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Title: The slave ship
Author: Mary Johnston
Release date: August 23, 2026 [eBook #79439]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1924
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79439
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SLAVE SHIP ***
THE SLAVE SHIP
By Mary Johnston
SILVER CROSS
1492
CROATAN
THE SLAVE SHIP
THE
SLAVE SHIP
_By_
MARY JOHNSTON
[Illustration]
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1924
_Copyright, 1924_,
BY MARY JOHNSTON.
_All rights reserved_
Published November, 1924
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
THE SLAVE SHIP
THE SLAVE SHIP
CHAPTER I
It was after Culloden. Though I, David Scott, was an unimportant person
yet I lay in the Tolbooth, in Edinburgh, with my betters. I was a young
man--twenty-two. I had fought for the Stuarts at Prestonpans, Falkirk
and Culloden, without the least question that I can remember arising in
my mind, that being the politics of my chief and my family and nearer
acquaintance. Now I made as little question that I would not lie there
in irons if I could help it. No, nor be shipped to Barbados or Virginia
if I missed hanging!
I loosened a clamped bit of iron from the wall and turned it into a
file.
It was dark night, a week later, when I got free. Dark and stormy and
chill--in June, I guessed. I lifted the stanchels from the window and
laid them all quietly upon the floor. Then I got through, and it was
narrow indeed, that window, but I was thin enough from little fare
and much misery. Got through and held by my hands for a moment, and
dropped, and I knew that there was deep depth and I might break my legs.
I did not so, but I was sair bruised and shaken, and I thought I heard
all around me whistles and calls, “He’s out! After him!” I crawled
across the narrow, narrow lane to a buttress of Saint Giles and lay
there shivering until I made out that it was only wind and rain and
my own heart pumping in my ears and that my bones were not broken. A
bell struck the middle night. I started up and began to weave around
that church, close to the abutments, skirting the shops built against
the wall. Every half-minute I looked toward Tolbooth. It was a wild
night, with gusts of wind and rain and strange sulphurous lights racing
through the clouds and at moments raising into an eerie quarter-light
Giles above me and that black mass I was leaving, and other tall, grim
houses of Auld Reekie. “A witches’ night!” I thought and wished I had a
broomstick to fly over the Luckenbooths and away. I was ragged and cold
and dizzied with hunger.
A fancied sound made me stand, scarce breathing, against the wall.
The sound proved nothing, but while I stood there I had a vision.
Gone was Edinburgh, gone the witches’ night. I saw and I breathed
and I knew, and yet could give no name nor circumstance, a blue salt
sea that rolled its long waves against a shore of dazzling sand. The
surf was high and strong and white; on the burning sand lay a row of
sharp-prowed, narrow boats; the sand stretched on and was met by palm
trees, I that had never seen palm trees knowing them well enough.
Stretched on and met palm trees, and a great mass of white masonry,
wall and gateway and turret, and a strange kind of keep rising behind,
and over all drooping an English banner. And I knew it and I didn’t
know it, and in a moment it was gone, and this was Edinburgh on a wild
night, and young David Scott, an escaping prisoner, with o’ermuch of
practical matters before him to spend time with visions. Scots folk are
liable to vision. Scots folk are baith the salt of the earth and the
dung of the earth. Scots know the hills of heaven and the pits of hell.
And there is a Debatable Land, but no Scots, I think, stay there long.
Young David Scott was already, I know, on his way across, to the side
of the dark.
This night in the material dark, in the material town, I had a goal
that was no more nor less than Sandy Scott’s small house on the
outskirts. If I could win there Sandy would hide me. I did it, stealing
and stopping and now and then running, through the witches’ night.
Crossing High Street, all the tall houses seemed to flare lights and
shout at me. Later, two men did rise to question me. But, “What are
_ye_ doing out at sic an hour, on sic a night? I’ve an honest
airrand, but I misdoubt yours--an’ I think I hear the Watch!” With
that, they turned quick their heads to listen, and I dived into
Willy’s Wynd, and worked through that into Auld Man’s Wynd, and so
pursued my journey.
An hour before the dawn I was at Sandy Scott’s and threw a clod against
his window. He was a cautious man, but at last he let me in.
“What good will it do you if two are hangit?”
“It isn’t a question of hanging but of slaving in Virginia. I’ve seen
it where I’m put down ‘Young and misguided.’ Let me lie in your barn,
Sandy, and if I’m tracked you can swear you didn’t know it.”
“If my name were Campbell that would pass. But it’s Scott.”
“Aye, I came on that. Let me in, man, let me in!”
For the better part of a week I lay in his small, small loft amid old
hay, and at night the cow munching and sighing below. Sandy brought
me food, and each morn a drop of rum, and at night the news. “They’re
speiring for you!”--“Jock Andrew at the Cannongate tauld me he saw ten
soldiers had seized a laddie, thinkin’ ’twas you.”--“Now they’re saying
a Dutch ship left Leith and you may ha’ swam out to her--and it seems
to me a ship’s the best you can hope--and I wad gae at once!”
But I was not determined. I did not want to go to sea, nor to a foreign
land--not yet! There was a glen that I wanted.
It was dull lying there upon the hay with a little light streaking
through a handsbreadth opening. On the second day I twisted around at a
noise and there, coming up the ladder, was Sandy’s wife, a pale young
woman with a kirk look. “I hae brought you,” she said, “the Book. It
maun be sair lying with naught tae do but picturing gibbets!” With that
she gave me a brown volume and shook her head and descended the ladder.
Well, I had the Book, and there’s no denying that reading made the
time pass. And that is all it did for me then--made the time pass.
I was turning from the light even then, David Scott at twenty-two,
foregathering with ancient, ancient cronies of the cave!
So I lay there and read about King David from the time he watched the
sheep and slew the giant until he died in Jerusalem. There was Jonathan
and the cave of Adullam, and the water that his men brought him, and
Michal, Saul’s daughter, and Abigail and Ahinoam, and Bathsheba the
wife of Uriah, and at the last Abishag the Shunnamite. And then I read
of King Solomon. And I read Ruth and Esther, and Haman’s gibbet made me
see the hugeous gallows in the Grasmarket built for them who had fought
for a Stuart, and the head on the spike atop the Tolbooth, and the legs
and arms of “traitors” nailed above the Leith Port. It darkened while I
saw all that until I could no longer read, and I lay there cold in the
straw and ached for vengeance. Off and on during the night, which was
wakeful, I saw these things, and when I started from dreams I knew that
I had been killing. Hawley first, and then all Hanoverians. They were
against me and thought they were victors; they were making me and mine
suffer, suffer terribly; they were altogether hateful and unworthy to
live! I killed them. Lying awake, panting a little, I still killed. And
as for the Stuart Cause, it was Ours and therefore exquisitely right.
I slept and when again I waked was rid of that frenzy, but felt hard
and dour. Dawn came in coldly, viewed from that strain between boards,
in Sandy Scott’s barn.
Mysie Johnston--that was why I wanted to go west from Edinburgh,
not east to any boat upon the salt, sair sea. Mysie Johnston--Mysie
Johnston.
Saying and feeling that brought me away from the evil anger and the
caked and frozen mood. Mysie, Mysie, Mysie, Mysie, Mysie!
The glen would be green now, and all the birds singing. We would walk
there, and our arms would be about each other. Mysie, Mysie, Mysie,
Mysie, Mysie! _And I will be a better man. And I will be a better
man!_
So I thought, and maybe so I would. But I never saw Mysie Johnston
again--not in the outer world, not in the outer!
For the fourth morning they took me. That very night to come I was to
leave the barn and Sandy, for we thought, poor fools! that the search
was given o’er. A neighbor--and I mistrust that neighbor!--had told
him that a sergeant of Cope’s had told Phemie Nicholson that they had
tracked me to the waterside at Leith.--Sandy had a decent suit for me,
and I would foot it to a laird I knew beyond Melrose, who might give
me a horse and an errand west. For my name now, it was Will Anderson,
a good Whig name. Once in that glen that I kenned I might blithely
hide the summer through. After that it was just possible that the ill
wind that was blowing so fiercely might quiet down. In other words the
_wrong side_ might tire of hanging and drawing and quartering and
sending over seas in irons. So many “mights” and so many “ifs”, and it
all came to naught, and I had Mysie only in dreams, and after a time
the dreams died away.
Well, there I lay in the loft, quiet enough, and to wile the time read
of Daniel in the lions’ den, and about King Belshazzar and the hand
that wrote on the wall--when suddenly there was Sandy’s wife with
a white, white face and world’s end in her voice. “They’re hauding
him--they’re hauding Sandy by the aik tree! Five soldiers--they’re
coming!”
With that she slipped down the ladder, and the next minute I heard her
singing at her work, for all as if there was never but one party in
the world and that God’s party.
“O God, do thou raise up thyself,
The earth to judgment call;
For thou, as thine inheritance,
Shall take the nations all.”
I made a burrow deep in the hay and covered myself and the Book and lay
there stifling with a drumming heart. I remember--I remember! I clasped
that Book, and I cried, _but not aloud_, “O I was reading Ye!
If Ye are, save me now, save me and Mysie! And Ye will not let Sandy
suffer that’s doing a friend’s part. Save! Save!”
But they came into the barn. I heard them below, and one mounted the
ladder. “It’s dusk as sin up here!” Below him said another, “Look
out that he doesn’t dirk you through the hay!” The first, at that,
contented himself with a small trampling that did not bring him where
I lay under the eaves. Presently he spoke. “Time lost to toss all this
stuff aside! Easiest to fire it, and that’s what we’ll do. If he’s here
he’ll come out, and if he isn’t it won’t be Holyrood that’s burnt!”
He went down the ladder. Presently I smelled the brand. I came out.
They had taken away the ladder, so I held by my hands and dropped from
the loft, flame singing now in my ears. The lower room was filled with
smoke; through it I could just see them without the door, waiting for
the tod smoked out. I had no weapon. Out I came, helpless as the tod. I
was big and strong--“Big David Scott”--But what was that against five
armed men? If I turned wolf from tod and sprang at their throats, then
more surely still Hawley’s gallows in the Grasmarket! I walked out of
the barn, hands up.
Oh, waly, waly, waly, Mysie Johnston!
The Tolbooth opened once more and swallowed me. I lay there two months
expecting hanging. To this day I do not know the truth of my escaping
that death. Some influence somewhere, but whose it was I do not know.
Mysie had not the strength. Maybe after all it was God. But lying there
in the dungeon that was for folk like me, for big, strong young men
who broke gaol, I cursed God and was glad his book was burned in that
burning barn.
In August I was taken from prison and marched with five Jacobites,
young and middle-aged men, to Leith and set aboard the brig, _King
William_, bound for Virginia and carrying thither a great parcel of
poor men signed for servants to planters, and we six who had not signed
but who natheless went.
CHAPTER II
If you’ve been for what seems a lifetime in a black and narrow place,
sky and sea, salt air and sunshine make you drunk and childish happy
and childish sad. Even if you’re leaving your land forever--even if
you’re leaving a loved lass. Just for a time it turns you a bairn--just
for a time!
There was a man upon the _King William_ who bulks in my memory.
Morrison was his name, Gervase Morrison; he had a lank but stately
figure and a face too early withered, was from London or thereabouts
and ten years my senior.
The _King William_ was no Scotch ship but an English one from
Hull, owned by merchants of that place. Captain and crew were King
George men, and King George men the three score and upward who for
reasons of wretchedness had signed papers to go and be sold in
Virginia for five years, receiving after that time freedom and certain
perquisites and opportunities. We six Scots were upon this ship the
only willy-nilly men, transported and sold without any “by your leave”,
or a set term of years. We alone wore outward shackles.
We wore them for ten days until England and France were behind us. Then
said the master of the ship, “Pass me your word that you’ll make no
trouble and you may go like the others!” We passed it, the six of us,
and we were named Alan McGregor, James MacLeod, Alan MacLean, Fergus
Ross, Alexander Gordon and David Scott. That captain comes to me across
the years as a decent man, short and red and bluff and well-spoken.
The mates and the crew were not so bad either. But those English
merchants had sair crowded the brig and had laid in for their
merchandise but scant and wretched food. Most of their bondsmen were
very young, youths of the poorest condition, scraped from field and
village. Four or five had taken a loaf or a coat or a guinea, and might
have been hanged but had mercy shown them after this manner. The rest
seemed honest enough, but some were dull and few had any learning. Yet
there might be found those who had been to school and were born to
better estate, but had come down in the world. Such an one was that
stately man, Gervase Morrison.
Even before we were free of our shackles he had marked us out for talk.
At last, I know not why, he settled upon me. The weather held good,
else we had had a horrid time, packed like herrings below. But the
master said, “For health, stay in the air!” and morning, noon and night
we lay like fruit upon the decks. Morrison came and sat beside me.
“So I suppose you drink to one over the water, and Jamie and Chairlie
are your favorite names!”
I said, “There’s not a drop of drink aboard, and that’s a sair loss!”
“It is,” he answered and politely cursed those merchants of Hull who
treated human beings as though they were casks of tobacco.
“I know how I got here,” I said. “But how did you?”
He told me. He was younger son of a good family, had gone to Oxford and
worshipped knowledge. But it was that very drink that killed him--drink
and the cards. Three years ago he had reformed. Only in a sty like this
would he really look at a bottle of port or a puncheon of rum--only
there was none here to look at! As for gaming he touched it no more,
only looked on over others’ shoulders. But the devil was that he had no
means and was about to starve. No one gave and no one lent, and as for
earning, “I wrote for a bookseller. It was then that I grew so lank,
and this suit is my only one.” The end was that he met a man who was
gathering poor youths to go to Virginia. “I was not a youth but I was
damned poor. I would be a rare figure in a tobacco field, and so I told
him, but then he pulled out a letter from a rich planter who wanted
sent him a man with education to be clerk or what not. Five years’
service, well fed and lodged and apparelled, and at the end a start
in life, and a determined man might do anything and mount fast in the
New World! I was tired of my bookseller and the Old World. Here is my
Indenture.” And he tapped a paper in his breast pocket.
“You’re luckier than me,” I said. “I’ll be at the tobacco, and for all
I ken for the rest of my life.”
He turned a little--he was seated upon a coil of rope--and studied me.
“You’ll run away,” he said and took snuff. He had a very good snuffbox,
and in a bundle a number of small belongings that marked him off from
the rustics around. Among them were a dozen small books, poets and
Latin authors. In large part I read the first, borrowing from him from
week to week of that weary while upon the _King William_. But now
he said, “You’ll run away,” and helped himself to snuff.
For David Scott, he looked at the green seas thrust from the bow of the
ship, and at the piled canvas and the blue sky above. “Where to?” I
asked.
He did not say and what came to me did not wait upon him. What came was
again that vision of the black night between Saint Giles and Tolbooth.
It came like the levin, unearthly clear. Ocean bluer than this ocean,
white sand, strange, narrow boats, palm trees, and a pile of whitened
building, wall and keep. What it was and where it was I had no idea at
all, _but I saw it_. It departed like the levin.
“Where to?” I repeated, without well knowing what I said.
“God knows!” answered Gervase Morrison. “I am not well acquainted with
the geographical _minutiæ_ of our country to be!”
In truth, however, he had a great fund of knowledge and he liked to
give it to any listening ear, prisoner of war, Hodge from the plough,
or Tyburn Tom, as the case might be. Or all three together. He was out
of the bonds of gentry but into those of the learned man, given to
philosophizing and to relating as he saw it the history of the world.
He saw it somewhat darkly, with an acid interest that never went so far
as to interfere. I listened to him fitfully, staring between times at
the sea and my own unhappiness.
I remember another day. A red sun was burning down to the sea,
setting a path of fire and blood. There was a listening ten of us
and he discoursed on Poverty and the heavy hand of old Law. He had
a dry, didactic way that took the edge off his startling things. It
was November wind in dry leaves, accomplishing little. Now he said
“Slavery”, but the word did not groan.
“Slavery! And isn’t there sufficient slavery in Europe? We don’t
precisely have to seek it out in America, in red and black folk, though
I won’t deny a certain exaggeration of it in those colors.”
A weaver began to curse and swear. “No, we don’t have to seek it here!”
Morrison went on. “Greece and Rome knew all about slavery, and all
times and countries since. Before and since. It’s only the foolish who
don’t see that men are slaves in England! The four winds blow over
slaves and have always blown up and down time. What does it matter what
they are called? I’ve heard of Russia and I’ve been in Italy and Spain
and the Low Countries and France, to say nothing of the British Isles.
Always the same. Slaver and enslaved, however they trim the name! ‘I
want to ride--it’s right that _I_ should ride--let me ride on
you!’ Through time. They change places. Now the slave is master and the
master slave. But the precious model remains!” He laughed. “That’s the
jib and cut of the good ship, _Society_!”
A young boy who was listening said, “It’s so and not so.”
“You can’t make that out. It’s so!”
As he spoke he stared round, and I followed him and saw two-score
examplars and instances. Again David Scott blasphemed. “It’s the Nature
of Life. _His_ doing, if _He’s_ up there!”
“Oh, I don’t think _He’s_ up there! _He’s_ gone out--like a
candle!”
That pleased me. “Yes! Like a candle!”
It never occurred to me to dispute what he said about the Ship that Man
had built and was sailing. I saw it and I hardened. If it was so, then
let it be so! _But it was pleasanter to ride than to be ridden._
He considered the sun and then said further, “It is true that it is
bottom as well as top. The bottom man will have his woman and his dog,
and if ever he creeps to the top thinks of no other course for the
ship!”
The sun went down so red! The path over the sea stretched so sinister,
so red. It faded and there came velvet blackness and the sorrowful
stars.
CHAPTER III
After seven weeks of tossing sea we saw the capes of Virginia, Cape
Henry and Cape Charles, and the _King William_ passed between
into that vast bay called Chesapeake. And now the agent of the Hull
owners aboard, Mr. Ransom, grew mighty busy. All of his cargo must be
freshened and heartened and persuaded with honied words, or drubbed
with hard ones, into looking healthy and smiling. It had been easier
work if his merchants had fed us and if there had not been so much
sickness from spoiled food and from the laithly crowding. Alas, David
Scott, and it taught you little!
But the land looked good after the salt foam, for few of the
merchandise were seamen. And they were young, and change is change. And
they understood, so many of them being parish poor, that it was better
go meet a master with a smile.
As for us six Scots, we had consulted. We meant devil-may-care! So we
laughed at the others and cracked our jokes. But it came with a shock
when, Fergus Ross having remarked to Mr. Ransom that he trusted some
rich planter meant to buy the whole of us, the agent, a cold man,
stopped in his going to and fro. “That’s not to be! Orders are, one
to one master. You’re plotters and we’ll have in Virginia no plots!
You’re rebels and we’ll scatter you! Moreover, back on you go the irons
till you’re sold.”
Angus Ross lengthened, then shortened, his face. “And not that shall
make me look sick and sorry, though your Whig world is the Devil’s
pleasant seat!”
“And what, may it please you,” asked the agent, “would have been your
Tory world? And I’ll tell you that. The Devil himself!”
So they had it. And we six wore irons again, wearing them already of
Party, as did the agent and others.
The land showed low and in part covered with forest, much of it being
pine. It was the autumn, and oaks and other drop-leaves stood in flames
of red and gold. We saw marshes turning tawny, and above them and above
the water flashed endlessly the sea birds. On the northern side the
great passage, sprang a jut of land with a fort. Morrison spoke behind
me. “Point Comfort, the Captain saith, where they landed first in
sixteen hundred and seven.”
Angus Ross asked, “Were there any kindly Scots?”
“I think not. They came on the next ship.”
“There are plenty now!” That was Billings the mate, passing us.
But we six, Highland and Lowland, young men, and our chains galling us
and our company soon to be parted, felt Loneliness and Exile. They
rose, gigantic dark shadows, from this low, strange country, where we
saw no mountain nor even a goodly hill, where there grew, they said,
neither gorse nor heather. When the ship came to Point Comfort and
dropped anchor before the fort, and the Captain went ashore in a boat
with his papers for clearance, we crowded with the others to mark that
place and the no great life about it, but Point Comfort gave our hearts
little comfort.
David Scott felt a kind of dread upon him. Twenty-two, and an overseer
and a tobacco field for one who loved the high glen and Mysie Johnston!
Back came the Captain. Weighing anchor, the _King William_ stood
into the River James that measured seven miles from shore to shore.
The cargo had never seen such a river. Presently we passed a rude town
named Norfolk with no little shipping lying in the roads before it.
By sunset we were a score of miles up stream, into the land. The land
was always low, and here stretched forest and here showed clearings
and brown fields and solitary good-sized houses with clusters of small
houses a-near, and running far into the stream thin, gray “landings”
like skeleton fingers. So broad was the river, we keeping in midstream,
that we missed the life of fields and road and wharf. All to us had
a melancholy spareness,--vast distances and the much forest and the
yellow, enormous river. The clearings were chiefly upon the northern
shore. There were a few ships upon the river or anchored about the
landings, and we saw cockle boats with gray handsbreadths of sail
and oared craft. But taken all together, to us, bondsmen and from
an ancient country, for all the beauty of the air and beauty of the
colored trees, loneliness and a melancholy spareness! The sun went down
behind long, long bars of purple cloud. The _King William_ came
to anchor for the night, and the ship’s lanterns made other lanterns
in the water, and the slow-marching stars, for all they kept the old
formation, seemed an alien host from them at home.
With sunrise rose another mood. Sick, sick, we were heartily sick
of the ship! Any land that we might come to still was earth, and
adventures might be predicated. In short, as the sails were made,
as the sailors with their chantey raised the anchor, as the river
turned red-gold, as the fresh wind filled our nostrils and the gulls
screamed about the ship, as the cook served us a far better breakfast
than usual, and the Captain sent forward with his compliments a small
measure of rum for each man, we became the courageous soldiers of
Novelty. When a canoe with Indians passed us we crowded to the side and
exclaimed at the raree show.
Now a good wind took us farther up that wide river, and still in the
early, gay morning, we sighted Jamestown that was our destination.
We six Jacobites stood together.
Our lot seemed the hardest upon that ship. The others had determined
periods. Five years, even seven years, pass! But for all we knew we
might never be our own men again, opposite us standing an infuriated
Monarch and Party that might reign, if not forever, still until earth
covered us. We wore irons, were marked “dangerous” as though we were
powder flasks beside a fire. The comfort of company, alikes together,
was going from us. Those around us seemed better off.
But David Scott, looking at those youths peaked and early wizened, or
dull, sodden, branded by ceaseless, hopeless labor, or fever-bitten,
restless and weakly turbulent, felt a sudden pride and glory in “big
David Scott.” So perhaps did Angus Ross in Angus Ross and MacLean in
MacLean and MacLeod in MacLeod. Pride and glory of the body!
That Jamestown enlarged before us, and it seemed but three or four
brick houses and a bit tower as of a church, and a landing, and around
this sloops and small boats. It seemed, at tide at least, an island,
and it was shady with great trees, green and yellow and crimson.
Morrison stood beside me.
“Here beginneth a new chapter. Rather a pretty place! Well, English
made it and here come English to it--English and Scots. As to
indentures and seven years’ service and so forth, we’ve known all that
since Father Jacob served Laban. Earlier still, I make no doubt! It’s
venerable--can be defended. As to you six, mercy has been shown you.
Mercy is venerable too.”
“There’s something in a book I once read about ‘the tender mercies of
the wicked.’--The wicked! Well, I’m that and will be that too!”
“Is that what you Scots name second sight?”
“I dinna ken----”
“It’s a pity,” said Morrison. “I have ‘kenned’ it as you say, also.
Kenned wickedness. It doesn’t pay. It’s never paid.--But I’m no
preacher. I’m only a ‘sair’ piece of shipwreck that says, ‘Look out!’”
As though he were echoed, the mate cried “Look out!” and the anchor,
rattling down, clutched the bed of the River James. The bare masts
and spars and rigging of the _King William_ gently rose and fell
against a bluebell sky. We were riding close to the landing that was
crowded with folk, and boats were putting off to us.
“Those are gentlemen of the country,” explained Mr. Ransom, “coming off
to buy you lusty fellows! Range yourselves, and remember that the worst
thing that can happen to you is not to be liked! Look at yourselves
when five and seven years are over and be smiling and brisk!”
A good big boat was speeding toward us. Negroes rowed her and the cargo
of the _King William_ who had never seen such before stared as at
a dark miracle. “Negroes! Why did God make them black? Have they got
souls?”
“Black men and red men and yellow men and white men, that’s the way
they mount in importance----”
“The saints and the angels are white. All the ruling people in heaven
are white. There couldn’t be yellow or red or brown or black angels----”
“Maybe they have half-souls. Dogs and horses have quarter-souls. Look
at that big one laughing!”
The boat came closer and there were three white men seated in the
stern. One, the tallest and biggest, had a gold-braided hat and a fine
coat.
“That’s one of the first gentry,” quoth Mr. Ransom, “and probably a
heavy purchaser. That’s Colonel Amory.”
“Indeed!” said Morrison. “Then I’m to keep his books. Well, he looks
polite enough! Hardly an ogre.”
So far from that was he that one and all preferred to be bought by
him. Even when other boats arrived and other planters, most of them
well enough looking, much like English squires and Scots lairds.
But he bought only three men beside Morrison who was already his
consignment,--that quite young boy who had said that the world was both
so and not so, a ditcher and woodchopper named Dick Merry, and that
Culloden man, David Scott.
CHAPTER IV
He had a handsome, cheerful countenance--Colonel Amory--and a genial
voice. He talked a deal and talked well, was a three-bottle man and
gallant with women, a hunter, a dead shot, admirable with a horse and
a dog and an obedient Negro, an out-of-doors man, yet with a taste
for politics, a vestryman, a member of the Governor’s Council, and a
possessor of books which sometimes he read and sometimes only talked
of reading. A part of all this David Scott had opportunities for
observing, and another part was told him by others.
Axeman during the winter, clearing land for tobacco; man of the tobacco
fields so soon as spring set in; in the fields the hot, hot summer
long, roused at dawn, worked till eve, dead with sleep before the
evening star had sunk--as little as any laborer at home did I have
touch around the circle of Colonel Amory’s life. But since I had had
some knowledge of laird’s life, squire’s life, lord of the manor’s
life, across the sea, I reckoned well enough how this southern, new
land, life of easy business, ran straight or meandered through the
year. It had a fairness and ease and a good nature, and the good nature
was for all so long as all swung to the commanded music; and the ease
was the hunter’s ease with good dogs around; and as for the fairness,
in small matters it tripped forward, but in large it always curtseyed
to the heathenish law. But almost every one thought him--and he thought
himself--a kind master, not seeing that to be master at all was the
trouble.
Big David Scott cut down trees for Colonel Amory, to clear Colonel
Amory’s land, to plant Colonel Amory’s tobacco that would freight the
_King William_ and other ships to England, that would be sold,
that would buy more young men to clear more land for Colonel Amory. The
years pass slow when one is young.
Up the river, a few miles from Williamsburg, lay Amory Hall. Land
and land, some thousands of acres, the “great house”, the various
“quarters”--Pine Tree quarter, Big Spring quarter, Indian quarter, Old
Mill quarter--the barns and tobacco houses and offices of kinds, the
two overseers’ houses, the mill and smithy and other workshops, the
store, the creek landing, the river landing--that was Amory Hall. The
fields were tobacco and maize and a small amount of wheat and other
grains, but tobacco, tobacco, tobacco overtopped and overspread. The
great house stood two miles from my quarter, Old Mill quarter. I rarely
saw it close at hand--a good-sized brick house, like many in England,
with trees and shrubs and flowers about it. All day, all those blazing
summer days in shadeless fields, the trees looked so good!
At Old Mill were twenty men. Much the smallest quarter and remotest
from the great house, it touched on one side a forest uncut since time
began, and on the other tobacco. In the winter we felled the first, in
the summer we worked that tobacco.
The twenty men were not always the same. They were changed, drafted
in and drafted out. Nineteen of the twenty. But David Scott, who was
“political”, rested at Old Mill for three long years. They seemed to
have said that they would never change him.
Five of the men were white, the rest black. It was the penal quarter
for refractory or erring white servants or for any who for reasons were
not to be indulged. They came and stayed and went, but I stayed. Small
cabins, two or three men to a cabin, and one larger building where we
ate, the white at one end, the black at the other, a black man cooking
for all. And at a little distance the house of Barget--Mr. Barget--who
oversaw us. A ragged, dreamy place--Old Mill quarter.
We had enough to eat, though of a coarse and monotonous sort. We slept
on pallets stuffed with corn husks. In winter there was covering
enough, and at any time we might have a roaring fire. In summer we
dragged our beds out of the stifling cabin. Our clothing was poor
enough, but a Negro woman washed our shirts and drawers and stockings
and kept us fairly clean. In all this we were no worse off than the
laboring poor across the ocean. Better off! Barget was a decent man.
When the general overseer, Williams, came around as he did every three
or four days, still there were decent words and decent treatment. When
Colonel Amory rode a splendid horse our way he was cheer itself and
almost fatherly and all that. There were even holidays, and we did not
work on the Sabbath, and some leisure could be stolen out of most week
days. Not much, but a little to gloat over. When it was exceedingly hot
weather, we lay under a pine tree in the middle day for an hour or two.
On great occasions we had a little rum to drink. The white servants
were expected to go to church, there being one within two miles. The
preacher often preached for a quarter of an hour directly to us, seated
on the hard benches at the back, behind all the others. Our happy lot,
to change hopelessness at home in England for hope here in America!
There were men sitting near me, with serious, rugged faces, who tasted
that hope. I saw it in their eyes. At last, after hard service, they
would lay hands upon their own fortune, and she would be good. I saw
it, I saw it! We heard stories of men, now highly prosperous, planters
and burgesses, who had come out as some other man’s servants. The
preacher said it lay in our own hands, and in a measure what he said
was true.
There were those white men who chose a sturdy patience, and those who
never chose at all, but stayed or went in apathy. And others were
always reckoning how much longer or how little longer they had to
serve. In the meantime, in some ways, it was worse here in Virginia
than at home in England, and in some ways it was better. A good many
ways, said some of them. It was not just heaven in Merry England
for poor men! But while all that was true, and while this especial
plantation had a name for an almost foolish kindness, and while the
Law, without wink or blink, doubled the caught runaway’s original
term of service, and while almost to a man runaways were caught and
returned--yet men ran away, men black and white ran away.
In much, with many, it was the very ease of the first step, the first
dozen steps. You were hewing, two and two together, at the edge of
the step-by-step retreating forest, on the one side stumps and fallen
trees and the broad light and the sound of axes and the ever-present
sense of masters and overseers and Monotony that had begun to gibber at
you--on the other the deep, deep forest, right beside you, whispering,
beckoning, “Come with me! I stretch afar, so far, away from all this!”
Or you transplanted or weeded or wormed or suckered or cut tobacco at
the edge of a huge swamp, and the reeds whispered, “Here is the little
path--you know it. Put down the hoe, slip in here! I will meet over
you and hide you. Tom and Dick will not tell. To-night you may make
the river _and find a boat_. You know there is deep forest on the
other side and a trail or something into Carolina.”
Men black or white sometimes went without forethought, without
intending to go, just because Freedom suddenly sang to them, or
Monotony lifted and clanked her chains. The first time David Scott went
he did that, and afterwards cursed himself for his improvidence.
Days, weeks, months. The first year. Into the second year.
Once, in the first six months, I was sent with a message from Barget
to Williams the head overseer, and not finding him, made bold to go on
to the great house where they said he was. There was a front door and
a back door, just as it is in Europe, so I went to the back and asked
a negro wench for news, and I was heard from a room to the right, and
a voice called to me to come in. Here, in his place of business and
a great armchair, sat Colonel Amory, and on a much lesser chair the
overseer, and at the back of the room, on a high stool before a desk
and a huge ledger, Gervase Morrison. I gave my message--three drunken
Indians had come across from their town and were making trouble--and
the overseer said that he would ride down and get them laid by the
heels, “If your honor has finished----?”
“Aye, go ahead, Williams.”
Williams departed, and David Scott made to follow him out of the room,
but was halted ere he got to the door.
“You’re the Jacobite. Would you like a morsel of news from home, man?
The _Sally_ has just brought London letters.”
Naturally I would, and he spread a letter and read me of how great
and good was King George and England, and the French were beaten and
London bells were ringing, while in Scotland the wild Highlanders were
being disarmed and forbidden to wear their ancient costume, and Stuart
Scotland generally was in course of “pacification.” “And that’s the
best thing that could happen to you, as you’ll be agreeing before you
die! What turned you the wrong way?”
“What turned you the ‘right’ way?” I asked. “Family and bringing up?
Perhaps neither way is just the path to glory.”
“You’ve got a dour way with you,” he answered. “But you’re pithy.” His
good nature was enormous. “Now that you’re here, would you like to see
the house?” So he condescended to show it to me, and I’ve known Scots
lairds do the same for a cotter.
It was a good, big house, fairly furnished, with silver in the dining
room, and some portraits and a spinet and books in a spacious parlor.
He gave me a single glass of wine in the dining room, and in the hall
he showed me a drawing of what on earth but a Scotch glen with beck
and mountain, and in the parlor a young woman in a flowered print gown
with her hair richly done was playing the spinet. She looked over her
shoulder and made a mouth and went on making music, and what should she
be playing but an auld Scots air named “The Four Maries”?
She did not speak to me, and when the master was done with me I went
away out of that house, and I cursed the Stuarts and the ways that men
are fooled in an ill world.
As I was walking a voice behind me called, and there was Gervase
Morrison, overtaking me. “I’ve got an hour and I’ll go with you a bit.
Rather a handsome place! Not much beside some English lords of the
land, but very creditable for a new country.”
I said, “He showed me over, and thought I would take the purest
pleasure in all that was his and not mine. The pleasure of
contemplating God and Heaven.--Skulls are so thick!”
“Granted. However, he’s not a bad sort.”
“No. Only stupid.”
“Oh, we’re mostly stupid when we get on top!”
We went on by locust trees in bloom and cedar trees. “Who put him on
top? Not himself, I’m thinking! If it’s the system of things, then it’s
a damned system!”
“You wanted to put James Stuart on top.”
“I don’t know if _I_ wanted to or not! I got caught. We all get
caught in a net. And something or somebody eats us.”
A small, black, land turtle lay on his back in our path, some urchin
having turned him over and left him there. Morrison stooped and turned
him correctly, and he put forth feet and a head and crept away. “The
system now. Systems interest me. I’m not blindly plunging against the
thing that hurts me, as you are. For one thing, I’m older. Then perhaps
I am slow-going like that tortoise and haven’t your consciousness
of pain.--The system. We must have--or we think we must--tobacco to
smoke and snuff. Or if it was not tobacco, it would be wheat or maize.
Farther south, sugar and rum. We must have them, or others like them.
We must eat and drink and be clothed and have desires fulfilled, like
the fireflies here for number. Well, there might be two ways. Everybody
might work, no man holding more acres than he and his family could
till. I work--my name for instance, being Robert Amory--and master my
son and my fine daughters. Everywhere workers. No exceptions. Helping
one another as is fit--combining to make work easier--taking counsel
to make it intelligent, to find better methods, save waste and so
forth--sifting the mind man into the mind place, and the hand man
into the hand place, but keeping neither there longer than he himself
showed it was his own. Probably a deal of our toil to-day would be
thrown overboard. When we had to make our own fantastic luxuries,
probably we’d begin to crack up the Stoics! We’d teach our pleasures to
hang on other boughs. No bad thing either! The whole’s worth trying,
sometimes I think, just from that point of view. What good there was
would be accessible to all. Nothing artificial in between. Not Law and
Custom shrieking, ‘You can’t’, when Common Sense is thundering that
you should. There would be no slaves nor servants. In short, it would
be Scriptural, ‘Be ye servants of one another, in honor preferring one
another.’ Something like that. All gaining by whatever each did. All
rising together. It’s a dream! Of course it presupposes that all would
try--even if not in quite the same degree. But each according to his
light. And those with most light would be very patient and sunny kind
with those who had less.”
“That’s a religious Society.”
“Yes. A religious Society.”
“What’s the other?”
“The other is what we’ve got.”
“Ha, yes!”
“The few with much, the many with little. The few doing about as
Colonel Amory is doing with the much. The many doing about as we
do with the little. And the few may go down into the many, and a
corresponding number of the many come up into the few--and there’s no
change that counts. So we spin around the sun.”
David Scott cursed the plantation and Virginia and the spinning
earth. “It isn’t worth the while,” said Morrison. “I am coming to the
conclusion that there’s a bare possibility that it’s in oneself. If
it’s not there, it’s nowhere.”
“What is?”
“Oh, God or salvation or wisdom, or whatever you call it!”
“I call it a Jack o’ Lantern,” said David Scott and thought of his next
runaway, and also of a quartern of rum that he had enticed out of the
hands of those Indians.
CHAPTER V
A quartern of rum, and if I got into trouble with Barget I got into
trouble, that was all! David Scott told himself a day of forgetting was
worth the price, but what he truly wanted was the rum. His body wanted
it, having learned to love the taste of it and the thrill of it in the
brain two years before. Wanted it headstrong and hot like a colt,--but
colts may be broken. David Scott did not break his soon enough, and it
turned to the deil’s side, miscalling it Nature and a man’s right. A
big, gaunt, red carle!
I hid the rum and drank it all in two days. I was working with Tom
Tripper at the Narrow Patch. The sun was not yet up, the river mist
heavy, the rows of huge-leaved plants ghostly gray at no distance, thin
as the pipe smoke they would eventually pass into.
“Where did you get it?” he asked and leaned on his hoe.
“That’s telling.”
“If I had a bottle, and I was in London, down by Paul’s, tell you what
I’d do! I’d drink it, little by little, all day, and then when it
was empty and night, down I’d go to river and drop it and myself in
together.”
“It’s empty for you now, and there’s the river, and night will come.”
He had a laugh like a kelpie’s: “No! Thames is your only river to drown
in.”
I worked dull and heavy-headed, but the work got done. I could work. I
could run and fight and read. I lusted to know life and the world, but
I liked not the part of it I was knowing. Months went by, and I did
not get any more rum that gave me gorgeous visions and expanded me to
thinking I had the world to turn and twist and toss and catch!
There dwelled a kind of beauty in Virginia. I was not insensible of it.
They said that under the setting sun it had green hills and mountains
like great walls and small, swift, bright streams. Here was naught of
that. But yet was beauty. I must see it and grant it, though palely and
grudgingly to what Great Nature should have! Morning was the divine
time, though evening, at sunset, and when the moon rose, or when it was
soft, deep blue around huge stars, and against the lower world played
ten thousand thousand fireflies, ran it close. For all the English
clearings of a hundred and twenty-five years, and for all the tiny
Indian clearings of unknown centuries, the forest yet cried, “Mine!
Mine!” It was a strange forest, beautiful in the spring and the summer
and the autumn and the winter, but with a sad beauty. The marshes
had the same, and the still creeks that wound among them, and the
monstrously wide, deeply moving tidal rivers. Mist from the fat land
and broad waters hung in the air and made all colors sheenlike and
melting.
I leaned against the tree I was hewing down, or I straightened from the
earth where I was setting, plant after plant, to the thousands, the wee
tobacco plants, and I saw that there was beauty though it would not
stay, though my heart went hot and sick again. But I had the gleam;
from my cradle I had that gleam.
And David Scott, servant for he could not guess how long on a Virginia
plantation, could not utterly forswear mirth, though the limmer and he
made great spaces between their meetings. But about once in so often
she came to me with the deil’s own slant about her!
When I ran away the second time and after two days and nights was
taken in a marsh twenty miles nearer the sea, Williams and his helpers
carried me before a justice of the peace and I was lashed. To serve
fourteen years and have twenty-nine lashes well laid on the bare
back--I sent for mirth that time, and she came with skirls of laughter.
I was twenty-four. I heard Barget tell two fine guests of Colonel
Amory, riding past Old Mill quarter, that I worked well, but needed
watching. “Runaway. And has spells of darkness.”
So I had! Spells of darkness.
All this time, at Old Mill quarter, the few white men came and went,
but the score of black men stayed. Mingo, Barbadoes Tom, Pickaninny,
Great Joe, Cæsar, Dominick, Bob and Dick and Frank and others.
From time to time Mingo or Great Joe or Pickaninny ran away, were
found--Mingo got as far as Baltimore--returned, and were severely
whipped. You see there is no way a Negro _can_ pay but with his
skin. The white bondservant’s time may be doubled, but Negroes are
already slaves for life. Elsewhere man may be put to forced labor,
but servant and slave already labor from red morn to purple night.
To give them any more would be quite to break down and irremediably
injure--property. Again men may be fined; but from what should
servant-without-wage and slave pay a fine? Culprits may be put in
prison, but if you put servant or slave in prison, it is the master
that is punished, losing the delinquent’s service. The only way
out--since it was nonsense to say that Negroes and white servants did
not transgress--was to make them remember it by bodily pain. Hence the
whip everywhere, ancient Egypt or Chaldea or some antiquity having
found out, for the use and benefit of every country since, that this
was the simplest, easiest, cheapest, everywhere handiest instrument
with which to inflict pain that should warn and deter (and revenge) and
yet not necessarily cripple even for a day. Nothing else could be so
nicely graduated from little to much. If an example were to be made,
it _could_ cripple for any length of time. Pushed far enough, it
might even slay.
One could see the human reason in it--at cool seasons. The lawgiver
might point at vice enough and folly enough among slaves and servants.
Murderous rages, obstinacy against orders and against work, lying,
stealing, wantonness, jealousy, laziness and tale-bearing, I’ve seen
them all, in Guinea Negro and white bondsmen. Not in all Guinea Negroes
nor in all white bondsmen, but in many. The planters may well have
said, “What can we do? It is law and custom and perfectly right that
we own these Negroes, and in a sense and for a time these white men.
We don’t particularly love--no, nor our overseers don’t particularly
love--the whip. But what, for instance, would you do?”
Pickaninny--called so because he was so big a fellow--and Old Hannibal
began to sing, breaking the clods with their hoes. They were born in
Virginia, and Pickaninny’s parents before him.
“When hab I done wid de trouble ob de world,
O-hhh! when hab I done?
Trouble ob de world!
I ask de Lord how long I hold ’em,
Trouble ob de world!
I ask de Lord how long I hold ’em?
I ask de Lord how long I hold ’em?
Hold ’em to de end.
My sins so heavy I can’t get along.
Aahh!
Ah, trouble ob de world!”
Eboe Sam differed from these two. Bought naked out of the
_Albatross_, straight from Bang-alang the same year that I was
bought clothed from the _King William_, we apparently experienced
the same trouble in settling down. I had to face the “seasoning.” He
missed that, his native climate being many degrees hotter and ranker
than Virginia. He had run away. So had I. But he had gone, madly and
desperately, over and over again, chance or no chance. I had not. I was
Scotch and sought straw for my bricks, though bricks in the end I meant
to have, bricks and my fortress and palace! He was, I should reckon,
four or five years older than me. He said he was a chief’s son. “Son
of Mongo--same as him!” He flung his hand toward Colonel Amory who had
just paced by, on his bay mare Cherry.
“African chief!” I said. “I’m the cousin of a Scots chief. Mickle
difference does it make!”
He had little English, and he came under Barget’s wrath continually. A
proud and haughty one! used, that was the trouble, to slaves of his own.
“Ah! Trouble ob de world.
When hab I done wid de trouble ob de world?”
I asked Eboe Sam many questions about Africa. He took a fancy to me,
perhaps because I was at pains to learn a little of his language,
perhaps because I was big of frame and cousin to a chief, perhaps
because I once did him a small kindness. He had as much sense as many
a white man, and there, while we tended tobacco in a blazing July, I
gathered a notion of the things and ways of his country. To him it
was the finest country in the world. Like Scotland. It was totally a
mistake, he said, _his_ being taken and sold.
I had from him my first notion of how, from ancient, ancient time,
African men were the gowden guineas of Africa, aye, and the silver
coin and the note of hand. They did not use metal money; they bought
with men and women and children. How did they get them? It spread as
big as forever, that land; he ran over names of tribes and peoples,
and it was worse than the Old Testament! All warred with one another
for that very money, just like us. Money was money, whether it walked
itself or was carried. Also they battled because of bitter feud and
family quarrel--again similarities!--and they lifted each other’s
cattle and in foray strove always to take prisoners, for prisoners were
money. It was gleeful so to drain the foeman clan’s purse! If there
were dead peace and no good wars going and chiefs were waxing poor,
then was the time _to make one’s own village smaller_. There were
always men and women who could be spared. And children. Plenty people
did wrong. Sell them to the white men! But here he fell into a fit of
rage so sorrowful and righteous indignant that it made one quake.
He--Jarroo--had done no wrong. He was not liable in any way. He was
chief’s son, Great Jarroo’s son. All he could say was that Satan had
been at work. He had slept on his mat after a feast. When he waked he
was out of the village and a rope was round his neck, and so many men
pushed him along whom, when it was light, he found to be Mandingoes. He
killed one, but they dragged him to the coast.
“Kidnapping or Spiriting!” I said. “Don’t you know everything about
that too?”
Yes, he did. But he was chief’s son, Jarroo! It shouldn’t have befallen
_him_.
Another time I asked him what folk in his part of Africa bought with
their money. His eyes gleamed, his tongue moistened his lips, he looked
around the bare cabin--it was at night--with disdain, and began to
describe. Muskets--I made out those at once--knives, cutlasses, powder,
rum, red cloth, blue and white and figured cottons, looking-glasses,
shining ewers and basins, fine coats, bells, trumpets, beads to give
women--all that he craved he told of in a kind of triumph. He had had
them; nothing could take that away from him. England had given them to
him for black and brown, walking ingots. But he liked it not when the
thimble fell in his own lap.
Though he was still a young man he had abundant war scars. Wars must
go on, he said, because there must be slaves for sale. So when there
wasn’t quarrel, pick quarrel. The white men at the castles on the
coast, the factories, helped the chiefs pick them.
The fire on the cabin hearth glared. They were dancing before the long
cabin--Mingo and Great Joe and Pickaninny and others, and Mingo’s wife
and two or three women from Big Field quarter. They had a fiddle;
Barnabas played it. The music screamed and laughed and lilted. All
their voices and their shuffling feet and the flame.
CHAPTER VI
Barget had a shrew of a wife, and a daughter, a slim girl of eighteen,
not beautiful, but with a kind, freckled face and bright blue eyes.
Ten years ago this overseer had been an indentured servant like the
many others around. His own man at last, he then worked for wages, and
saved and bought a little and sold a little and saved again until he
had saved enough to bring over from England his wife and child. Now he
was overseer under Williams at Amory Hall, living in a decent log house
two hundred yards from Old Mill quarter cabins. With him lived a young
fellow, his assistant, whom he was training for his successor when
Williams should have retired and he himself have stepped into Williams’
shoes. For his successor and his son-in-law.
My eyes began to seek this girl. It was three years since I had walked
with Mysie Johnston in the glen. I was twenty-five and unhappy. Nelly
Barget! She had not been at Old Mill at first.
All this time in Virginia I had seen young white women afar, at church,
on the road to the landing or at the landing itself, or in boats that
passed, or in coaches that came a-visiting to Amory Hall. I had seen
young Mistress Maria Amory, seated at the spinet, playing “The Four
Maries.” I had seen, nay, I had touched hands with six young slips of
the ruling order.
And how on earth did that come about? I will tell about that.
It was the day before the ball at the great house. Not even Old Mill
quarter was without talk of that ball and the fine folk who would be
there. They would come by boat, they would come by coach, they would
come on horseback, arriving from other great houses up and down the
river and from Williamsburg. A dozen fine young men and women, Amory
kindred and intimates, were already at Amory Hall. Colonel Amory had
three daughters. The ball was for the birthday of the oldest, my young
Mistress Maria of the spinet.
This day before came Barget to David Scott. Did I know Scots reels
and strathspeys and maybe the Sword Dance? Without taking thought,
I said I did. Then I was to make myself clean and go at once to the
house. Dances of surprise were being arranged for the coming ball and
instruction in the Scotch was wanted.
I said I would not go. Barget whistled. “What d’ye think the Colonel
will say to that?” I did not care what the Colonel said for I was in a
rage. Then all of a sudden that changed and a great wave came over me
of I know not what, save that it might be just youth and longing and
“Mak’ what ye can of it!” and I said I would go.
We had two suits of clothes each, we white servants. Work clothes and
church clothes. So I put on my church clothes--shoes and stockings
and a coarse white shirt, and breeches and coat of indifferent cloth.
It was a tingling, gray, winter day, and Dick Merry and I had been
cutting an oak nine feet in girth. When I came to the great house fires
glowed through the windows and out of an opened door poured laughter. I
entered the hall, and when a mulatto boy appeared, told him to say that
the Scot was here. He grinned and I followed him. They were dancing in
the great parlor, and large enough was the room and all polished the
floor. They had two Negro fiddlers and everything was in practise for
a great affair with masks and dressings-up. They lived, these Virginia
planters, with no little jollity.
Well, here I was, regarding as from an enormous distance a dozen or
more young men and women and two or three elders. The Colonel saw me
and exclaiming, “Ha, Scott, are you there?” signed me to a place by the
fiddlers. So at last they came to the reel and called on me to state if
this were right or that was wrong.
They were good-natured and flushed and free with the dance. They wanted
one step and then another. David Scott was there to answer them, and he
answered.
In the auld historic movement upon which we were engaged, there is a
good deal of handling and clasping and flying together. And of all
there there wasn’t any who danced with the spirit that showed the
Colonel’s second daughter, who was named Judith. She had dark, ringlets
and dark flashing eyes, and a rosebud cheek and a laughing mouth. “Is
this the way--what’s your name--David Scott?” She gave me her hand. I
showed her and swung her, and presently in the wheel she came to me
again. Up and down and around and across went the auld Scots dance, and
I was dancing both in the glen at home and here in Virginia, with the
cold and the hot alike in my heart and my head. I danced like the deil.
A girl they named Catherine--we were dancing so fast, the feet were so
twinkling--came plump into my arms, screamed and laughed and skimmed
away. Judith again took my hand. “It’s right now, isn’t it? We’re doing
finely!” Up and down and around and across, and the great room and the
fiddles and the blazing fire, and we were all one being and that in a
mad dance.
The fiddlers ceased for a moment. We stood panting a little, at rest
before the final and intricate square and wheel. Across, from the group
of elders by the fire, pointed and keen as a poniard, came the thin
voice of a yellow and wrinkled woman in a satin gown. “Well, for a
bought servant, I must say he has his boldness with him!”
Instantly the fiddlers were fiddling again and we were all dancing.
But “Catherine!” called a voice from the fireside and called twice,
and Catherine, so imperiously bidden, left our company. The next
step brought me facing Mr. Warwick Beaufort, who had, I had already
observed, an interest in Mistress Judith. I divine that lightning and
thunder had been gathering there for some minutes. At any rate his
brows now were as black as Erebus. We danced, and down the line came
Judith again, and she laughed at him and laughed at me, and her eyes
sent their own dazzling lightnings. Her slim white hand was in mine
that the ax had hardened. We danced, and every Scott and Stuart and all
Jacobite Scotland, and David Scott himself and all his wrongs, and men
and women everywhere, just their essential selves, were dancing on an
oaken floor to the music of eternity.--Then it all broke, the figure
was confused. Mr. Warwick Beaufort had said something offensive, and I
struck him.
Well, the end of all that was that I went back to the tree-cutting and
never entered that house again.
Nelly Barget!
When first we talked together the blackbirds were chattering in the
March trees and the bloodroot whitening the forest floor. I was hewing
by myself, Dick Merry having cut his foot and gone away to quarter.
She had been on an errand to parsonage a mile up river, and instead of
using the high road for her return chose the forest path. The spring,
I reckon, was in her blood, and a maid as well as a man may like wild
flowering. Now Dick’s foot had bled beside the pine tree we had been
chopping. She saw it and turned aside and came to me--just showing I
must have been, through the trees, and my ax not ringing at the moment.
“Yours?” She knew my name. “Have you hurt yourself, David Scott?”
“No. It was Dick Merry. He cut his foot badly, but we bandaged it up
and he’s gone to quarter.”
“Well, I’m glad nobody’s killed!” A patch of little purple and white
flowers growing beside her own foot she stooped and plucked them. “It’s
a lovely day.”
“Aye. ’Tis spring.”
“Don’t you get tired chopping? Chopping trees and tending tobacco?”
“No, of course not.”
“That’s a lie!” said Nelly Barget. She moved to gather violets from a
sunny place. “How do you like Virginia?”
“If I were not a slave I might like it well enough.”
“You aren’t a slave. Not like Pickaninny. Not like Eboe Sam.”
“There are differences. But still I am a slave.”
With that I began to cut the tree, and having gathered the violets, she
moved away.
Two days afterwards she came again this way, and still Dick Merry was
crippled and could not work.
“Tell me about Scotland. When I was a little girl I lived in England. I
remember mountains and a city ten times as big as Williamsburg.”
I rested my ax and sat upon a log and told of Edinburgh and that glen
and loch I best knew. She sat near me with her hands over her knee,
but all the time she kept a sharp watch. “There’s somebody coming!”
she said at last, and starting up walked sedately away upon the wood
path that wound between Barget’s house and the parsonage and one or two
other small dwellings. That morning as I worked I constantly saw her
face among the branches--kind and freckled with wide mouth and bright
blue eyes.
Sunday I saw her at church. She sat between her father and mother and
looked straight through the window behind the parson, and sang in a
lilting, sweet voice:
“_I was glad when they said unto me,
Let us go into the House of the Lord_----”
On Wednesday I saw her again on the path. But Dick was with me, and
she went by without a sign or look.
But now I meant to see her and talk to her. By this time Dick Merry
followed me in what I did or said, and had the staunchness of a good
dog. I told him, “I want to talk to Barget’s daughter. She will talk
with me, but not when you are by. They don’t care how we cut, so that
we get this tract done. To-morrow about this time you take those trees
in the hollow.”
“All right!” answered Dick. “I’ve seen her look at you in church, when
she thought everybody else was marking the other way. Lord! If there
happens a snatched kiss, who’s the worse for it?”
And nothing ever happened more than the snatched kiss--the snatched
kiss and the pressed hands, and the arm around her one day when it was
all so sunny gold and fine, the small flowers blooming around and one
rich bird singing, singing, in the beech tree overhead. And that was
the last, as it was the best, for a child, going through the wood, told
her mother.
Barget stormed at me. “She’s gone to Williamsburg to my sister. And
either the Colonel will sell you from this place, or he and Williams
may find another helper than me!”
“I did her no harm, man!” I said. “She’s nothing but frank and young
and kind, and it’s the springtime--even in Virginia! I kissed her, yes.
It’s a fearful crime!”
But still he shook his stick. “You’re going from here or I go!”
“Shall I weep and howl if I go?” I answered. “I think not!”
For that and other things. I was sold at the courthouse, and Eboe Sam,
who likewise was unruly and a runaway, was sold at the same time.
The Colonel on Cherry parted with us that morning before Old Mill
quarter. “Scott, you’ve piled up trouble for yourself steadily since
you’ve been here. I’m not a hard master--I’ve got a name for just the
other thing. You might have accepted the lot you brought on yourself
and made something of it, and in the end been a happy enough man. But
you didn’t choose that way, and now I’m thinking you’ll fall into hands
less easy than mine!”
He told the truth there.--Well, I look back over years and see that he
was a spirit caught in his own toils, as I was caught in mine, and Eboe
Sam in his, and Barget in his.
Gervase Morrison also came down to Old Mill quarter. “I told the
Colonel I wished to say good-by to you.”
“Yes. Well, good-by!”
“David Scott, you could do more with yourself than you’re doing.”
I laughed. “Likely enough I might become a saint like old Walter
who smiles and talks with the Universe while he makes shoes for the
Colonel’s servants!”
“You’ve arrived at the man named Bitter. After that comes Vengeful and
then Cruel.”
“Well?”
“I don’t mean to preach,” said Morrison. “I can’t. I’m no preacher. I’m
a wastrel. I don’t like preachers, either. But don’t go running and
sliding and leaping down Perdition’s slope! There’s something in you--I
saw it on the _King William_--that looked like a soul.”
“It’s hard for souls to flourish in slavery,” I said, and bade him
good-by with an aridity that I like not now to remember.
In the morning at dawn we went to the courthouse. Before noon I
had been bought by Mr. Daniel Askew, a man of little education and
less feeling, living twenty miles nearer to nowhere than the Amory
plantation, and in bad odor with all the better kind of Virginians.
CHAPTER VII
I walked into two years of pelting wretchedness. It is quite true that
Amory Hall and Colonel Amory and Williams and Barget and Old Mill
quarter took on by comparison an angelic hue. I had been bought by a
man who in any land or time would have been a kind of devil.
I suppose many Virginians knew that he was an “unkind” master. But
he kept just within the law, that to be sure allowed impatient or
exacting masters leeway enough. And there was the greatest feeling of
sanctity of property and of the individual rights of owners. So no one
interfered. They would have said that they “could” not, that he was
within his “rights.” It is true that there was a social displeasure, at
times coming within sight of ostracism. Virginians are no unkindlier
than Englishmen and Scots, whom in truth they are. Domestic tyranny
occurs in England too, and now and then arises there or anywhere some
misbegotten son of darkness who works havoc. But slavery may place many
in the power of a demon.
David Scott did not philosophize those two years. He suffered in a
black and dumb rage, and he hardened and grew more evil than he was.
Eboe Sam was with me, but Askew broke Eboe Sam’s spirit. He became an
apathetic or timidly smiling poor Negro. My spirit was not broken, but
I arrived at the man named Vengeful.
I ran away, was taken and maltreated; ran away again and was taken and
maltreated. I began to think of murder.
It would have come to that, but the third time I tried _I got
away_.
It was September. I left at night, and it was hot and very still with
tension in the air. I sweated as I ran through the forest. Askew had
great dogs, and I knew he would follow with them. What I aimed at was a
stream running through the forest. If I could reach it, I might throw
them off the scent. It was some distance away and a question if I could
gain it before dawn, gain it and wade down it and across and begin
again with a faint, a temporary security. As I ran the stars went out
above me, group by group. “Storm!” I thought. “Well, it might help.”
The forest leaped into a pale gold, instant light, then died again into
blackness. Thunder followed. “You’re coming up quickly at the last,”
I thought, “but you’ve been on the way for a day and night.” A hot
puff of wind struck my cheek, the forest began to talk. There came a
dazzling glare, a Judgment crack. In a moment the forest was shouting,
then rushed a downpour like the crest of Noah’s forty days. I could
not run, but crouched beside an uprooted tree and exulted in the deluge
that would wash my tracks away.
At dawn still was howling and havoc. I knew now that it was no ordinary
storm, but one of those gales, edges or effects of the more southerly
hurricanes, that at long intervals struck Virginia. While it lasted I
might make hay. It lasted two days, and the land ran with water like
a sluice. The stream I sought for had become a dozen, great trees
were overthrown and doubtless chimneys fell. None but a runagate with
Askew to fear would have liked that being abroad! But I liked it. I
liked that great fight with wind and water that were yet my helpers
and might be exulted in and with. I was fey. And, ah, God, I liked the
loneliness, I liked my freedom!
I went west for a time and then I bent south to the River James that
was running high and strong and yellow. I wished to cross it and make
for North Carolina, yet how I did not know. It might not be swam as it
was, and no boats were forth to-day, and if they were how would they
receive me who had not a groat, and “man in trouble” written all over
him? Askew’s ragged, grim plantation lay considerably to the west and
the wilderness from the Amory Hall neighborhood. Hereabouts stretched
ancient forest, and any dwellings, few and small, stood far apart. A
road ran near the river, bottomless now with mud and pools of water. I
stood there in the storm that still raved, though with a sunken fury,
and saw no life upon its long stretches to one hand or the other.
I was wet through and torn by the forest; the bread and meat I had
abstracted from the plantation I was leaving was long ago eaten; I had
had little sleep and no shelter, I was half naked, burned and gaunt
as a wolf. As I stood there, back flashed to me Tolbooth Lane, Saint
Giles and the high roofs of the Luckenbooths. That, too, was witches’
weather, and Sandy Scott’s barn had proved no long shelter. Five years
ago, five lang, lang years ago! Suddenly night thicker than a knife
could cut descended on my soul. Through it I heard the river there
below me, swollen and hoarse, flinging itself to the sea. I said,
“Drowning’s short. Let’s be over with it!” and put myself into motion
toward the yellow flood that was already carrying logs and broken trees
enough.
A bank of earth and a row of huge, ghostly sycamores hid from me the
stream’s edge. As I came down, my head dizzy now and singing, I heard
bagpipes, and knew that I must be dead already and back in Scotland.
It was not the pipes but a man with a flute, seated before a kind of
cabin built up from a flatboat laden with skins and other matters, and
fastened to a sycamore in a backwater under the bank. I saw him and
checked myself and would have vanished among hazel and alder, but his
eye was keen or he heard the loosened stone and earth. He took the
flute from his lips and laid his hand upon a musket on the deck beside
him. “You there in the bushes! Better come out--but in case you mean
any harm, I’ll just state that I’m a dead shot!”
I left the alders and he saw that I was unarmed. It was the middle of
the day, the rain had halted and a cold and lurid light wrapped the
world. He stared at me.
“Well, I know what you are! You’re a runaway! Isn’t Daniel Askew’s land
over that-away?”
“You’re in the right,” I answered, and came to the water’s edge, a
strip of flood being yet between him and me. “If you’ve got a bite of
anything, remember that we are both men!”
“Why did you come racing down as though to a meeting?”
“I meant to plunge in and have life over that I was tired of. But life
has an awful amount of life in it. My mind’s changing.”
“If you think you can take my boat, you’re mistook.”
“I don’t, man!” I said. “You’ve got a gun. And I’m nigh dead, and you
look fresh and limber as a Maytime buck. What I’m asking you for is
just mercy.”
“I’m not putting across to the other side. As soon as the sky clears
and the old river stops her tossing a mite, I’m dropping on down to
Norfolk.”
As he spoke there rose before the inner eye a ship with heaped canvas.
If I could get to a ship, if a ship would take me aboard! Ships forever
wanted seamen and were never too cautious whence they came. It was like
threading a needle in the dark, but I threaded it, and willed Norfolk
port, not Carolina. _O what guided ye, David Scott?_
I said, “Take me to Norfolk, man! By any chance, are you knowing Daniel
Askew?”
He spat. “Yes, I know him.”
“Then you know why I’m running. If you hate him, you’ll not be anxious
to gratify him. If you love him, you’ll be serving him, for if I’m
taken I mean to murder him.”
“You may scalp him for all I care!” and he spat again. “I suppose you’d
make yourself useful? Jim Halfman that was my partner got drowned at
the falls.”
“Try me and see,” I said. “And in the name of all that’s good, man,
haven’t you anything to eat?”
He looked at me hard again, then rising brought a plank and with
it made a bridge from boat to shore. I came across, and ah, that
flatboat and its stinking skins seemed to me as fair as a palace! And
when he gave me venison and maize cakes to eat and poured for me half a
pint of rum and water, I felt that he was a kind of woodland god.
Christian Todd, that was his name, a man of forty and trader to the
Indians for half those years. He had an old hunting shirt and leggings
and an otter-skin cap, a long knife and a short knife, a musket and
powderhorn and bag of shot, and his flute. His hair and beard were long
and tawny yellow, and his gray eyes looked vague and never were so in
the least. His tongue lay silent nine-tenths of the time in the cavern
of his jaws. The other tenth, if there were no other need, he slowly
talked of Indians and their ways or of forest beasts and theirs.
The blue sky shone, the light played, the air grew balm. We loosed the
boat from the shore. There were two great oars and also a short mast
and small patched sail the color of a dead leaf. The hutch of a cabin,
the jut of his heaps of skins and other truck furnished cover for me
when boats passed us or we were hailed from the shore. Neither happened
often, for this is a hugeous river and country and the human life is
not numerous. Moreover, Christian Todd seemed to be known and his ways
respected. When he shouted, “Going down the river and I’m late!” none
overpersuaded or tried to prevent. The first night, the river still
rough and high, we laid to beside an ancient, broken landing, but the
second the moon was bright and the water wide and we went on with the
flood, one sleeping while the other waked. No one pursued, no one
summoned us in the name of the law.
“My luck has turned!” said David Scott, and was no more thankful or
in-seeing than that.
But I liked Christian Todd who never asked a question as to my past or
my future, who could keep a colorful silence, and who lived with the
great forest, not chopped it down. It is true he traded in the lives
of the beasts; there were heaped about us skins and fur of fox and
bear and marten and squirrel, doe and fawn and beaver. But David Scott
thought of that no otherwise than as a matter of course. David Scott
and Christian Todd. David Scott, twenty-seven years old, going down
James River on a flatboat, good meat and bread to eat and rum to drink,
and before him day and night a dream ship, tall and white as the moon,
that might even take him back to Scotland.
Now and then Christian Todd took up his flute. He played strange airs,
Indian maybe. By now I knew well the melodies of the Negroes. It was
not these, nor was it English or Scots. He may have taken them from the
Indians or from himself. He was a strange, Panlike creature.
So I went, so safely and securely, down to Norfolk. It was as though,
suddenly, a warlock had taken me up.
The river grew enormously broad, the sea was felt, the sun glistened
against gull wings and the sails of tall ships. Now I saw, though still
afar, that small, rude, port town that I had not seen since the _King
William_ bore me by it. And not a hitch; as smoothly had we gone as
though Heaven had said, Let it be so! Christian Todd pointed. “That
black mark’s my landing. The merchant there in the brick house takes my
skins.”
“It’ll be dusk before we get there. Am I at all like Jim Halfman?”
“Not the least bit. And there’s always a power of people around.”
I shook myself and woke up and tried to plan. The sun was setting,
fiery red. Flood and our small sail carrying us on, Christian Todd
picked up his flute and began to play an air sweet as the throat of
the mocking bird and melancholy as the whippoorwill. In his boat, in
the forest, he was a wise man, but I knew without being told that in a
white man’s town with white man’s law around, his magic would depart.
And yet I could not plan. I was in a dream and yet not so. And what it
might be I did not know, but I never truly doubted that now at last I
was quitting Virginia who had dreamed so often of quitting it. I say I
do not know, and yet maybe I do.
The sun went down. There flared a great, red, autumnal afterglow. We
were over toward the southern shore, and now the landing, the brick
houses of the merchants and the town beyond increased in size, and the
anchored ships in number. I had reached the point that I might easily
stay upon the flatboat through the night, leaving my wits to work
at dawn, and just as I rested upon that and looked again at the sky
that flamed as though the earth beneath were on fire, and at the wide
water and smelled the sea, the lanterns were lighted upon a large ship
swinging at anchor close before us.
“I don’t know her,” said Christian Todd. “But then I forget ships,
being gone so long in the land of canoes.”
It was not so dark but that much of her might be seen, lying there
under bare masts, and now we drew nearer and nearer. She had a
collected and tidy look, her boats were in, her men aboard. We heard
the bo’sn’s pipe. “She’s a creature ready for the sea,” said David
Scott, and his voice had to himself a fatal and resonant sound.
“Aye, at dawn the stag will be gone.”
We were moving past her, we saw her name. The great lantern showed it.
_Janet._ The _Janet_ of Bristol.
David Scott stood up. “Bring her to a bit.” He hailed the ship.
“_Janet_, ahoy!”
A man leaning over the rail answered. “Ye crazed wee boatie, what d’ ye
want?”
I shouted back, “I wad gae tae sea. Tak me and ye’ll find me useful!”
Two more heads appeared. There seemed a colloquy, then the first man
called out, “Come aboard then if your health’s na cracked!”
“This is my ship, Christian Todd,” I said, and we lowered sail and
took up oars. When we got to her side I thanked him. “If there’s Fate
or Necessity or something of that kind, then these three days have
been just at its beck! Maybe all days are. You’ve been a spirit of
deliverance to me, sent out of the wood, and I’m thanking you, man!”
“I was lying under a tree smoking oncet,” said Christian Todd, “and all
of a sudden I sat up and said as loud as ever I spoke in my life, ‘By
Jiminy! there’s very few things that aren’t meant!’ Well, there’s my
hand, and think of Virginia kindly!”
So we parted, and I climbed the side of the ship, using the rope they
dropped for me. When I stood on the deck and looked back, Christian
Todd had pushed off; up went his dead-leaf sail, he swung toward
Norfolk. The red of the sky had grown purple and a huge, round moon was
coming up from the east.
“Are ye a mariner?” said the voice that, I now perceived, belonged to
the first mate.
“I was one summer, for fun, on a brig that went from Berwick to Glasgow
by the Hebrides.”
“‘For fun.’ D’ye hear that, Michaelson? I’m always telling ye that the
sea and the ship and the trade have got their glints. All right, my
billie, my name’s Mr. McNaughton. And now I’ll be taking you to cabin
and the auld man.”
By the lantern I saw that he was red Scot, red as a fox, lean and dry,
and six feet two. Of the sailors with him, one, Michaelson, had been
born in Stirling; the other, Dory, was an Englishman. I gazed around
me, but little could be seen now save by moonlight. It seemed, however,
a tidy, fine ship, and I heard men laughing in the forecastle.
So we went to the great cabin. “Come in, Mr. McNaughton, and whom
have you got there?” said a full, reasonable voice. And to cap the
strangeness of a strange day, it seemed to David Scott that he had
heard that voice before.
CHAPTER VIII
The man to whom it belonged sat at the table with a bottle of wine
and a chart before him. He was rather tall and full of figure, with a
reddish-brown beard, a big nose and dark, hawk eyes, and might be just
this side of fifty. “What have you got here, Mr. McNaughton?” He had
a full, deep, slow, rumbling voice. “Who are you?” He stared at me,
standing in the yellow light, ragged and gaunt and unshorn. “You’re a
runaway, that’s what you are! What are you doing in this galley, may I
ask, Mr. McNaughton?”
The mate explained. “Maybe there ought to have been inquiries, sir.
But I was leaning on the rail, and he came by, and it was as though a
fish takes your line, and you’ve drawn him up and in before you can
think or wink! A bell inside just rang, ‘We’re short a couple of men,
since Ralph Daughter died and the Dutch lad left the ship.’ And anyhow,
what’s the care, considering we’re leaving, not coming, and ’twas all
in the dark and none seeing?”
“You’re an immoral man, Mr. McNaughton, with your no care at all for
civilized laws!” He addressed me. “It’ll be some trouble setting you
ashore, but I can take it!”
“I hope you won’t, sir,” I said. “I can serve you as a sailor, and I’m
sair wanting to see Scotland again.”
“So that’s where it lies?” he answered. “And when did you leave that
poor, cold, barren land, and for what?”
“I left it five years ago, and for being at Culloden.”
He jerked back from the table. “They were fools at Culloden! Some
kin of my ain were involved, but none the less they were fools at
Culloden.--What’s your name?”
“David Scott.”
“Scott! There are a mort of Scotts. Scott of Where?”
I gave the name of our old house. He looked at me thoughtfully. As for
me, I turned two dice around in my mind, and then cast one, seeing
I must choose quickly. “You are Captain William Bartram. I remember
you. You came to my father’s house when I was fourteen and I rowed you
across the loch. I called you Cousin Bartram, and you gave me a Spanish
gold piece.”
He stared. “Why, so I did! Well, this is the strangest world!” He drank
the red wine. “And what is it you think you’ll be doing?”
“What I said, sir. Mr. McNaughton has just stated that the _Janet_
needs seamen. I’ll work for my passage.”
“Your passage where?”
“To Scotland.” When I saw him that time, years and years ago, he was
captain of an East Indiaman. His ship, I remembered, was then the
_Margaret_. “To Scotland,” I said again, and Edinburgh rose before
me, and a mountain, a loch and a glen.
“Scotland?” he repeated. “And what should a Culloden man on the wrong
side, that has been deported for life or the better part of it, do in
Scotland? I’m thinking you might explain your disappearance for five
years, but not your reappearance! As I sit here, I’m remembering the
case, for I was told of it when I happened to be in Carlisle. You broke
gaol and were taken in a barn. Aye, there are plenty of informers
in Scotland who sit by the roadside and mark such as you!--You’re
noticeable, too,” he said, and again drank wine.
David Scott stood in silence. A window was open; he heard the light
washing of the river down which he had come. In the desperate ache and
urge to escape and find a life that was not this life, Desire had made
a picture and had declined to shadow it. I had thought somehow of easy
hiding, and men having forgotten, and safety, and old, sweet life. But
now I saw the shadows and that they hid an iron, inimical power that
might well toss me back across the ocean, a marked ball, precisely into
Daniel Askew’s hands. Then I would do murder and be hanged for it. But
likelier than all that, they would hang me first in Scotland. There
was no refuge; home was home no longer. I may have known it all along,
but never realized it. Dark, dark, dark!--But what was the power that
had set me on the _Janet_?
“If your port’s Bristol,” I said, “I’ll fare as I can in England. Or
I might shift there to some Dutch vessel, and live and die in the Low
Countries----”
“And anyhow,” he said, as if not marking me, “neither Scotland nor
England’s my destination at present.”
“What is it then?”
McNaughton behind me gave a click. “Ye’ve got your impudence with you
to be speirin’ the Captain that! Fine fo’castle stuff ye air!”
As for William Bartram, he did not change his countenance, but wiped
a drop of wine from the chart. He was a big man with his big nose and
hawk eyes, and knew how to command. Stories of him were running around
in my head, in motion after many years. There had been, I thought now,
many stories. At last he spoke, in his reasonable, deep voice. “So you
see, kinsman, your shortest way round might be just to step now into
the boat and be rowed ashore!”
I said, “Will you row me ashore yourself, kinsman, as I rowed you
across the loch?”
He put down the glass that was on the way to his lips, and leaning back
appeared to study me afresh. Again I heard the water lapping. The air
in the brown cabin began to move and hum around me, and yet no moving
or humming was visible or audible. But I felt changes and decisions,
and yet back of them something that neither changed nor decided. I
spoke again, “When you said ‘kinsman’, sir, you said ‘I’ll not put
you ashore against your will.’ Now all my will is to abide with the
_Janet_. You’ll not regret. I’ll work out the passage, wherever
it’s to, or long or short. The passage and the gold piece, too.”
His beard twitched. “Aweel, as to the gold piece, I gied ye that. But
I’m no objectin’ if it heightens your appetite for wark.” With that
he rolled up his chart and called out, “Geordie!” whereupon the cabin
boy appeared. “Glasses, Geordie, and another bottle and some biscuit.”
He measured me again. “I’m thinking that I’ve an old suit of clothes
that might nearly fit you. You can’t be parading around in a guise
that skirls out ‘Runaway!’” He rose from the table and crossed to his
own cabin that opened into the great one. Now I saw more clearly what
a big, muscular man he was. He vanished, and McNaughton gave another
click. “I hope ye’ll remember me, Mr. Scott, when ye’re scattering
moidores! What a thing it is to be daft about your ain kith and kin
that ye see but seldom, and to find a braw example rising like Neptune
out of the deep!”
I drew a long breath. “He’s a fine man. I remember him so well now!”
“Aye, he’s a fine man. No better captain in the trade! Aweel, your
fortune’s made. Dinna forget that ’twas I that pulled you out of the
river!”
“I won’t,” I said. “And truly I thank you for it.”
Captain William Bartram reappeared. “Go in there and change.” I obeyed.
There was a light, and he had laid upon the bed quite good enough
apparel, better than any David Scott had worn this long, long while.
We were both tall and big-boned men. He had more flesh than I, so that
his clothes hung somewhat loosely. But they answered. As I dressed I
looked around. His cabin was very neatly kept, with ingenious devices
of shelves and cupboards and racks. There were arms, pistols and a
sword and a cutlass, more pieces, it seemed to me, than would be usual
for the master of a trading vessel. It might, however, be his fancy.
Now David Scott had fought in battle and came of a fighting stock, and,
occasion given, he could and did revolt, and feel somber, wild and
hot anger and fight for his own. Witness all my life in Virginia for
that! But I did _not_ even then, not in Scotland, not at Culloden,
not for itself, God knows, even in Virginia! care for battling and
bludgeoning. I had rather reason it out, though I stifled that down so
often, and fought. So I looked at my kinsman’s armory, but did not
lust for it. He had a shelf of books. I lusted more for them, and I
lusted now for the rum and brandy which he must have upon his ship.
When I was dressed I rolled into a bundle those wretched and ragged
garments that I had worn, and through the cabin window tossed them
into the dark and gliding water. And then I returned to the great
cabin and to my cousin. Mr. McNaughton was now seated with a glass of
Canary before him, and the two had been talking. Both gazed at me a
moment before speaking. No doubt my general air was improved by decent
attire and by hope and warmth and kinsman and the taste of adventure
that was not tragic and despairing. At any rate, “Sit ye down, David,”
said William Bartram and poured wine for me. “Conditions cloak men
strangely!” Again he looked at me thoughtfully. “You’ve had a fair
education? You could clerk a bit at need?”
“I think so. Though for five years I’ve not touched a pen and hardly
seen a book.”
“You like books?”
“I used to. Yes, I like them.”
“I don’t like all books,” said my cousin. “But give me the Ancients--in
a translation--and I’m as happy as the day is long.” With which he
neatly picked up his talk with Mr. McNaughton at the broken end. “You
see, Mr. McNaughton, it’s not possible for a Bartram to derogate his
blood by putting it in the forecastle of his own ship. So we’ll just
name him a passenger and give him that bit hole in the side yonder. It
may have been providential that young Smith was just no clerk at all
and left me in Philadelphia.”
“Whatever you say, sir. Your will’s law here.”
“Well, that’s settled,” said the Captain. “Have you had supper, David?”
Christian Todd and I had eaten at sunset, and I said so. “Then it’s
bedtime,” answered Bartram. “We’ll be lifting and away with the first
blink of light.”
The _Janet_ seemed to me a roomy ship. The cabin that had been
young Smith’s who differed with the Captain and parted at Philadelphia,
was big enough for me to turn about in, and I heard the water lapping,
and seemed in a dream, and laid down a free man, and said the word to
myself mair than once. “Free! Free!” and then I went to sleep.
I waked after hours of dreamless sleep, deep as the nadir or high
as the zenith. In at the tiny window looked the pale dawn. Then the
morning star was set in the round and vanished and came again. A hum
and creaking entered my ears, and the cabin slanted slightly and
righted again. For a little I lay, savoring the most strange drama of
life. The _King William_ passed before me, and Gervase Morrison
and Colonel Amory and Williams and Barget and Nelly Barget and Judith
Amory and Dick Merry and Pickaninny and Eboe Sam and Daniel Askew and
others. I came down the river with Christian Todd, and his flute was
playing. I was in Scotland, that now it seemed my body would never be
in again. During the last three years the image of Mysie Johnston had
paled, the heart had despaired and altered and ceased to beat that way.
I thought now, “She has forgotten doubtless, and maybe married,” and
the thought had a dull sound and was no longer wholly unbearable. The
star swung again across the window and was gone.
Then Scotland no more! Well, then, where was I sailing? I thought of
the Bermudas, or on the other hand, Charleston or Bahamas or Barbados.
If the _Janet_ were for any of these places, I meant not to leave
her. I meant not to leave her until she put me somewhere in Europe. I
was still a young man. All manner of old, not all uncomely, ambitions
stirred and rose from the dead, from the slain and stamped upon. I felt
strength in me to make a name for David Scott, a name that should stand
for increase to all.
A hand knocked upon my door. It was the cabin boy, and he held a
tumbler of spirits and water. “Your dram, sir.” I took it and drank,
knowing that I had here a dragon to fight, and postponing the combat.
Dressing, I peered out of my small round for air and light and saw no
shore, but a green and rumpled sea and in the east saffron and purple
bars of sunrise. The star had melted away. We were moving under a good
breeze in the great bay or sea of Chesapeake. Quitting my quarters, I
found the cabin empty of all but Geordie, who was setting the table for
breakfast. It seemed that there was no shackle upon my movements. I
might go where I would, so I went on deck.
The _Janet_ was a fine ship, a four-master, larger, cleaner,
finer, a better sailer in every way than had been that _King
William_ of weary memory, or that long-ago brig on which I had
turned seaman through a northern summer. All my prepossessions of the
night before strengthened, and a love of the sea and of this white,
racing creature upon it shot up from some deep place within me. Oh, it
was better than working Daniel Askew’s tobacco!
The sails were piled to catch the light but favoring wind, and men yet
worked aloft or upon the decks beneath those white billows. I watched
and listened, leaning against the side. Seamen, passing, stared at me.
But some word had been given, and they were civil when they spoke. Crew
and officers, and myself as supernumerary, I reckoned that there might
be not far from fifty men aboard. Some were Scots, but much the greater
number English. Three or four seemed to me French or Italians, and I
made out certainly one Dutchman. Sailors are--sailors. These seemed to
me a good average, or--so sweetly did everything blow to me--slightly
above the average. There would be good, bad and indifferent among
them as among any fifty men anywhere. But there have been crews of
scoundrels, and the _Janet’s_ was not such.
Cheerful were all the sounds of the ship, cheerful the golden sun that
now pushed above the wave. I looked toward Virginia, and saw a dimness
that I knew was land. It was vanishing. “Let it vanish!” I thought, and
“New Life! I shall taste New Life!”
Seeing that I was the Captain’s cousin, I mounted to the poop deck.
Now I saw that the ship carried guns, three to a side. Just above me
floated the great British flag. My eyes lifted to the mainmast top.
There streamed another flag--it would be that of the owners--but I
could not make it out.
McNaughton came up the ladder, saw me and stopped to speak. “I needna
ask ye how ye’re faring, Mr. Scott. Ye look like a bridegroom the
morn.--Aye, it’s grand, the sea and air and a good deck under a man’s
feet!”
I said, “What’s the flag yonder, Mr. McNaughton?”
He followed my gaze. The sky up there was now a lovely blue, and
against it the flag gleamed richly, streaming in the blissful morn.
“Eh, the flag? The Royal African Company’s.”
I did not answer. Something crashed, as though a castle fell, and it
was night, and a spectre arose. _The Royal African Company--The Royal
African Company--The Royal African Company!_
I heard some one say, and it might of course be David Scott that was
speaking, “We’re sailing then to Africa?”
“Oh, aye!” replied McNaughton. “To Daga that’s one of the Company’s
factories above the Niger.--And there’s Geordie signalling breakfast.
Will ye come along?”
CHAPTER IX
“So that’s where the wind blows!” said William Bartram. “I’ve marked
you through the day, walking in a cloud, and I said to myself, ‘What’s
wrong here?’ and ‘We’ll have it out the eve.’” He leaned back in the
great, fixed chair, in the cabin of the _Janet_, his pipe and
glass and bottle before him on the table. He only drank after supper,
and only wine, and no more than that leonine head of his could stand.
The yellow lantern light fell upon him. I liked him, had liked him
strongly, I knew now, when I was a boy; liked him to-day, and that
apart from all reasons for gratitude. There was that in our two
natures, for all our difference in years, that clung, that sounded
together. There would be great differences too, but we should never
escape, nor want to escape, from the liking.
“So it’s as a servant of the Royal African Company that you’re not
liking me?” he said without anger. “And you’re liking the _Janet_
no longer, because she’s built and decked and stocked for the slave
trade?”
“I have been in effect a slave; I don’t like slavery.”
He answered from behind a cloud of tobacco smoke. “It’s my own opinion
that it will not last forever. But in the meantime it’s the weary way
of this weary world. We’re all more or less slaves.”
“Yes,” I said. “More or less.”
“I take your emphasis. But the ‘less’ has always come on slowly and has
had to wait on time.--As for Negro slaves, Pharaoh owned them, and for
all we know, Solomon and David. Probably Pericles did, and certainly
Alexander and Augustus Cæsar. When you come to know Africa, you’ll see
that it’s just one great hunting ground for men and had always been so.
It’s recognized. Moreover, nothing would so break the public heart in
Africa as not to be allowed to trade enemies or the useless or their
own for what they want. When folk continuously enslave one another,
there’s no good shrieking about outside giants.”
Eboe Sam rose before me. I said, “Still you think it will not last.”
“I suppose one day we’ll all grow up,” he answered. “Europe, America
and Africa. Grow to some kind of a religious level. But now we’re in
and of the present world.”
“You tempt them.”
“Aye, they’re very temptable,” he answered.
He drummed on the table. “I will tell you, David. The _Margaret_
was my ship at the time when I came for a week to your father’s house.
I had had her then for three years, and I had her for four years
thereafter. Seven in all. She was a good ship, and I sailed her for
the East India Company. London to Calcutta, Calcutta to London again.
English goods and passengers going out, spices and ivory and fine
Indian weaves returning. Seven years--I sailed her for seven years,
and gave the people over me no trouble, and made the Company money.
Sailed her well! I could not tell you all the storms and plagues I
brought her through. And they praised me--they praised me in London
and Calcutta. If a great man of the Company was going out to India,
they used to say, ‘Go in Bartram’s ship.’ Storms and fearful calms and
plagues of kinds--those things happen in seven years--but I brought the
_Margaret_ and them in her safe to haven. And then in one night
came a typhoon that broke our masts and beat us down. Our seams opened,
the pumps were naught, we took to the boats. The _Margaret_ sank
before us. The boats parted company, two were lost that night. After
six days a Dutchman picked mine up. Three men and I only were alive
in it. We got at last to London. The Company had my record, and after
six months it gave me another ship, the _Falcon_. I sailed her
a year, then, passing Cape Saint Vincent, there shot out against us
two Moorish pirates. We fought them a day, they grappled and boarded,
we were afire. The officers and crew were slain or taken. I gathered
my strength and burst from those that swarmed upon me and leaped into
the sea. The murk saved me--the land was not so far--I swam and was
carried and a plank came by, and at dawn I was ashore.--I’ll not weary
you with the long road for a penniless man to London. I got there and
to India House and made my report, and old Hollingsbury said, as dry
as Sahara sand, ‘Your luck’s not so good as it used to be, Captain
Bartram.’ I knew what that meant. It meant ‘Nothing must happen to the
next ship, if so be you want to continue with the East India Company.’
But they gave me the _Good Adventure_, and inside three months she
was driven in a gale and staved to pieces on the Irish coast.”
He got up and walked the cabin twice and returned. “They who follow the
sea know certain things. To be called a fortunate captain is summer and
the fruits thereof. To be named an unfortunate captain is winter and
the blast that makes you shrink. The East India Company departed from
me. I had saved a little, but it wasna much. I had a hard year, David,
a hard year.
“And then Murchieson and Murchieson gave me the _Rose of Lorn_,
trading between Liverpool and Boston. And in a year, off Newfoundland,
in a fog, the _Lydia_, a barquentine, ran us down. When I got to
London this time I went to a woman teller of fates that I had heard of.
She said that I had entered a belt of trouble that had been waiting for
me, just as a ship might enter the doldrums or the Arctic seas. A star
was adverse to me and a number was my foe. Why?--Well, as to that, the
true I Myself had not been born in precisely the year 1720, as I had
mistakenly thought. The true I Myself was old enough to have earned a
world of good and ill.--And how wide did she think was the belt?--But
that she could not tell though she held that it was thinning. I could
not see that, David, when, after long, long waiting, I got just a
poor brig, the _Hannah Lisle_, owned by the Alleynes and plying
to Rotterdam. It was that or starve--and she burned at the wharf at
Rotterdam, the boat next her carrying powder and a spark reaching it,
none knew how. And what did it count that I did not set that fire, nor
had the eye of God to foresee such a thing? I was done for, David, done
for!--Did you hear no sound in all those years of my matters?”
“I was sent to school,” I said. “I lived with my mother’s brother in
Edinburgh, and he was a bookman and a dreamer. And then my own life
began to turmoil.”
“Well, so it was,” he said. “I had been a proud man, but that was over.
I found a garret and grew gaunt as a wolf there,--as gaunt as you,
David, when you came aboard. I knew owners and captains and seamen
enough, and many I knew would have given me a crust or a crown piece,
but I did not choose, as I did not choose to take my wage when my ship
was gone. What I had saved from my good years, having been always a
free spender, was all departed. And I did not believe, David, that I
would ever sail a ship again.”
He was silent, then poured wine with a steady hand and pushed the
bottle to me. “Then there came up my garret stair John Archibald that
had been mate upon the _Falcon_ and prisoner on the Barbary Coast
whence in six months he got away in a Spanish galleon that carried him
to Cuba, and from Cuba, by hook and crook, he got to Jamaica. He told
me all about it. Then came into Kingston harbor the _Swan_, a
Royal African Company ship, Captain Martin, wanting a mate. Archibald
appealed to Martin and got the berth. Two years afterwards Martin
retired. Archibald, who’s a queer chield, had kinsfolk above him in
station, with stock in the Company. He was given the _Swan_--is
her captain still--I saw him last trip at Daga. Well, David, to get
back to my garret! Once I had done him a good turn, and now he had come
up with me again, and he had not forgotten the bairn Gratitude. He
wanted me to go with him to see certain gentlemen. So I went, David,
having no chance in the world of an East Indiaman which is what I
would have much preferred. But beggars may not be choosers! And many
are willing to serve the Royal African Company.--Anyhow, I went with
Archibald. And like that, David, the luck turned! I came out of the
belt of darkness that woman talked about! They took to me.”
Color and vigor increased in my cousin’s face. “They saw and said that
those lost ships were not lost through me. They were willing to try
me. They talked of the _Janet_ that was building, that was nearly
ready for the sea.” Bartram’s voice rose almost to a shout. “David
Scott, in three months I trod her poop deck and took her down to the
blue water. And she’s seven years old, the _Janet_, and no man
quarrels more with William Bartram. If a star was my antagonist, he has
taken his war elsewhere!” Again he rose from his chair and walked the
cabin, then stopped before the window and looked forth upon a dark blue
night powdered with those orbs or beings or whatever they are. When
he spoke his voice had sunken and was not addressed to me. “He is no
longer in the sky; he is dead or obscured, banished as I was banished!
But as for the _Janet_, she and I are one!”
He turned toward me. “Since the days of Elizabeth this trade’s been
going on. Tudors and Stuarts and the Hanover Family have all been able
to put up with it! Parliaments no less--the Royal African Company has
its parliamentary grants. And all the pillars of the world, the big
pillars and the little pillars. If you could see now a list of the
Company supporters! It’s imposing, man, imposing!”
“I know the world is with the trade,” I said.
“Well, the world maun live!” he answered, with a kind of fierceness.
“It’s all inwound--it’s all so inwound. Things are built upon it to an
extent you’d hardly believe. In all lands and all ranks. You ask the
first merchant or lawyer, aye, or teacher or parson you meet! Planters,
of course--but everybody beside planters. Fairly anybody.”
“Custom and Gain.”
“Aye, precisely. Custom and Gain. They’re Rulers. As for me, I’m a
plain sea captain, with my bread and salt to earn. I don’t set up to
be wiser or more moral than quarter-deck and forecastle of Society and
they that own my ship!”
I said, “Yet you would scorn, for gain, to become a pirate.”
He answered with violence. “You’re daft! It’s not the least the same!”
And I was so muddled in those years that I did not know if it was. The
comparison would never have come into my mind but for Culloden and
thereafter. And Culloden and thereafter were already fading away. I
said dully, “I have been a slave, overboard in the rough sea, while the
ship you call Society sailed by.”
He answered, “You were a white political, sold into limited servitude.
Africans are black barbarians, and all the reasoners will tell you that
in the end if not just at the beginning, it’s a happy exchange to the
West Indies, let alone Virginia, New York and New England!”
He came back to the table, and suddenly he was entirely the reasonable
and weighty person he had appeared in our earlier intercourse. “I would
ask you, David, did you not see a good deal of happiness among them in
Virginia?”
I saw Pickaninny dancing, and heard Old Joe fiddling and the negro
women laughing, and the children squealing and tumbling about, and I
thought of the suave self-importance of Colonel Amory’s house servants,
and of real contentment in good work in field and shop, and of
religious ecstasies that I had witnessed. Even at Old Mill quarter that
was the black books’ quarter, I could remember jollity.
“Yes,” I said. “I have seen what you may call happiness. But I never
saw or heard of a black man or woman who had not been enslaved and
brought from Africa against their will. They or their parents or
grandparents. And if I have seen what looked like contentment, I have
seen misery too. Always against their will and like animals, and still
they are bought and sold and worked like animals. But they are men and
women.”
He poured wine and put it at my hand. And yet I know that he did not
then know that this way lay one of my cities of destruction. I pushed
it aside, and then I took it back and drank. And straightway the false,
smirking lights began to play.
“You see, it’s not the life I would have chosen,” said my cousin. “I
don’t say that I greatly like my errands, for I don’t, but I do them.
And I would have you observe, David, that my work begins and ends with
the handling of my ship and cargo. The Negroes are already enslaved
and in barracoons up and down the coast. It’s the factors that collect
and deliver them. The captains but see that they’re brought as safely
as may be across the water. And look you, if I were not sailing the
_Janet_, another would be--and likely a rougher man, David, likely
a rougher man! For look you another thing, David. D’ ye know what I am
called at Whidah and at Daga and Calabar and Bonny? ‘Holy Bartram!’
And that because the crew that sails with me and the blacks I carry
are _not_ ill-treated. Just as far as my power goes they are well
treated, and that’s more, man, I grant, than can be said for all slave
ships and captains.”
“I’m thinking,” I said, “that I must go this voyage because I am here
upon the ship. But at your return port I will leave you, thanking you
for great kindness and hoping some day to repay it.”
“You will do about leaving the _Janet_ as you please,” he
answered. “As for thanks and payment, I’m not asking them, David. But
I would not swear I was going until I had looked things over a bit.
You’re not very safe on land, and the sea gets a grip. If you took
another vessel you’d have to give some account of yourself and to ship
before the mast. Here you could render me a deal of help as my cousin
and maybe clerk at times, with the sea to live with and my collection
of books if you like them. McNaughton’s got his points beside being a
good officer, and our surgeon, Colley, that you haven’t seen yet, for
he has a touch of fever, is a man of parts. The old Guineaman isn’t so
bad, you know.”
He ended quietly--asked if I would have more wine--said it was a braw
night and that it might be six weeks and more ere we sighted the coast,
and took up his cap to go outside.
CHAPTER X
The sun rained gold, the sea ran blue, the wind in the rigging sang the
very oldest song. I moved about the ship. The covers of the hatches
were raised. I saw with a kind of shock that the openings beneath
were grated. So were other apertures about the ship. I went to one
of the hatches and looked down, but the strong light above showed
little save darkness. I asked a man how much room would they have down
there between floor and roof. “Six feet clear,” he answered. “But the
platforms divide it, you know, so each tier has almost three feet. The
_Janet’s_ roomy compared to most. Roomiest Guineaman I know!”
“How many Africans does she carry?”
“Five hundred.”
I stared at the darkness below the grating. The seaman--it was Jack
Dannet--went on swabbing the deck beside me. I said, “Do you like
bringing slaves from Africa?”
“I’m not paid to like it,” he answered. “At first I didn’t like it, I
remember. But I got used to it. A man gets used to anything.”
I thought, “There’s always a little of him that creeps away.”
Dannet, washing the deck, continued, “I’ve been in ships that I didn’t
like--any more than hell! Free English sailors get banged about in
Guineamen as if they had been born without a rag on them, up the Oil
River! But the _Janet’s_ got a reputation of being a regular old
mother.”
“But the Negroes--how do you feel about them?”
“Oh, them! I don’t feel about them at all. Used to, maybe, just at
first, but it don’t last.”
His continued swabbing put distance between us. The second mate,
Pomeroy, came by. “Looking at our accommodations, Mr. Scott?”
“They’re scant for five hundred,” I said. “They’re shallow for five
hundred or for fifty or for five or for one.”
“Why, there you’re mistaken,” he replied. “The ship has a name for
commodiousness. At Whidah and Calabar and elsewhere you’ll see them
that I do think are scant.”
He was a short, black-haired, bull-necked man with a fishy and prying
eye. I liked Bartram and I liked McNaughton but I did not like Pomeroy.
He was curious about me and I let him be curious. “Jamaica and
Barbadoes are our usual ports. But we’re just from Bristol where we’ve
been refitting, and the captain had a fancy for anchoring by Norfolk.
It’s pleasant that we hit in with your plans, sir! I believe you have
been on a visit to a relative who’s a Virginia planter?”
That was Bartram’s story! I laughed, I doubled up with laughter, but
inwardly. “Just so,” I said. “I’ve been visiting, Mr. Pomeroy. It’s a
good thing to see the world and all that’s in it.”
“That’s a sailor’s opinion, sir,” he answered. “And you’ll doubtless
find things to interest you in Africa and the West Indies.”
He went on about his business, and David Scott, being tired of standing
and peering down through the gratings into the darkness of the empty
slave deck, moved aft and found a place where he could sit and think,
or not think but only stare at the sea that was growing more blue.
We are foreigners. I made the remark to myself that life was strange,
and many other men have made, are making, and will make the like
comment. For me, I was indolent and befogged and held in a Sargasso
Sea, like to that physical one somewhere in this ocean. I said to
myself that doubtless it would be difficult to leave the _Janet_
in Africa, but at the first English island I would surely do so.
And then came along Geordie with the morning dram for officer and
passenger, and he seemed to regard me as both.
I drank. The sea sparkled, the wind sang. I began to love the ship.
And was it so bad, this traffic that I had never particularly thought
of and certainly never questioned before I quitted Scotland--_on a
visit to a Virginia kinsman_? That ill gipsy Mirth, that I gave
house room to, screeched at that. But as the rum worked the wry-mouthed
started aside, and there came in General Benevolence, beaming on
the slave ship and Whidah and Calabar and Daga and Camaroons and the
other heathenish names. Then I grew judicial and thought I must wait
to judge--_wait till I got used to it_. And I never saw the imp
Self-Interest sitting on my shoulder, patting my head, his heel on my
heart.
The dram was not so deep but that in an hour Daniel Askew--Eboe
Sam--Old Mill quarter--returned upon me. But at dinner time there would
be another.
The good breeze held and drove the full-sailed ship joyously. It was
not hot or cold, but sunny and gay. And David Scott had no shackles
upon him, nor had to go into the tobacco field. He began to think of
his ambitions, and of how from, say, Jamaica, he might get to Holland,
and thence into France where were Jacobite Scots not a few. Some kind
of career--in a learned profession if he could manage that. He didn’t
want the army; not the Scots Company in the French army, not any army.
He did not like the life of an idle soldier, nor the life of a soldier
in action. He liked a book life and a life out with nature. He had,
after all, that much good out of Virginia. Memories of the morn and the
night, the sun and the air. Earth, water, air and fire, color, sound
and the trees.
Scotland--Virginia; Virginia--Scotland. The Hebrides brig--the _King
William_--the _Janet_--Christian Todd’s little boat and his
flute coming down the river! And what would one do in France without
money? Money, money, money, money. Rider without steed; sails without
wind!
A slender, dark man, very dark, with blue eyes, approached me. I saw
that this would be the surgeon, Colley, whom they had said at breakfast
would be out to-day. He came up. “It’s the Captain’s kinsman, Mr.
Scott, I believe?”
“The same,” I answered. “Sit down, won’t you? I am glad to see you
better.”
He took his seat beside me. “I got a nasty fever at Daga going in a
boat up the river after sunset. I gave myself all the bark in the
medicine locker, but it hung on. Up one day and down the next. But I’ve
been getting better for a fortnight and I’ll soon be all right. I feel
finely to-day.--How did you like Virginia?”
“Why, it’s got its good and its bad.”
“Mixed feelings?” he said. “That’s me. I regard most places with mixed
feelings.”
“The _Janet_?” I asked, then thought, “If I say things like that
forever, I shall be disloyal to William Bartram.”
He clasped his knee with long, bony, well-shaped hands--surgeons’ hands
with power and knowledge in them, and lifted those intense blue eyes
of his to the topgallants. “I went in debt to get through Surgeons’
Hall. When I was through, I could not get out of debt. Every other man
I saw seemed to be a surgeon running to a case! But I had none, or
so few that they could not get me out of debt. They seemed all to be
in debt themselves. Bread and cheese, even, grew to be a problem. At
length every creditor was threatening. So at last I said, ‘I will go
on a ship, for ships at least seem to be always wanting surgeons.’ So
I answered advertisements of East Indiamen and others, but always when
I got there each berth had just been filled. I was hungry and not far
from ragged. And there was one creditor who made himself detestable. So
I saw one morning that the Guineaman, _Janet_, wanted a surgeon.
Here I am.--The pay’s not bad, and your cousin’s a strong man and a
good captain. I would drown myself from most Guineamen I know, but I’ve
stayed on this. Three years. I’ve even paid the worst of the damned
creditors and mean to pay them all.”
“Shall you spend your life on a slaver?”
“No! No, indeed. Just two or three more years till I get clear. The
pay’s higher than elsewhere if you can stand the game.”
“Stand the game?”
“Africa’s a hot country,” he said, “with strange, old diseases. There’s
all the chances of the sea--and there’s Africa.”
“I never gave all this a thought till lately,” I said. “There are
worlds within worlds like Chinese boxes. I suppose it _is_ a sickly
trade for all concerned.”
“Grain Coast, Gold Coast, or Slave Coast; it is only a question of
degrees. If you’re merchant for inanimates--ivory, beeswax, palm oil,
dyewoods, Malaguetta pepper or what not--still there’s sickness. Of
course it’s worse in the _Janet’s_ trade.”
“Yes, of course.”
I looked toward the forecastle. “Yet he seems to have a healthy crew.”
“These are the seasoned and the new hands. We lost fifteen men voyage
before last.”
“And how many black men?”
“Eighty,” he answered. “There was a kind of pestilence. But all that’s
unusual. He’s got an extraordinary record for a clean ship and little
trouble.”
“‘Holy Bartram,’” I said, and then repented, for he had pulled me out
of the river and I was going along with him. Colley’s bright blue eyes
flashed my way. “He’s told you that? He’s proud of it; he keeps it like
a pot of balm on the shelf of his conscience.”
I broke into laughter. “Then we’ve all got a conscience! You, too?”
“I’ve got a surgeon’s conscience. I do my best.”
I said, “I was not visiting a Virginia planter. I was a Stuart man
at Culloden and was sold into slavery. I’ve got a personal, not a
hearsay, knowledge of what it is to be bound. How much balm for my
conscience should I have to have if I persisted upon this ship? At the
moment, of course, I have a pot upon my shelf. I did not know what was
the _Janet_ when I came aboard, and I cannot go knock down the man
at the wheel and alter her course.”
He turned with vivacity. “I knew McNaughton was holding something back!
So you’ve had a history too! Aren’t there a lot of them? And you’re to
be considered as just a bird of passage? I understood that you were to
have Philip Smith’s place. McNaughton said that the Captain had taken
a personal liking to you and that as he’s daft on family anyway, your
fortune might be considered to be made!”
I laughed again. “What fortune?”
His blue eyes half closed. “Oh, all things are relative! But of course
if you’ve got great ambitions----”
“I do not know how great they are,” I answered. “But greater than this.
I’ll go the first port I can.”
“That won’t be an African port,” he said.
I reminded him of the ships that traded only for ivory and palm oil and
gum copal and so forth. I might transship to one of them.
“It isn’t,” he answered, “the easiest thing in the world to do that!
They aren’t always in the same river mouth with us, nor are their times
our times. From Sierra Leone to Camaroons is a long, long way, Mr.
Scott. And you’ve got to go in parties in Africa. It’s not a place for
single souls to be trotting around! You’ll have to wait, I’m thinking,
for Jamaica. And maybe you’ll change your mind in Jamaica. Unless you
have influence with the Governor, or with some great sugar planter who
buys what the Royal African Company has to sell.”
I sat in silence, looking at the blue sea. Colley yawned and stretched
his thin limbs. “Africa gets into the blood and bone. It’s the climate
and the sea and, it sometimes seems to me, an old, strange rhyme and
routine. At first there’s a kind of horror in the life, but at last Use
comes in--though when you think of it there’s a kind of horror in Use
herself. But you grow indifferent. If there’s any tremendous wrong in
enslaving black barbarians it gets to be as invisible between Whidah or
Calabar and Kingston or Bridgetown or Charleston as it is everywhere
else in the world.”
Colonel Amory rose before me and how invisible it had been to him and
his easy and amiable like. How invisible it was to Judith Amory. How
invisible it was to Scotland, whose merchants and wandering sons were
everywhere. How invisible to England, with her ships upon the seas and
her “royal” companies.
Something out of old school reading entered with violence into my mind.
_The dyer’s hand subdued to that it works in._ I left my seat
and moving to the rail stared at sky and sea, then returned. “A little
more or a little less of misery--good ships and bad ships--I’m not
talking about that! It’s the whole damned business, root and branch,
white and black alike, that I’m meaning. Men enslaved and men enslaving
everywhere, and they’re twin brothers in wretchedness!”
He opened those intense blue eyes. “Oh,” he said, “if you’re a
Quaker----”
But I was nothing like so complete a man. I was an unhappy person with
an imp upon my shoulder that was going to strangle me.
CHAPTER XI
I liked Colley, McNaughton and William Bartram. I did not like
Pomeroy. I liked Geordie and the mulatto cook, Tom and his quadroon
helper Don, which was short for Adonis. These two were free men,
manumitted on his death bed by the planter their owner. They made a
deal of it, carried it written as it were about them. Yet were they
bound to the _Janet_, year after year, for one told me that they
rarely went ashore in any port. I did not like Davis the boatswain. I
liked Llewellyn the carpenter. Of the seamen whose names were quickly
learned, I liked certain ones and certain ones I did not like and to
others I was indifferent. There were no saints among them, but on the
other hand few forthright scoundrels.
I knew now that that numerousness of her seamen which had struck me at
the first belonged to her as slaver. She must have enough to allow for
sickness and death, and enough to handle and cow those five hundred
that would be brought aboard. I learned that many seamen signed for
Slave Coast ships when they were muddled with drink or otherwise
deceived. Llewellyn the carpenter told me this. “Wherever there’s a
sail and a mast and a hull, there’s danger. Seamen know all that.
Britain’s got her ships of war, and the Newfoundland trade and the
North American trade and the regular West Indian and Bermudas trade,
and the East Indian trade and the Grain Coast and Ivory Coast and Gold
Coast trade and the Slave Coast trade. Seamen don’t wait to get old to
die--not on any ship! But seamen die quicker and in more ways in the
slave trade than in any going. And if they don’t die outright, they
move ashore at last with some bad disease. And so they die anyhow. I
_have_ seen old ones sitting watching the sea that were on a slave
ship in their youth and manhood, but they aren’t many. No, they’re few!”
But Llewellyn, too, said that the _Janet_ was a good ship. No
man--no captain nor anybody else--could have helped that sickness
voyage before last. “Yes, fifteen seamen--God rest them!”
It was the first time I had heard that word aboard. “Do you believe in
God?”
“Oh, aye!” he answered. “Most carpenters do.”
“You lost eighty Africans.”
“Aye,” he said. “God rest them too!”
Days and days went by like beads on a string, easily slipping beads.
As I had read Gervase Morrison’s books on the _King William_, so
now I read my cousin Bartram’s. He had as many as fifty, the most of
them the Greeks and Romans done into English. But there were also
modern books, poets and philosophies and histories, and full in the
middle of his shelf a Bible. It had his name written in it and the fact
that it had been given him by his mother, on his tenth birthday.
In boyhood I had read every book that came my way and would go far out
of my way to get one of which I had heard. Then another life rushed
upon me and spoiled the old life. And then I came to Virginia. One
didn’t read at Old Mill quarter nor at Daniel Askew’s. But now the
hunger returned and I read and read.--And do not think I do not know
that reading is an opiate!
I read Herodotus, Tacitus and Livy, and I read Homer in George
Chapman’s version. It was so good a place to read--the _Janet_
going, not coming from Africa! Very clean she was, with the salt air,
warm not cold, searching all her empty spaces. Cabin and poop deck
were free to me, and I had also the diminutive room that had been
Philip Smith’s. I wondered sometimes about this man, and why he left
the _Janet_ at Philadelphia where apparently, once or oftener,
she had touched. I had space and sea quiet, with all the sounds of
good weather. I read and I read, and my hand went out for the dram
that Geordie brought. Or Colley, his fever now only a memory, came and
talked, his intense blue eyes aiding. Or in the cabin after the sudden
dusk, when the yellow lanterns were lighted, William Bartram talked.
We talked in the cabin there about many things, but not about the slave
trade. Early in the passage he had set his great foot upon that topic.
“It’s my business to sail this ship and see her laden and deliver
her cargo as undiminished as may be. I’m no thinking of resigning. I
loved the _Margaret_ that I had so long, but she’s dead and now I
have married the _Janet_. And you’ll please leave your reasoning
and objecting alone! If I’m no for listening, I’m no for listening.
And you’ll kindly, David, do no preaching nor you-know-what-kind-of
questioning among the officers and crew. It’s not healthy for them
nor any. I’ll be obliged if you will take it that those are Captain’s
orders. I’ll have no mutinies, David, even from one man.”
He was captain of the _Janet_. I recognized that. “I’ll make no
trouble,” I said, and saw not, indeed, how I could make it. And I spoke
to my conscience that was not in robust health. “_It’s but this
voyage; we’ll make a change when we come to Christian lands. We’ll go
ashore and stay ashore._”
“And I’m noticing, David,” he said, “that there’s a lure for you in the
wine and the dram. You’re too Scots not to know that a hard-drinking
Scot throws his soul away. I’d advise you to put the ship about while
there’s time.”
“Have you seen it affect me, sir?”
“Why,” he said, “not precisely ‘affect.’ But you’ve a way of setting
it to solve problems and I never heard of a one that it solved!”
I answered with moodiness. “It may not resolve but it makes one forget.”
“It’s better not to wish to forget. Face your life! At any rate don’t
make a dram your angel!”
He spoke with vigor, and Colley told me afterwards that he had a strong
feeling upon the subject.
“He’ll take wine after supper, but if it wasn’t that there _would_
be mutinies, I don’t believe that he’d have a drop of rum or brandy in
the spirit room! Drunkenness anywhere, land or sea, is to him the king
viper. He’s capable, if he didn’t have the _Janet_, of going on a
crusade to deprive the beast of his head. Sometimes he’s funny----”
David Scott thought, “Because the presence of some viper is on his
soul. He’s striking at it over yonder, when it’s by his ankle, under
the log.”
But I ceased, in cabin, to question the backgrounds of trade, and when
I spoke with Jack Dannet and his like I did not again ask, “How do you
like it?” or “What do you think of it yourself?” Colley and I sometimes
disputed, off to ourselves, with the wind singing and the blue sea
sheering away. But one day he said, “You’re here and I am here--on the
_Janet_. Unless we are prepared to jump into the sea let’s stop
the argument! You’re just easing your soul with it, anyhow.”
And I saw that I was, and that it was taking the place of action. Then
I said to myself “Hypocrisy!” and ceased to assert that there should be
no slave ships nor slavery. When I left this ship then I might begin
once more.
Moreover, after that talk with William Bartram, I had collared Geordie.
“Geordie, a dram in the morning and a dram at night, but no dram in
between!” and thought that I had done well and killed the snake. I
looked at Geordie severely, and he was a queer imp. He said now,
“Forgive me my sins, sir, and I’ll try to do better!” and so elfish
was he with light-gray eyes and flaxen locks and slim as a reed in a
bog, that it passed, as did all his comments, for elfishness and not
impudence. So I drank less, though I lusted for the foregone cups.
When I had been a week upon the _Janet_ my kinsman tried me out
with a blank book and a pen and a paper of figures and other matters.
Now it chanced that I had done some clerkly work for that uncle with
whom for a time I had lived, and that he was particular and taught
me thoroughly. I could have clerked in Virginia as well as Gervase
Morrison, but I was bought for a tobacco hand and woodcutter. But now
Bartram was pleased. “You’re a better man than was Philip Smith! I
see that you may be very helpful to me, David, if you’ll leave strong
drink alone. There’s nothing like kindred if everything else is
provided.”
After that I had an hour or two of work each day. He was upon--in the
great blank book--a transcript for his owners of all the voyages of
the _Janet_. In a month I became deeply learned in her fortunes
and her trade. I had a kind of gift for this kind of thing. I could
do it well and with the mind. I saw the pictures of all I was putting
down, but I began to see them coolly. Even then, even so soon, feeling
was dulling, Self-Interest, the promising devil, sitting fast upon my
shoulder!
The _Janet_ ran on, piled with canvas, through fair weather. A
week, two, three, four, five. Sometimes at night, before I fell asleep,
there filed before my eyes James River and Amory Hall and Old Mill
quarter and Daniel Askew’s and tempest-tossed forest wet as the sea
and Christian Todd’s boat under a sycamore. Going off, I heard now his
flute and now a Scots pipe screaming a pibroch in a glen. I slid into
dreams, some good and some bad. Once I dreamed that I lay in Sandy
Scott’s barn, and it was afire, and Helen Scott brought me a great
book, and I said, “Now this will show me the way out for it is the book
of Holiness.” And I clasped it, but it turned into Eboe Sam, and we
wrestled and tried each to throttle the other, and a great voice like
thunder cried “The soldiers are coming!” And the fire that was laying
hold of the straw and the rafters began most awfully to laugh. I woke
and lay trembling, bathed with sweat. There dawned a morning. I went
on deck. Pomeroy, leaning against the rail, turned his bull head and
spoke. “Africa, Mr. Scott----” I followed his nod and saw the mountains
of Sierra Leone.
We coasted south by east, turned the great hump at Cape Palmas and
coasted east. There were days and days of this, so huge is Africa. We
passed the grain, the ivory, the gold lands. They all dealt in man-gold
likewise; slaves might be acquired in any bight or river mouth. But
the Slave Coast proper was our end, where rose by the ocean the most
factories or forts or castles, French, Portuguese, Dutch and English.
Daga was one of ours, built seventy years before. I knew much about it
now from the great book and Colley and McNaughton.
There came a day. The sea was strongly blue and flowed in long waves.
We had been standing in to land, were close now, could see the fringing
cocoanut palms and the low land behind and then hills, blue and
emerald. Turning a white prong of shore, we sailed into a deep and
narrow bay where emptied a sizable river.
“Daga Bay,” quoth McNaughton at my shoulder. “Yon is Daga.”
The sea ran into surf against a shore of dazzling sand. Drawn up
on this lay a row of sharp-prowed, narrow boats. The burning sand
stretched on and was met by palm trees. I, who had never seen a palm
tree, knew them well enough. Stretched on and met palm trees and some
low, green growth, hard and staring in the sun, and a big square of
whitened masonry, big and low, with gateway and embrasures and guns
in these, and under its shadow a huddle of huts. Only there was no
material shadow just now. The sun stood at noon and all was blindingly
light. Behind the walls rose a kind of keep, and from this floated the
British flag.
_And David Scott, an escaping prisoner, was back in Edinburgh on a
wild night, a witches’ night._ There, there, I had seen Daga that
lay now in my path!
CHAPTER XII
Lace was the factor at Daga, a corpulent man with a red face and a
watery eye, and he had for assistant Berry, who looked for all the
world like whom but Williams at Amory Hall? Under these were three
clerks or handy men--Andrews, Hyde and Graves. The surgeon was Markham,
a man of fifty and sour as a green grape. He was kept at Daga years
and years, only, I think, because he was fearless. There are no more
fearless men in this trade than in any other, and they are needed
and are at a premium when found. Baker was the storekeeper, and he
had Brown for helper. There were other white men at Daga, filling
small offices of kinds. And there were four or five who filled no
office, hangers-on, men with some claim on some one, or with no claim;
sea-drift, withering and growing sapless of all that man might be. And
there was Rathbone Lace, the factor’s brother, a man of about my age.
Daga fort carried fifteen guns, but they were of old times and nowadays
never used. But they could be used; shot was piled beside them, and
Daga had an ammunition chamber, powder and muskets and cutlasses.
Within the four walls a vast sunbaked square of court provided room
for half a dozen buildings of kinds and yet left space for a caravan
market or what not. And in the thick walls were hollowed passages and
chambers enough--places of storage with heavy doors and infrequent,
grated loophole windows. On opposite sides of the court stairs of
stone led to the top of the wall that was wide enough for a coach and
four, if ever there had been such a thing in Africa. From the wall,
ocean, sand, wilderness--wilderness, ocean, sand, except when one
looked almost immediately beneath, being then on the northern face.
Here showed a baked, brown palaver ground and a haphazard and pell-mell
assemblage of cane and plaster huts thatched with palm and sheltering
the multitude of Daga’s black retainers. Runners, hunters, boatmen,
porters and so on forever. Women too.
On the eastern face also an interruption occurred, for here rose a
sudden, small hill with what looked like a cart road to the top where,
a hundred feet above the world, stood the fairsized, broadly verandahed
house of the factor with about it its own huts for servitors. With
him dwelled his brother and he gave house room to two of the clerks.
The cart track led directly from a postern door in the wall--nothing
was more than a pistol shot from anything else. Markham the surgeon
had likewise a house on this hillock, a small house under heavy and
magnificent trees, where he dwelled solitary, a curious, bitter,
hardened man. The remainder of the twenty or so white men at Daga
lived in the fort.
This “castle”, this African village, this wilderness, this white and
sun-charged sand, this dark blue ocean! There was surf, but a barrier
reef taking the most of it left only slight foam and low thunder
for the actual shore. In the deep water beyond the surf rode the
_Janet_ and two smaller ships, the _Sherwood Oak_ and the
_Fancy_--Liverpool and Lancaster. It was now November and the
climate at its best.
The _Janet_ proposed to swing at anchor before Daga for no more
than a couple of weeks. This was an orderly, big station that knew
about when to expect the ships that used it, and that gathered and
stored beforehand the cargos. Where such establishments lacked, a ship,
if conditions were adverse, might hang offshore or in some river mouth
while weeks slipped into months before the full tale of slaves was
secured. But the proper factory made proper provision--never, in short,
was without stock. Here were three ships, but the full crop was nearly
gathered.
“Where is the barracoon?” I asked Andrews the clerk, who was showing me
around. We were on the wall looking down into the square.
“Oh,” he said and waved a hand, “there’s room enough in this place! We
keep them in the old stone rooms--dungeons, you know.”
“Do they stay there day and night?”
“From five in the afternoon to sunrise,” he said listlessly. “They’ve
just been kennelled.” The sun hung low, a red ball. He spoke in a
weary, singsong voice. “The _Sherwood Oak_ and the _Fancy_
finished their lading yesterday. There aren’t but three hundred for you
here now. But we’ve boats up the river. The rest will be down in time.
This is your first voyage and you’re kin of Captain Bartram?”
“Yes,” I said, and I looked at the sun, and I saw the Negroes in
the fields of Virginia looking at the same red and sinking sun,
straightening themselves from their toil, turning their faces to the
cabins. And I heard with the inner hearing Old Hannibal singing loudly:
“When hab I done with de trouble ob de world?
Ooo-h! trouble ob de world!
My sins so heavy I can’t get along.
Trouble ob de world!”
I stared at the _Sherwood Oak_ and the _Fancy_ and a kind of
terror came upon me, and yet I did nothing that I should have done.
Bartram and I were spending the night ashore under the factor’s roof.
I might indeed spend as many nights as I pleased, being lavishly
invited to do so. But Bartram never, they said, gave but the one and
that grudgingly. The star his foe might have traveled elsewhere in
the infinite room to journey, taking with him that unlucky number,
whatever it might be. He might have come for all time out of the belt
of darkness. On the whole he thought he had. But something nested still
in his mind, for you could not separate him from the _Janet_--not,
they said, until, every two years or so, she rested in Bristol dock
when he would go into the country for a while. But at Daga or Kingston
or any port a day at a time or a night at a time was all he could be
got to give. He trusted McNaughton whom he always left in charge, but
when pressed to stay he answered that Bartram’s place was with his ship
and walked somewhat rapidly to the boat that ever was held waiting for
him.
But first night at Daga was a custom that it was politic to maintain,
seeing that factors must be kept friendly or captains of ships might
meet a thousand petty annoyances, to say nothing of second or third
choice in goods. So Bartram, Colley and I had come ashore, leaving
McNaughton and Pomeroy with the _Janet_. Bartram was smoking and
drinking good wine and conversing with the factor on the latter’s
verandah. Colley had been claimed by Markham. Andrews the clerk would
show me, the only stranger, the sights of Daga.
The sun was going down. Somewhere a thin, small drum began to beat,
flat and fast and insistent and desperately unchanging, like the
drumming of a giant insect. “Tom-tom,” said Andrews. “The palaver
ground’s yonder. A lot of black traders are in from up river and
they’re feasting. There goes their bonfire.”
We came down from the wall and crossing the court went by the long
storehouse and the ammunition house and the house where the white men
slept, and through the dark, high, echoing passage and out at the
castle gate. And here stretched the white sand and the ocean, endless
under the red west. The west never stopped it; it came around again to
the east. It was dusk, the air heavy and warm for all that sea before
it, and the drums beat, beat, beat.--I have heard them so often; I have
heard them too often!
Andrews was speaking, “I wish I were in Boston where I was born!”
“Boston in England?”
“New England. That’s the country for me!”
I regarded his long, lank frame and his thin and sickly face.
Everything about him languished. “Why do you stay in Africa?”
He answered with a weak and boyish violence. “Because I can’t help
myself! I got into trouble with the law--it wasn’t so much my fault,
I can tell you, as ’twas that of others!--but I can’t go home. My
father’s part owner of the _Indian Maid_ that trades here, so here
I was shipped! New England ships come, and I can’t go back in them.
Back home. I’m homesick, I tell you. I’ll die presently. If there’s a
melancholy hell it’s Africa!”
“It’s the trade you’re not liking?”
He took me up dully. “The trade? No, it’s not the trade I’m objecting
to. But at home now the snow’s beginning to fall, so white and pretty,
and directly they’ll be thinking of sleighing and Christmas.”
We were walking now over the hard sand to the road that led to the
factor’s house. “Does every one here hate Africa?”
“Oh, no!” he answered. “The factor has been at Daga twenty years. He
likes it well enough. He’s got his comforts around him--he doesn’t miss
his family.” He said the last in a curious tone, and I afterwards found
it to mean the two Mandingo women and the children that looked now like
them and now like Samuel Lace. “As for Mr. Markham the surgeon, he’s
an old hand too. He’d find verjuice wherever he went, so what does the
place matter? And to listen to some of the others you’d think it the
finest place! Of course you can have a good deal to drink and all the
women you please. Only I don’t like whisky, and for the other----” he
made a vague gesture of dismissal. “There’s a farm out Concord way that
I see forever.”
By this we were even with those native huts and that irregular trodden
ground of gathering where smoked and reddened and flared the bonfire
and where moved and sat and kept up a great laughter and noise a number
of dark people. We saw between stems of cocoanuts and other trees
whose names I did not then know.
“Let us stop for a moment and watch.”
He asked wearily, “Do you find it interesting? That’s long ago over
for me, if it ever began.” But he stood still and I with him under the
heavy cocoanut fronds and the clusters of nuts the size of men’s heads.
A voice behind us spoke. “Listen to old Osuma holding forth! He’s
boasting now about how the King received him in Dahomey.”
Andrews said, “This is Mr. Scott, Mr. Rathbone, who’s kin to Captain
Bartram and came in the _Janet_.”
“Glad to know you, Mr. Scott! I’ll go along with you up to the house.
I’ve been on the _Fancy_ and so missed your landing. So ‘Holy
Bartram’s’ well and fortunate still?”
“Do you call him that here too?”
“Oh, yes! Behind his back. But no offense, Mr. Scott! He likes it when
he hears of it. And coming in, just now, I admired the _Janet_,
too, for the fiftieth time. The others in harbor can’t touch her!”
There was still light in the sky, and also the back flare from the
bonfire. I could make him out; rather tall, with a short beard and red
cheeks, with a wide, straw hat and white clothes. His voice had oil
in it, but also iron. Oiled iron. Between Bartram and Colley, I knew
well enough the white inhabitants of Daga. So now I said, “Mr. Rathbone
Lace?”
“The same,” he answered. “Have you had enough of this? But if you will
wait longer, I am at your service.”
“They are traders who have brought in slaves?”
“A hundred yesterday. Small traders--Osuma and Banno and their men--and
they’ll feast and dance here till late. I see it’s your first voyage.
From Kingston?”
“No. I am a Scot, but I have come from Virginia.”
“Ah, Virginia! I have been in Baltimore and New York. That’s the one
thing we miss in Daga, not seeing the world.”
We went up the hill. It was low, rising from a wooded plain that
stretched far inland. But there were mountains and great ones in
Africa. I had noted them from the sea. We went up the hill in the hot
dusk, the ocean faintly booming against the reef and the drums sounding
behind us. I asked my question that was growing wearisome, even to
myself. “Do you like your trade?” And Rathbone Lace’s was the first
full assent.
The others had misliked and inveighed and cursed though they stayed,
or had found reasons for refusing to consider if they liked it or did
not like it, or had seemed unthinking, or indifferent, or apathetic, or
too dull to have tastes. But Rathbone Lace said, “Why, it gets hold of
you! Yes, I like it.” I was to come to know not a few who felt as he
did, but he was the first. To like it for itself and in itself. To like
black power as black power!
We went up the low hill. Lights were shining out of the factor’s house.
Andrews now left us, murmuring something about some errand and taking
a side path with a small, lighted house at its end. We went on a few
steps. Something came hurriedly from the bush and would have flitted
across the way and been gone, but “Lalla!” he shouted and made after
and seized and brought her back upon the white road that yet gleamed
under a sky yet lighted. She twisted this way and that in his hands,
then stood, a slight, dark-skinned girl, dressed in a scanty white robe
with chains of beads about her neck. He spoke to her gibingly in a
tongue I did not understand, and she answered thrillingly, with passion
and complaining. He grew angry and shook her as he might have shaken
a child or a dog; only needed a free hand perhaps to have struck her.
She broke into a passion of speech, confused, hurried, and charged with
some kind of woe, then putting forth a sudden, unexpected strength,
dragged herself free, turned, and with a cry was gone into the thick
darkness and matted growth. He thundered after her some threat, but
there only came another cry and then silence.
He cursed, then laughed. “The devil! I’ll pay her out!”
“What is the matter with her?”
“She’s Fullah; that is, she’s part Arab. Old Banno brought in yesterday
five or six Fullah men whom he got from the King of Dahomey who had
them as a gift from some Senegal chief. She’s heard of it, and has
taken a notion that among them is a member of her family.”
Her cry still echoed in my ears. “Couldn’t you release him to her?”
He stared, then burst into laughter. “Well, I confess _that_
hadn’t occurred to me! I’m more like to sell her to go along with
them--the vixen!”
“Then she belongs to you?”
“Yes,” he said, as indifferently as you please. It seemed to suffice to
him to explain all things, for he immediately with profound unconcern
began to talk of the trade goods that the _Janet_ had brought. By
now I knew as well as he that the _Janet’s_ port before Norfolk
in September had been Bristol where she had refitted, and where the
Company had loaded her heavily with wares for Africa. Only a small
space of that slave deck was cavernous and empty, boxes and bales
being stored through all the rest. To-morrow would begin the unlading
and Daga be furnished for a year. And I knew that Rathbone Lace was
supercargo or receiver here. He was speaking of trade rum, trade
muskets, kegs of powder, tobacco in cask, hatchets and axes and small
tools, beads and looking-glasses and figured handkerchiefs, kettles
and pans and cottage crockery. I knew as he knew that the muskets were
none of the best, nor the axes and hatchets and knives; nor the tobacco
which we had taken on at Norfolk, nor the rum, nor the powder, nor the
cloth, nor the more trifling articles nor anything else. They were
manufactured in England for Africa, and if the muskets burst and the
powder was dampened and the axes would take no edge and the cloth would
tear like paper, and if the tobacco was leavings, and if rum and sugar
and salt were adulterated, what were the odds? Africa was not critical,
or if critical gained nothing thereby.
“A man,” I thought, “to pay for a dull ax. A woman for a glass necklace
for another woman.”
I could think as my fellows were not thinking, but I did as they were
doing.
We were now before the factor’s house, low and rambling, untidy and
yet comfortable. He himself called to us from the verandah. “That you,
Rathbone? Is Mr. Scott with you? Supper is ready.”
We went in. Bartram was here and Colley and the captains of the
_Sherwood Oak_ and the _Fancy_, Berry the assistant and
Markham. A table was spread--there were English dishes and African
dishes, rice and fowl and pepper, cassava, yam. Two black women
waited--there were candles--it was warm. A vast bowl of punch was
brought and set before the factor. Tasted, one found it as strong as
Hercules.
The captain of the _Sherwood Oak_ was a man I should not wish
to sail under. He drank hard and he would drink with each one, round
and round. The captain of the _Janet_ would not be tempted. “No,
no, Captain Garth! You know my custom. But I wish your health all
the same. Prosperous voyage, sir!” The captain of the _Fancy_
was sailing before dawn. He said, “No, I must keep sober, Lace,” and
took but three cups of the punch. He was a talker, swinging from one
subject to another, especially engaging Rathbone Lace, but bringing in
Colley. The elder Lace, the host, promoted all as best he could and
urged the punch. Bartram was speaking in his slow, reasonable voice to
Berry the assistant. Garth drank with me again. The talk became general
and grew thick with ports and prices, African and West Indian names,
Company policies and niggardliness or the reverse, Bristol, Liverpool,
captains, ships, fair weather and foul, storm, wrack, sickness, mutiny,
loss and gain! In at the open windows came rhythmically the sighing,
hot breath of Africa; the candle flames bent aside, there seemed
wraiths in the room, then nothing but the punch bowl, big as a tarn,
and the good, strong, West Indian rum.
Supper was over, I saw that, and the captain of the _Fancy_
bidding Daga good-by, and it occurred to me that it was no loss to see
him go. He departed, Berry seeing him from the house. Then the others
drank again. Markham the surgeon appeared at my corner of the table,
seated there, watching me. “You’re drunk,” he said, “but you carry it
as though you were not.”
“That’s the way to be happy,” I said, and indeed was so. I was “happy.”
And I sat quietly and did not seem to be drunken. When we got up from
the table I did not lose balance or walk crookedly. I sat in a window
and watched the room and its occupants, and it all seemed very large
and filled with shifting colors and music. Time passed and sometimes I
talked and sometimes did not. Time too had expanded and deepened till
there seemed much of it and all worth while. And what we were talking
of I really did not know, but at last I understood that the night was
getting old and that we must go to bed. I thought that Colley was
drunk, he and Markham drunk together, and going together out into the
night, to Markham’s house. As for myself, I proposed to return to the
_Janet_ just so soon as I should see William Bartram my kinsman
safely installed in the room next the factor’s, he in one bed and the
captain of the _Sherwood Oak_ in the other. I felt a joy of old
romance when I thought of the _Janet_ and the cool sea around and
the star-powdered night looming above and between her bare masts. If
they did not expect me to go and had not provided me a boat, I could
swim.
Bartram and Garth and the factor had disappeared. Rathbone Lace had me
by the elbow and was laughing. “Come on! I’ve quarters for you in the
smaller house.”
The smaller house was set behind and to the left of the greater one.
There were trees and a roof and stars, a verandah, a door, a room. I
thought that Lace had questioned me as to what book I had been reading
lately, and I began to speak of Herodotus and his journey into Egypt
that was in this same Africa that had been known so long and both
favorably and unfavorably. I talked quite steadily and lucidly, as in a
dream. He laughed again and said, “A Scot is a strange animal! Are you
drunk or are you not? I swear I’m not certain which!”
But I was drunk and capable of wrecking a ship, my own or another.
The small house had the same guttering, blowing candles. By their vague
light coming forth from the interior, I perceived two forms upon the
verandah. As we stepped upon it, they moved with a kind of fluttering
and a low, nervous, catching laughter. The one vanished around the
angle of the verandah, the other remained. Lace put out an arm. “Are
you there, Fanny?”
“Yaas, sah.”
He drew her forward. “She’s Fullah--like Lalla. She’s a good girl and
has a little, a very, very little English.”
He pushed her toward me, just sufficiently, so that her brown, warm arm
came under my hand. “My room’s round the corner,” he said. “See you in
the morning--but sleep as late as you choose! Only no one can really
sleep after dawn in this place.” With which he bade me good night and
was gone, leaving Fanny’s arm under my hand.
CHAPTER XIII
The _Janet_ took a fortnight for unlading, cleaning, mending
and preparing for the Jamaica cargo. We all kept fairly busy, seeing
that it was Africa. In my charge now rested merchants’ books, lists,
tallies, receipts. At some hour of the day I went over all with my
kinsman in the cabin, but the actual clerkly labor and the actual
supervision to a degree were mine. Bartram seemed satisfied and I was
glad to do it. I had a power of work in me when I turned that way.
After the first night I drank no more to excess of Daga punch. Bartram
had said, “Mind you what you are about, David! I’ve seen many a tall
ship wrecked on this coast. As for Rathbone Lace, I’m fair to hope he
couldn’t have been bred in Scotland!”
I laughed. “I’ve heard of Captain McKenzie.”
“McKenzie’s a changeling and a byword. He’s not the least like any
McKenzie at home.”
McKenzie was the captain of the _Darling_ and if Colley and others
told true, there were oceans in hell and he had long been sea captain
there. But the younger Lace did not seem to me quite of that energy.
I worked with him in the tally and transfer of cargo to the Daga
warehouse. Baker and Brown and Andrews and Hyde and Graves and others
worked also. Sometimes we were upon the _Janet_, sometimes on the
beach, sometimes in Daga fort, in the long warehouse, in the sunbaked
enclosure. Work began early but stopped when the sun stood a little
past noon. Except for an hour or so with Bartram, the rest of the time
until dawn again was my own.
I remember the sands of Daga that were so white. The boats--the native
boats--brought from the _Janet_ boxes and bales and casks. Black
men waiting knee-deep in the water lightened the boats and heaped the
merchandise upon the sand. Black men, a line of them, shouldered the
lighter things or carried between them the heavier, and bearing them up
the sloping sand vanished with them through the dark and low entrance
of the castle. They were powerfully built black men, naked save for
the loin cloth, belonging to and serving the Company. Among them some
worked mum as logs, others chanted and laughed and joked. So it had
been in Virginia. They were naked here; they had clothing there. Here
they used an African tongue, there they had learned or were learning an
English one. Here was home, there another race’s home. The sea struck
ceaselessly against the Slave Coast. So they carried in the goods that
were to buy for another continent their kind, maybe their immediate
kith and kin; maybe, if they displeased any here, themselves. Muskets,
rum and powder--tobacco, tools and gaudy cloth--crockery, beads and
mirrors. I saw the English multitude toiling to make all this with
which to buy, and that multitude themselves seemed slaves. And then I
shut all such thoughts and images under hatches and went and drank with
Rathbone Lace, and was myself--and not only in the drink--a slave.
At the warehouse toiled Baker and Brown with one or two nondescript
whites and a dozen blacks to help. The warehouse was inside the castle,
a long, shallow structure, stone against the stones of the wall. Around
spread the baked earth, a square big enough for a town market. The sun
beat on the stockade within the square where through the day was herded
the _Janet’s_ lading that was to take the place of boxes, bales
and casks. It was as large as a palaver ground. By dint of crowding,
its citizens could make a space for dancing, for the beaters of drums,
for exhorters and prophets, tellers of stories and starters of songs;
space too for the serving of meals which were plentiful. It was policy
to keep them cheerful. No one wanted pining skeletons for Jamaica or
anywhere else. Their drums and lutes were given them; they were urged
to dance, to sing, to eat. So far as their exhorters chose to encourage
them, these were given full swing. The ordering of the barracoon fell
to Berry the assistant and his helpers. Berry was not a bad sort, but
had a kind of wry joviality and a parental bearing. When he appeared in
the place it was always to say, in effect, “How well we’re getting on!
Let’s have a feast--but it’s nothing, you know, to the feasts they give
in Jamaica!”
Through the day, at intervals, the drums beat and there was singing
and dancing and noise. Till an hour before sunset. Then the square was
emptied, the drove vanished into those chambers within the walls, and
all was still.
One morning, having an unoccupied hour, I found myself with Colley upon
the wall. Hard by stood one of those guns trained within, and near
to it talked among themselves three of Berry’s guards, white men who
looked much like pirates without a ship.
I said, “Do they ever rise?”
He answered, “Two or three times in ten years. When by chance there’s
among them some spirit of war and leadership.”
“Wallace or Bruce?”
“Anan?” he said. “I don’t think it goes as far as that. Anyhow, it’s
the most hopeless of enterprises! There’s a tradition that once they
burned and slew and swarmed away and were never taken, but it must have
been very long ago.”
I said, “In Virginia it was white slavery that was concerning me most.
But is there any difference?”
He said, “There you go again! When I look at them I do not see white
men and women.”
“No, but men and women.”
He swung round upon me. “Why, then, do you not make your choice?
Yonder’s a path into the forest and after a while another path and
another and another! You come to towns, palaver grounds, chiefs’
houses, black people, black merchants and traders, black princes and
priests, thousands and thousands of black people, the land’s so full!
Why not go preach to them? Or, better still, why not preach in the
factor’s house this evening? Preach to white men and the Royal African
Company?”
I answered him sullenly, “I am no preacher.”
“I thought,” he said, “that we agreed upon the _Janet_ that we
could not change the world. And I’ve thought at the factor’s and with
Rathbone Lace you were beginning to be fairly reconciled!”
I saw that I was, and I saw for a moment my blackness, I who had been a
slave.--Then Fanny and the drink and Bartram and the ship and Security
for David Scott, with clerkly work that did not come hard, and goodly
books with leisure to read them, and coin in his pocket, and some
seeing of the world after all, and friends. Security, friends, a good
ship and the blue, salt sea.--_And at any time I might quit!_
I was not lost enough to say brazenly to myself, “I will not quit just
yet.” But underneath, underneath consciousness, as it were, it was
said. “_I will not quit just yet. Jamaica? Perhaps not even then._”
Immediately, there in the sunshine, things shifted a little. I saw the
barracoon under a more favorable light. Under the light, in short, in
which Colley and Bartram saw it. Yes, there was a woman weeping there.
Yes, there sat a man in a gloom that darkened the sun around. Yes,
that knot yonder was sending forth a chant that could only be likened
to the one hundred and thirty-seventh psalm. Yes, there seemed some
wretchedness in the barracoon. _But was it so bad after all? Nothing
was idyllic in Africa, anyway. And one must live, and the shape of the
world is past our changing. And of course nothing in any one else had
the poignancy I found in myself. They did not feel as I felt._
I said, “Well, they are laughing over there! And that girl who is
dancing seems to enjoy her dance.”
Rathbone Lace came up behind us. “We’ve missed you and Mr. Markham, Mr.
Colley! You’ve been up the river?”
“Yes, up to Oil Palm village,” answered Colley. “There’s a man there
with a melancholy Mr. Markham wanted me to see.”
“Did you cure him?”
“It was to observe an interesting case. I don’t think it is curable.”
We leaned upon the parapet and looked down into the stockade. “Your
five hundred,” said Lace, “is about made up. Three hundred men, one
hundred women, seventy young boys, thirty girls under twelve. There
are a few lacking, but Gambo will bring them in presently. You’ve got
an unusually strong, good lot! Mandingoes, Fullahs, Dualas, Soo-Soos,
Ashantis and Coromantins.”
Said Colley, “Coromantins and Ashantis are fierce and bold barbarians,
Dualas and Soo-Soos are tractable as sheep, Mandingoes and Fullahs are,
so to speak, gentry.”
“Aye,” said Lace, “but in the market all alike.--When do you begin
lading?”
He spoke to me. I answered, “A week from to-morrow.”
“Then we’ll have time to go up the river for two or three days if you
like. You’ve never been up an African river. We’ll go up to Oil Palm
village in my boat. Saturday?”
“I’ll ask the Captain.”
I did so. Bartram gloomed a little, then said, “Africa is biting you,
David. Well, you’ll have to have it over with. There’s no saving a man
from himself.” He drummed on the table. “My self didn’t come to me as
Rathbone Lace, but perhaps as an ill a man.”
I said that I didn’t quite understand him, but the Inner Man did
understand. The Inner Man is never less than clear-eyed.
Lace and I with five Negroes went up the Daga River in a boat carrying
little food, for we would get that ashore, but with a great jug of
Jamaica rum.
At first, to either hand there spread great coverlets of mud, forlorn
with rubbish of the forest and the sea, and the water was dull and
brackish. I saw here crocodiles and many a wading bird. By degrees,
this changed to soil, black and loose and unfathomably rich. Here began
the great trees and the marvelous blossoms. Here I saw parrots. The
black men rowed us on, and now and then we drank. At times a forest
overarched the stream so dense that there was as little seeing into it
as into a stone wall. At times we passed clearings where there seemed
to have been old cultivation. At times the trees were set as in a
park, and a path ran by the water, a manifest, cheerful, trodden path.
“Africa is full of paths,” said Lace. “Even the caravans know in the
desert the way to go.”
“We are far, far away from the deserts.”
“Yes. There are few people in the desert. But the Africa we know about
is full of people, and these are their roads.”
“What size is the Africa we know about?”
“God or the Devil knows!” he answered. “The size of Europe, maybe.
Trade comes to the Coast from as far away as Russia--were we in London
or Bristol. Down a hundred rivers like this and over a crisscross
forever of forest paths.”
“The Coast is their Ind or Ophir.”
“You seem to read poetry.--Every black or brown kingling at any
distance whatever, and every soul in the territory that he rides, knows
that muskets and knives and rum and toys grow on the Slave Coast.”
“The marvel is that they do not all see, having used one another for so
long for money, that the day will come to each when he shall be used in
like fashion.--But we do not see that either, in Europe.--It is like
shipwreck, or plague aboard. Each seaman thinks, ‘They die, but I shall
escape!’ Africa and Europe and Asia and America. Four seamen.”
“You philosophize,” he said. “I’ve never had time for it, nor for
poetry. Negroes are Negroes and born to wait on their masters.”
The five boatmen had among them a little English--all the Africans
attached to Daga had so much or so little--but if they understood or
did not understand was all one to Lace. They pulled the boat and had
black bodies and faces, with hair unlike a Christian’s.
David Scott had never dreamed of the trees and flowers and beasts and
flitting birds and insects of these lands. Overpowering beauty and
strangeness now were around him, up the Daga. Wonder came upon him,
and a clutch of the land upon his heart. The Negroes began to sing.
He knew that too--that there never were any people who loved singing
more. Rathbone Lace yawned, drew his wide straw hat over his face and
went to sleep. David Scott sat in a kind of dream between the pinions
of strangeness and beauty. All along his life had been beginnings
of sensibility here, but now on the upper Daga these gathered to a
head, burst and expanded. Beauty! I came over the frontier, into Her
kingdom--but yet was I unprofitable to Her--an unprofitable servant.
The moments passed, green and gold and purple. I could not follow the
words of the boatmen’s chant, but the air was now richly cheerful and
now a wailing plaint--but from the one end to the other ran music.
It broke and ceased. The man in the prow said something in his African
tongue, then all seemed to listen. Rathbone Lace took the cover from
his face and sat up.
“Drums. They sound like Gambo’s.”
The Negroes acquiesced. “Gambo’s.”
“He’s bringing in,” said Lace, “the balance of your lading. Row on,
boys, to the opening yonder.”
We shot from a deep, gold-spangled shadow into full sun. It shone upon
a narrow, grassy plain but little raised above the water, with a brown
path running beside it. Now I heard the beating, as of quite a little
host coming.
“Do they bring them in with drums?”
“Why, they come more quickly so,” he answered. “Everybody walks
better to drums and horns. They keep time. And then, it’s for Gambo’s
importance.”
A long, wooden trumpet blared as though in confirmation, and out of
the shadow of cotton trees and palms and bamboo emerged into the tawny
meadow a procession headed by Gambo with his musicians and tailed
by half a dozen of the trader’s armed men. In between moved perhaps
seventy men and women and children, divided into three squads and tied
one to another with rope. Each squad had for guard a couple of men with
muskets and cutlasses. They came on without at first seeing our boat
masked by a clump of canes. The great sun lighted their almost naked
bodies, their faces, intelligent and unintelligent, the rope about
their necks and their wrists. Only the children were unbound. Nine, ten
and twelve-year-olds, they trotted beside their elders.
Slaves under thirty are the valuable slaves. Men and women, most of
this band were young, though Gambo had acquired a few at middle age.
They seemed of different tribes, for some were charcoal black, and
others deep brown, and others light brown with almost straight hair.
Some were low-browed, flat-nosed and thick-lipped, with a great,
protruding jaw, and some had by no means that coarseness but were well
featured, with a black or brown comeliness. The figures of many were
strong and fine. The young boys and little girls had grace, forlorn or
impish as the case might be.
The drums had ceased to beat. All moved a few paces in silence, when a
woman with a high, quavering voice, burst into a chant of parting. A
man joined in, then a woman, then others, men and women, till all the
company of bondfolk were singing as they marched to the slave ship.
They sang upon the brown, African road an eerie, wild and tragic chant.
David Scott sat in a dream listening, for it linked to that perception
of Beauty. And again he was hearing Negroes singing at Amory Hall,
singing at dusk, in the quarter, after work, singing before and after
the white parson’s religious instruction, singing at funerals. The
tongue was changed but the music was the same. All the rolling ocean
was an illusion, this land and that neatly joined.
The chant broke. One viewing the river had made out our boat. Gambo’s
powerful, unctuous voice rolled out a command; all halted. The armed
men made motions with their muskets. Lace, standing up, shouted, “Daga,
Gambo!”
The boatmen pushing the boat head into the bank, we jumped out, Gambo
and his lieutenant Big Man--I never knew his real name--affably
assisting. The company of slaves was no longer afoot but sitting and
lying amid the grass, instantaneously resting where rest was to be had.
Lace and Gambo talked in a fearful mixture of English and African that
I could not as yet completely understand. I gathered that the trader
was discoursing troubles and expenses.
Big Man moved back to the sunken troop and I went with him. A woman
with a child beside her, roped as she was, managed to fling herself in
the dust and grass before me. Her hands touched my ankles, she laid
her face against my shoe, then gathered herself to her knees and cried
to the white man to be let to go back with her child to her village
and her hut, where two children screamed for her. Big Man, when I
asked what she said, got through to me with that much. He also offered
to beat her away. I prevented the blow that was falling, but I said,
“Tell her it’s useless--that I can’t--that I have no power,” and I drew
myself from her grasp and removed a few steps, when a man began to cry
to me, “White man master--white man master!” There followed gibberish
to me, wildly and energetically spoken. I turned and found Lace beside
me. “What is he saying?”
“He says he is from Calabar and was in the employ of the factory at
the mouth of the Camaroons River. He says he has favorably known white
men and white men have favorably known him, and that he was their
interpreter when any journeyed up to the mountains. Then he went
home to Calabar, and there happened a great war--three years ago, I
gather--and since then he has been a slave of a king on the Benwe. The
king sold him to an Arab slave merchant--he escaped and swam a river
trying to get home--a second caravan captured him--he escaped again,
and has been far up Daga River for a long time in a village, the same,
he says, that the woman who has spoken lives in. Then lately there fell
a war, what war he does not know, but it was for slaves. The village
was burned and its strong men and women carried away. It was all in
the dark, and the leaders in the war quarreled, and one marched away
with no more than a dozen out of the village and he among them. That
was a month ago, and a week ago he was sold for a knife and some powder
to Gambo. The moral of it all,” said Lace, “is that having worked
for white men and done, he says, his best, he thinks that white men
can hardly mean to put him on a ship.” Lace laughed. “_I_ don’t
listen to their stories, bless you! But you are new to it, Scott, so I
translate.”
“Have all of them stories?”
“Any one can make up a tale. I have known funny ones in my day! But
many are as dumb as cattle.--Pshaw, they _are_ cattle!”
He looked the company over with the supremest indifference as to
certain things, but with merchant keenness upon others. “Gambo’s
done pretty well! They’re a mixture. He’s bought from King Timbu who
collects from all quarters. But they seem sound.--Big Man, club that
fellow if he will not hush!” The man from Calabar subsided. The woman
with the child sat with her head upon her knees. “A lot of them have
been slaves before. Gambo says that there are two witches also and
three women sold by their husbands and a thief or two.”
I looked at the witches, two young, thin, great-eyed women, more
heavily bound than the others, as though for stigma. Their companions
seemed in part to shrink from them and in part to feel a dim
enchantment and a hope that if they were propitiated something to the
good might yet happen. Their village had sold them for the good of
the village and for rum. The three wives seemed much as other women.
Perhaps they had brought scandal and commotion and strife and adultery
into the family and were justly punished, or perhaps newer loves
and jealousy and revenge had somewhat to do with it, or perhaps the
husbands merely ached for muskets and tobacco and rum. What the couple
of thieves had stolen did not appear, but here they were, going to
the sugar islands. I have known in England of a boy hanged for taking
loaves of bread, and it’s not so long since in Scotland we burned three
women for witchcraft.
The woman and the man were not the only ones to find voice. Two thirds
of the troop were making appeal--a distressful noise of many in
trouble. There was a clamor around us until Gambo, Big Man and two or
three of theirs began to lay about them with whips and the butts of
muskets.--David Scott turned and walked away. He went back to the boat
and sat there with a stony face.
Lace returned at last. “Gambo’s a jewel! With a little direction he’d
make a great merchant. There’s a small world of native traders in
Africa and he’s of the best.”
“Are they going on now?”
“Yes. There are the drums.”
They were beating and the long, wooden trumpet blared. I looked through
the cane and saw the squads in motion.
“How many are bought or caught and shipped overseas in a year?”
He considered. “If you take all the factories from end to end of the
Coast--British, French, Portuguese, Dutch and so on--it’s a big number.
Seventy thousand or a little above, I should think.”
“A year!”
“A year. We British have any number of factories, a few large like Daga
and many small ones, and more than half the trade. All the English
ports together may send out not so far from two hundred ships, big
and little. Perhaps the British total may be between thirty-five and
forty thousand Negroes a year. Ships and seamen, manufactured goods,
establishments on the Coast and so forth--I don’t know how many
million pounds are invested, nor the number of investors. It’s very
great.”
The drums beat, beat, beat. Gambo and Big Man and the armed others,
the drummers, the trumpet man, the three groups of slaves for the
_Janet_, passed across the meadow and vanished into the shadow of
gigantic trees. “Get on, boys!” said Lace. “It is hot here in these
canes. More rum, Scott?”
That afternoon we reached Oil Palm village, named so by Daga of old
time because of its many of these trees and the oil they furnished.
For long it had been a kind of pet place, rendezvous of traders,
depot at times for merchandise for the interior, provider of guides
and go-betweens, center of intrigues, under the protection of two or
three factories, a supple favorite of many years. The chief or head
man was a creature of Daga, the four or five hundred villagers bowed
with the chief, and the surrounding clans kept hands off the “white
man’s people.” Daga maintained here a big clean hut, and had often on
the ground a clerk or other emissary. Oil Palm village flourished to
the eye and grew sleek and prosperous, without fear of damage, under
the gracious shadow of that great tree, the British. A good many vices
grew up with its prosperity. It had somewhat the function, for wearied
traders and men from the factories, of a Capua. A bland, suave, dusky,
noisy place.
Here Lace and I abode for two days and nights. There was plenty of rum,
and there were women.
CHAPTER XIV
We began to lade the _Janet_. She was clean and stanch and as all
had always sworn, roomy. Our seamen, to whom Bartram had given just as
much shore leave and license as his name for a “good” captain obliged
him to and no more, were all home again and fairly fit. The officers
no less--McNaughton who never seemed to take a holiday, Pomeroy who
took all of it that he could hold, but who had a bull’s strength,
Colley who took with moderation. As for Captain William Bartram, his
holidays were of his own devising and within his own mind and spirit.
Tom and Don, the cooks, had been three times, I think, ashore. Once
I had encountered them on the wall, staring down into the barracoon.
Those therein had surged toward them with shouts and appeals. They had
answered back, but their tongues were not pure African and did not seem
to be understood. The barracoon had begun to laugh and to jibe, and
then it seemed to menace spiritually, seeing that it had no material
power. The two from the _Janet_ cried something back and left the
place. Again I had seen them at low tide, sitting on the beach, upon a
piece of a wrecked boat, staring into the west, where would be Jamaica.
If anywhere was home to them it was Jamaica--and the _Janet_.
If anywhere was home now to David Scott, it was the _Janet_.
Scotland was fading. A time would be when all its tint would come
again, but now it was fading.
Davis the boatswain and Llewellyn the carpenter, Hamilton that was
surgeon’s mate, Benjamin the steward and Geordie, Jack Dannet and all
his fellows, poop, midship and forecastle, we were all aboard. The sun
was shining--the hatches were open--one looked down along shafts of
light into that depth that, quite clean and airy and empty now, would
soon be not the one nor the other. Colley said that the Captain had
them up from it an hour earlier and into it an hour later than any
other that he knew. “He’s got good customs.”
McNaughton, standing by, put in, “Aye, he gaes tae kirk inside. At
times it gets into the way of complete effeeciency.”
“I don’t agree there,” said Colley. “I think he’s more efficient for
it.”
“Aweel,” answered McNaughton, “there’s room for a difference of
opeenion.--But yon’s the first boat.”
He moved to the side. William Bartram was on the poop deck. I went
to him there and watched with him the oncoming boats, two or three
between us and the shore. They were the long, native boats, made of the
greatest trees; they had many rowers and were packed with slaves. On
the white beach beyond showed a number of Daga figures, the factor and
the assistant and Rathbone Lace and others; and squads of naked slaves
were issuing from the barracoon and Daga castle, driven forth and down
to the water where waited boats. The sky was the bluest imaginable,
there was a sweet, singing air. The scene had beauty, but there was
horror too.
On the _Janet_ a certain number of our seamen were armed with
cutlass and pistols. “There’s a fear and despair at first,” said
Bartram, “that makes them dangerous.”
The foremost boat now touched the shadow of the ship. Men stood by with
rope and the long, cleated, landing board. This boat had women and
children, mostly silent, ashy with fright. They were taken aboard--the
boat pushed off--the second took its place. Again naked black women,
naked young boys and girls. In Africa many tribes wear some slight
show of clothing, some light and partial attire in a land of heat, but
Africans put upon a slave ship are put there naked--nor could it be
otherwise, the conditions given. If they felt it or did not feel it, I
do not know. There was so much else to feel. In this second boat there
was wailing and praying.
Bartram descended to the deck. He stood among those women and children
and honestly tried to comfort them. He had, as had all at Daga, a
rough and ready acquaintance with African tongues that were all, so to
speak, variants one of the others. Now I made out that it was:
“Stop greeting, you women; you’re wringing your bairns’ hearts! Nobody
wants to eat you--nobody’s going to hurt you in any way if you’re
good! Ship--this is a good ship--fine ship. Men--these are good white
men. You’re going to a good country--plenty to eat, houses, good folk.
Plenty your own kind there!--Now, here comes another boatful. See if
you can’t get up a laugh to meet them!”
The third boat--women and children still--came alongside and gave to
the deck, Pomeroy and half a dozen seamen handling the cargo. I had
followed Captain Bartram, and now in the momentary lull while the
company aboard watched those coming aboard, he spoke to me and with
feeling.
“I’m looking to you, David, to follow my ways and Mr. McNaughton’s
ways, not Pomeroy’s ways nor Rathbone Lace’s ways. I’m fain to treat
these poor souls, just as far as ’tis possible, like kindly Scots folk
torn from hame by poverty and trouble and gaeing ower seas. I’ve seen
greeting amang women at Glasgow and Leith when first they came to the
white ship that was to take them away. Not loud greeting like these
poor, naked children of the sun, but greeting. In the end greeting’s
greeting, sorrow’s sorrow, whatever the color of her claiths.” He
sighed, “There’s many a cruel necessity, David!”
From out the women from the third boat started one, taller than the
others, vigorous, with a deep and intelligent eye, with a dark fire
running well-nigh visibly through and around her.--David Scott had in
his time felt anger too deep for any shaken voice or idle movement,
and he recognized it. She spoke, and she checked attention and held
it breathless. We did not know her tongue; she seemed a Negress from
the mountains. Maybe she had been a prophetess or a queen. Beyond
doubt, by nature she was something like that. Her speech straightened
the cowering groups and for a little made it to seem that the captors
cowered. There was a strange illusion.--David Scott, at least, saw as
in a mirage a great dark figure, out of space and time, standing as
judge.
The voice of this woman thrilled through the _Janet_. She cried
upon God--presumably ours and hers alike--to show us through suffering.
We did not know her tongue, but the ship understood. Through suffering.
Then I, watching, saw and heard something strange. It came as it were
from the inner sky, out upon her visibly. The dark fire changed hue,
became rose and sapphire, then a golden flame. Her arms were lifted,
she seemed tall as a mast, her voice sang and was universal as the
wind. “Show! If it must be through suffering, then suffering, but show!
Show!” That was her saying, though I knew not the words. I do not know
if what I saw and heard was caught by any other, though Bartram beside
me shuddered slightly as though one had passed over his grave. But
David Scott heard it and felt it for the _Janet_ and all ships
upon the seas, and Africa and the rest of the earth. Show! Show!
It stayed with us a moment, that enchantment or that Truth. Then,
Bartram having nodded to him, Davis the boatswain seized the prophetess
and threw her reeling among the dark crowd. “You’ll stand watching, for
it’s you that bring about risings!” She fell to her knee, caught by one
of the women and stood up, but spoke no more. I saw her now as only a
tall negress with the air of one who held rank. Her voice sank away,
now and for this voyage. She died the third week, and we dropped her
body into the wave.
The boats that were coming now held men. The sun blazed over Daga.
The whitened castle and the many palm trees, the river mouth, the
village, the factor’s hill, the white beach and the ant procession out
of castle, out of barracoon--and again there flashed to me Edinburgh
and the Luckenbooths. A naked black man, first of his boatful, stepped
upon the _Janet’s_ deck, and for all the world he looked like
Pickaninny.
CHAPTER XV
All night and every night five hundred beings lay as close as herrings
in a cask upon the _Janet’s_ slave deck, under the _Janet’s_
grated hatches. Men were shackled, two together at the ankles. Women
and boys lay ungyved. Each and all had just enough space in which to
lie their length, or almost their length, and their breadth without
turning or spreading. Bodies touched and rubbed one another. Overhead
was scant, scant space. The hatches were kept uncovered, but still was
it suffocating down there--and fetid beyond believing. David Scott,
who knew an Edinburgh prison, yet had never dreamed of anything like
it. It steamed up through the gratings. He thought he saw it, one hot
night, as a cloud surrounding the ship. It was black in that sighing,
grunting place, black as the pit. Sounds came up all night long. Out of
five hundred always some were sleepless, always some in anguish of body
or mind, always some breaking out into wrath. They remonstrated with
each other, they seemed to curse God, or now and then to be praying.
Sometimes would come a wild and sudden cry. The watch on deck paid no
attention, unless the noise grew and a certain note came in. Then a
threat was cried down through the gratings.
In the morning, “an hour earlier than other ships”, the gratings were
lifted, and they poured up the short ladders to the light and air. The
deck became covered as a sugared board is with bees. They gasped, they
stretched themselves, some leaped up and down; they stared at sea and
sky and each other; their tongues were loosened. Water was given them
and a sufficient breakfast. Divided into companies, they sat and ate
from great platters of beans and rice. Now you might hear, out of one
group or another, a guffaw of laughter. There is something in the Negro
ineradicably cheerful. But there was never much or lasting laughter,
not even on the _Janet_ that was so “good” a ship!
The slaves stayed on deck all day long. Two hours before sunset they
had their second meal. The allowance of water was a pint and a half
in the twenty-four hours to a man, less to women and children. This
seemed great hardship and was miserably felt by these who at home drank
when they wished from a thousand springs and streams. But the Middle
Passage took long weeks, and tempest or dead calm might at any time
make it longer. Among the ghastliest stories were those of slavers
without water. The five hundred black folk were given sufficient for
some degree of health and no more. A little thirst spaced through the
voyage, said Bartram, was better than empty water barrels a hundred
leagues from land. Certainly he wished there were room for more barrels.
“If we carried fewer Negroes----”
“The Company thinks we should carry more.”
He had his rules for the day. All ships had pretty much the same. There
must be exercise, and it was best got by a kind of dancing. Fettered
men still could shuffle and sway, and the women and boys were free of
bonds. Dancing was good for the body and the spirit. Singing was good
too, so that it leaned to the jovial and not the melancholy. All were
encouraged to dance and sing. They might sprawl in the sun and sleep.
They might converse and tell stories. The surgeon came and looked them
over every morning when they emerged from the blackness, every evening
before they returned to it. If there were any truly and really ill they
were removed to a corner that was called their hospital. All wanted
as few as possible to die. A certain number might be expected to go
between Daga and the sight of Blue Mountain in Jamaica--half a dozen
out of a hundred perhaps, in a decent ship like the _Janet_. Much
more than that would mean some calamity. So soon as they were forth
in the morning, salt water enough was sluiced about the slave deck,
swabbing poles were used and it was dusted with purificatories. The
Middle Passage was a time of labor for all but the Negroes, and as for
risks and anxieties, slavers had them in abundance. A prime need always
was to keep the cargo well and reasonably content, or if not content,
submissive. Every interest led to kindness with firmness. Not only were
the owners served by carrying their goods undamaged, but to secure as
many lives as possible there had been devised head rights. Captain,
first and second officers and surgeon had each so many shillings or
pence out of the price of every able-bodied slave delivered to the
agents in the ship’s port. Every interest led to reasonable kindness
in Virginia. But there was Daniel Askew! And at Amory Hall, that meant
kindness and in a degree achieved it, I had not loved their kindness.
The _Janet_, to many slave ships, was as Amory Hall to Daniel
Askew. I will give her credit, and I will give Bartram credit, and
McNaughton and Colley and many more. I will give David Scott credit. We
were not demons. We were perplexed and erring men, calloused by this
work.
The first week we lost nine. The first week, they said, was usually the
worst. There was more despair, and there was the universal seasickness.
Two suddenly, at sunset, jumped overboard, and though sailors leaped
after them they were not rescued. One refused to eat and though
at last Bartram ordered the cat, and though the third day Colley
supervised the forcing open of his mouth and the pouring down of broth,
neither did any good. He determinedly died. A man and two women died
of some disease. Two children died. A boy died, apparently of mere
homesickness. The second week saw less mortality. It had its toll, as
had every week that followed, but we kept the fair side of calamity.
Time out of mind two things are most dreaded by slavers--plague and
outbreak. The _Janet_ was helpless before plague, except inasmuch
as she strove for what cleanliness was possible, and what order was
possible, and had drugs enough and a good surgeon. But as to outbreaks,
William Bartram kept the probability or the possibility of that as low
as might be. And he kept it so to an extent by being a good captain,
not a bad one.
The story was that he did not sleep on the Middle Passage. It is called
that because a ship’s original course is England to Africa--Africa to
America--America to England again. And so it is the Middle Voyage, the
Middle Passage. Bartram slept, of course, but he slept little. All
day he was wary; cool, just, according to canon, and wary. Throughout
the night, any hour, he might be found going about his ship with his
padding step, like a tawny, watching, desert lion. The watch had no
chance to grow drowsy, the man at the wheel, the mate on duty, found
him silently beside them one moment, then gone. He stood at a grating
and harkened to the sounds coming up, and gauged their importance;
he studied weather of whatever kind. Then he might go and sleep a
while and return again. A tall, robust man with tawny hair and beard,
big-nosed and keen-eyed. When he and McNaughton walked together, there
were two tall, red Scots; when David Scott was joined to them, there
were three.
He kept his seamen with his eye and his slow, full, reasonable voice,
and the character behind both. They did their work, they made or took
in sail, they sat aloft in the rigging or swabbed away the filth and
refuse of the slave ship, or stood as guards over those five hundred
prisoners; they toiled, watched, ate, slept and played, shouted, cursed
and laughed, were sick and well, grumblers more or grumblers less, as
seamen are; but they gave no fear of mutiny and the _Janet_ sailed
her way.
The _Janet_ sailed her way. It was the winter and the heat not as
it is in summer in the Middle Passage. But there was heat when the deep
wind failed and the sun stood overhead. Then the sails hung slack, the
sea became a hot blue floor which never might we cross; the ship seemed
to fester, to fester and to groan. Then the wind blew again, the sails
filled, and life revived.
Twice we met tempest, once bitter and prolonged, the greater part of
a week. A mast broke, the seas washed over the sides, the ship was
tilted and played with like a walnut in a boy’s hand. For three days
and nights the Negroes must be kept below hatches. That was frightful.
Eight were dead when the sun shone again and the waves stilled
themselves. We lost also two seamen, Jonathan West and Walter Bigger.
Barring this week of storm we had a fair and uneventful voyage, day
after day of good wind and bright, blue sky. We sighted two British
Guineamen, a Spaniard to whom we gave a wide berth, and a craft that
we could not make out. Africa now was far behind us and the great West
coming nearer, though still it, too, was far, far away.
In some sort a part of the Negroes grew reconciled. I saw brutalities
aboard the _Janet_. Pomeroy could be brutal, and Davis and certain
of the sailors. But the ship’s intention was not brutality, other than
the brutality of being there at all, a fetcher and carrier so, in the
eye of day. Harshnesses appeared; punishments and intimidations. It
is a problem of high difficulty, the ruling of five hundred barbarian
captives crowded for long weeks on a ship upon the sea. What harshness
Bartram exercised, or let the mates exercise, was always to him a
necessity, done to save from worse things. But the same plea would
be advanced by the captains of the _Sherwood Oak_ and the
_Fancy_, or by that McKenzie of evil name, men of less judgment
as to good and ill and necessity than the Captain of the _Janet_.
When it was thought to be needed the whip was used, or other punishment
such as deprivation of food and drink, detention under hatches by day
as by night, or chainings to the mast. Disobedience and turbulence were
the crimes. Some committed them, others did not, and Bartram strove
for justice. And when he could--or thought he could--he showed much
kindness. Only there was so little room for kindness on that slave deck!
Yet, as I had heard laughter in the Tolbooth--as I had known men to
laugh at Daniel Askew’s--so I heard laughter among the black men and
women on the _Janet_. For such is the human spirit. Laughter at
times, weeping at times.
CHAPTER XVI
At times David Scott’s stomach turned against this work, and he waited
but for Jamaica and freedom. At such times he saw that he and Bartram
and McNaughton and Colley and Pomeroy and the others were slaves; aye,
that the Royal African Company, supporters and Parliamentary grants and
all, was a slave. Daniel Askew was a slave. Colonel Giles Amory was a
slave.--David Scott was in slavery.
At such times he sent Geordie for a dram, and then, for such a length
of time, he saw things differently. It was not so bad a life. All life
was a picture and a play and great emotions surged through it!
Again, he might be as cool and as much himself as the Tron clock. From
Africa to the Indies was a small hell. Granted! But there had been
and might be again the great empty ship from the Indies to Africa. He
liked that, and there would be the ports, the Indies and the coasts of
America, England where he might risk it, and Daga where was none so bad
company. A man must live! If there were iron walls against him where
he might wish to live and prosper, then he must even live and prosper
where he might.
_Because he had been a slave and knew, therefore he must not
enslave._
He said to himself, so cool and at himself, that he was not enslaving.
That was the Company, Daga, England, America and the earth. A man was
a puny thing and must go with the crowd! And the slaves being enslaved
anyhow, they might even profit by having for slaver among the others
one named David Scott. He saw things that even Bartram could not see,
how to combine kindness with rule. They might benefit. So he reasoned,
the losing soul, so cool and clear! Had it been a shipload of white
slaves--had he been an ancient Roman bringing slaves from Britain,
slaves enslaved in much the same ways, it would in the end have been
much the same. _He_ was not responsible, but the order of affairs.
And other moods possessed him, and chiefly, “Let sleeping riddles lie,”
and “Take it as it comes.”
The golden and blue days, the starry nights went by. Over-thronged,
foully smelling, with some sound of mourning always, the _Janet_
that I had thought so clean and light ploughed her way. Bartram gave me
work to do--kept me at it, not unwilling, for it killed the thinking
when I could not drink. Under his apparent self-sufficiency he was a
lonely man, craving his own, missing son or brother or friend. I came
to meet a need, having the same blood as himself, understanding his
liking for books, understanding his wish to be kindly, and his passion
for the native land, understanding his pride and his self-ponderings.
We could journey together, talking little, but sticking no thorns one
into the other, and on occasion giving each other help. He troubled me
no more about wine, rum and brandy, though his eye was watchful there.
Nor did he argue any more about the _Janet_ and her freight, nor
did I argue any more here. The action is the thing that has the clarion
voice. I did Philip Smith’s work. Once I asked McNaughton why he left
at Philadelphia.
The mate looked at me from under red tufts of eyebrows. “Ah, he was a
brittle chield! He developed scruples.”
“You call that being brittle?”
“If this is your wark and your living, Mr. Scott, I do. Aweel, he’s
doubtless howked himself to death in an almshouse. He wasna fit for
much when he left us.”
I slept in this man’s small, small cabin, and at times I felt him.
And at times, waking in the night, I felt the slave deck below, and
the fetid blackness, and the bodies close, close to my own, sighing,
pressing, straining for space where was none.--But then the comfortable
dwarf within me slammed the door against that silent calling.
The stars rose, crossed and departed my window. The cold dawn, the
solemn dawn, rode into the field, and then, his mood brightening,
decked himself with the violet and the rose. The golden cap of the sun
parted the purple sea. And here was the day, to better or to worsen.
At first the horde we carried had seemed all of a piece, sex and adult
or youth the only distinguishing marks. All were bare; all had a jargon
that only painfully was I learning to interpret and find a language
like my own; all were dark, dark of skin though with shades in that
nighttime. All were crowded, all were captive; the same destiny was to
all; they were already slaves. At first the one looked like the other.
But at last the observant eye parcelled out even in that swarm. David
Scott had vision to use and must use it. He watched the cargo and could
not choose but watch it.
It had been so in Virginia also. At first one had seemed like the
other. Then it had emerged that Old Hannibal was not Joe, nor Joe,
Pickaninny, nor Pickaninny, Eboe Sam.
Colley sometimes stood beside me, gaunt and hollow-eyed, for there was
something, he said, in every voyage that poisoned him. “Then quit it!”
I answered one day. “Spring to the first shore and run!”
“Take your own medicine!” he said. The sun was shining, the rigging
humming. We look down from the poop upon a corner where naked men were
playing some game with a kind of dice, bits of wood that they had
secured somehow and most ingeniously marked. “In God’s name what have
they got to dice for? They can’t even sell themselves any longer.”
A young man, all clean bronze, threw and leaned back and laughed.
Another, sitting cross-legged, cupped the bits of wood in his hand,
shook and cast them. Four others, thick-lipped, with woolly heads and
bandy legs, subservient somehow to the main two, laughed and jabbered
and clapped their shins. “Two great lords gaming,” said Colley, “and
their followers and cup-holders. I’ve seen the same when I had a look
one day at White’s.”
“This ship makes you sardonic,” I said. “I don’t know what it makes me.”
“There is,” he said, “a thoroughly abominable two months or rather
less, followed by a somewhat longer term of comparative happiness. I
live for the comparative happiness. We all do.”
I was looking at a woman seated with downcast eyes, a child of nine
across her knees. Now I saw that it was the woman who had cried to
me up the Daga River, who had two children at home. If she felt me
staring at her I do not know; perhaps she did. At any rate she raised
her eyes and stared back. She was hollow-eyed, her face and frame were
thin, her breasts hung lank. A dark light as of recognition entered her
countenance and turned into hatred, blank scorn and hatred. She stared
at me leaning there, then with a most deliberate insolence slowly
moved her body until I had only her dark back and shoulders and her
face was for the sea.
Colley had followed my eyes. “I thought she would die, that Eboe woman.
She would have gone, I’m pretty sure, but for the child. I worked it
so. I said--black lingo--‘You don’t want to leave her, now do you?’ and
it worked like one of their ju-jus.” He finished reflectively. “Mother
and young one like that are usually bought together, but not always so,
by any means. So it may be that she’ll have to leave her anyhow.”
In the middle of the swarm--the deck was black with them; they had
little room to move about--a man was laughing, a rich, subdued,
whole-hearted laughter.
“That fellow there must be clean of sin.”
“You laugh and I laugh.”
“Not like that----”
“If he’s clean of sin there’s one there--and there’s one there--who is
not.”
It was a sullen and violent brute to whom he pointed, and a crafty and
apelike one. “Yes,” I said, “they are mixed.”
Those nearest the barricade began to speak to us clamorously, men and
women. They made appeal for increase in the water ration, for more and
other food, for a little rum, for license to stay, when it came dark,
this side the hatches, for medicines, for news of where they were
and where going, for release, for return to Africa, for justice and
knowledge and joy and freedom. They made no discrimination--we were
white men--it was enough. We were in the magic, wizards and evil kings,
all! No one ever knew when gusts of passion and of desperation would
take them. Something of this kind happened now, appeared and spread
and mounted. From a few many become involved. There grew a dizziness
of faces and upswung arms. Voices ran the ladder of excitement into a
deep-throated yell. Like a levin flash came a certain tension. Colley
raised his voice. “‘Ware, Michaelson!’ Ware, Dory!” A man above us
shouted “Mr. Pomeroy! Trouble here, sir!”
Pomeroy was at hand, McNaughton came running. The deck showed now a
ferment as of determined bees. A leader started forth, then with a yell
there came, as a comber comes, a dark mass against the barricade where
they thought it weakest. Then I saw Bartram, tawny as a lion, with a
lion’s roar.
“Too late for soft words, Mr. McNaughton. The tall one, you, Dory!
Fire!”
Dory fired, and the tall one, the leader, fell. “Burke! Take that man
yonder!” and the one to whom Colley had pointed fell. The wave recoiled
upon itself, broke. A moan ran through and over like the moan of foiled
waters. Bartram shouted to the insurgents in their own tongue, “Who’ll
die next?”
This way and that they looked into the mouths of pistols and muskets,
and upon cutlasses that flashed and dazzled and made dread, and beside
these there was only the shoreless sea. They feared the sea that was
their severing foe, they feared the ship--sailed and tiered ships being
the highest magic,--they feared the white men’s guns and swords. Blight
struck them, they wilted, withered, sank into an abject, wailing or
silent mass.
The two dead men were lifted and thrown into the sea, and the blood
mopped from the deck. There was no further punishment. Bartram was not
sanguinary, nor loved in any way immoderation.
Days and nights--days and nights--days and nights, and the reeking
ship went on. Week on week until we had counted six. The log showed
an average voyage. There had been better, said Colley, and there had
been much worse. We lost three seamen, two in storm, one from sickness.
Others were ailing, but it was always so. There were four hundred and
seventy slaves on deck or under hatches. The loss of that thirty made
for them that much more room, but still a stranger would have wondered
where that thirty could have been stored.
We were now upon the Indies. I remember the cry of “Land ho!” and how
it thrilled, for there was none upon the _Janet_ who did not now
wish land.
CHAPTER XVII
And yet it was days between the sighting of the first of the Windward
Isles and the vision, like enchantment, of the Blue Mountain of Jamaica
that was twice as high as Ben Lomond.
These days were different from those before them. The run was all but
over, many dangers overpassed. The ration of water was doubled; the
slaves might have all they wished to eat. All the object was now that
ills be forgotten and the cargo seem and indeed be in the fittest
conceivable shape. It was Daga’s triumph to ship stout slaves; it was
the _Janet’s_ or the _Sherwood Oak’s_ or the _Fancy’s_ to deliver whole
and stout as many as might be. Ours were fed and cleansed, and given
oil to rub with, and at the last the most were unshackled. And they
were told tales of the goodness of the Indies.
There is something in the Negro of a vast good nature and a knowing how
to live. Tragic was this ship to him, and his own land was left behind
forever and forever, his land and kin and ways and tongue. He had not
left it of his own will, but was stolen, forced, dragged, wronged. He
was going to a world strange to him as the moon, and into slavery, and
the slavery he was already tasting was not sweet. And yet Great Nature
gave him humor and mirth, and the moment, on the _Janet_, physical
pain and oppression lessened, up and out they welled, like springs from
dark hillsides. Not from all but from many. And another thing. He is
a barbarian and a heathen, with images of stone and wood, but behind
that mask and that childhood yet, he is religious. David Scott found
that out of old in Virginia, and nothing ever changed his conviction
here. Not that it shows in every man and woman. In many it shows not
at all or most fitfully. But in the whole there is the tincture and
the mark. Even on the _Janet_ it rose in many or descended upon
many, and out of the black present sprang a bloom, a sense of a Future
that was different. David Scott saw that happen, and deep, deep in
him something knew what it was. It was there, behind or above all the
flows of passion, all the sluttishness.--Something in them, as in the
Africa they were leaving, dark and rank and strong, incredibly old and
incredibly childish. Something mirthful, despite the world. Something
savage, something grotesque, something shallow as the skin and deep as
the bone, something foolish, something passionate, something delighting
in music and drama, something religious, something warm and kind,
something good, something wise, after one of Nature’s many ways of
wisdom. It was all there; it showed on the _Janet_ as elsewhere.
Some were credulous of the tales that were told, some were not. John
Dory and Benjamin the steward were the ones set by custom to tell them.
Our slaves would like to have heard, I thought, from Tom and Don. But
Tom and Don avoided Africa, naked and chained; as little as might be
went that way or looked that way.
John Dory and Benjamin had been afoot through Jamaica, Barbadoes and
Trinidad, and on the steed of imagination across the Spanish and French
islands. I listened to them telling preposterous marvels of fat and
ease and plenty. One or the other or both sat cross-legged atop of
barricade and dealt out fairy tales in a mixture of Negro tongue and
sailor’s English. The four hundred and seventy listened, and woebegone
faces shortened and white teeth showed. What was dearest to them was
that they would meet a lot of their own folk--a lot of black skins--and
that these were universally happy, and that they, too, would be happy.
A woman shrilled at John Dory, “They won’t part me and him?” “Lord,
no!” said Dory.
We passed by the Bahamas, and saw the mountains of Cuba, and the
mountains of Santo Domingo and at last the mountains of Jamaica. The
_Janet_ was made as clean as was possible, the sick sailors seemed
to recover, fiddles sounded in the forecastle. The officers smiled;
around Bartram played like a beam of light, _The star that warred
does not return!_ The Middle Passage was gone over, the voyage
made, the luck fair.
The shores of Jamaica are gorgeous to see, under the golden light,
under the rose and purple when the sun is low. I gazed and gazed at the
peaky mountains and the vales between and thought I saw a paradise.
Dusk gathered, stars swam above the purple land, it seemed to me that
there was music. In the cabin after supper, McNaughton and Colley
having gone on deck, Bartram put out a detaining hand. “We’ll anchor
presently in Kingston harbor. And there, David, what is your will? Will
you be leaving me?”
“I hope the _Janet_ may be my home still,” I said, “until I know.”
“You do not know?”
“No.”
Opening a box beside him he took out golden guineas. “Here is what I
would have paid Philip Smith--a little more, maybe.”
“I’ll take just what you would have paid him.--Thank you, sir.”
“The _Janet_ will stay two weeks or more. North, that’s the agent
here, has a good enough house and decent connections and is a safe man.
If you want to see Jamaica he can put you in the way of it. It will
be best just to say that you’re my cousin who came out with me from
Bristol.”
“You’re very good to me, Captain Bartram.”
“Of course it must be ‘Captain’ before the warld of the ship. But when
we’re like this, David, it might be ‘Bartram’--for all that I’m a wheen
aulder than you.”
I said, “That’s as the warld counts it, Bartram. Inside, there’s no
telling which is the auldest or the youngest.”
“Guid!” he answered. “Have you a purse for your money?”
At midnight we anchored. At dawn all the slaves were let upon the deck.
The east reddened and threw a light against mountains and a broad
coastal plain, blue water breaking against the shore and a host of
cocoanut palms leaning from the land over the wave. We saw bright green
patches of sugar cane. The air breathed balm, one made out a kind of
houses among trees, and the crowing of cocks came faintly to the ear.
All the upturned dark faces!--It was not hideously, fearfully, unlike
Africa.--_It was like Africa!_
The sailors were making sail. Up came the anchor to a chantey.
A steaming breakfast went to the deck, and, with the Captain’s
compliments, a dram for each man and a smaller one for a woman.
Afterwards abundant water was given with which to bathe. They scrubbed
themselves and each other, while the cleaning gang below made the
slave deck sweeter than it had been since we laded at Daga. The wind
blew fair, the _Janet_ went hummingly, the great sun laughed
on flag and pennant and sails. Bartram sent Willy the fiddler to
play for Africa. Then out of the storeroom came cotton breeches and
shifts--slaves’ clothing, since English and Christian countries must
not be shocked by nakedness--even black nakedness, which in itself, so
comfortably has Nature arranged it, shocks much less than does white
nudity! In an hour the slaves were clothed; they only needed now to be
baptized.
We entered Kingston harbor, that is a goodly one. Ships large and small
rode at anchor, and before us, flat upon the plain, sat a fairsized
town, all embowered in tropic trees. There are shoals and reefs and
spits of land. A pilot came to us, and he was white but his boat held
black men. Ah!--and ah!--and ah! Africa to Africa.
The town enlarged before us. There showed a wall and a long and low
stone building and a wharf that ran out toward us like a giant’s
finger. All grew until we could see the moving crowd that watched
us--watched the _Janet_, known to Kingston, coming in with
hundreds of Negroes. Her wings were folded.
“Oh, heave her down,
Oh, heave her down,
Heave her down----”
Her anchor grappled the white sea floor. Another boat appeared under
our bows. It had in it a medical man who stood up and flourished a
fine hat. “Good day and welcome, Captain Bartram! Have you smallpox,
or any plague?”
“Good day, Doctor Cawthorne. We’ve no smallpox and no plague.”
“Then I’ll come aboard,” said Cawthorne, and doing so, greeted Bartram
and Colley standing beside him. “_We’ve_ the yellow fever,” he
said. “But that’s a matter of course.”
A third boat appeared. “That’s North, just behind me.”
Mr. North came aboard. Geordie put wine and glasses on the cabin table.
Captain and first mate, the port doctor and Colley and the Company’s
agent and Mr. David Scott, cousin to Captain Bartram, drank to one
another, to the _Janet_ and Jamaica and the market and so forth.
Cawthorne and North both were tallish, thin, yellowish men, somewhat
drawling and weary in speech. They asked of the voyage and the cargo
and the luck, and gave the news of Jamaica and of England from a
man-of-war in harbor.
We went on deck, to find small boats enough around us, chiefly oared
craft. The rowers were Negroes, naked to the waist, with cotton
drawers, and some with a shirt beside. They had fruit and wares for
sailors, and all around the ship pulsed a chanting, shouting noise.
The four hundred and seventy from Africa were not silent neither. A
strong light beat, the plain shimmered, the mountains behind melted
into misty greens and colors of heather. Bartram and the others were
talking, talking. David Scott thought, “How old is the world, seeing
that this has been going on since old time, and yet is but a moment?”
And it seemed to him drawn out like a long, long violin note, yet there
was silence on all sides of it.
That very day we transferred cargo to the long building that was the
Company’s barracoon. The Company had a fleet of boats. Load after
load the four hundred and seventy were ferried ashore. They left the
_Janet_ without seeming reluctance. A man, standing up in the
first boat, shook his clenched fists toward her and shouted something
that Pomeroy translated for me. “‘Stinking hell!’ he’s saying. ‘All
evil to you, stinking hell!’ If I had him here, I’d flog him to a mask
of blood for that!”
Pomeroy’s red face grew redder. And David Scott too had a kind of love
for the ship--left from her outgoing--and resented the black man’s
words. But then he had not spent his nights on the slave deck.
CHAPTER XVIII
North’s house, a commodious enough one, built of plastered stone, had
a verandah that commanded Kingston harbor much as the factor’s house
had commanded the far smaller haven of Daga. The climate was not so
different, nor for the matter of that the landscape and the tree and
the flower, save that tree and flower in Africa were vaster and more
varied. And the ocean struck here and the ocean struck there. Ocean,
Ocean, Ocean, just the same, striking Virginia, striking Scotland.
Colley and I stayed with North but went back and forth to the
_Janet_. Bartram stayed with the _Janet_, but came and went
ashore and to North’s. McNaughton I met at times in the street. Pomeroy
had, they said, a wife or a mistress in a tiny, deeply shadowed house.
And for our sailors, there existed the waterside and the town at large
and the Seaman’s Delight.
The uneasy spirit within drove David Scott to the sunbaked slave market
beside the barracoon. I saw our cargo sold, and only long usage could
make that selling less than frightful. Back I was upon the _King
William_, and they were selling me!
At North’s there was always punch or brandy neat, and servants and
servants to wait upon one. Colley and I slept in a great airy room,
with a net over the bed to keep out mosquitoes. North had no wife,
but a brown housekeeper. His table groaned, and at supper was always
company. Down by the water stood the house of the Company, with clerks
and ledgers and a great lounging place. North’s days were spent there,
and this was the place to find ship captains and traders and outfitters
and often sugar planters.
I saw little of Bartram these days. He seemed willing to give me sea
room in which to make decisions.
With Colley or alone I saw the scambling, hot and dusty, not so big
town that was Kingston. We were put in the way of getting horses and so
rode over the plain, between sugar fields and through untrimmed forest
to Spanish Town, where was the King’s House and the Governor, and some
kind of Parliament, and an Assembly room and a theater and a great
church and an inn. We put up at the latter and saw the sights. Spanish
Town was once, they said, St Jago de la Vega, before Cromwell put the
Spaniards to the sword and took the island. The old port town was Port
Royal that a great earthquake swallowed only sixty years ago. Then up
came Kingston in its place. Earthquakes still happened, earthquakes
and hurricanes and yellow fever and the pox, and threats at times from
Spain and from the French in Santo Domingo; and pirates infested the
surrounding seas.
There were British soldiers in Spanish Town--two or three companies, I
should guess. In the inn we found their officers gaming and drinking.
By degrees they began to speak to us at our small table, and when they
found an intelligent ship’s surgeon and his companion, to draw us in
to the general company. We did not meet the consideration which would
have been ours had we come from the man-of-war in the harbor, nor the
consideration due to a stately East Indiaman, nor even to a general
merchantman in the American Trade. The slaver had a dark mark over
the world, though the world demanded that she persist. She was like a
prostitute.
So they used a certain freedom and condescension of tone. It irked
Colley, I saw, but God knows it seemed only to put me back into
Virginia, where I had been a servant and laborer.
They wished to know of the sea and the cargo and Africa, and if we had
seen so and so who was upon the Guinea station. Colley would hold his
gentility and so minced in and out. But David Scott did not care. For a
moment he had been in the great parlor at Amory Hall, where there was a
fire burning, and a dance and young men and women laughing. And then he
sat thinking.
There entered a couple of men who also had been riding and who, greeted
by and greeting our officers, seemed folk of consideration, Jamaica
owners of the neighborhood, sib to English squire or Scots laird. One
seemed an amiable man enough, languid and drawling like North, but with
an educated tongue. The other was of coarser stuff. They drank and
the talk went on. The Captain of soldiers--a fine young buck such as
I might have found opposed to me at Culloden--mentioned our names to
Mr. Dalrymple and Mr. Crabtree, “Doctor Colley and Mr. Scott. From the
_Janet_ in harbor.”
They seemed to know the _Janet_ and asked of Captain Bartram,
“Holy Bartram,” said Mr. Dalrymple with drollery. A military man of
superior rank entered the room; the officers present rose and saluted
and then all sat to drink again. The newcomer proved an authoritative,
talkative person, just back from Kingston and from dinner aboard His
Majesty’s sloop of war _Nemesis_. Wishing to talk about the
posture of affairs at home--they all, Dalrymple and Crabtree and the
soldiers, called England “home”--he talked and the others deferred
or put forward just the starters he wished. He talked of the French
and Prussia and Austria and the Ohio Company and Pelham and Pitt and
Ireland and Scotland. His remarks upon the last-named were intemperate.
I said, “I am a Scot, sir. The country is poor but not villainous.”
He swung himself around in his chair and stared at me.
“And who the devil, sir, are you?”
“I am from the _Janet_,” I answered. “The country is poor but not
villainous.”
Mr. Dalrymple intervened. “A nephew, I believe, Major, of Captain
Bartram of the Guineaman _Janet_. You know how are the Scotch,
sir! He means only properly to stand for his own.”
“I mean,” I said, “that the country is poor but not villainous.”
The Major swallowed. “Well, sir, it is villainous in part. You,
doubtless, are an exception.”
“Every land is villainous in part. For instance, England----”
He suddenly roared. “Yes, England too! Haven’t I just been saying so?
In short, I don’t feel like quarreling, Mr. whoever you are from the
Guineaman!”
“David Scott, sir.”
“Well, Mr. David Scott, I don’t think the _waur_ of you for
finding good under your own rooftree! I’m supposing, of course, that
you were not ‘out’--as the saying is--in ’45, or that you were ‘out’ on
the right side?”
“I was ‘out’ on what I considered the right side----”
Colley’s voice, that was a clear, penetrating one, made itself heard
with suddenness and completeness. “A soldier with the yellow fever. As
we came into Spanish Town----”
“Another!” exclaimed the Captain.
“I don’t think I could be mistaken,” said Colley. “He had every sign
and was making for the hospital. Have you ever thought, sir, of moving
the men bodily to a mountain top? The higher you go, the less of the
fever.”
Mr. Crabtree followed him, though certainly without any notion
of serving David Scott. “I’ve thought the same. I’ve thought of
balloons--and I tell you what I’ve thought too, Doctor. I’ve thought it
is the mosquitoes.”
“The mosquitoes!”
The soldiers laughed and no one picked up again the former topic. As
for Colley and me, our eyes met and said, “We’ll sit just long enough
to show that we’re not chased, then pay and depart.” The company now
was upon a ball to be given at King’s House in honor of the officers of
the _Ariadne_, upon the ball and the fever and the sugar crop and
the Maroons, which last word I think I first heard here. We were about
to rise when a young white man in a very poor dress, who seemed to have
been riding, entered the room. He had in hand a package, and standing
by the door he coughed twice and at last attracted the attention of Mr.
Dalrymple.
“Bulkeley! What are you doing here? Oh, did I leave that behind?”
“Aye, sir. Mr. Robinson, he sent me after you with it.” Advancing to
the great table, he extended the package, which seemed of papers. The
planter took it.
“All right, Bulkeley! Wait outside. I’ll have a note to send back to
Mr. Robinson.”
Bulkeley in his poor dress touched his forehead and went out. He was,
I saw, a white bondsman, indentured servant in Jamaica like those in
Virginia. Dick Merry rose before me.
When Colley and I had bowed to the company and paid our score and left
the inn’s big room, we found him leaning against the wall outside. I
wished to stop to talk, but Colley said, “For God’s sake, David!” and
whistled to the black hostler who brought our horses. We mounted and
rode through Spanish Town, past the cathedral and the other wonders.
At last we found ourselves out upon a road running between groves of
logwood in blossom and the harvest field of a fabulous number of bees.
We had it to ourselves, save for a wagon drawn by four oxen with three
or four black men walking alongside that was disappearing into the
distance.
I said, “I considered it the right side. But now I think Tory and Whig
are just on the same side and that it’s not a particularly important
one!”
“_I_ think,” he answered, “that in another five minutes you might
have found yourself apprehended. What possessed you?”
“I don’t know, Colley,” I said, “except that I love Scotland. Listen to
the bees in all that yellow stuff!”
We rode on. “Mosquitoes!” he said. “How could it be mosquitoes?”
Leaving these trees, we came to a great planting of sugar cane, many
acres, breathlessly still now in the drop of the wind. Half-naked black
men were cutting, cutting, a large gang of them, dim and dimmer down
the rank field where the cane was head-tall. They felled the stalks
with curiously shaped knives, somewhat like a short cutlass. We made
out two armed white men standing watching, and in a moment a third, on
horseback, came along the road that seemed an unfrequented one, and
stopped at our greeting. I recognized an overseer, with some of the
marks of Barget, but harder.
“Good day!” quoth Colley. “The cane seems prime.”
“’Tis so, sir.” He stood in his stirrups and shouted something to the
nearest white man, who shouted it in turn to the next. In the distance
rose the tall chimney of a sugar mill, and there was a movement
toward it across the great field as of a monster serpent, a dragon of
antiquity. We seemed to catch a sight of oxen too, and of heaped wagons.
“New slaves?” said Colley.
“Just so, sir,” answered the man on the horse. “Out of the
_Silver_, no longer ago than Christmas. Coromantins, too. The
worst of the lot!”
“But they’re in demand.”
“They’re big and strong as an ox. That’s why,” replied the overseer.
“But, God! they’re hard to tame! And when they find that they can’t
kill you--unless they wish to be burned alive--they run off. Clear away
to the mountains and feed the Maroons! We’ve been breaking these in
for a month.” He had pistols, a knife and a great whip, and his white
helpers were similarly armed.
“Are they broken yet?” I asked, and he answered with satisfaction,
“Pretty well!” and I saw Eboe Sam who also had been fierce and haughty.
He departed into the field, following the line like a serpent. Colley
and I rode back to Kingston, to North’s house, to the verandah and
the hammocks and the bowl of punch. It was an easy, easy life and it
attacked with the power of a tiger. To lie and dream, to lie and think
that you were thinking!
Two days after Spanish Town we rode into the Blue Mountains, starting
before sunrise, our destination a “pen”, as their plantations are
called well up toward the clouds that hid the purple heads. The owner
was a Mr. Browne, a connection of North’s, and the latter had suggested
our going, but indeed Colley had been before. It was not a sugar
plantation, but Browne experimented with coffee. And as planters are
as hospitable as Highland chiefs, no need for forewarning. It had been
so in Virginia and was so in Jamaica.
When we left the plain and began to climb, the road grew profoundly
poor. But all around was beauty--around, above, below, where now the
plain and harbor spread, a shield all vert and argent. We saw the
ships, could make out the _Janet_.
“There she is!” quoth Colley, and “There she is!” I followed. Still
we climbed while strange trees pressed about us and rich and strange
flowers, and we heard water falling. From shoulder to shoulder we saw,
in an amber light, the plain and the mountains and the sea. I said, “It
is a beautiful island!”
He agreed. “A man might live here very well if he had means and place.”
“There would be forever warmth and light, even if you had neither.”
“Yes,” he said. “But toil. Warmth and light and toil.”
The day was well on when back among the hills we came to cleared land,
to growing coffee and to flat, stone drying-places called barbecues
and finally to a house of wood and stone that was Browne’s Folly,
where we were going. At once the great shady bloomy yard before it
seemed to swarm with Negroes. A great bell rang, we dismounted, a Negro
house servant, not at all unlike several I remembered at Amory Hall,
appeared to tell us with unction that “the Captain” was out but would
be in ere long and that we were at home. He showed us a big untidy
room, and a blowsy mulatto girl brought us water for our hands and
faces; and the butler, if that was his denomination, returned with
glasses and a squat bottle of rum. There seemed no hostess. “I don’t
know if he ever married,” said Colley. “He’s an old man now.”
We sat awaiting the Captain--Colley did not know how he got the
title--in deep and comfortable chairs on a verandah with a great view.
Some kind of quarter seemed to extend from the house at the back, or
some kind of cultivation to go on in the immediate neighborhood, for
numerous voices made themselves heard, rich Negro voices, men and
women. I said, “They sound mighty gay and cheerful.”
“This pen’s got the greatest name for good nature. Browne’s an oddity
with some notion in his head. North says he has money in the funds at
home or he could never do it. He says the place makes him nothing.
Rather he’s always putting in----”
“All these Negroes speak English after a sort. They don’t seem recent.”
“They aren’t. Browne believes in their breeding and so keeping up the
stock. Most planters go the other way about. When their number is
worked off and getting low, they buy more out of Africa. North says
Browne hasn’t bought for a long time. There are some here who were born
in Africa, but they’ve almost forgotten it. He doesn’t work them hard
either; there are always two or three to a one-man job.”
“How old a man is he?”
“Browne? Seventy, I imagine, though he doesn’t look it. He came out to
Jamaica young.”
“What does he do when the population grows too great?”
“Sells, I suppose,” said Colley. “Yes, of course. Junia at North’s was
raised here.”
I listened to the laughter somewhere beyond a thicket of fruit trees.
“I should think that they would miss it here when they’re sold.”
“Yes,” he answered dreamily, “I should think so.”
“They have no say in it,” I said. “This island is like Virginia, only a
deal more so. That’s the climate, I dare say, and the fact that it’s an
island, and the history of these seas.”
“These seas and these islands have a terrible history,” he said. “Well,
that is man!”
It seemed not to trouble Colley, or not to trouble him at that time.
And David Scott, upon this mountain shoulder, with the tropic day about
him, the light and the air and good-natured sound, with a long deep
chair in which to stretch his limbs, with drink at hand if he wanted
it, wrapped in leisure, wrapped in balm, said No! to his eternal
querying, said, “Don’t trouble me now--don’t trouble me ever, if you
can manage it!”
Browne came home and proved to be a white-haired, strong old man,
with a round face and a kind of perpetual beamy look not unmixed with
whimsey. He greeted us hospitably, the Negroes grinned when he spoke,
the dogs sprang up on him and a parrot flying down from a mango tree
perched upon his shoulder. “Universal Benevolence!” I thought. “Father
Christmas!”
We had supper of an untidy abundance but well cooked. One hardly
counted the attendance, but saw dark countenances come and go, and that
one and all seemed happy enough. After supper, we sat upon the verandah
in the warm, rose-shot dusk and smoked and talked. He had an easy, old
man’s loquacity. He wanted to hear about the _Janet_ and Daga and
Bristol, Liverpool and London, but with a touch of disinterestedness.
“I said to myself forty years ago, ‘This thing ought to be better
managed! Buy enough women--make them all, men and women, comfortable
and happy enough--and see what will happen according to Nature! In
short, raise your own Negroes and don’t be forever spending fifty
pounds for a raw Ashanti or Eboe stark from the Slave Coast!’ So I
began with this place and thirty odd, male and female, and a few
children. It’s paid. They’ll tell you, of course, in Kingston that
it hasn’t, that I make nothing. But I do. I make the satisfaction
of seeing a theory _work_--and as you know, young men, there’s
nothing in the world like that! If the Indies and the Continent, North
and South, would go about it my way--be indulgent to them and give a
feast for every baby--there’d be enough right in America in a hundred
years to cultivate all the fields we’re likely to want cultivated. Then
all the cost and worry and loss of bringing them from Africa might be
stopped for good and all. Turn the slave ships into spice and oil and
cotton ships. That’s a deal healthier trade for all concerned!”
I said, “You’d stop the warring and kidnapping and buying and bringing
them. But you’d keep those who are this side the ocean slaves forever.
Those that you have, and their children, slaves.”
“Yes,” he said. “Treating them always kindly. There isn’t any other way
to get the work done.”
“No, I suppose not,” I answered.
_Who would clear the land, who would tend tobacco and coffee, who
would make the sugar, who would make the rum?_
The rose dusk changed to violet dusk, with a beat as of wings and the
dry voice of an army and an army of insects. A white and glowing star
set itself above a palm tree. Voices throbbed from the hidden huts of
black men and women and children, mellow voices, voices that laughed
and sang.
I said, “Set them free and if they will work for you, pay them their
wages.”
The old planter knocked the ashes from his pipe. His face was round
and pleasant as the moon and on the whole as unenergetic. “That’s for
Utopia,” he said. “No, no, they’re children! Best to own and command
them like children. But children are not sent us to be harshly dealt
with. That’s my point. I like children and like to see them happy.”
He was a still more benevolent Colonel Amory.
One might live rather happily in an island within an island, with a
vast household of “children”, with a soft abundant Nature dropping
flower and fruit around. Be happy, lose edge, become rounded like a
pebble in a river bed. Be happy and at the same time pretty good,
making happy “children” around one, not over-working them or
over-punishing them, giving them their little pleasures.
After all, they were barbarians--as the Romans said we Scots were. God
knows how long we had been barbarians there in the northern forests
when the Romans came. White--black; black--white. Red, yellow, black,
white. If Great Nature loved the white so, why did she not make all
white? White marble is beautiful, and copper and bronze and ebony are
beautiful.
“No, no!” said old Mr. Browne, as though he had answered my thought.
“They are naturally inferior and of course we must recognize it. But
make them happy--make them happy!”
We soon went to bed. Colley said he was dog-tired and slept, but I lay
awake, and the tune in my head went, “When the _Janet_ sails, do I
sail with her? When the _Janet_ sails, do I sail with her?”
Had I money I could live like Browne, who had begun this life when
he was as young a man--live as kindly as one might, considering all
things--live in a Jamaica of wonderful colors and tumbled mountains and
forever summer--live with black folk around me whom I would buy and at
need sell, but whom I should treat kindly in the meantime--kindly, with
only just such hardness as would ensure their working. But I had not
money, so why dream of all that?
I might, through Bartram’s influence with North, obtain a situation as
clerk in the Company’s house, with the ledgers and the other clerks,
and the coming in of slave ships and the tallying and recording. But
so I should have changed naught, being still with the Royal African
Company.
I might become clerk or bookkeeper or overseer to some planter--be as
Barget or Williams.
Somewhere on these mountains, on unoccupied land, I might build for
myself a hut and thatch it with palm, plant yams about it, and there
live as a hermit, a solitary, an eccentric; now and then earning a
little from some greater neighbor, enough to buy rum with, a little
meal, a gun, a suit of clothes a year. And I liked that better, but not
well enough.
I could earn somehow doubtless--enough to live doubtless--and somehow
keep a still tongue doubtless--and the years might pass like heavy
lilies, growing on the edge of mire, falling, falling, one by one, upon
the mire.
The sea and Bartram. The sea and Bartram and the _Janet_. Turning
in bed, I made that choice, flung my arm over my eyes and went to sleep.
But waking in the night, I heard as though it were the echo of a deep
voice. “There are other ships than slave ships coming, going, and you
might go upon one.”
I said back, “I should not be so advantageously placed. I should be
under much more restraint.” And turned upon my side and went to sleep
again.
Before dawn I woke once more and that same deep voice was saying,
“God.” Just that, just the one word. It should have been enough. But
I at once grew deaf to it, putting what I thought to be David Scott’s
needs between me and it.
CHAPTER XIX
The beginning of the second year on the _Janet_ saw a change in my
relations with rum and brandy. The body had its reasons doubtless that
only reached the mind as recognition of an alteration in taste. I began
a course of drinking not at all or more sparingly even than Bartram,
for something like three months precisely. That time out, I then with
deliberation drank myself into a kind of lucid drunkenness in which I
saw a strange world and did strange things therein. For the better part
of a fortnight I moved in this perpetually renewed mirage. Then I slept
two nights and days on end, and came out of the cabin of Philip Smith a
sober man. Three months of the one state, a fortnight of the other, and
over and over again. Out of the cabin of Philip Smith, or out of the
small house back of the factor’s house, deep shaded by palm and pepper
trees, on the low hill at Daga.
On the _Janet_ I became accepted for what I was. At Daga there was
that latitude that no one cared. Rathbone Lace liked me better drunk.
Then I was like a sleepwalker, and sleepwalkers did all manner of odd
and entertaining and daring things without winking. When he suggested I
followed, though now and then I did the suggesting myself.
But on the _Janet_ obtained a different version of latitude. And
nothing in the world but Affection caused Captain William Bartram to
keep David Scott upon his ship. He did good work and was satisfactory
throughout the three months, but those two weeks might come down at
sea, in storm or danger, or in good conditions and make a danger. And
if the stuff were shut away from him, he grew more of a madman than
with it. So Geordie was told off to watch him, and Colley kept an eye
over him, and William Bartram suffered him where with another he had
hardly waited for port to say, “Begone this ship!”
Bartram looked grim upon me but I answered him out of another world.
Then I slept twice around the clock and came to supper like a lamb. He
kept me after McNaughton and Colley were gone and said, “So you’re hame
again with your better man?”
“Is he a better man?”
“He’s got the power to ask questions anyhow. David, you’re like your
grandfather. I’ve heard about him. He was verra responsible and somehow
big, except just once in so often when he sold himself to the devil.”
“Just once in so often? I’m not certain that I’m so like there,
Bartram.”
He answered dryly, “For all your way of looking at it, I don’t hold
that you’ve sold yourself entirely. Your grandfather sold himself like
you, for short terms. But in one of them he took a torch and fired
his own barns and byres, and it spread to the whole house and it was
burned. He tried to get through to a room where was a child, but the
rooftree fell and slew him.”
“I’ve heard the story.”
“Then I wish you’d lay it to heart. For you’re like him, David. I’ve
seen his picture.”
But I did not wish to talk about torches flung in barns and byres, and
even as I thought that, saw the flaming barn of Sandy Scott, smelled
the smoke, and marked the cover and the leaves of Helen Scott’s Book
begin to move and curl. I said, “What are you reading now, Bartram?”
For it was the voyage out, and he had time to read.
“The ‘Odyssey’ again,” he said, and fell to speaking of the Phæacians.
One year, two years, into the third year upon the _Janet_.
Counting that first involuntary one from Norfolk, five voyages.
Pomeroy was dead, knifed by a seaman--Eldred--whom he had thrice
flogged. Bartram hanged Eldred. Hamilton, the surgeon’s mate, was dead
of smallpox in Barbadoes, Davis the boatswain of flux at Daga. Of the
forty seamen whom I watched that first day out from Norfolk, more than
half were sunk away from view. Dead, disabled by disease or accident,
or simply gone, vanishing in port towns, saying that they would
reappear but never doing so, spirited away by their own desires or by
those of others. Bartram accepted losses, filled his number as best
he might and sailed on. More than other merchantmen slave ships must
be forever renewing their crews. Even the _Janet_ with William
Bartram for captain.
Her second mate now was Edward Black, and he was more than a little
like Pomeroy. Wheeler was the boatswain, and a better man than Davis.
Out of the seamen a dozen would bear watching.
Five voyages. Twenty-five hundred Africans, men, women and children,
taken on at Daga. Twenty-two hundred delivered to Company agents in
Kingston, Bridgetown and Charleston. Three hundred dead and given to
the sea somewhere in the Middle Passage, or dead in port before they
could be landed. It was all down in the great book, how they died and
when, the most of that smallpox which we found among us the third
voyage. On the whole, for five voyages, the fortune was good.
The _Janet_ had been a long while from Bristol in England, from
her berth there and any true overhauling and renewing. Under Bartram
what could be done at sea, at Daga, at Kingston, was always being done,
but for all that she was growing old and worn and sere and foul. When
the next lading had been delivered at Kingston, he would take her home
to Bristol and give her full time there in which to be made new again.
He himself would go then into the country, or even, it might be, to
Scotland. He would rest through those months, repose himself, forget
what it was to be captain of a Slave Coast ship. And Colley would go to
London--pay his last creditor--and like enough settle there and return
no more to the hot, blue sea between Africa and America. McNaughton
would surely go to Scotland, to Stirling where he was born. But he
would come back to the _Janet_, or to William Bartram, for the two
were interlocked in McNaughton’s mind.
What should I do--what should David Scott do?
It was eight years since Culloden, and if I changed my name and grew a
sailor’s beard, should I not move in safety, even if--even if--I went
to Scotland?
“Aye, you may, man,” said Bartram, “if only you’ll time your veesit.
It’ll never do, David, to choose the time when the devil has you.
That’s the day you should seek the _Janet_ or at the worst a
Bristol lodging house I’ll give you the name of. There, with Geordie at
the door, you can bide till Auld Nick and you are weary, the tane of
the tither. But if you meet him in Scotland, he’ll betray you to the
Whigs, or you’ll betray yourself and it’s the same thing!”
He looked at me with an anxious fold in his broad brow, sunburned into
the hue of one of his old brown books. “I’d feel safer about you,
David, if you’d bide in Jamaica that while. Leave you at Kingston, find
you at Kingston--and the old berth on the _Janet_ and the books
and the sea and all----”
“I want to lie on the green grass by Arthur’s Seat once more.”
“Well, I’m saying what I think is best, but you’re your ain man.”
The full moon that night made of the _Janet’s_ sails mountains
of pearl and caverns of ebony. We were going toward Africa. The ship
was clean, was silent save for the ever music, where we gave it harp
strings, of the wind that put us forward, and the sound now and again
of seamen’s voices; was spacious. A full sea was running and under the
moon there were crests of light and caverns of night. I watched them,
and Bartram’s words kept running through my head.
“My own man. I am my own man.--David Scott, you are your own man.--Then
why the devil am I so unhappy?”
It was not necessary to show that I was unhappy. Before Bridgetown
in Barbadoes I overheard--a great water cask on deck hiding me from
them--the steward Benjamin describe me to Black, the new second
mate, just signed with the _Janet_ and a former acquaintance of
Benjamin’s. The latter had doubtless been picturing Captain and first
mate and surgeon and all. I came in only for myself. “And there’s Mr.
Scott----”
“Who’s he?”
“He’s kin of the Captain. God knows, I think he’d been in some horrid
strait in Virginia where he picked him up! Killed a man maybe, or maybe
’twas a woman.--He’s a stark, tall Scot with a glint of the Captain
about him.”
“What does he do?”
“He clerks for the Captain--and the Captain’s been always a perfect
sea lawyer about putting things down. But he can handle a ship too. He
wa’n’t no novice there when he came aboard, though he might be what you
call rusty. If he’d ‘a’ wanted it he could have been second mate after
Mr. Pomeroy was killed.”
“Well, seeing that you are aboard, Benjamin, I’m glad that he didn’t
want it!”
“We were nearer Cape Verd than we were to the Indies when Eldred killed
Mr. Pomeroy and was hanged for it. Then up comes all of a sudden a
terrible blow, regular small hurricane! Mr. McNaughton gets struck by
a boom--knocked senseless and didn’t rightly come to himself for two
days. Enduring that storm Mr. Scott was mate and there’s no denying he
did well. The _Janet_ never had any one do better. He’s rash and
he’s not rash--that kind.”
Mr. Black demurred. “Give me the kind that’s steadily not rash.”
Benjamin, who had a turn for analysis, would not relinquish me. “Yes,
poop and forecastle have got a liking for him, but he’s got curious
ideas about slaves.--Yet he has a slave girl at Daga and he stays quite
calm upon this ship.”
“Curious ideas?” said Black and spat. “My only idea is they’re cattle!”
“About every two months,” continued Benjamin, “he gets drunk in the
entirest way. The strange thing is that you don’t know if he is drunk
or is an extraordinary person doing extraordinary things. You tell it
at last because there doesn’t anything useful come of what he does.
They’re just fantastic.”
“Well, if he drinks that way, he oughtn’t never to be mate.”
“He’s the kind that’s more like to be captain, and God knows there are
drinking captains enough in the trade!”
“Captain of the _Janet_, you mean?”
“Why, no captain’s immortal! If Captain Bartram was to go, he might
say to the Company, ‘I recommend my kinsman for my place,’ and they
might listen to him. Mr. McNaughton don’t want it. He’s been first
mate so long that he’d rather die as he’s lived. I talk that way,”
said Benjamin, “but Captain William Bartram ain’t like to die yet, and
his kinsman will have to stop his particular kind of drinking before
_he_’ll put him over the _Janet_. That’s _his_ care for
seamen and slaves.”
McNaughton called, “Mr. Black!”
“Aye, sir!” and the second mate and steward departed that quarter.
It was true that there was at Daga Fanny. I bought her to make her
safe while I was from Africa. She was Fullah, that is, mixed Negro and
Moor, from the country where the caravans over the great desert change
sand for forest and where the Negro villages grow Mohammedan. She said
“Allah” as often as she said “God”, but when she was really moved she
used the Negro word for the same Being.
Fanny!
CHAPTER XX
When I was away from Daga she lived with an old woman in Daga village;
when I returned she came to the small house among the heavy trees.
She was slender, quick, with beautiful black eyes and features rather
Moorish than Negro. She could sing richly and sweetly, and I loved to
hear her sing. She was merciful to small lives about her and would go
out of her way to do a kindness. Once I found her passionately crying
and learned that she had been down the hill and upon the beach and had
watched two hundred men and women driven from the barracoon to the
boats of the _Sharon_, a Boston-owned brigantine.
“Do you care, Fanny?”
“Do you think I am devil?”
“So many of you don’t seem to care.”
“How do you know? How do you know? How do you know?”
I did not entirely know, though I thought that I knew it of some.
The great trouble in this matter is that we say at once, “They are
different!” and so leave ourselves no way of seeing how like they are.
Fanny rose from the ground and went off into the shadow of the tree
and I did not again see her cry for the filling or the emptying of
the barracoon. Yet she may have done so many a time, or cried in her
heart where it could not be seen. Her name was Aja before the factor’s
hill at Daga named her Fanny. She might be twenty when I bought her.
Three years before, being in a boat with others on a river in her
own country, slave hunters set upon them and took all. She received
some hurt and when at last after long travel and change from hand to
hand she came to Daga, it was seen that the factor would reject her.
There were always a certain number thrown back upon the hunters’ and
traders’ hands. These were sold for little or nothing where they might
be, or if no one wanted them and they could not even travel if they
were set free, then they were taken into the bush and quietly killed.
So it might have been with Fanny, had not Markham the surgeon observed
her and thought he could cure her, and undoubtedly felt compassion.
In this trade, vast through time and space, over and over again occur
individual emotions and acts of compassion. But they do not stop the
trade. Markham bought her for a trifle from the trader, put her in Daga
village with old Bembe and in a year she was as strong as a young palm
tree. Markham left her in the village where she cooked and wove with
Bembe, but not long afterwards, taking the fever and believing that
he would die, sold her for her own protection to the factor. He might
have freed her, but at Daga she would have been little better off
for that. He stipulated good treatment and that she should not depart
Africa against her will. I bought her on the same terms from the factor
my second time at Daga.
She was a young, barbarian woman, comely, clean, at times affectionate,
at times deeply sullen. She had a quick apprehension, a kind of deep
tact. There was much in her that I never fathomed, much that I fathomed
only afterwards. Each time I came to Daga I found her at the small
house.
So it was all around me. Only Bartram, when he came to Daga, paid no
visit to Daga village, or to a further village in the bush, or to Oil
Palm village up the river; took no woman from one or all of these or
from the barracoon. Upon the slave ships, the anchor weighed, any and
all intercourse in this sort was straitly forbidden. Between Africa
and America, on the broad blue sea, by written and unwritten law, the
women of the cargo were cargo only. But in Africa, with Spaniard and
Portuguese and French and American and Briton far from home, it was
otherwise.
Once, twice, thrice, four times, five times. I saw from the blue
Atlantic below the Line the foaming bar, the gleaming beach, the palms,
the castle and the flag that I had twice seen with an inner eye before
ever I saw the _Janet_.--Daga met that which was evil in me, and
the two intertwined. There was a side of me that cohered with Rathbone
Lace.
I seemed to rush forth to myself in Africa and to cry “Hail fellow,
well met!” I laughed and I caroused, but I was not happy. Markham, that
dour and acid man, once told me as much. “Unhappy--I seem to recognize
in you an unhappy man. I’m not myself a happy man and like knows like.”
“For why?”
“For why aren’t we happy men? Ah, that’s a question that goes far back
on the road!”
We were seated at sunset on his verandah. I was waiting for the boat
from the _Janet_. In the east hung a great moon. “You do not see
me carol and bubble with joy,” said Markham. “I do not feel joy and
years ago I gave up the empty carolling and bubbling. But you still
whistle and joke and stride along, outfacing yourself.”
“Outfacing myself?”
“I suppose so,” said Markham wearily. “Yourself or Justice or
Something.”
I sat with my eyes upon the round and golden moon. Presently I said,
“Markham, have you ever known any one improve in this trade?”
He considered. “No, I am fair to say I haven’t.”
I thought to myself, “Even Bartram, McNaughton, Colley and David Scott.
Even Bartram, McNaughton, Colley and David Scott.”
He had been smoking. Now he laid down his pipe and locked his long,
thin, parchment-hued hands. “It is not only this trade--this trade is
just a part of it. It is not only African slavery--African slavery is
just a part of it. There is something that is needed, for and in you
and me and others. I don’t know what it is; it is, perhaps, something
like light and something like a command. I can see that they ought to
come to me, but they don’t come to me. Maybe they will to you, maybe
not. I only know that to lack them is to know hunger and thirst and
nighttime and purposelessness. I have that knowledge of myself that
I am an unhappy man, and I have the like knowledge of you. That is
all.--There is the boat.”
The moon shone upon us so, the boat was picked out by it so, the fifth
time at Daga. The _Janet_ would presently be sailing with a fine
lot of Coromantins, Mandingoes, Fullahs, Ashantis, Whidahs, Eboes and
Dualas. The cargo delivered at Kingston, she was for home, for England.
It might be a year and more before she came again to Daga. And as yet
I did not know if I should go with her to Bristol, or if I should stop
in Jamaica. And if I did the latter I was not sure--I might never again
come upon the slave ship--not, that is, to sail with her and be part of
her. It might be true farewell to Daga.
There was Fanny. I spoke to Bartram. “She is mine--I am fond of her.
If I should stay in Jamaica, I could keep her there. I do not want to
leave her here where any and everything can happen. Does it matter to
you if I carry her with me to Jamaica?”
“That’s against the rules, David. I might have McNaughton or Colley or
any one speaking for such a permission. It’s been over and over proven
that it does not do.”
“I know it’s a general rule,” I answered, and proceeded to argue for
an exception, showing how it could be managed and she be reckoned both
with and not with the _Janet’s_ lading. He listened, pondering,
and at last, though with distaste, he agreed that I might take with me
my slave. There would have been no difficulty had I been willing for
her to be shipped simply with and like the five hundred, no difference
made from Daga to Kingston, and only there, in the unlading, pointed
out as my property. But I was not willing; I had rather leave her at
Daga.
He agreed, but when he had done so and we had turned toward the
factor’s hill--we had been walking upon the beach--he stood still
and looked at the _Janet_. “Something came athwart me then,
David!--Did you ever think how the stars are always there, behind the
day?”
Eight days later we sailed.
Fanny made no objection to going to Jamaica. When I told her what I
thought of and why, she looked at the sea and at the palms and to the
northwest where, far away, was her country, then squarely at Daga
castle and barracoon. She waved her hand. “I go like them?”
“No, more comfortably, Fanny.” I described how it would be, and that
the sea was only six to eight weeks wide, and then I spoke a little of
Jamaica, where was sea and white beaches and mountains, and trees and
weather much like trees and weather here and where were great numbers
of her people. “Those that have gone away in the ships. Mandingoes and
Fullahs and others.”
“I think that a lie. All of us think that a lie. Why do you never bring
any of them back? They say in my country white men’s ships all go to a
place where they sacrifice dark men and women to their gods. White men
have just one god, and he says, ‘Give me dark men that I may eat them!
More dark people, and more and more!’”
As she looked at me with large eyes, her years at Daga where she heard
all manner of other statement than this appeared to roll from her.
She was back in her old village, in the forest where it touched the
desert, a young barbarian, believing all things so that they were
fearful enough. Her eyes widened, she shivered, her hands went up,
palm out. I laughed at her and took pains to tell her many things that
might alter her opinion. At last she laughed too, and an hour later I
heard her singing over her work. But if her mind altered or not--or
if it altered and acceded only to alter again and hold to the forest
opinion--I do not know.--Or rather I _do_ know. I know that it did.
When I bade Rathbone Lace farewell, he said, “Come back--come back
next year, David Scott! I’ll miss you to-morrow, going up to Oil Palm
village--the rum in the boat and you not there! Good-by and Good Luck!”
Bartram heard him. I caught his muttered, “It’s a strange, sad thing,
I’m thinking, Rathbone my man, your full definition of Good Luck!”
The _Janet_ sailed. Slave ships sail at night, so that all the
slaves may be below. If they are above hatches they grow frantic,
seeing the African shore stand back from them. So many may be trusted
to leap overboard.
At sunset our five hundred were induced, urged, thrust, beaten, naked
and the men shackled, down upon the slave deck, where they must lie
rubbing sides, the feet of one row touching the heads of another, and
above small space of heavy darkness between them and the platforms on
which others lay, or between the platforms and the deck. Began the
continuous sound of the night coming up through the gratings, and
presently the reek. It is hot, hot, in Daga harbor, before the wings
unfold, before one beats out from the shadow of the land. The multitude
below hear the seamen’s running feet, the making of sails and weighing
of anchor, the shouts they do not understand. The swell rocks the
ship; sickness seizes them who have never been to sea, many whom, a
little while ago, had never seen the sea. They do not know where they
are going or to what fate, except that if it is in the middle and in
the end as it is in the beginning, it must be terrible. Their prison
becomes a cavern of mere terror and pain and misery. Night passes, that
is as long as a year. Gray light filters down. White men appear at the
gratings, the gratings are opened.
“Out with you now!--Nearest first--So!”
They come thick up upon deck between poop and forecastle. Overhead are
the spread sails, around is the empty blue sea, astern are distant
mountains that may be Africa.--Even then there will be attempts to
leave the ship.
One first night and morn from land are much the same as another. So
with this time on the _Janet_. The only woman who did not fare
quite as the other women was the girl Aja or Fanny, who was known to
belong to me. She wore her cotton dress; at night when the others were
herded below, she curled herself upon the deck upon a coil of rope
and slept there. But throughout the day she was with them all, men,
women and children. They were hardly strangers to her, for they had
been collecting for weeks and months into Daga barracoon, and at times
parties from Daga village might go to the stockade and watch and talk.
The fate was so common all over Africa--one might hear news and see
known faces from tribes and villages with which one had acquaintance.
Each time the traders brought in parties, Fanny went with old Bembe to
see if there were Fullahs.
From the poop deck, from time to time, I marked her in the crowded
waist, finding her by her scanty white dress among the unclothed
forms. She was there all day. The weather was good, the ship sailed
steadily. Bartram had followed his wont and standing with the cargo
before him had assured it of good treatment, as long as it itself was
good, of safety and food and just as much water as could be spared,
and of ultimate content in the Island of Jamaica. Colley had made his
round and sent two or three into hospital. We kept a store of native
drums and castanets and several of these were tossed down to them with
the suggestion that dance and song were good for the body and spirit.
When I looked that way again, she was dancing. A small space had been
cleared; two men, seated on the boards, were beating drums with a
rapid, insistent and wild rhythm. Aja, another girl and two or three
boys danced. The shackled men, the women, watched absorbed, squatted or
standing close together around the cleared floor which must be small,
small, in so thronged a hall. Hardly smaller, though, than I have seen
in some Highland gatherings. Highland dances mean something, and I
thought that this one did also. The boys ceased to dance, the girl
stopped, but Aja danced on. She had now a castanet in her hand; the
drums and that sounded all the time, continuous as water falling or
wind on a roaring day. The noises of approval or indifference ceased;
all became quiet. Those who could not see appeared to take the sight
from others; all could hear the drums and the castanet. I began to feel
a tension and to pick the meaning. The first dancing had been ancient
love dancing, mating dancing. This had ended. The woman dancing in the
cotton dress was expressing another theme. Bartram came beside me on
the poop deck.
“That’s a religious war dance.--Mr. McNaughton!”
“Aye, sir, I understand!” McNaughton went forward.
“David, you’ll tell that wench the eve the kind of dances we’ll have
here and no other!”
“I’ll speak to her.”
I did, when the sun was underneath the sea, and the west all a carmine
flare, and the five hundred below, and the usual dull sound and stench
coming up through the gratings, and the now darkened sails of the
_Janet_ flapping like bat wings in a fitful and sunken breeze. I
came to her where she was sitting, her knees drawn up and her hands
around them, her eyes fastened, not on the flaming west but on the east
that we were leaving.
“Fanny!”
“Yaas.”
“Don’t let us have any more dancing like that! All these Coromantin and
Mandingo men are to be quieted, not stirred up. You have sense, and
you’ve lived long at Daga and understand.--You understand, Fanny?”
“Yaas.--I did not mean to do wrong.”
I left her seated there, not far from a grating. An hour or two later
I marked her in her corner, apparently asleep, her arm under her head.
As I turned toward my own quarters, I met the boatswain Wheeler whose
watch it was. “A hot night, sir! One of those nights for African
dreams.”
“African dreams?” I answered. “Just what are they?--But I think I know,
boatswain.”
“They’re when you seem a considerable way back upon the road.
You’re yourself, but you seem a considerable way back. The road’s
familiar--that’s the kind of dread in the dream----”
“Yes, I know them,” I said. “European or Asian or African.--Good night,
Wheeler!”
The next day was again a hot and listless day. Only among the Negroes
did there seem much life, but there went on jabbering and dancing and
singing and a good deal of laughter. It was quite beyond what was
usual--but each voyage provided its own difference. Each five hundred
that we conveyed struck, so to speak, an altered note, or--despite
its being classed as all of a hue--changed in color. It depended in
great measure upon the natural leaders within the swarm, but also on
the subtle variations within each breast. What seemed evident after the
first day and night was that the _Janet_ had not, this passage,
the woebegone and listless crowd that sometimes she carried. But all
this day the drumming and singing and movement, in so far as there
was room for movement, remained cheerful. From the morning on, Fanny
was with and of it. I remember thinking, “It’s a good part she’s
playing--to help them on so.”
So light was the wind that three nights out from Africa the mountains,
faint and blue, yet kept the eastern sky. It was hot, the ship foul to
the nostril; again to my sense, and this time to Colley’s also, was a
haze, a smoke, a cloud about her of what she was. All sound above man
height was fallen to a droning and a flapping. All Negroes save Tom
and Don in the cook’s galley, and Fanny, stretched motionless in her
appointed nook, were under the gratings. No more complaint than was
usual came up through these. Rather less than usual. I heard McNaughton
say, “We’ve got a quiet, jolly lot this making--just a wheen too jolly
maybe----”
The strong watch was set. McNaughton himself had the decks to-night.
In the forecastle Dory was playing the fiddle--an old jig called
Money Musk. This ended, those who could sleep slept. Bartram went his
rounds with his long padding step like an old lion, then retired to
his sleeping cabin, where ran his shelf of books with the Bible in the
middle, and hung in their rack pistols and cutlass.
I was quite sober--had been so for a fortnight and would be so
throughout this passage. I lay in my small, small cabin where still
at times I felt Philip Smith. I felt him to-night, then I passed from
him to Christian Todd and his boat coming down the James River, and I
thought, “I will let his flute play me to sleep.” I slept and waked. It
was very hot. I saw by the stars out of the window that midnight was
near. I slept again and dreamed. The flute was playing--but it changed
to pipes skirling and dirling in a purple glen--and then to a hammering
and hammering that the guide that goes along in sleep informed me was
due to the putting up of Hawley’s gibbet in the Haymarket whereon to
hang, not Jacobites, but easy old Bartholomew Browne, up in the Blue
Mountains above Kingston. That seemed to frighten me, for I awoke and
the sweat upon me was cold. For a moment I lay listening to the echo
of the dream--a continuing hammering. Next I became conscious that the
sound did not belong to the inner but to the outer life. I sat up in
my bed, then left it and stood uncertain. I heard a pistol shot and a
shout, “Watch! Watch! Watch!” and then a wild yelling from a hundred
throats and knew whose throats they were.
When I reached the deck, the gratings had been forced upward from
below. There were the lanterns, and some one had fired the great
cresset provided always against trouble in the darkness. We had light
enough, though none too much. Coromantins, Mandingoes, Ashantis were
pouring up and out. In some way they had freed themselves from their
shackles; they brandished these now for weapons. They were yelling,
they came forth thick as bees, strong and furious men, and ever as they
swung themselves on deck, others pressed behind them. The _Janet_
turned into gigantic noise. Her seamen too were shouting, running for
arms. Bartram’s voice came towering.
“Are you ready? Fire!” A dozen muskets flashed. The _Janet_ seemed
to shriek. There fell almost as many Africans, but what was that to
hundreds, wholly desperate? Had those who were forth hesitated, those
behind had pushed them on, coming up as it were through the ship from
the depths of the sea.
I saw Bartram--McNaughton--Black--all seamen in their places. The
barricades were manned--cutlasses, pistols and muskets--and the boys
and Tom and Don behind to take and load and pass. The night was not
dark. It drew toward morning, there swung a quarter moon in the sky,
and the ship’s cresset and lanterns gave light beside. Bartram had one
barricade, McNaughton the other. I saw Colley with the latter; I stood
with Bartram. The air rocked with the din. Below hatches was a volcano,
belching dark lava, lava that parted and rolled upon this barricade and
upon that.
“Fire!” shouted Bartram.
We were above them and fired down. Men fell, there rose shrieks, the
torrent recoiled upon itself. “It won’t last,” said Bartram. “They’re
thoroughly up! We’ll have to kill half of them.” A huge Coromantin,
moving, gesticulating, where the light struck him, held my eye. He was
brandishing both arms, and one hand grasped the iron shackle loosened
from his ankles and the other a file!
A slave cargo comes searched and naked into the slave ship.--But there
are files enough in the stores at Daga. And as I thought that, I saw
another in a Mandingo hand, kept for weapon where real weapons were
none.--There was one slave who came aboard clothed, who even had with
her a small bundle of her toys and fineries.--I looked for a glint of
white cotton and I found what I sought.
She was with them, in the middle of the storm. Other women too. In
Dahomey the king has women soldiers, a great guard of Amazons. It is
not likely that any of these were aboard. But there were women who
came with the men out of the deeps and fought.
With a great and frenzied cry, all bore against the barriers.
“Fire!”
Crash and smoke and shrieking, and many were down and trampled. But
they came on and swarmed up and over, naked and weaponless, and
clutched and locked with men who had cutlasses, who had firearms. What
was their vision? Their vision was the seizure of the ship and the
death of all white men, save only just enough maybe to show them how to
put about the ship, how to bring her again to Africa, not to Daga but
some lonely place. Then, then, kill all and leave the ship--take the
boats, and swim, and get ashore, and burst away from the sea, inland,
inland, and get maybe to the old villages; or if not that, make a
fastness in the hills and live there. It invited from the slave ship;
it beckoned and smiled.
The vision of the fifty white men was life, even if the cargo were
lost. We slew and were slain.
But we had all manner of weapons and their spears and knives were far
off in the African villages.
Victory crossed to our side.
A cold light lifted in the east. We leaned against the barricade and
twelve men were dead, their own weapons wrested from them, turned
against them, and twenty had their wounds. But the deck below us was
a shambles. We had shot and shot them down, and what the gun did not,
the cutlass did. Under the dawn lay thick the dead and the desperately
wounded. Less than a hundred dark figures raised their hands and cried
for mercy. These and the women with children who cowered beneath the
gratings were all that were left of our lading. No great number of the
wounded were like to recover. Eight thousand guineas easily must be
thrown into the sea.
I saw white cotton, torn and blood-stained, Fanny lying dead, near the
big Coromantin with the file.
CHAPTER XXI
The house, stone and fairly large, faced the sea, across a quarter mile
of cane that was bright green, that rippled like the sea, that sent up,
here and there, pale, purplish, feathery heads of bloom, ghostly in the
twilight. Along the sea ran a narrow beach of deep, soft, ivory sand,
and bordering the sand and the road went a ribbon of sea grape and
cocoanut trees; and where streams ran into the ocean, or it was marshy
and shoal, stood mangrove that is a desolate growth. The cane stretched
like the sea right and left of the house, but behind it a wood ran up
into hills and the hills into mountains. Palm and mango and allspice
and the cotton tree and mahogany and many others. The mountains had
beautiful shapes; a troop of them, joined at base but above sharply
separate, peaky, horned and rounded forms, clothed with an amethystine,
a dreamy light. The sea was superbly colored. An Italian painter could
give it there no hint, must take the hint from it. A highway ran
between the sea and the cane--the cane of My Fancy, for so was the
estate named. Diverging from this the plantation road struck through
the cane and then between thinly planted trees to the house, but there,
bending, went toward the sea again and found, halfway, the sugar mill.
The sugar mill had a tall chimney, and the smoke went out like a gray
plume and all day long it shredded away with the moving air. A stone
aqueduct of many and many an arch ran up into the hill and fetched
water thence to grind the cane. About the mill grew a cluster of long
and low buildings, and the whole did not lack of making a picture. The
heaped wagons and the empty wagons, the white, wide-horned oxen came
and went, to the mill, from the mill. At a stone’s throw, on either
side the dripping aqueduct, were strewn, haphazard, the huts that
sheltered at night the slaves who cut the cane and made the sugar.
These and the oxherds and stable men and boatmen and nondescripts
and the house servants in their own quarter back of the great house
constituted, men, women and children, the nearly two hundred out
of Africa owned by My Fancy. Out of Europe were eight indentured
white men, “servants” as against “slaves.” And there were three
“bookkeepers”, who in Virginia would have been called overseers, and a
manager and his assistant. Fifteen white men in all.
The owner, Mr. Godfrey North, a connection of North, the Company’s
agent, was gone with his family to England, his object to put his son
at school and to marry off his daughter. He purposed an absence of a
year. His old manager in whose charge My Fancy must be left did not
please him--there was a change--a new man must be sought. North in
Kingston brought him and Bartram together. I was spoken of.--At last I
came to supper with North and his kinsman.
I was the manager at My Fancy, engaged for the term of the owner’s
absence, with a fair salary, a free hand, the great house, emptied of
all its former inmates, to dwell in, between the hills and the sea.
The _Janet_, the blood stains scrubbed and holystoned from her
decks, the relation of misadventure, unforeseen and occurring despite
all care and good conduct on the part of officers and crew, duly
entered in her log, duly drawn up in a memorandum for the Company,
sailed for Bristol.
“Will you go or will you not, David? You know this thing makes no
difference to me. You’ve got a star, too, man.--And as for ill luck
continuing and some discovery of you being made, and its coming as a
back-blow upon me also--why, you see, man, William Bartram will risk
that!--I dinnae think,” he said in his reasonablest voice, “that after
almost ten years the danger’s mair than you can carry.”
But I had made up my mind not to involve him. I said that I would stay
in Jamaica and that I preferred it so.
The _Janet_ sailed. I watched her forth from Jamaica Harbor, and
then, walking back to North’s, found there two horses from My Fancy
and a mulatto boy--they are all “boys” though they are fifty--who was
to return with me. My belongings went into two pair of saddlebags. I
said good-by to North and two or three others in Kingston, and an hour
after sunrise started for the northern shore and the western end of
the island, for it was there lay My Fancy. It was like riding across
Scotland from Inverary to Dundee and then by ocean side from Dundee to
Dornoch.--It was not Scotland, but a sugar island of the West Indies,
and the sea the Caribbean.
The _Janet_ had sailed three months ago. I lived in the great
house alone save for Atkins the assistant and managed My Fancy. For the
sugar manufacture I was soon instructed there, and as for labor and the
handling of it, behind me lay five years in Virginia. Tobacco or sugar,
what was the odds? And though there I had been among the handled I knew
well enough by observation the other side. The sea and the _Janet_
also gave training. And to move among and be over Africans was no
novelty.
Atkins, a short, sturdy, curt, efficient person, five years my junior,
had the immediate supervision. I looked at affairs from two or three
steps above him, parcelled my time and gave or withheld my presence as
it seemed good. Yet I was not idle, and all matters of real dubiety
came before me. Atkins, fortunately, took a liking to me and I to him.
It was an old, long-established place--My Fancy--just as had been Amory
Hall in Virginia. Old, that is, according to colonial notions. All
things went on smoothly enough after the lavish, loose-end, colonial
system, lavish and loose-end at least in warm climates and where there
is slavery. A full two thirds of the My Fancy Negroes had been born in
Jamaica, and of the remaining third very few were recently from the
Slave Coast. In consequence there was little turbulence. And by and
large the treatment was kindly, just as I could now see that it had
been kindly at Amory Hall--“kindly” being a word of a high degree of
relativeness. Of course they must work, and not for themselves. Two or
three hours’ toil a day would have provided, in such a climate, all
that they, as yet, desired for themselves. But to make sugar for the
world and ease and luxury for one family, they labored from sunrise
to sunset. Of course, being property, they must not be idle and they
must not run away. Of course, if they were guilty of either, they must
be whipped as that was really the only way to teach them. If they
were incorrigible more and more pain must be heaped upon them, and if
they deserved death the law would see that they got it. But all this
provided for, there was not at My Fancy and there was not at Amory Hall
wanton cruelty, but rather, in the interstices of the system, kindness,
or what was meant for that; what, relatively speaking, was that. At
any rate, at My Fancy, one heard a great deal of genial Negro laughter,
of good-natured talk and singing.--But the thing rested slavery.
The eight white men likewise were enslaved, but for a term of years
only, and they had sold themselves, and were called servants, not
slaves.
The great house had cool, large, mahogany-floored and panelled rooms,
high-ceiled, slightly furnished and echoing, a wide lower and upper
hall, deep windows and a porch from which I saw the sea of cane, the
mill, and then the utter ocean. The whole was mine to wander in. Atkins
had a room that made a jut from the main building. The two of us
together were supposed to keep the house from damage or entry, having
abandoned for that purpose the manager’s cottage. There also slept, in
a small chamber next to Atkins, a powerful mulatto named Dick, who had
been born upon the place. And there were two strong and fierce dogs,
Nero and Cæsar.
Three months. When I had been at My Fancy something more than six
weeks, at twilight one evening, sitting smoking in the stone porch,
I spoke to Atkins of that periodic shift of mine to another level of
feeling, thinking and doing, warned him that it might begin in a day or
two, and told him what to ignore in me, what to acquiesce in and what
to override. “Mr. Godfrey North knew about this before we signed. For
all I know, you may know too.”
“Yes, Mr. North told me,” said Atkins. “But you see in this country the
difficulty is to get men who don’t drink all the time. He snapped at
you!”
Well, I drank, and for a fortnight became a crazed spirit moving among
dream landscapes. Then out I came, and found that Atkins and the
mulatto Dick had kept me from wreaking any especial mischief. When I
had ordered fantastic things they had said “Of course!” and when my
back was turned disobeyed or substituted. I always thought that I was a
kind of sultan.
Well, I came out one afternoon and took a great dip in the sea, and was
David Scott again.
The months slipped by, bead on bead.
All these “great houses” in Jamaica as in Virginia practised to their
own color and class a boundless hospitality. The inns were few indeed
and wretched. Who rode on the highway and found himself toward eve too
far from his destination, or who merely wished to break his journey,
noon or evening, turned, as a matter of course, into some plantation
road. He might be a planter or a merchant or a lawyer or a clergyman
or a doctor, or he might be of simpler estate, but if he were free and
white he had entertainment. To these lonely estates he was news, he
was society. Such a guest occasionally rode up to the great door of My
Fancy.
But they were not many. In all this island, which is a large one, there
were not, I suppose, eighteen thousand white persons. Strew these over
so great an extent and save in the towns there are few indeed in any
ten miles. Lonely, lonely, the plantations are lonely, each by itself,
a small world in space.
Yet they stopped at My Fancy, one alone or two or even three together.
Perhaps once in ten days I had company for dinner or for supper. All
the months together I saw the planter and the trader and the lawyer and
the doctor and the sea captain, and the clergyman and others--more of
the planter and the merchant, less of the others. And one and all they
had to me the mark of something less than the good, and David Scott had
and knew he had the selfsame mark. Yet many of them were what you call
amiable and honest.
They assumed the system upon which and in which they lived. They
assumed that it was Deity’s system, wherever Deity lived. Slavery
of dark Africans, benighted, childlike heathen! Servitude, over the
world, of white men and women if they were born by the sea of poverty
and trouble. And very strangely poverty and trouble were both God’s
good will that it were blasphemous really to try to overthrow, and the
error of the individual man or woman who must suffer for it--need not
be overmuch compassionated, seeing that they were but getting their
deserts. And the moral of it all, “Nothing can be really changed. And
why should it be? for on the whole it is a pretty good affair.”
So the planters, merchants, captains, lawyers, doctors and clergy.
But none that rode by My Fancy and asked for a meal or a night’s
lodging were in straits for either. None who rode by My Fancy had been
slave or servant, or if any one had come out from home as the latter,
he now strenuously forgot it.
But I had not forgotten. I had not forgotten the Tolbooth, nor the
_King William_, nor Amory Hall, nor Daniel Askew’s, and I knew
Daga on the Slave Coast, and I knew the slave ships. I had not
forgotten, and the mark of something less than good was upon me plain
and I knew it. Plainer than upon them, who were only unimaginative.
CHAPTER XXII
In a small room at My Fancy I found a few books, and among them “The
Faery Queen.” During these first months I read and reread and read
again this volume with a kind of desperate clinging to its beauty. It
came to help me, to give me a kind of gleam.
I saw in a sort of moonlight how general was the problem, how general
and how deep, and how it allied with all other delays and struggles,
how they were all one, mere varieties of one another, and how both ill
and remedy might lay somewhere in that mysterious other-world called
“Within.”
I saw it, I say, as by moonlight, but it went then no further. Instead,
when I had been six months at My Fancy my soul entered Egyptian
darkness. Outer life went on as it had done, but within I sat in
blackness, and before me sat the Sphinx, and I did not move and she did
not move.
There was a bit of beach, a lonely place, that I haunted in these
months. At dawn I went to it to bathe. There were no great breakers,
but I swam and floated, and then came out and lay naked upon the
bone-white sand.
The sun rose, but my soul was dark and my mind a treadmill. And
there was a narrow estuary, sluggish water and shoal, winding between
mangroves. I came down through the cane to this and found a boat and on
winter days that knew far more heat than summer days in Scotland, rowed
myself up and down or sat idle in a shadow from the dismal growth. Here
and yonder stood a long-legged wading bird, motionless as I. Crabs
scuttled over the mud; at low tide the oysters were visible fastened
to the mangrove roots, the forlorn forest of them; where the soil was
firmer tall trees overhung the water that mirrored an azure, empty sky.
It was not so unlike Africa, but I lacked Rathbone Lace. I did not
want him; I wished now to be alone. Sometimes I rode into the hills
but not often. At long intervals I rode three leagues or so to the
nearest town, sat for an hour or two in the inn, wine before me that I
did not always drink, then rode back to My Fancy. But it was the house
itself, the house at eve when Atkins had said good night, the house in
the night time--I slept, then I waked. My room was large, with a bare,
stained floor, with a couple of tall presses, with three windows giving
upon the cane and the sea. I rose when I could not sleep and paced
this floor or took my station at now the one and now the other window.
Sometimes when the moon shone I opened my door and paced barefooted the
great upper hall or wandered in the vacant rooms. These windows were
closed. I returned and from my own heard the wind in the cane and the
surf upon the shore.
It was now the world, not one part of it but the whole.
It was now, _What am I and what is He?_ not a particular year and
plan in the so-called existence of a so-called David Scott.
It was a deep and large place, not the Slave Coast nor the slave ship,
nor Amory Hall, nor Daniel Askew’s, nor My Fancy, nor the _King
William_, nor the Tolbooth, nor Culloden Field where white men
shot one another down, though all of them were in that ocean and that
whirlwind and that mountain of fire.
The place was dark, the fire was dark. At times there were plains of
ashes and then I thought, “Why not kill myself?”
But I was not the kind to kill myself. Had I been so I should have done
it at Daniel Askew’s.
There I had been the slave. Now I was, so to speak, the master, being
manager for a master. There I had thought, “Why not kill myself?” Here
I thought the same. For all the worldly difference, the state was the
same.
I could leave My Fancy and I could leave the _Janet_. But others
would step into my shoes as I had stepped into theirs. I did not know
then what I felt, but now I know that I felt the General Man and his
self-destructiveness.
Up and down, up and down, I walked barefoot up and down. I walked the
long hall as it were the deck of a ship and saw the moon framed in
the western window, and each time I faced that way it was nearer the
sea.--As I walked the old Lykewake Dirge came and walked with me.
This ae night, this ae night,
_Every night and alle_,
Fire and sleet and candle light,
_And Christ receive thy saule_.
I read it with Mysie Johnston in the glen at home, and the bird was
singing in the thorn.--Then I was at Daga and in the Oil Palm village,
and a desolate wind howled in my soul. I saw the _Janet_, and
Fanny lying dead upon the heaped slave deck.--O Mysie Johnston and the
throstle in the white thorn!--O the gross, thick darkness!
To Brigg o’ Dread thou comest at laste.
It was not my own fortune but the world’s fortune. My own and the
world’s were one fortune, and it was bad.
From Brigg o’ Dread when thou mayst passe,
_Every night and alle_,
To Purgatory fire thou comest at laste,
_And Christ receive thy saule_.
The moon hung just over the sea. I stood in the window and watched it,
but my soul was away with the Sphinx.
If ever thou gavest meat and drink
_Every night and alle_
The fire sall never make you shrink.--
If meat and drink thou never gavest nane,
_Every night and alle_.
The fire sall burn thee to the bare bane.--
What was meat and drink?
“To do the will of Him who sent me.” That started out. Who sent me?
What am I and what is He? _The same, and I feel my own wounding?_
The fire sall burn thee to the bare bane.
The moon touched the sea. Cæsar began to bark. A voice outside was
calling. I went to the window at the rear of the hall and heard Dick
quieting Cæsar, then Atkins’ “What’s the matter there?”
“It’s a child very sick, sah. Maria’s child. She say for Jesus’ sake
give her some medicine!”
Maria cooked for us and lived just by the kitchen across the yard. I
called down, “I’ll come, Bob.”
A torch lighted the hut. The child lay contorted upon a mat on the
earthen floor. I thought it was poison and went back to the house
for remedies out of a big closet that looked and smelled a veritable
apothecary’s shop, then recrossed the yard and got the stuff at last
down the child’s throat, after which we made a fire and held him by it,
rubbing his body. The medicine worked, he vomited, the small twisted
frame relaxed, he opened his eyes, gasped and began to wail. Maria
gathered him into her lap, I gave him a spoonful of weakened rum; he
hushed, stretched himself, then curled into a ball and went to sleep.
“He’s all right now.”
Maria laid him upon the mat, then stood up. She was a slender,
charcoal-dark, dramatic creature. Now she raised her hands to heaven,
then spread them abroad, then curtseyed to me not once but thrice, each
time more profoundly than the foregoing, just as, I think, she may have
seen the young ladies of the North family practise for the Governor’s
ball in Spanish Town. “Thank you, master! Maria thanks you, master! May
the Lawd Jesus stand for you at the end! O Maria and Bob and Little Bob
thanks you, master! May the Lawd Jesus step up to the Big Chair and
say, ‘I was a little black boy and I took what was bad for me, and this
white man worked over me and brought me through!’--Yaas, master, what
you want you just say----”
David Scott went back to the great house. He had seen abundant small
kindnesses, abundant small, right actions through life. A kind of surge
of these everywhere and in all times came upon him. But there rose to
meet it a corresponding wave of cruelties and stupidities.--Something,
something was needed so tall that it saw through and over both and
built another sea!
