the American blockade and sell them in Mobile and New Orleans at three times what we had been paid for them. When you calculate that the trade cargo we'd given to King Gezo, through Sanchez, had been worth maybe a couple of thousand pounds — well, no wonder the slave trade throve in the forties.29
I said we sold all our slaves, but in fact we kept Lady Caroline Lamb. Spring had decided that if I persevered with her instruction in English, she would be worth keeping as an interpreter for later voyages — such slaves were immensely valuable, and we had actually made our last trip without one. I didn't mind; it would help pass the time, and I felt somehow that it was a feather in my cap.
To her Spring also added about a dozen mustee and quadroon girls sent aboard by the brokers, who wanted them shipped to America where they were destined for the New Orleans brothels. Spring agreed for a consideration to take them as far as Havana, where we were to load cargo for our homeward trip. These yellow wenches were quite different from the blacks we had carried, being graceful, delicate creatures of the kind they called "fancy pieces", for use as domestic slaves, I'd have traded twenty Lady Caroline Lamb's for any one of them, but there was no chance of that. They weren't chained, being so few and not the kind who would make trouble anyway.
We didn't linger in Roatan. Slaves from the barracoons came aboard with a load of lime and scoured out the slave-deck, and then we warped out of the bay to cleaner water, and the pumps and hoses washed out the shelves for twenty-four hours before Spring was satisfied. As one of the hands remarked, you could have eaten your dinner off it — not that I'd have cared to, myself. After that we made sail, due north for the Yucatan Passage, and for the first time, I think, since I'd first set foot on that d––d ship, I began to feel easy in my mind. It was no longer a slaver, I felt — well, give or take the few yellows we were carrying — we had turned the corner, and now there was only Havana and the run home. Why, in two or three months, or perhaps even less, I would be in England again, the Bryant affair — how trivial it seemed now ! — would be blown over, I would be able to see Elspeth — by jove, I would be a father by then! Somebody would be, anyway — but I'd get the credit, at least, Suddenly I began to feel excited, and the Dahomey Coast and the horrors of that jungle river were like a nightmare that had never truly happened. England, and Elspeth, and peace of mind, and — what else? Well, I'd see about that when the time came.
I should have known better, of course. Whenever I'm feeling up to the mark and congratulating myself, some fearful fate trips me headlong, and I find myself haring for cover with my guts churning and Nemesis in full cry after me. In this case Nemesis was a dandy little sloop flying the American colours that came up out of the south-west when we were three days out of Roatan and had Cuba clear on our starboard bow. That was nothing in itself; Spring put on more sail and we held our own, scudding north-east. And then, out from behind Cape San Antonio, a bare two miles ahead, comes a brig with the Stars and Stripes fluttering at her peak, and there we were, caught between them, unable to fly and — in my case, anyway — most unwilling to fight.
But not John Charity Spring. He turned the Balliol College on her heel and tried to race the sloop westward, but on this tack she came up hand over fist, and presently from her bow-gun comes a plume of smoke, and a shot kicked up the blue water off our port bow.
"Clear for action!" bawls he, and with Sullivan roaring about the deck they ran out the guns while the little sloop came tearing up and sends another shot across our bows.
Now, in my experience there is only one way to fight a ship, and that is to get below on the side opposite to the enemy and find a snug spot behind a stout bulkhead. I was down the main hatch before the first crash of our own guns, and found myself on the slave-deck with a dozen screaming yellow wenches cowering in the corners. I made great play ordering them to keep quiet and settle down, while overhead the guns thundered again, and there came a hideous crash and tearing somewhere forward where one of the Yankee's shots had gone home. The wenches shrieked and I roared at them and waved my sheath-knife; one of them ran screaming across the tilting deck, her hands over her face, and I grabbed hold of her — a fine lithe piece she was, too, and I was taking my time manhandling her back to her fellows when Sullivan stuck his head through the hatch crying: