"They do, sir. They call them Maroons," Winwood answered.
"Do you believe that Captain Lewrie is a thief, Mister Winwood? One who received stolen property for his own use, sir?"
"No, sir. In this instance, I would call him a Christian gentleman," the Sailing Master somberly replied, turning to look the men of the jury in the eyes. "You might as well put me on trial, for what we did that night… I only wish we'd had a ship of the line, 'stead of a frigate, in need of hands, and taken all of them away."
MacDougall paced back towards the Defence table, but paused in midstride and whipped about. "One last question of you, sir… If, under Jamaican slave law, the Blacks in this matter stole themselves, who, then, used them for his own purposes, Mister Winwood… Captain Alan Lewrie, or King George the Third, in whose service twelve brave Black men willingly volunteered, and five of whom have perished?"
"Now, I must object, milud!" Sir George Norman cried, shooting to his feet, roused from his nodding stupor at last. "The witness is a Warrant Officer in the Navy, not a legal scholar, and cannot form a legal judgement, in the first instance, and… for honoured counsel for the Defence to suggest that his Majesty shares any guilt in this crime is abominable and shameful, in the second!"
"Withdrawn, my lord," MacDougall offered, hiding his amusement. "I have no more questions for this witness."
"The insult to the Crown, milud!" Sir George pressed.
"Mister MacDougall," Lord Justice Oglethorpe said with a dyspeptic scowl or warning, "you are known for frippery in court, but let me caution you to eschew any suggestion of lиse-majestй against our Sovereign."
"The question is withdrawn, my lord," MacDougall said, looking a trifle hurt, like a boy caught skylarking and called down for it. "An injudicious phrase, when the proper statement might have been the Royal Navy, or Great Britain, which prospered from the services of the sailors in question, rather than our King. I stand admonished, milord."
"Very well, then. You have more witnesses?" Oglethorpe asked.
"I do, my lord."
"It is now nearly a quarter to twelve," the Lord Justice said, "so we shall adjourn for dinner. Proceedings shall resume this afternoon, at half past one."
"All rise!" the chief bailiff intoned.
Once Oglethorpe had left the courtroom, Lewrie came down from the raised and railed dock to join MacDougall, who was shedding his peruke and putting it in a small wood box, and shrugging out of his robes. "A deuced good morning, sir," MacDougall told him, all smiles and high spirits. "A splendid beginning. Imagine! A trial that will take all day, why, we'll be the talk of the town by supper, and atop the front pages of all the papers by tomorrow morning, ha ha! Hungry, are you, Captain Lewrie? There's a delightful chop-house not a five minutes' stroll from here."
"Aye, I s'pose," Lewrie allowed. "You think we did well?"
"Extremely well, sir," MacDougall was quick to assure him, with a Puckish grin.
"I thought just laying out how we… committed the deed, just like that," Lewrie fretted, "would doom us. Me."
"As I shall tell the jury this afternoon, Captain Lewrie, was the deed an act of criminality… or, was it a deed of liberation? I will fill the afternoon with the testimony of your Black sailors, and there will not be a dry eye in the courtroom, once I'm done. Not one stony heart unmoved. Ready, Mister Sadler? Shall we go, then, for I am famished."
Lewrie fingered a breeches pocket to assure himself that his coin purse was still present, and that it was suitably stuffed with a sufficiency of bank notes and coins, enough to bear the cost of dinner with such imposing trenchermen as MacDougall and Sadler. No matter the financial support of the Abolitionists, and other "Progressives," for his legal expenses (and all those visual aids), dealing with attorneys was a dear business.
"As a matter of fact, Captain Lewrie," MacDougall said as he stowed away his court wear, "I am so sanguine about the rest of the day that, this once, allow me to treat."
Lewrie's jaw, it here must be noted, dropped rather far.
CHAPTER FOUR
The afternoon's testimony indeed turned out to be emotional and dramatic as Mr. MacDougall put all seven surviving Black sailors in the witness box, and led each of them first through their wretched lives as chattel slaves in the West Indies, and on the Beauman plantation in particular, then about their flight, their reception aboard Capt. Lewrie's frigate, and their experiences in the Royal Navy, since.
Shoddy clothing, if clothed at all; the poorest, meanest rations of condemned salt-beef or salt-pork, bug-infested rice, and but a few fresh greens or vegetables, with even so-called holiday victuals of a barely unremitted sameness, for even the rare duffs or puddings were, though cooked on a sugar cane plantation, sadly lacking in sweetness. How prime field hands, sleek when first they came from the slave ships and the vendue houses, wasted away to skin, gristle, and bones before three years were out… which was considered a bargain by unfeeling masters, considering the sad, low price placed on a human being they'd initially paid. There were always ships arriving with healthy slaves from Africa, the barracks and pens were continually full, and prices for people were nigh as low as those for cattle.
Crude huts for shelters, leaf-stuffed sacks for bedding on the dirt floors at night, exposed round the clock to insects and weather; up before the sun to the tolling of bells and the crack of whips, poor victuals choked down after being scooped by hand from communal pots, then back-breaking labour 'til the sun was all but set, with only one brief break in the shade for a miser's dinner.
And whips, and chains, and choke-collar boards round their necks for the slightest act of mis-behaviour, hot irons to brand recalcitrant shirkers; hot irons to sear the tongue from those who dared speak back without being asked a question, or for the merest suspicion of lying to an overseer, master, or mistress.
Poisonous snakes had been imported from Africa and India, turned loose in the surrounding forests to make sure that slaves wouldn't dare run off without risking a "five-stepper" death.
For the slow, the slow-witted, or lazy, for those who broke the poor tools they were given, for hiding a cane-cutting machete or knife, there was the whipping post, where the lashes were doled out capriciously; thirty for this sin, fifty for another, perhaps an hundred for the same offence at the whim of the overseer's imagination, with age or sex no assurance of leniency.
And slave women… the young, firm, and handsome were masters' prey, overseers' perquisites. In the fields, in the huts after dark, it was just rape, when drunken sons of slave-masters and their friends or cousins felt like it, and the mother, the father, the lover who objected in the slightest laid himself open to pure torture, and no one could lift a hand to rescue the young girls. After all, slave children quickened by White men fetched more when auctioned off, and made lighter skinned, less-African-featured house servants-to-be.
Did house servants have it slightly better? Of a certainty, but they paid a high price. Did slave women, mothers against their will, hope that their offspring might be "bright" enough to be spared field work? Of course. If girls, though, planters' sons desired them more.
Did anyone ever preach the Gospel to them? Only the snippets from Saint Paul's letters that urged, "Slaves, behave your masters."
"And, since signing articles aboard Proteus," MacDougall asked the wiry young George Rodney, who had been a spry topman and a sharpshooter, "did Captain Lewrie ever put you, or any of the other volunteers to any work in his great-cabins? To wait upon his table, buff his boots, do his laundry? Anything like that?"
"Nossuh, he nevah did. Wull, Jones Nelson be in 'is boat crew, but dat 'coz he big un' strong oarsman. Be a run-out tackleman on de twelve-poundah'r eighteen poundah'r, sah."