I threw myself on my bed and slept and waked unhappy. I went down to
the mill and did a round of things, and then I rowed again among the
mangroves, and felt again oppressive night, more deep, more black than
before.
Another week and the time came round to drink and forget in a paradise
not without horror.
That two weeks was over. I came down to the sea at dawn, stripped and
plunged in and swam across to the reef. And here I sat and watched the
coming of the sun, and all the world was still and dry and empty to me.
After an hour I swam back to shore, dressed and came up through the
screen of sea grape to the road. A man walking by turned his face
toward me. A white man, rather tall and plainly dressed, with a long,
pale, quiet face, broken and made animate by very bright, dark eyes. He
seemed to have been upon the road some time, judging by the dust upon
him and his broken shoes and an air of not being fresh from bed and
ease. He carried a staff and leaned upon it when he stopped to greet
me. “Good morning, friend!”
I answered “Good morning!” and made to cross the road toward the My
Fancy opening.
“Can thee tell me how far I am from the town?”
“Three leagues,” I said, and noticed again his weariness. “Have you
been walking through the night?”
“Through much of it, friend.”
“Do you want breakfast? This is the My Fancy estate. If you will go to
the house they will give you bread and meat and coffee.”
He stood as if pondering, his hand upon his staff, his eyes level, then
raised. “Why, friend, if thee will I shall be grateful.”
“Come along then. I am going there myself. The family is from home.”
For a few paces we moved together upon the highway, then turned under
the huge cotton tree into the road through the cane. He looked at it,
on either hand, tall and waving in the early light.
“Thee grows so green and high! Thee, too, gives praise, and thy great
longing is to give full and innocent praise.” He turned his eyes upon
me. “What is thy name, friend?”
“David Scott.”
“Then, David, if thee did know how empty is my stomach, thee would be
glad thee has the means to fill it!”
“Why, hunger is hunger,” I said. “I have been hungry. ‘Thee’ and
‘friend’ and ‘David.’ Are you a Quaker?”
“So thee calls us,” he answered cheerfully.
“I have met two or three in my life,” I said, “and found them very good
folk. But there are few of you in Jamaica, and I seem to have heard
that you are not particularly welcome.”
He laughed. “Thy qualifying word is not strong enough! I have been five
months in Jamaica, and truly, David, thee is the only man, apparently
in authority, whose voice I have heard say ‘Quaker’ and yet continue
friendly. Thee is in authority?”
“I am manager of this estate.”
“If thee asks me to breakfast will thee not get into trouble with thy
master?”
“I do not precisely call him master,” I answered. “Besides, he is in
London.”
We walked on between the cane shaking in the morning wind. I did not
care if he were sectary, Jew or paynim. My likes and dislikes did not
depend on these things. Presently we met two great wagons and their
oxen with half a dozen men bound for the Five Trees field. Some were
riding, some walking, and all cheerful enough in the bright air and
free with “Morning, master! Morning, master!” We stood aside to let all
pass, and when they were by the Quaker turned and watched them into the
distance.
“I gather, friend David, that it is a kindly plantation. Good the child
in the arms of Giant Ill.”
I did not answer. The house now rose before us, and from the rear was
blown a great conch shell.
“That sounds sweetly!” he said. “I do not suppose thee has been in
Africa?”
“Yes, I have. Many times.”
He looked surprised. “As a trader?”
“Yes. On the slave ship _Janet_.”
Checking his long, deliberate stride, he stood under a palm--we now
had left the cane--and looked at me with a new interest, but hardly a
flattering one. “Ah!” he said. “And what made thee do that?”
I answered, “Needs must when the devil drives.”
“Is thee sure he drives?”
“Not wholly but sufficiently sure,” I answered and preceded him up the
ten stone steps to the door.
At breakfast I proposed to him that he rest with us until to-morrow.
He was evidently footsore, had been walking, he said, for the better
part of a week. Now and then he met with a lift but not often. In the
town to which he was making lived a brother Friend who could give him
certain information. He was going to get this, and then return the
length of the island to Kingston in time for the sailing of the _Mary
Pembroke_ for Liverpool. I asked him why he had not bought or hired
a horse, and he answered that in the first place he was a city man,
little used to horseback, and that when they talked of mountains and
rough paths instead of roads a voice within had said, “Thee knows two
feet. Rest content without six.” In the second place he was short of
money and must save where he could in order to spend where he must. The
enterprise in which he was engaged, he said, had been more expensive
than he and others had reckoned. “That does not matter,” he ended. “But
I must skimp between here and Liverpool.”
“What is the enterprise?”
We were seated, just us two, at the mahogany table in the hall. Atkins
was gone to the mill. We had eaten and drunk, and a boy that we called
Puck was taking away the dishes. My guest waited till he was out of
the door at the back, then he said, with his bright, dark eyes very
full and quiet upon me, “David, we who are Friends are at many points
not of one mind with the world around us. One of those points is the
propriety of that very slave trade in which thee has been engaged. Two
years ago our Society resolved to send a member into North America and
another to this island to the end that it might have certain first-hand
observations. I was chosen for Jamaica, and I have been going about the
work with quietness for a year and more.”
“My wonder is,” I said, “that being so free-spoken, you are not
spending your time in some gaol.”
“I am not always so free-spoken,” he answered serenely. “There was
a little trouble at Spanish Town where I was accused of preaching
sedition and inciting slaves to rebellion. But the Lord’s hand was over
me and I escaped.”
We rose from table, and I showed him a room where he might rest. It
was next to mine. We paused together by a window. “Will thee go again,
David, on the slave ship?”
“Yes. In a few months’ time.”
“Things are strangely written,” he said. “Perhaps it is to some good
that thee goes.”
“Do you Quakers think to end human slavery?”
“It is the Light Within, not us ‘Quakers’ that will end it. It may
be a long time, David. There are instruments, of course. And times
and seasons. As for African slavery it may continue a long, long
time. Where it is established. The parents and the children and the
grandchildren and their grandchildren. Those who are already brought
and the born in the land, and they who shall be born. But it is borne
in upon Friends, David--and others, too; and others too--that the Slave
Trade itself might cease. The making and bringing more across the sea,
continually and forever. The tearing them from their land and forcing
them here. It might cease, and cease in our day, David. The Light has
grown that much, it seems to us. It will grow further, of course, but
not for a time.--So, David, thee may not be chained to thy slave ship
forever.”
“Am I chained? It is said to be the Negroes who are chained.”
“Oh, thee is chained!” he answered cheerfully. “Thee and thy ship
captain and crew. Thee is chained here, my poor David. Can thee not see
and hear thy manacles? _I_ can. Thee wears thy manager’s chains,
and the owner here wears his chains.”
I said, “This is the first time I have ever heard it determinedly said
that the traffic with Africa for slaves should and must stop. I know
men who would secretly welcome that, and I know men who would rouse the
dogs and beat you forth.--Yes, I am chained, but to something else and
more than My Fancy and the _Janet_. Something larger and darker. I
am chained to living, and the devil and myself.”
He jerked his hand toward the shining cane and the sea and the road
between. “The Voice said back there, ‘Lo, a poor, chained one!’ So I
came with thee, David.”
I broke into laughter. “So I and not you are the fed? Well, let your
pride have it so!”
He put out his long hand and touched me and his dark, bright eyes came
again fully into mine. “Both of us are fed, David, both, both! Thee has
done unto me and I have done unto thee. The chain is in thy laughter
and thy slavery is deep, including as it does all slavery. But thee
will come forth, David! Thee will lift the gravestone and come out and
up.”
With that he made a strange, wide gesture and turned from the window to
the cool quiet room and its bed. “I was walking the most of the night,
and yesterday too was tiring unto me.”
I left him to his repose and went to the mill. Things there proceeded
as usual. I caught up the threads of work neglected or done awry by
David Scott during his two weeks. I was busy, and so partly buried my
Quaker and his errands, and Daga and the _Janet_, and that dark
idleness inside me where I sat with the Sphinx. The conches and horns
blew for dinner. I returned to the house and found him still sleeping.
Atkins and I ate together, and I told him just that I had sheltered
a Quaker who seemed a good and harmless man and would depart if not
to-night then in the morning.
Atkins looked at me shrewdly. “Aye, they seem harmless, but to most
of our folk, Mr. Scott, a pirate appears the luckier guest! They’re a
curious lot, with their ‘thees’ and ‘Call no man master’ and ‘Go not to
war’ and their ‘Voice’ and ‘Inner Light.’ Mr. North can’t abide them.
Not that there are many in Jamaica!”
“This man came from England and is going back on the _Mary
Pembroke_.”
“And that’s a good thing for him to do!” said Atkins, and pushed back
from table. “Of course he can’t poison the house while he is here, and
I just wouldn’t say anything about him in the letter to London this
month.”
He was cautious, liking My Fancy and meaning to abide there. David
Scott did not intend abiding, but he recognized responsibility. “He
will go in the morning at latest,” I said, and went to my own room
for the afternoon rest, then to the mill, then again, an hour before
sunset, to the house, and found him sitting in the porch, his bundle
beside him, his staff across his knees and his eyes upon the very
splendid clouds in the west, above the sea. “There will be a good
moon,” he said. “I will eat with thee, David, and then thee shall set
me on the road and I will trudge to the town and ere midnight knock at
Friend Thomas’s door.”
I said, “If you care to pass the night----” but he shook his head, and
I did not press it. Puck gave us supper in the hall, Atkins absenting
himself for his own reasons. He told me certain things that I had not
known, having to do with his Society and with individuals out of it.
I had not known there was any conscious attempt anywhere putting out,
however faintly, force against the Slave Trade. But he said there was a
growing feeling, that it would come to a head, and some day the whole
matter would be brought before Parliament. He took from his pocketbook
a slip of paper and laid it under my eyes. It was the copy of a
Resolution passed by the Yearly Meeting of Friends.
“We fervently warn all in profession with us that they carefully avoid
being any way concerned in reaping the unrighteous profits arising
from the iniquitous practise of dealing in Negro or other slaves;
whereby in the original purchase one man selleth another as he does the
beasts that perish without any better pretension to a property in him
than that of superior force, in direct violation of the Gospel rule,
which teacheth all to do as they would be done by and to do good to
all, being the reverse of that covetous disposition which furnisheth
encouragement to these poor, ignorant people to perpetuate their savage
wars, in order to supply the demands of this most unnatural traffic,
by which great numbers of mankind, free by nature, are subject to
inextricable bondage, and which hath often been observed to fill their
possessors with haughtiness, tyranny, luxury and barbarity, corrupting
the minds and debasing the morals of their children, to the unspeakable
prejudice of religion and virtue and the exclusion of that holy spirit
of universal love, meekness and charity which is the unchangable nature
and the glory of true Christianity. We therefore can do no less than,
with the greatest earnestness, impress it upon Friends everywhere that
they endeavor to keep their hands clean of this unrighteous gain of
oppression.”
I read and gave the paper back. “It is enwound in every civilized
country with commerce and revenue and private interest, ambition,
pride and gain. It is like back and front--I don’t know the thunderbolt
that will split them!”
“Yet God will launch it,” he answered and put up the paper and said no
more at all upon this subject. Nor did he question me upon conditions
at My Fancy, but put the whole aside and turned, it seemed to me, in a
strange and intimate fashion, to the inner plains and keeps, mountains,
tarns and sea of David Scott. At first, moving from the house toward
the high road, we moved in silence. The night was quiet and beautiful
with a half-moon riding high, and golden Venus in a west still flushed
with color. We heard the sea and the forever-ever slight rustle of
cane and frond. We walked in silence, he with his bundle and stick,
and with his thoughts, whatever they might be; I with mine. I say that
and yet, strangely then to me, still we seemed to be conversing. We
walked so to the great cotton tree and stepped upon the gleaming coast
road that should take him to the town. Across from it ran the thin belt
of sea grape and cocoanuts and the white sand and the blue water. I
said, “Let us go through and look at the sea.” He nodded agreement and
presently came upon the beach. Before us streamed and flowed and held
the enormous sea.
_This ae night, this ae night.
Every night and alle._
I said, “There’s a slave ship that I am upon--beneath the gratings, in
thick hot darkness, with All That Is pressed against me.--It’s not the
_Janet_, and this is not the sea, and color of the skin does not
come into it.--I was there at times in Virginia where I was a bought
servant. I think I may have been there at moments when, so young a
man, I lay in prison in Edinburgh. But I was there, too, when I ranged
free. Then it was at moments, but now almost all the time. And if I
were in London or Paris or home in Scotland, it would be the same. If I
had never come upon the _Janet_, or seen Daga on the Slave Coast;
if I had hardly seen a Negro or a formally named slave in my life; if
I thought not of them, if I were lawyer or schoolmaster or tenant or
laird, all now would be the same. There is a Great Ship of slaves, and
slaves are in the shrouds and on the poop deck, and I am a slave in the
depths of the ship.”
“Aye, aye,” he said. “Aye, aye! Such is the perception and the
emotion--and neither do I speak of physical enslavement, though that is
of it, too.”
He stood leaning on his staff, his bright eyes upon the sea. “David,
the slave both cannot and must free himself, and there is your
paradox----”
I laughed and it was dreary and mocking laughter.
“To find in the dark, without fingers, a catch or spring that may or
may not be there--there being everywhere!”
“That is just it,” he answered quietly. “There is everywhere.”
“I am tired of riddles that are never answered.”
“Never is a long word.”
He turned upon me in the moonlight, with the voice of the sea about us.
“You cannot be helped further at this time. But I say unto you, You
will find the way.”
With that he turned from the sea back to the road, and presently I
parted with him, and have never, with my bodily eyes, seen him since.
With the other eyes I have.
CHAPTER XXIII
The _Janet_, her second voyage after refitting at Bristol, carried
a cargo slightly differing from her usual one in that it represented
Negroes from the Zaire and Africa beyond the Camaroons, a vast back
country that Daga did not ordinarily drain. But Daga, ministering to
twenty ships, had this time thrown her net in that direction and drawn.
These Negroes were heathenish to us; from afar, very heavy and black.
The Coast tongues, north and south, and the back country tongues that
we knew did not meet their case. We handled them more like animals than
was the _Janet’s_ wont.
Daga lay three days astern.--
My Fancy in Jamaica lay to me more than a year astern. Back I had gone
to Bartram and Colley and McNaughton and the ship.
Colley had paid his debts in London, but here he was again. He had even
had a fair offer of a practise--but here he was. “You know it ruins
you, David, this life! ruins you for anything else. At last you don’t
know how to treat any other world, and it doesn’t know how to treat
you.--Well, here’s a right good company too!”
And it seemed that we did cling together, Bartram, McNaughton, Colley,
David Scott, Tom and Don, Michaelson, Llewellyn the carpenter,
Geordie, Jack Dannet and Dory and other who still lasted from the
_Janet’s_ population that autumn night when I climbed her side
from the boat of Christian Todd--and later ones too,--Wheeler the
boatswain who took Davis’s place, and others. Benjamin the steward was
dead. Black the second mate had left us for the _Sherwood Oak_.
In his place we had a big, slow Dane named Olafson. And every year saw
changes, many of them, among the seamen.
She had come into Kingston Harbor, white and trim from England, all
her sails so lovely, and strong new masts and rigging, her decks and
her hold and her cabins sweet again, her figurehead, a sea goddess,
restored, her flag and pennant new--the big and fair ship, the
_Janet_. In her hold and boxed upon her decks she carried stores
as she had carried them when first I knew her, all manner of trade
goods for Daga. She came in with a kind of music, and David Scott had a
warming of the heart to see her, the Enchantress, the good and evil one
together! She had been away a year; he had been at My Fancy a year. He
knew about when she was due, and had ridden from the north and the west
through the great island to Kingston, having resigned his manager’s
place at My Fancy, given it back to Mr. Godfrey North who was home from
England, and who would have kept him on. But David Scott was restless,
and his own unhappiness had tainted for him My Fancy. So he returned to
Kingston and North the agent, and the _Janet_ was sighted and swam
into harbor like a mountain of pearl.
That had been a successful voyage to the Coast and back. Going out, it
minded me of that first voyage from Chesapeake Bay. Returning, we had
only the best luck, weather, health and all, and landed four hundred
and ninety-two out of five hundred slaves. This time our port had been
Charlestown in South Carolina.
Said Bartram, “All in all, David, taking all my years together, East
Indiaman and Guineaman, they may call me a fortunate captain! We have
our ups and downs, but that one ghastly ribbon has been spun off the
spool!” But as he spoke he put out an arm and touched wood. When he saw
that I saw it he laughed, then drew a kind of long, sighing breath.
“Eh, man, eh, man David! Life’s a strange bird that goes across the sky
and who’ll say whence or to where? And then, you see, there’s yon net
of stars up there!”
Back at Daga and Rathbone Lace and his boat up the river, to the Oil
Palm village.
Markham the surgeon asked me about Fanny. That luckless voyage was
of course known in all detail at Daga, but such things were never
stressed. The accidents of the trade--they were the accidents of
the trade--and all trades have accidents. But I went to Markham’s
house--Colley chancing to be somewhere up the river--about a cut that
I had received upon the arm in the bush, and when he had dressed it
he asked me the question. I told him briefly. He nodded, was silent a
moment, then said, “I find it natural enough.”
“I am quite of your mind,” I answered. “I think it was so.”
“They were her people.”
“Yes.--It’s all the same, Markham, all over.--God knows how we can be
One Thing that hates and hurts itself so, and can’t give messages to
itself from itself! But so I come to feel it is. One Thing. One tragic,
pitiful, insane Thing!”
We came out upon his verandah. Daga lay in the afternoon light. All
suddenly castle and village and ivory beach and native boats and palm
trees made again the picture of that witches’ night in Edinburgh, long
ago now, long ago! It passed, and I saw with distinctness a mournful,
human Face--and whether it were Fanny, or a girl in Barbadoes, or Maria
at My Fancy, or old Melinda at Old Mill Quarter, or Eboe Sam, or Old
Hannibal, or Pickaninny, or Tom and Don, or all together--and I think
it was all together, all these and many more together--it held, it
overwhelmed and drowned me. Then it was gone.
“What is the matter?” demanded Markham.
“I don’t know.--I saw a vision.”
“Don’t do it!” said Markham. “I began it once. But I stopped them off.”
But I made a gesture and left him, going down unseeingly to the sea.
That was the first time at Daga after the _Janet’s_ refitting.
The second time, for two weeks, I was drinking and altogether for and
with Rathbone Lace, and what I did or left undone one day I may pick
up and stare at with affright. I came back into sobriety, and all of
Rathbone’s power could not make me drink. He laughed and gave it up.
“But it won’t be always so, David, it won’t be always so! No wall that
you’ve built but shall crumble! Then you’ll stay at Daga, and find rum
good every day in the year, and we’ll go forever, my boy, from Oil Palm
village to Oil Palm village!”
At times, from the first, I hated him. And then Daga again, and we
sought each other out.
This second time the _Janet_ had swung at anchor long weeks before
Daga. There were trade troubles. A war that had been expected to send
down streams of slaves, that had indeed been fomented for just that
purpose, had failed of bursting. Other chiefs were demanding more and
more and more for their villagers, and the factor had made a stand
against such exorbitancy with the result that here, too, befell a
temporary drought. Add to this that a rival British company had lately
established a factory no distance at all up the Coast and was making
glittering promises. Trade, diverted, flowed that way as well as to
Daga. And other things had happened. We had been not far from two
months at Daga when like a flood tide came traders with those Negroes
from the Zaire and beyond Camaroons.
We took them and filled the _Janet_ with them. They seemed to us
brutish, with their heaviness and unknown tongues--we handled them at
last in the piece and with no ceremony. All at last was done--the water
was in--all was ready--we should get away that night. In the harbor
about us lay the _Sharon_ of Boston, the _Waterlily_, the _Blake_ and
the little _Frances Fynes_, the _Sharon_ taking too of those southern
and inland Negroes and almost ready to sail, the others just in. When
the factor came aboard before sunset to bid Captain Bartram farewell
the captains of the _Sharon_ and the _Blake_ came with him, and all had
wine in the _Janet’s_ great cabin.
“Here’s to you, Captain Bartram!”
“Thank you, Mr. Lace. Thank you, Ross. Thank you, Jenkins!”
“The best of voyages!”
“I’m thanking you again. If it’s like the last it will be good.”
He was not convivial--“Holy Bartram.” They knew it and secretly winked
that the bottle was emptied and there would not be another. A little
further talk, and out they trooped and down into their boats and so
away--and that night about three we sailed from Daga.
Africa lay five days astern.
I came in the early morning out of Philip Smith’s cabin into the
great one to find seated at the table Bartram and Colley. The latter
was speaking in a low voice. Bartram, looking particularly tawny and
big, sat staring out of open door. The sun was just up, the sea ran
sparkling, a brisk wind filled the sails. I remember the blue and
gold and white, the humming, the thrilling salt, the cool and lift. I
made to pass through the cabin, but Bartram spoke, “Come here, David!
There’s trouble walking beside us.”
“What is it?”
“It’s sickness.”
He moved his big frame, put his hands behind his head--a way he
had--and stared through the door at what showed of his ship. “Five dead
this morning.”
I asked Colley, “What do you think it is?”
“God knows! _I_ don’t. I’ve never seen it before. We bought
it with these Negroes, and where they bought----” He described the
sickness. “It’s one of the old plagues.”
“None but the Negroes----”
“Yes. Jack Dannet’s got it.”
Bartram stood up. “We’ll do as we’ve done before--the best we can! Say
nothing of its newness or anything else. Say it will presently stop.
I’ll order an extra dram for all.”
“All” meant the _Janet’s_ officers and seamen. No one told or
could tell the freight that it was not serious and would presently stop.
Seven days out from Daga. There had been half a dozen more deaths,
and another seaman lay in the ship’s hospital. But that was not so
bad--we could weather it at this rate. Then suddenly like a tiger the
thing jumped. On a hot morning, the sails lank, we brought up and cast
into the sea fifteen bodies. At noon Dannet died, and in the evening
Jonathan Williams. Between dusk and dawn three more were smitten in the
forecastle. It settled down.
McNaughton’s opinion was that we should put back to Daga.
“What for?” asked Bartram, with reason. “The sea opens for them as
easily here. We can’t send them back into barracoon and poison all
there--and for us white men the _Janet’s_ still the best hospital.
If it’s bad, better to be bad keeping our course. If it’s an evil
that’s got a term, what’s the object in turning tail? What’s to be will
be, McNaughton, and we’ll go on our way.”
The next day panic appeared, in the black and in the white. Bartram
quelled it, shamed it, dissipated it, so that at least it came into
bounds. In both colors arrived the drawing into two camps: they who
feared and gave all way to fear, and they who feared but kept their
manhood and banded to help themselves and others.
We ceased to drive the Africans at night under the gratings. The most
of them stayed night and day on the deck and they began to die like
flies. It was fearful, their noise; and fearful their stillness. In
every throng of black men and women as in every throng of white, there
will be so many who are better, braver and wiser than the others. They
are smothered under until times like this. Then they come forth and
are seen to be tall and strong. So out of this mourning or desperately
silent mass sprang at last their own helpers. When we saw who they were
we picked them out, gave them freedom and told them as best we could
what to do, then left it to them.
When we were two weeks from Africa a third of our cargo was gone.
Seven seamen were dead. Hardly any one who was taken recovered. It was
malignant from the first.
Add that there now befell a calm. Day after day of it when we hardly
moved. And each day dead men and burials, and the sea hardly seemed to
take them away.
Bartram apparently did not sleep at all. The old lion went padding at
all hours through his ship, strengthening here, strengthening there.
Bartram, McNaughton, Olafson, Colley and young Winter his helper, David
Scott, Wheeler the boatswain, Llewellyn, Dory and Wat Allen, Geordie,
Tom and Don and some others feared, but worked.
Then Winter was taken and died, then Geordie, then Llewellyn. Three
weeks, and half the cargo was gone, and out of fifty white men aboard
were left not thirty-five. The dead calm held. The sea was brass and
the sky was brass, and the sharks swam beside the ship.
It was middle of the night. It had been my watch; Olafson had relieved,
and I came to my bed, to throw myself upon it and sink into dead sleep,
forgetting for three hours the stench and the cries and the heat. But
as, half-naked, I touched it, I heard Bartram’s voice at the door,
“David!”
I knew, I knew, what it was. I knew it in his voice. When I reached
him, he was supporting himself against the table. “It’s the number and
the star, David! They’ve come again--they’ve come again!”
I got him to his bed and went for Colley, who presently stood beside
him. “Captain, Captain! You’re stronger than us. You pull through! We
need you.”
But Bartram regarded us with strange eyes. “You’ve got
McNaughton.--William Bartram is sending in his papers, and crisscross
and blotted and torn they are!”
We gave him water which he at once began to call for as they all did,
and McNaughton came quietly and took his orders which were short. “The
best you can, McNaughton, the best you can!”
It was to be kept from the _Janet_ as long as might be, which was
short enough, we knew. There were three dying men in the forecastle.
Colley, thin as paper, with hollows and shadows under his eyes,
returned to his enormous work; McNaughton to his. I stayed beside
Bartram. His speech was rapid and dry; now and then he groaned, and his
hands moved over the bed or with strange signallings in the air. “Is it
dawn? Is it dawn?”
“It’s coming, Bartram.”
“There was to be a wind at dawn. A right wind. And land at dawn! Land,
land, land!”
He struggled to sit up. I pressed him back. “Lie down, Bartram, lie
down!”
His wits came back. “Ah, David, man, a sair trouble--but we’ve known so
many! I’m fortunate in McNaughton. That Dane, too, is a good man.”
“Yes, he is,” I said. “But you’re the best man here, Bartram.”
“Na, na!” he said. “And I’ve got a star to fight.”
With that he began again to toss and speak at random. Colley returned
and looked at him. “No worse and no better than the others. The same
boat, we’re all in the same boat, captain and crew.” But by dawn he was
worse. The very strength and bigness of him seemed, when it turned, to
aid that direction. He fell into a stupor. When the sun rose and poured
light about him, it was seen what ravage the one night had made. When
Colley came again he said, “He’ll go, David, and it won’t be long.”
It was not. At sunset Bartram died.
At dawn we buried him--and the _Janet_ seemed dead with him, the
_Janet_ and the sea.
McNaughton was captain. We had no time for grief or for memory,--time
for nothing but a dull, eternal struggle with the pestilence.
Then McNaughton was taken, and in twenty-four hours followed Bartram
into the sea.
Olafson came to me, with him Wheeler and Michaelson and others.
“We’re come, Mr. Scott, to say that I do not wish to be captain of
the _Janet_, sir. I’ll do my duty as your first mate, but you be
captain. All of us who are alive, and we think those who are dead, say
the same.”
So I was captain--Captain David Scott of the _Janet_.
The next day Colley was taken. For a little while he was very
clear-headed. “I’m dead tired, David--too tired really to suffer. I’ll
go quick.--They never should have been!”
“You’ve done the work of a dozen, Colley. And always you’ve doctored
and helped us----”
“Yes, maybe. But they never should have been--the errands of the
_Janet_. Leave her now, David--I’d leave her if I were you.”
“Oh, Colley!” I cried. “Little fear but I shall be leaving her! Look
around soon and you’ll see me--and Olafson and Michaelson and all!”
He turned his head and turned it again. “And I’ll be seeing, too, don’t
you think, David, the black folk?”
I was summoned for something, and when I returned he did not know me.
As he said, it was quick and he suffered little. Colley died, and we
dropped him into the sea.
We were a month from Africa, but because of the calm not a third of the
way over. Of five hundred slaves the _Janet_ held now a hundred
and forty; of fifty white men there were now twenty to man her. And I
was captain and Olafson was my mate.
CHAPTER XXIV
I stood by the man at the wheel and looked at the glassy sea. Then afar
there seemed upon it a little darkening. It spread. I felt an elfin
stroke upon my brow, my hand; a rope hanging near swung, though ever so
slightly. It came again, more strongly. I looked at the man--he was a
New Englander whom we called Dandy--and he looked at me. “That’s wind,
Dandy!”
“Praise God!” he said, and the water stood in his eyes.
The _Janet_ started from her dream, shook herself and began to hum
and move. Life! It was life again!
That day we had but five deaths and four new cases, three among the
Negroes, one in the forecastle. The next day saw further lessening; the
next it dwindled still. There came a day when was no death and no one
struck down. The plague departed. It left alive upon the _Janet_
one hundred and two Negroes and fifteen white men.
That day when with a great and weary breath we saw that it was gone,
there came up with us the _Sharon_ that had left Daga twenty-four
hours after us. She was built for speed, and she packed close, carrying
between six and seven hundred Negroes, though I know not how she did
it. Now as she neared, there poured down the wind upon us her stench.
We lay to; she came on and hailed us.
“_Janet_, ahoy!”
“Ahoy, _Sharon_!”
“The plague! Have you the plague?”
“We have had it. It is over.”
“How do you stand?”
“One hundred and two Negroes living. Fifteen white men. Captain Bartram
is dead, McNaughton and our surgeon.”
“Who is that?”
“David Scott, Captain of the _Janet_. How is it with you?”
“Dying. We are dying! Do you know anything to do?”
“Nothing. We could do nothing. You’ve got your surgeon?”
“Yes, but we’ve never seen this thing before.”
“It has gone from us. It will from you.”
“If it isn’t too late---- We’ve thrown overboard half our
Negroes.--Good-by, the _Janet_!”
“Good-by, _Sharon_!”
She sailed swiftly. In an hour she had left us quite behind. The sea
ran dark blue and in hills and vales; the warm wind behind us pushed
us on, straight into west. But we were hardly half through the Middle
Passage, and we had fifteen to handle the ship and our freight. David
Scott regarded the latter, knowing by now every face, and seeing in
them, when all is said, only Universal and Eternal Man. By now he
had enough of their tongue roughly to understand and be understood.
They had endured the plague and in some sort tended one another and
had buried in the sea their host that was gone. Of those able or
compassionate or higher men of their own who had at last stood out to
serve, three or four remained alive. Over all rested as it rested upon
us fifteen the shadow of something gigantic behind and over-topping
life that was small. I went among them and talked, and it was to me as
if I were at Old Mill Quarter, discoursing in the dusk after work with
Old Hannibal and Eboe Sam and Pickaninny and Joe and the others.
I offered, the weather resting fair, to let them sleep upon deck--they
having a great horror of below, where in the blackness companies of
them had died. They would have had space enough down there now for some
sort of comfort, but they had that horror. They might stay upon their
deck--they should be unshackled--they should have abundant food and all
the water we could safely give. What we could do for them we would. In
return would they undertake obedience to orders? We had the guns, the
cutlasses, the great guns, and always we could sink the _Janet_.
And lastly, I wanted six to help clean the ship and carry the food.
A great black man--one of the helpers from the first--stood forth. I
will put his words into plain English.
“Where are you taking us?”
“To an island named Jamaica.”
“Are you going to kill us there to please your god? Some of us think
that.”
“No. If a man has bad luck in Africa he becomes a slave. You know all
about being slaves to head men and chiefs and kings. You know about
going into far countries to be slaves. In Jamaica you will just be
slaves to white chiefs.”
“Are there other black men there?”
“A great many. You will find folk who have been your neighbors.”
“What will happen to us? How shall we be treated?”
“You will work to make sugar and rum and tobacco, or to cut down trees.
If you will not work or if you run away, you will have hard treatment.
If you work and stay where you are and make no trouble you will be
treated differently. Some of you will be treated very kindly.--You know
a great deal about it, though you have never been out of Africa.”
His face seemed to work. He looked at every man of us armed, and at
the ship and the piled sails and all the matters that were foreign and
marvellous to them, and at his people. Something solemn, something
of rest awhile after that Death Cloud, was upon them as upon us.
Something of resignation, something of muteness before Destiny. After
a time there might manifest among them, even here, that cheerfulness
that was theirs by nature--but to-day was other coloring. The speaker
for them, and he was tall and big and black as night, but his head was
well-formed and his countenance showed homely strength, looked at sky
and sea, the _Janet_ and us.
“We cannot help ourselves. If we fight we just die and gain nothing. We
do not know for what evil we are here and are going into a far land to
work for others. Maybe it is for evil, and maybe it is for some good at
last. We do not know. Maybe somebody bigger than you is taking us. We
won’t make trouble.”
The good weather held, we cleaned the ship, the plague made no return,
though we had a degree of other sicknesses, due chiefly to exhaustion
and desolation. Our Negroes as a whole remained tractable, and helpful.
God knows, by this time David Scott knew the good qualities and those
not so good of Negro folk! On the _Janet_ this disastrous voyage,
the good rose, the bad sank away. There is in this people a Philosopher
who is over and over again slain by Passion and who over and over again
rises from the dead. He had, in this voyage, an exemplar in the big,
black man, and the rest were guided.
We fifteen white men, divided into two shifts, under captain and first
mate, had our work, being so short-handed.
There was scant time for musing grief. I _saw_ Bartram and Colley
and McNaughton and others.
A week--ten days--went by of steady westward going. Then befell another
calm. I heard Wheeler the boatswain say to Michaelson, “Somebody’s gone
to war against this ship.”
“Aye, I’m thinking myself somebody has a scunner against us.”
The third day of it Olafson and I went secretly and examined the water
casks. We were only in mid-passage who should have been nearly to
port. A hundred and twenty now drank water as against an expected five
hundred and fifty. But for very need and mercy we had been free with it
during the pestilence, giving the sick and dying what they cried for.
That first dead calm had lasted long, and this, for all we knew, might
equal or outgo it. Our faces were grave when we saw what we had--and
the lift of any land so far away. Said Olafson, “Something less than
the old allowance?” and I nodded.
David Scott and the black man together made the hundred understand and
acquiesce. For the most part our fifteen and Tom and Don in the cook’s
galley met the stress with courage. We shared equally, black and white,
captive and free. As captain, I said it should be so. At first there
threatened mutiny, but Olafson and Michaelson and others stood by me,
and it was so. Each soul upon the _Janet_ had each day enough
water just to do with and no more.
Again the _Janet_ was pinned to the moveless sea.
The calm lasted--so hot, so still--with little to do for the ship. Dead
distaste, dead weariness, bodings, and at last with us all nerve and
temper a frayed and giving thing.
The fifth night of it I entered the captain’s cabin--it was Olafson’s
watch--and lay down. There were the arms, there the books, stars
glimmered in the window. There formed in me the words, “It’s time!” I
smelled rum. In one moment lust for it had me by the throat. It was
more than that; it clutched in every member of the will as well as the
body. I sat up. Already the delusion flowed about me--the delusion that
everything and all was best served by my taking the key of the spirit
room, going there softly, and returning with a great jug of rum. I
arose and took it, and went barefoot and returned unseen with my store.
I put it down, a cup stood by me. I sat upon the bed. A voice spoke in
me--another voice, I thought then, than my own. “If you taste that cup
you are damned.”
At the same moment I was pervaded by a light that was not starlight,
moonlight or sunlight. In it I saw the _Janet_ with a drunken, mad
captain, and saw disaster to her and to six-score human beings. I saw
widely, intensely, with minuteness, many-formed disaster. The light
went, the voice was silent, but a rod was lifted over my soul.
My fingers unclasped from the cup. I pushed it a little from me on the
shelf by the bed, then motionless in the dark I began to wrestle.
All the rest of the night.--Toward dawn I got up and took the jug and
restored it to the spirit room. But I kept the key. I could get it
again.
The cold, the forlorn dawn streaked the sky. The demon and I still were
locked. The bell struck. I must go on deck and send Olafson to rest. I
went, and he exclaimed, “Are you ill, sir?”
“No. I could not sleep.”
He and his men went to eat, to have a small measure of water and to
sleep. Mine came wearily out of forecastle. On the deck the Negroes
were still sleeping. A deathlike purple hung in the east.
I moved about the ship as was needed, or sat in my place upon the poop
deck and I fought until I was spent. “I will not take it to-day, but as
soon as it is night----” When noon was passed Olafson relieved me, but
I would not go to Bartram’s cabin. I lay solitary upon the deck in the
shadow with the dead mirror of the sea around and fought. Once I fell
asleep but I met a terrible dream and woke trembling, with sweat upon
me. The sun sank and I must take charge while the others rested and
sweetly slept. Somehow the hours passed till midnight. Olafson took the
ship. I left the deck and sat upon my bed in the cabin, waiting just
for a little when I should go barefoot, unlock the door of the spirit
room and bring the jug back. Again said the voice, “If you do it you
are damned.”
Oh, what lion, what tiger, what army, is like this to fight? Oh,
help--help to break a slave’s chain!
Once I went outside the door and halfway to that place of storage that
was to me Heaven. But I saw in mid-air before me a mournful face, and I
turned back and sat again, shivering, upon my bed.
And again dawn----
All day--all day----
It was sunset. The sun went down a ball of fire, and there were no
clouds. The west flared carnation then ebbed to purple and the sea
likewise turned to clear purple glass. I stood by the side with the
moveless sails in mountains above me. The ship had its sounds enough
but there fell to my senses a silence like a night in space. I seemed
to stand alone in a quiet place. It was like a battlefield a year
after the battle. I stood as one foredone, and yet I knew there was a
victory. But who won it I hardly knew, whether it was I or another.
That raging desire in me died or fell asleep. I came quietly, stilly
back to David Scott before or after his two weeks. And yet not to that
David Scott either--seeing that on my part or on Another’s part there
had been a victory.
CHAPTER XXV
The next day upsprang the wind and did not again fail us. Three days
thereafter we met the _Edina_ of Baltimore bound for Whidah. We
hailed her; she lay to and the _Janet_ near her. I went to her
in our boat and spoke from it to her Captain, Weymarch, whom Bartram
knew. Could they give us water? We would thankfully take no matter
how little. They had had a quick and prosperous voyage, with but
forty aboard. Weymarch knew the _Janet_, was sorry for Bartram’s
death. He offered three casks and when we had these shipped cried that
he thought he could give another and did. It was our saving, and we
blessed the _Edina_ for kindness.
She dwindled toward Africa while we ran into the west. We were careful
indeed with water, but thirst no longer tormented us, neither the white
nor the black. We would stop at the first of the Bahamas and fill our
casks before we took the Windward Passage downward to Jamaica.
Olafson, Wheeler, Michaelson and the rest of our seamen did well. I was
used to them and they to me. I knew the _Janet_, the _Janet_
knew me. The Africans, with that big black man their teacher, made no
trouble that might not be argued or soothed away.
Michaelson said to me, “You’ll be a Captain, sir, after the heart of
Captain Bartram, rest his soul!”
And Olafson said, “The Company will confirm you Captain, doubtless,
sir. I’d like to keep on the _Janet_ with you.”
But I was unhappy.
There broke a day that showed us the Blue Mountains. The anchor rattled
down in Kingston Harbor. North the agent came alongside in a boat.
“What’s wrong?”
I delivered to him the hundred and two Negroes. The next day I saw them
in the barracoon, and the big, black man still led and comforted them.
David Scott came and went, Kingston waterside and Kingston Harbor,
keeping Bartram’s cabin and watch upon the _Janet_ that was being
holystoned and painted and made all clean again. There was sympathy
among the world of ships and men of the sea and dealers in black men.
“Holy Bartram” had been much liked despite his queernesses. North
sincerely missed him. “If there were more like him the trade wouldn’t
get the name it has!”
“Has it a name?”
“The world is getting finicky,” he answered. “It wasn’t always so!”
He had been long with the Company, was esteemed and had power to
give a captain to a ship lacking one. Like a good agent he pondered
it, he talked with Olafson and the _Janet’s_ men, and he weighed
the claims of two or three in Kingston who had had ships, had them
not now, and wished them again. Then he offered the _Janet_ to
me--Bartram’s pay and all.
I thanked him and said I must think of it.
“There’s just one thing that made me hesitate,” he said. We were alone
in his quiet house behind the vines. “But I assert that Bartram never
told me you had a cloud over you in Virginia. If it ever comes out--and
with common prudence, now after ten years, it never need--why, I simply
knew and know nothing about it!”
“I understand.”
“Lord!” he said. “The high seas and the land are different things, and
Scotland and Africa are different things! Six out of ten men bound for
Guinea have strange stories.”
“Mr. North,” I asked, “when is the trade going to stop?”
He stared. “Why, when slavery stops, I presume. There’s no particular
sign of that!”
“The factories and the slave ships might cease and leave all the
Negroes in America slaves--till the world grows finicky again.”
“There’s finickiness and finickiness,” he said. “The Royal African
Company don’t see it to that extent.” He laughed. “Bartram used at
first to have those fits. But we’ve got to live--and he came round to
his bread and butter. What’s the use in being better than your time and
your work? But it made him a humane captain and that’s a good thing in
any trade! Follow him, and you’ll do all right.”
“I’ll have to think.”
He pursed his lips, then spoke, “There’s just this other thing,
Scott, that I’m not supposed to know about and yet _do_ know
about--except when somebody asks that’s got no proper or convenient
right to know. God knows there’s drinking enough in the African
trade--as there is for that matter everywhere--but I understand that
just at times you are as far as may be from Bartram’s way there. Now if
you have the right mates it’s possible----”
“It’s my belief that I’ve quit drinking.”
“For good?”
“If I take the _Janet_ I won’t drink while I am upon her.”
After a moment he said, “I’ll take your word, David.--Well, then, the
Company offers you the _Janet_, Captain Scott.”
I said again, “I’ll have to think.”
Returning to the _Janet_, I tried to think--but I loved the
_Janet_.
Next day I got a horse and rode out to the Blue Mountains. But from
every height I saw the passionate blue sea and the _Janet_ and I
loved them both.
It was to my advantage to go with her. I could not now find new things.
Bartram and Colley and McNaughton were in some sense there, there upon
her still.--Bartram’s cabin and the books and the long, clean voyages
out.--Daga--I would turn the new leaf at Daga. David Scott, world
flotsam with an easy job, and the Captain of the _Janet_ were two
things. If I took the _Janet_ I would be true to her.
The voyages out--but the voyages back?
Cargoes of slaves. Distaste, heat, stench, fatigue, close watch and
ward, barbarity and danger--all the deterrents that made men of the
sea draw back at the word “Guineaman,” that gave to the trade mostly
hardened and reckless men. Well, was I not hardened and reckless?
I was used to it all. There was even a crude excitement in seeing each
time if it could be done. Captains of slavers rarely at last left the
slavers, died in the trade unless it threw them out, broken and useless
hulls, decaying forever in some little port town.
I saw it, but I had known no human trade without distaste. Distaste in
soldiering, distaste on Virginia plantations, distaste at My Fancy. I
was used to the _Janet_--I was the slaver--there were reliefs.
Slavery. The hunting and trapping of black men and sailing with them,
against their will, over the seas and selling them for life, them and
their unborn children, the generations to come.
I got down from my horse and sat upon a stone, but between bough and
branch I saw the extreme blue sea and the ships in harbor and the
_Janet_.
Once, for five years, I had been almost as much a slave as if I were
born in Africa. I knew the taste of the cup. In much it tasted the
same, if you were white or if you were black.
Captain of the _Janet_. David Scott, Captain of the _Janet_.
If planters and merchants and others the world over did wrong in
enslaving--and according to that Quaker they did--_what of me?_
Captain of the _Janet_--Captain of the _Janet_.
As I sat there the _Janet_ seemed to come near. I saw her stem
to stern, every mast and boom and spar and rope, her sails, her decks
and her cabins. She seemed as she was when I climbed out of Christian
Todd’s boat upon her, but seemed more, with a thousand memories as of
home and things endured and enjoyed. I saw the great cabin and the
lanterns and the table and stacked in fairy columns the gold that would
be my pay; and Bartram and Colley and McNaughton seemed with me there
and approving. The sea flowed midnight purple, and the _Janet_ had
every sail spread, and the Trade Wing sang.
Somebody must do it--somebody must run the slave ships. Better the
decent, the humane-as-might-be, than Garth and McKenzie and their
kind! Better Bartram’s kind on the _Janet_ than some one who sneered
at “Holy Bartram,” and was himself a terror to white seaman and black
slave! Bartram seemed to stand beside me in his cabin.
“David, let us sail her still together! I wadna like another----”
And I was idle and indolent and slow in the inner man, distasting
change where I had taken the groove.
As well be unhappy on the _Janet_ as away from her! As for the
slave trade and slavery, they would persist while I lived and while
I died. The earth was wound with a chain. My being Captain of the
_Janet_ wouldn’t enslave and wouldn’t free a Negro of them all.
Another wouldn’t be so merciful a captain, and that was the solitary
difference.
I saw the chain around the earth and that it held white men as well
as black. It held us all, though some it appeared to gall less than
others. Degrees of harshness and various masters, but all, all, all,
possessors and possessed, in slavery!
I was again at My Fancy, roaming the great rooms at night and unhappy
almost to self-murder.
I rose from the stone and mounted my horse and rode back to
Kingston, and happening to meet North in the street, “Captain of the
_Janet_, is it?” he asked, and I answered, “Not yet.”
But next day, being on the _Janet_, silently, swiftly, like a
serpent raising his head, David Scott spoke to that Unnamed One in
prison within him, “If I am lost anyhow, I will walk, dance, and run
a little first!” And sat down at his table in his cabin and wrote to
North that he would take the ship.
CHAPTER XXVI
“So the rum’s not for you?” said Rathbone Lace.
“No.”
“Then let us row without it up to Oil Palm village.”
“I’m not going up the river.”
He stared, peeled the fruit beside him and ate it, then spoke. “Does
that mean that my room is better than my company?”
“No. But I have settled it that as I am Captain, I will be Captain.”
“You mean captain like Holy Bartram? There are others you might copy.
They live--he’s dead.”
“Yes.”
“Your ambition is to be called Saintly Scott?”
“Perhaps----”
He and I were at table on his veranda and it was dusk. He pushed back
his native-wrought chair, I mine. A Negro woman with a large soft tread
cleaned away food and dishes. Lace and I sat upon the steps where the
night wind might find us. It was hot and there sounded a dull moaning
and roaring from the bar.
“Daga----” he said, and stopped to light his pipe.
“I saw this place,” I said, “before I came to it. There was a wild
night in Edinburgh and I was in danger. I stood against a wall,
listening and looking into darkness. It opened before me, this African
ocean and that castle, that beach, those palms. Had my ear been as keen
as my eye, I would have heard those drums.”
They were beating below us, below Factor’s Hill, in Daga village. They
had, likewise, a bonfire down there and some celebration. Beat, beat,
beat, beat----
“I’ve heard tell of visions,” he said. “I don’t have them.”
“I can have them,” I answered, “but the trouble with me is action.”
“You are beautifully clear.--An uninformed man would say that your life
was sufficiently active.”
“So he would--the uninformed.”
He laughed. “The same old David--plunging always from your stake and
being brought up short! Now I--I am free!”
The bowl of his pipe glowed. “Daga suits me. I don’t even want to be
Captain of the _Janet_. There’s danger there--and no danger here.”
“I suppose not. At times life seems to me a very big thing--but the
next hour a most puny and wretched one!”
He made a smoke cloud. Below us the drums were beating and beating.
“Then I say again, Let’s go in the old boat to-morrow up to Oil Palm
village.”
“No.”
Something appeared on the step beside us--rum in a decanter with
glasses. The African woman with no noise had put it there, then
vanished. Lace poured himself out a dram. “None for you?”
“No.”
He drank--the odor of the thing that made you forget, that made you
seem to yourself powerful and gigantic, was in the air--the drums were
beating, beating.
“Man is a preying animal,” he said. “White, black, red or yellow, what
does it matter? The successful is he who recognizes the fact and preys
and joys in it.--You’ll be happier, Scott, when you bow to Nature!”
Through the dusk the sea still gleamed and the _Janet_ was riding
there. Nearer at hand a last glow struck Daga castle and its barracoon
that was filling for the _Janet_. The palms were drawn against a
copper sky. “I do bow, Lace,” I said and got to my feet.
“Aren’t you going to sleep ashore?”
“No.”
“Bartram again!” he said. “When you fell heir to his ship did you
_become_ him?”
In a certain sense it seemed to me that I had. Going out to the
_Janet_, while the men rowed, hearing the waves upon the bar,
marking the stars lighted above Africa, it was Bartram that I assumed.
Assumed him in the sheer feeling older--first manhood all passed,
maturity here and here for some time; assumed him in the watchful,
plodding care for the ship and her great worth to me, her great and yet
melancholy worth; assumed him in a concentration on getting the thing
done in the best way possible; assumed him in his eye upon the stars.
The _Janet_ encreased before me. I heard Olafson’s deep slow voice
and a fiddle in the forecastle.
Within a week we began lading--Negroes from Dahomey, from the
Camaroons, the Niger and the Zaire. At last all was done and we would
depart in the night. The elder and the younger Lace and the captains of
ships in harbor came aboard to drink farewell and good voyage. Again
in the cabin I was Bartram.--Garth was here and he noticed it. “By
God, you’ve but to let your beard grow, Scott, to be Bartram! And let
me tell you, you might do worse. Damn me, he trod too soft with his
niggers and his sailors, but he was a big man!”
They drank and talked and departed, and I was glad to see them go, and
that, too, was Bartram. It was night. We made sail and slipped the
land while our slaves were below in thick darkness. It never did to
let them see at any close range the receding shores. But up through
the gratings, as I walked the deck, came the familiar crying and the
familiar odor from miserably crowded bodies in a tropic night. We
sailed, and I looked out and upward at Bartram’s stars.
Olafson rested first mate, and a good one, almost as good as
McNaughton. He and I had our own sympathy, the big Norseman, with
some story, I knew, behind and around and before him. For second mate
I had taken on a Scot, Alexander Nicol, who had been the same on the
_John Land_, lost by fire. And for surgeon, in Colley’s place,
there was Lisle from the same ship--a good man, but not Colley. Wheeler
the boatswain, Michaelson, and the seamen who had outlived the plague
remained, and Tom and Don who would stay with the _Janet_ till she
sank. And in Kingston and in Bridgetown we gathered two-score and five
seamen. As far as I could I picked them out; they were not a bad lot.
Now and again, for mysterious reasons, the Company operating there in
England produced changes in routes and markets afar. For a long space
of time a ship might be for the Islands, steady as a ferry between the
Slave Coast and the British Indies. Then a notification, and for a
string of voyages ports of North America. We had gone to Charlestown in
South Carolina the voyage before the disastrous voyage. It was my port
now. The Company agent there was one Trevannion.
Using Bartram’s cabin, taking his place at table, sailing his ship,
more and more I felt Bartram and his stars. Yet was I also David Scott.
And around David Scott and Bartram and all came at times like a flicker
that strange sense of being another and a larger, a Some One that held
and understood the others, but was not they.
This first voyage from Daga proved a straight, quiet, successful one.
I delivered my cargo, smaller by a very little than when it was taken
on. Trevannion I had met before. Charlestown harbor and waterside,
Charlestown inns and their frequenters, some of the houses, the low,
sandy, flowery country round about, the rice fields and the great pine
timber became familiar. With a number of differences it yet reminded me
of Virginia.
Beginning now to use the continent and not the islands, I reasoned one
night, standing before the minute mirror in Bartram’s cabin, as to
whether, after all these years, David Scott should strive to provide
for himself a different physical aspect. As Garth had suggested, I
might become bearded like Bartram. It was possible perhaps slightly to
change my voice and manner of speaking.--As for my story, that had long
been provided. Africa, Indies and the sea between, it was known and
forgotten that I was some kin of Bartram, a Scot whose youth had been
passed in France but who had joined the _Janet_ on some one of her
returns to Bristol.
And long ago Bartram and I had discussed it, whether or no I should
change my name. But in us both was something that clung to the given
name--especially if it was good Scots--and that hated for their own
sakes disguises.
It was not far from seven years since I had run away from Daniel
Askew. Standing before the mirror, I put side by side my man then and
my man now, noted the difference and thought that the Captain of the
_Janet_ was safe enough, even though some fate should drive him
into Chesapeake. And even if that were so, how unlikely any meeting
with any who had known Daniel Askew’s or Amory Hall while he was there!
On my forehead I carried a jagged line of white, scar of a wound
received at Amory Hall in a wood we were felling. A great storm came
up suddenly with wind that tore branches from the trees and sent them
flying. Such a one was borne endwise against me like a spear and gave
the hurt. But who would ever meet me who knew that? I dismissed all
thought of it.
Trevannion was a different man from North and other agents that I knew.
I could tell tales of him, and of Charlestown that was both fair and
unfair, courteous and uncourteous, right and wrong like the rest of the
world. But now I am back upon the _Janet_, and we go to Africa for
more Negroes.
So, coming and going, with various fortunes, David Scott spent two
years.
CHAPTER XXVII
Through that great block of space and time my mood was often and over
the mood of My Fancy. Unhappy enough, I roamed an inner world that was
a dark world, with here and there a tarnished gold. But then again I
came to the outside and stayed there with the day’s work and at night
hard, dead sleep. Or if I could not ignore the inner world, I busily
packed it with false shapes. And again there were other moods. In some
sort I loved the ship and the sea and, strange to say, the human race,
and in some sort I hardened to my trade. I became Bartram.
In Charlestown once I met travellers, a learned German with a book in
mind, a gentleman from New England and another from New York. I forget
what was the relationship between the three, but the two Americans,
having leisure and liking adventure, were engaged in piloting the
European down the continent, from snow in June to flowers in January.
Massachusetts to Georgia, the colonies had passed or were passing
before them. The German had a library of notebooks.
Charlestown is a town of a very polite society. When it read the
travellers’ introductory letters they did not lack entertainment. I
met them at a supper party in a genteel inn, and I was there because
I was in port and Trevannion took me. Trevannion was asked because the
German had mentioned that he would like to meet the servant of the
Royal African Company, one of his notebooks having a page devoted to
that concern. The party was not a large one but was devised to furnish
the learned man with the various information for which he hungered and
thirsted. Three or four planters, a couple of considerable merchants, a
lawyer, a divine, the travellers, Trevannion and myself were all. The
lawyer who was host had caught, it seems, at Trevannion’s suggestion
that I be included. The traveller to be honored and fed knowledge
might obtain something of value from the captain of a big slave ship
who was also a decent person, not a bear at table, nor one to disgust
with oaths and horrors of the Middle Passage--which last were largely
mythical anyway.
I did not err in these respects, but erred, I afterwards found, in
keeping silence. I never now discussed the slave trade save in precise
and immediate business talk, and Trevannion might have known it. I
never philosophized over it in company now, or speculated as to its
course and end, or questioned it, or praised, or blamed, or extenuated.
Something true in me held me back from that while I sailed the
_Janet_. So I sat a listener, or when I answered a direct question
answered it shortly, with the bald fact.
Rice, wheat, maize, tobacco and indigo culture, markets and prices--and
the German evidently making notes in his brain; the story of South
Carolina or of Charlestown, past, present and future; soil, forest,
remnant of Indians, back country where the red men still were
plentiful; the sea, trade with home, trade with the other colonies,
trade with the Indies; buccaneers and pirates, and it is certain we
would have a chapter on these; the Government, the Church, the Law;
Planting; the gentry and others, plantations and plantation labor--and
here we are at slavery and the river through the sea that feeds it from
Africa.
And here it was that Trevannion was eloquent and Captain David Scott
was not.
They were all eloquent, the planters, the merchants, the lawyer,
the clergyman, the agent, the traveller from New York who spoke of
the Negro house boy and coachman whom he owned, and the traveller
from Massachusetts who had shares in the _Amelia_, Captain
Jonathan Bolt of Salem, trading to Old Calabar. I knew the
_Amelia_.--Self-interest made them eloquent.
Self-interest!
Seated there, half listening to all that I had heard a hundred times
over, the word took hold of me. Self-interest. The King’s in his
palace, the Pope’s in Saint Peter, the richest man’s, the poorest
man’s. Bartram’s and mine and Colley’s; McNaughton, Olafson, Mr.
Godfrey North, Colonel Amory, Williams, Barget, Lace the factor and
Rathbone Lace. Black traders, black chiefs, black kings in Africa,
black men and women in the villages who betrayed and sold, and who when
their turn came around were themselves betrayed and sold. White men who
in thousands of ways did the same to white men. Over all the world,
black, white, red and yellow--self-interest. It rose from its throne in
me, that word, and went up and down in a darkened, vast hall, its face
in its hands, as I had wandered at My Fancy. What was interest? What
was self?
It was strange. I had been sitting there stolidly, wearily, and they
were all as so many wooden figures with parrot tongues.--Something
turned, slid, mounted. It was like a dewy morning in the glen at home,
in Scotland. Dew and the dawn, hush and tenderness. It was like that,
but in the world of the soul or spirit, not of the senses. I felt
compassion.
For a breathless second it flooded me--compassion and understanding.
Then it went, but it left its echo and its mark, its sign and seal.
I saw Earth a slave ship and the wake it made. I saw that the yoke was
of self, but not forever. I felt the god bound in the human self who
would one day be free--bound in me, bound in these, bound in those who
served the table. The room melted into sea and land, the rolling ball;
the minute, like a streamlet, crossed the beach and was in the ocean. I
sat there, and they did not notice increase of silence.
The party broke up with the Charlestown debonairness. Every one was
courteous to me, even though I had not aided them with an already
prepared and rosy light. The German said in parting, “You have a store,
I think, sir, but you will not open the door.”
Out under the stars with Trevannion he said, “You’re a big, picturesque
figure, Captain Scott, but you didn’t help out with much more than
that.”
I said, “Look at the stars!” And indeed the whole sky had to me a
strange, new aspect--strange, but not formidable; no, something to be
understood.
The next day, waking at dawn, the sense of the moment at the inn
breathed more faintly. But it was not gone; it was sunken in me. The
business of the day covered it over; by eve I thought that I had
forgotten it. That night I had ill dreams and woke in the morning in a
bitter mood. That I had ever understood, that I had ever been truly and
thoroughly compassionate, was unlikely indeed. Yet--yet--I _had_
been!
In four days the _Janet_ sailed. Charlestown harbor, the pleasant
town, the live oaks and the pines, the tower of Saint Michael’s church,
we left them all behind. The ship was clean, the ship was fair; we
experienced good weather. I could pace, pace, pace my deck in the day
or the night; I could take a book that sometimes I opened and sometimes
did not; I could talk with Olafson or Lisle or others. Olafson pleased
me. Once I asked him what he thought of the stars and he told me of a
vision he had had one night in the northern seas. He saw all the stars
tied together with moving cords, the color of lightning. “All tied
together, sir, and we with them.”
Walk, walk, walk the deck, as though it were the great upper hall at
My Fancy. Sit and brood and brood, as though poop deck or cabin were
the reef out to which I used to swim. I was unhappy--life frustrated,
bitter and weary, and that moment in Charlestown a dream.
When the Bahamas were half a day astern a sail upon the horizon drew
our eye. She increased, coming down upon us with power, having the
advantage of the wind and being built to sail. She was strange to me,
and, “I do not know her,” said Michaelson, who had been to and fro in
the Trades for thirty years. We knew well enough the particular danger
of these waters and we got the _Janet_ ready and stood to arms.
Twice before in my memory we had been chased, but more feebly than this
pirate promised. He came nearer and nearer, but I looked at the sky
which had been darkening for an hour. It was toward day close also. Up
and out went his flag.
“Black, sir!”
“That’s no news. Ready, gunners!”
She was on us now, a fast-sailing bark with pirate written over her
as slaver was written over us. She cut across our bows, swung to port
and gave us a broadside. We answered. A sea fight began. But the
heavens meant their own way this time. There burst with fierceness wind
and rain, lightning and thunder. We were driven apart, the pirate’s
foremast snapped; we left him with his wild wreckage and were gone,
running before a tempest. Night came on; in the middle of it the storm
vanished, leaving a heavy sea; in a dawn of piled clouds and purple
waters we saw no other ship than ourselves. The _Janet_ had some
damage that could be removed. One man was killed; two or three had
their hurts. The sea subsided, the wind came back to its steady, sweet
blowing.
But that very dawning, looking up to masthead, I had a vision--being
a Scot, being liable at times to _see_ things that were symbolic
or that were real in another order. What I saw this dawn was that we
were flying a black flag. The dawn sent a beaker of light and spilled
it against the outflowing web. It was black, it had upon it skull
and crossbones. It was there as plain as my hand--the _Janet’s_
flag. I turned cold, I shivered. It streamed there, fastened to our
mast, and behind it towered a purple cloud. I saw it--it was gone. And
then--the great strangeness--even as I grasped that it was gone and
that I had put it there, opened within me so quietly again that clear
depth of understanding--of understanding and compassion.
Seemingly it lasted no longer than a lightning flash, as it had done
in Charlestown. When it was gone, again I was unhappy, torn. The black
flag was not only upon the Guinea slaver--it was everywhere in life.
Days and nights, sun and stars, wind and warmth and the great sea, and
we came to Daga.
How many times had I come to Daga? I hardly knew. It seemed of me now,
of my flesh. This day that it rose before us was my thirty-seventh
birthday.
The _Janet_ hung in harbor a month. I did not drink with Rathbone
Lace, or go with him up to Oil Palm village. In the place of that he
and I quarrelled.
It was Markham the surgeon of whom I saw most. “Have you had any more
visions?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“There are a folk called mystics who have at times--or some of them
have--visions. It’s a well-known medical fact--which may or may not
mean a fact of Nature. I’ve now and then seen just a flash of that race
in you. It was in Bartram too.”
“Yes, it was. Both of us put a stone upon it.”
“For me,” he said, “I’ve a weary vision of Daga going on forever. A
world of Dagas. At any moment we see what we are and nothing else, and
if all our moments prove the same color----”
“If,” I said.
“There you go!” he answered. “Well, have you got your full number of
Negroes?”
In the month I had them and had them aboard--coast folk, hill folk,
mountain folk, river valley folk. I sailed from Daga.
That evening there was a great sunset. It flared and flamed, and it
cast light across upon Daga, all her whitened masonry. I saw her so,
then over all flowed the tropic night, and these eyes saw her no more.
I had aboard docile Negroes and no pest or particular sickness. It was
November, the best season for all our affairs. Day after day, day after
day, the old routine--week after week.
I woke in the middle of the night, or maybe past the middle. It was as
though a hand had been laid upon me, but when I sat up there was no
figure, but only Bartram’s cabin, star lighted. But I was awake as I
had never been before. I left my bed and sat upon the bench beneath the
window. The night was luminous, with a rushing, strong, warm wind, but
only my outer man noted that. I sat upon the bench and I was a boy at
school.
I will say as shortly as may be what I knew at last. I knew that God is
the Whole of us. I found myself and my neighbor there and we were One.
I found a greater Self--oh, a greater!--a SELF that left none out.
CHAPTER XXVIII
“So you quit the Trade!” said Trevannion. “Well, so long as I stay in
it, I’ll maintain it’s not so bad!”
“Yes, Trevannion. But one day you also will quit.”
“Perhaps, and perhaps not,” said Trevannion. “When you’ve fetched your
bread and butter so long this way it’s not easy to face getting it
another way. I’ve a family.”
“I know. It’s hard to know what to do.--Well, I’m giving the
_Janet_ back again.”
“I’m sorry! Men like you and Bartram who is dead keep us
going.--Hoggard is the most probable man.”
“There are better! If it were possible--Bartram loved the _Janet_.”
“I’ve heard you say you love her.”
“I do.”
“Then why leave her?”
“Ah, that, Trevannion, opens up so many things! But----”
“We _could_ give her to Carraway.”
“I’d prefer it--seeing that Olafson won’t budge from being mate.”
“Very good then,” he said. “I’ll do it.--And now may I ask what
_you_ are going to do?”
“I haven’t quite decided,” I said, and thanking him for his kindness
rose to take my leave.
“You’ve got, I’m glad to know, a good deal of money with us here.”
“Yes. Bartram’s will left me his savings, and I’ve saved a little
myself.”
“Then,” said Trevannion, “I sha’n’t worry about you. Money’s a great
lifeboat.”
“I should like,” I said, “to make the _Janet_ my home until
Carraway’s notified and comes aboard.”
“Why, of course!” he answered. “You’re Captain until then. It’ll be
about three days, I imagine. He’s eager.”
“He’s as good a man as you’ve got. It wasn’t his fault, the losing of
the _Thistle_.”
He went with me to the door. “Have you come into a fortune or been made
a lord, or what? I’ve known you for more than three years, but you’ve
hardly looked as you do now----”
David Scott stood for a moment, looking out upon the town and the sea
and the morning sun. “Trevannion, there’s a lass named Happiness. She
hasn’t a penny, yet the world’s her dower!”
“Oh, well, if you’re happy----!” said Trevannion, and we parted.
That money! I drew it out in those days, leaving just enough to keep
David Scott from want until he knew what course he would shape. It was
not so much after all--Bartram’s and mine together--about six hundred
pounds. There was a merchant I knew in Charlestown, not in the trade,
or gaining by it more than another, where all were touched. He managed
matters for me. Out of the sum now in his hands I drew as I needed
it for the purpose I had in mind. It had first occurred to me to buy
and free as many Negroes as I might out of the _Janet’s_ lading
this last voyage. But then I saw that I could not. I was by no means
powerful enough to see them shipped back to Africa, sent there to their
own people and released. How could I get that done, who would become
outcast by the very mention of it to owners of ships and factories?
And if I bought and freed them here in America? They were barbarians,
free to fall into, and to cause, all manner of trouble in a world not
theirs. At once they would meet the Law of the Land, and it would break
them. Nothing could be done by me here and now. I saw that last lading
that I had brought herded into the barracoons, and during a week sold,
slave by slave, at the slave block.
What I could do I did. There was a mulatto shoemaker who sat in a hutch
of a shop upon a half-road, half-street, and worked at cobbling and
making. I used to pass him, coming and going from Trevannion’s, and
several times I had stopped for a cast of his trade. At first I thought
he was a free Negro. But no, he said, Mr. So-and-so was his master and
owned this hut. One half of what he earned he took each week to Mr.
So-and-so; on the other he lived. Later, stopping again to speak to
him, in a burst of confidence he let it out that from this half he was
slowly putting by. “To buy myself.” There was pride in his voice.
“Will Mr. So-and-so sell you? You must be profitable.”
“Yes. He’s a good man. When I have the money he’ll free me.”
“How long will it take you?”
He mentioned a term of years. His plans after that included freeing
in succession his wife who was owned by another family, though in
Charlestown, and his son and daughter owned by the mother’s owners. He
would be an elderly man before, barring accidents, it was all done.
Through the merchant and a lawyer I bought these four and freed them,
and bought for them the cobbler’s shop and tools. I found other men
and women whom I bought and freed, working quietly. It hardly took a
month to bring David Scott, so far as money was concerned, within a
few pounds of where he was when on an autumn eve in Virginia he first
cried, “_Janet_, ahoy!”
All this went on quietly, very few knowing anything about it. Carraway,
it proved, had some arrangements and a short journey to make before
he took over the _Janet_. For ten days still I was Captain and
dwelled on my ship. When at last Carraway appeared I removed to a
small inn by the shore.
Those ten days were strange, meditative days to me, whose life had
changed its road. I was not unhappy; I was happy with some ache and
bewilderment at the new taste of the happiness. And I think that it is
the sense of growth, saying forever, “Listen! Here is again something
new under the Great Newness,” that makes one feel one’s self a child.
The _Janet_ rode quietly in harbor, and I was aboard her much of
those ten days. There was regret, I know, that I was departing, and yet
the seaman’s nature is like the sea, and a new Captain, said to be a
not unkindly man, was coming, and they would weigh anchor, and new days
would cover the old, and novelty is novelty. But Michaelson and Wheeler
and two or three others and Tom and Don did grieve. As for Olafson, I
could not make him out in those days.
I felt Bartram, I felt Colley and McNaughton, and when I left the
_Janet_ I took them with me.
I left her. I went one eve when the sunset burned around her.
Carraway slept in the Captain’s cabin and walked the poop deck. If he
in no wise equalled Bartram yet he was honest and strove to be just and
had the name of a good captain. The _Janet_ would shake out her
sails and be gone in a week.
The dawn in which she was to leave harbor I rose while it was yet
night and stole from my inn and walked the shore road till I came to
a point whence I could see her sail. I sat down under a pine tree,
and a pale light being now in the east, watched them making sail. The
_Janet_! I watched her forth, the _Janet_. She went in the
glory of the dawn, in the slant, golden light of the sun. I never saw
her again with these bodily eyes, but ah! often and often by the inner
light.
I returned to the inn. My affairs were nearly done. The money I had
kept for David Scott would allow him short time before he must begin
earning. Going by the waterside I looked at the ships in harbor, and
when I reached the inn, there was Olafson sitting, waiting for me.
“Olafson!”
“I’ve left it too, sir.”
We sat down. He spoke of the _Bright Nancy_, Captain Cobb,
carrying sugar to Philadelphia. She had put in here for some need or
other, and, he had heard, wanted seamen. Olafson knew her, a decent
ship, with a decent captain and mates. He proposed now to sign with her
as far as Philadelphia. He knew folk in that city who would help him
to a mate’s berth again--on some ship that was not for Africa. When I
told him of my own lack of money and the ideas bred by it, he proposed
that I also become seaman for this voyage upon the _Bright Nancy_.
Philadelphia was a prosperous town, full of trade; there must be there
many chances.
I sat and regarded Olafson whom I greatly liked, and the _Bright
Nancy_, and Philadelphia of which I knew a little, and chiefly
that it held many Quakers. Then I thanked Olafson, and took my hat,
and together we found and hired a boat and went out to the _Bright
Nancy_.
CHAPTER XXIX
The forecastle of the _Bright Nancy_ became for a time David
Scott’s sea home--his and Olafson’s. The seamen there were just Dory
and Dannet and others again. I was content to work so and journey so to
Philadelphia. A stormy voyage gave the less time for thinking how much
finer was poop than forecastle.
It did not trouble me. The light held for me, though with an unequal
strength. Sometimes it sank and there was almost darkness, but never
the darkness that had been. The pain was the yearning for more and more
light.
We passed Cape Fear and passed Hatteras of rough seas, and saw on a
morning the coasts of Virginia. I turned and turned again my eyes that
way. We passed Virginia and passed Maryland and entered the great bay
and river of Delaware, and sailing up the latter came to the Colony,
great as a kingdom--they are all great as kingdoms--named for William
Penn, and so anchored at last before the city of Philadelphia that held
twenty thousand souls.
Olafson and I talked it over together. The _Bright Nancy_ was a
ship considerably to our liking. A great number of things about her
might have been worse than they were. But that aside, I had determined,
before she anchored, before I trod a Philadelphia quay, to renew with
her Captain for one voyage more. To Olafson I said that I liked the
ship and that I wanted the sea for just a little longer--but I did
not say what I felt and that was that I must stay upon the _Bright
Nancy_. Each time my mind turned to leaving her here and now I felt
an arresting touch. I did not tell him, or perhaps I did tell him.
But when I said that my going just this one other voyage with the
_Bright Nancy_ must not affect him, who could surely with time get
his mate’s berth somewhere, Olafson shook his head and smiled through
his golden beard. “I’ve never been what you call an ambitious man.
She’s a tidy ship and I like her name. I’ll stay by her as long as you
do.”
So it was settled. One more voyage; we’d go one more voyage. She bought
her sugar at Havana and brought it only to Philadelphia.
We anchored. When we had unladed her and made her more tidy than
before, we seamen went ashore. Olafson and I kept together. The
_Bright Nancy_ would be ten days here, in the stately river,
before the quay below High Street. Olafson knew a sailors’ tavern, The
Good Merchant Seaman.
Here we settled ourselves, and he went off to find the man of his
own country who dwelled and prospered in this city. In two hours he
returned. “He is dead, and his family have gone into the country. The
warehouse is sold and the business wound up.--So, you see, it is the
_Bright Nancy_ for us both!”
“Just for a little while then, Jan,” I said.
He sat and drank ale and then we went out to see the town. It was a
pleasant, leafy place--the season was high summer--with good docks and
warehouses and much shipping in the river, with wide straight streets
and churches and brick dwellings in ample gardens. There seemed a
civility plain and real. I thought, “I could clerk it here--studying
and thinking when work was over. Long walks, studying and thinking----”
I thought. “Later on I might teach----”
For two days Olafson and I sauntered and gazed together, but then old
shipmates found him, and he must go with them, and I wandered alone.
The streets so busy, the many people, pleased me. I saw rich and poor,
high and low, city folk and country folk coming into town, hunters and
rangers and Indians from farther away than the planted fields, coming
to William Penn’s town on errands of their own. It pleased me to make
out in the stream men and women whom I was sure were Quakers--though
for some reason I never went to their meeting house.
Upon the streets, coming and going, I met or passed Negro men and
women--slaves. They seemed chiefly house servants or grooms or
porters, for this was town, not farms or plantations. Nor were they
anything like so numerous as they would have been in a like-sized town
in any one of the great southern, planting Colonies. Those that I saw
had evidently been born in this country, or at least been brought very
young from Africa. They were fairly clad and cheerful enough; and in
Charlestown and Kingston and Williamsburg one saw the same.
But the white man had enslaved them all and kept them enslaved. I
saw beyond the Delaware, out upon the great sea, and there were the
ships that crossed and crossed, the _Sherwood Oak_, the _Fancy_, the
_Sharon_, the _Amelia_, the _Wreath_, the _Janet_ and so many more
there was no counting them. I saw Daga, and the factories at Whidah,
and Bonny, and Calabar and where not. I saw the Sugar Islands, and the
rice and cotton and tobacco lands, and these northern towns as well.
Wandering and questioning as I did, I found that in this city there
were well-to-do Quakers or Friends who owned slaves. It came to me with
a kind of shock, remembering my Quaker and the paper he had read me.
The man that I questioned about this said that as a whole their Society
condemned the practise, and that many would not touch it, but that the
current was not yet strong enough to check and turn Old Custom.
I went up and down and my week was wearing away. Between the High
Street and the river stood a certain substantial place of business, a
merchant house of warm, red brick with trees spaced before it. This
place drew me; I would go out of my way to go by it. Through open
windows I saw decent, quiet clerks; responsible looking persons went
in and out of its broad door. One of these told me that it was an old
house and furnished goods to villages and yet smaller settlements afar
in the wilderness.
At last, when I had been by this house half a dozen times, when I had
but three days and nights before the _Bright Nancy_ should sail, I
came on a golden, late afternoon even with the door at the moment when
there issued a clerk, a man something younger than myself, slender of
frame, with a pale, lined face. He asked, “Do you want anything, sir?”
“No,” I said; then, “You have a pleasant place here in which to work.”
“Aye,” he answered. “These are forest trees still, and straight as
masts.”
I wondered. “Perhaps that is why I come and come this way.” Aloud I
said, “I am a seaman. This fine city comes freshly upon me.”
“Aye, aye,” he said. “What is your ship?”
“The _Bright Nancy_.”
We were moving together under the trees. The house was a corner one,
the street we now moved upon quite quiet, with a great summer sky
above. “The _Bright Nancy_? That’s sugar from Havana.”
“I have made but one voyage with her. She sails the end of the week.”
He said, “I was upon a ship once--as clerk. It’s been long ago, but the
sea comes round me at times.”
“Why did you give it up?”
“That,” he said, “is a long story. It was the slave ship _Janet_.”
“Then I know your name,” I answered. “It is Philip Smith, and I took
your place and slept in your cabin.”
David Scott went home with Philip Smith. He lived with a sister much
his elder--just the two of them--in a small house by one of the creeks
that fed the river, a mile from the house where he was clerk. By the
time we had reached it he knew the fortunes of the _Janet_, and
of Bartram, McNaughton, Colley and many another, and I knew why he had
left the ship. It was as I thought--not the _Janet_ in herself but
the trade.
It came up in my mind again. I was talking to McNaughton.
“Why did he leave?”
“Ah, he was a brittle child! He developed scruples.”
“You call that being brittle?”
“If you have your wark and your living, Mr. Scott, I do! Aweel, he’s
doubtless howked himself to death in an almshouse. He wasna fit for
much when he left us.”
I looked at him walking beside me. He had not howked himself to death
in an almshouse, but bodily frailty did mark him. He spoke as if he
answered my thought, “I’ve never been strong enough to do much.”
His house was neat as a pin, with flowers and a great walnut tree in
the dooryard; his sister a quiet, strong person, like him in many ways.
We had a frugal, well-cooked supper in a room with a sanded floor, and
afterwards sat together in a great sunset glow upon the bench built
around the walnut tree. When I said at last that I must go back to The
Good Merchant Seaman, they would have me spend the night. I slept in a
small room under the steeply sloping roof, all clean and fragrant of
lavender. In the morning, breakfast eaten, I walked with Philip Smith
into the heart of town, parting with him at the red brick house behind
the forest trees, straight as masts.
That day I found Olafson and told him where I should be until Friday
when we must go aboard the _Bright Nancy_, then paid my score at
The Good Merchant Seaman and took my small chest of belongings to the
small house under the walnut tree. In the afternoon, when the sun’s
rays were all slanting, I again met Philip Smith and we walked out
together.
Upon the _Janet_ he had never been completely out of my mind. It
seemed that although he made no outward move to learn her fortunes,
within himself he had always followed her. He knew Bartram, McNaughton,
Colley, Llewellyn, Michaelson, Geordie, Tom and Don and most of the
others whom I had found at the mouth of the River James, twelve years
ago. We had common ground.
But there was something more than this. In a way he was like that
Quaker who had come to My Fancy. Like and not like. He was not so
conscious and advanced a man; much younger, not so given hand and foot
to what he saw, not so centered there that he must act, act definitely
from that place. He had in him the making of a man even with that
man. But again in another way, for the power of variation here is
great. He was not a Quaker. After his day’s work, which he performed
conscientiously and well, he read and dreamed and worked his garden and
sat in silent content with his elderly sister. From his boyhood his
health had been slight. He was a listener and observer, a taker apart
in the mind and a putter together again, still in the mind. But he had
light, he said, that at times seemed to go beyond the mind, into a
bigger life.
We talked, walking forth from the heart of town and into it again, or
seated on the bench under the walnut tree, or after candle light in
the room with the sanded floor, Mrs. Dorothy sitting with us, her
strong hands never idle.
We talked of slavery. It was widespread, he said; we were slaves within
and without, to one another and to our own old Adam. When you began to
free yourself you began within. Think it out and use the imagination
and cry for a stronger, cleaner, kinder heart!
“Little by little there will be result in the outer world.”
“Aye, little by little.”
We talked of Negro slavery. “They are slaves to themselves, you know,
too. Just like us.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know that. I know it abundantly. They’ll break that
slavery, little by little. Just as we do. In all that, they and we are
one.”
“I like,” he said, “to look at the future of this country and the
world--just as far as I can, which of course isn’t very far. There are
certain things that are plain to me. They--or their descendants--won’t
be in slavery to us--or our descendants--forever. I see the slave
trade with Africa stopping first, then long afterwards, it may be,
the host that will be here by then freed and become as hired laborers
anywhere.--Long after that perhaps we may be all Christians in a
Christian world.”
“As Christ sees it.”
“Yes. I am very certain that he does not see it as the world sees it
now.”
Mrs. Dorothy folded her work. “May his Kingdom come!”
I had but these few days with them, and sweet was the taste of that
small, true home! Friday dawned; I said good-by and went to The Good
Merchant Seaman, where I found Olafson, and together we rowed to the
_Bright Nancy_. But it was settled. Only this voyage to Havana
and back, and then I should part with the sea. I should come to Philip
Smith and his sister and stay with them while I looked about. I should
find work, and when it was found I might still make my home with them.
There was the room under the roof; there were plate and knife and fork
at the table in the cool, sanded room where the walnut leaves made
patterns on the floor and wall. Here, too, ran a shelf of books. I said
good-by, expecting to see them again in three months’ time.
I was going alone toward The Good Merchant Seaman. It was early
morning--the water gleamed and glistened brightly before me--there was
a tree and a bench. I sat down. I leaned forward and clasped my hands.
Light came around me and a determination to do what I could.
When a man sees MAN then he becomes that ONE’S servant.
Moments passed.--The fledgling bird cannot long hold aloft.--I came
down to thought that uses words.
So I thought, “I will go to England and find that Quaker and set myself
to work with him and his circle.” I knew that it was Great Britain who
fostered the Slave Trade. I would go to England. There were men there,
Friends and others, whom I would find.
When would I go?
I stood pledged for this voyage to the _Bright Nancy_. But when I
came again to Philadelphia, I should stay but the shortest while in the
house under the walnut tree. Some ship would be going to England, and I
would go in her forecastle.
So my brain planned, not truly, I suppose, knowing the Great Mind. The
light had lessened, and though with the sense of it set like a star
before him a man assuredly goes forward in the general direction, just
the path that is meant may not be seen or foreseen.
CHAPTER XXX
It was late September and a little north of Hatteras--the time of the
year and the place for storm and rough seas. The _Bright Nancy_
met it, met tempest. The sea ran to meet the clouds, the clouds
descended to meet the sea. A shrieking wind drove us, bare-masted. When
forty-eight hours had passed and the wind lulled and the sun shone,
it was seen that we were in bitter case. The foremast was gone, the
mainmast hurt, and we had sprung a leak that we could not stop and
though we pumped day and night the water deepened in our hold. We flung
into the ocean her lading, casks and casks of sugar. We mended our
masts and piled on sail, the wind being now all in our favor.
So we hastened as best we might, but before we reached Chesapeake her
end was come.
She sank, the _Bright Nancy_!
Captain and crew, we were but a dozen, having lost two in the tempest.
We took to our boats--got off clear--watched her go down--and wild and
mournful it is to see a ship die!
Land loomed faint against the western sky. We rowed toward it, the sea
being yet heavy. After an hour of this and no great progress made, a
sail appeared to larboard, increased, became a trading brig with men
noting our signal. She lay to--the _Miranda_ of Baltimore--and we
rowed to her side. After some parley and showing that we were almost
unarmed, she agreed to take us aboard, her present destination being
Norfolk.
The sea calmed itself. Captain Cobb was a sturdy man who could bear
up against the sinking of a ship. He talked with Captain Bart of the
_Miranda_; our seamen foregathered with hers. Olafson and I
watched the sea and the misty, misty shore.
I said to him, “I have seen Norfolk before. I have been up the James
River.”
“This New World has so great rivers! What was your ship?”
But I did not tell him that at the moment nor why I was upon it. I
said, “Olafson, do you believe that there is something deep in us that
knows where it is walking?”
“Perhaps----”
“There are two men in each of us. One knows, but can very rarely tell
the other. The other is a child.”
The sea grew calm and blue. The _Miranda_, passing between the capes,
stood into Chesapeake. Captain Cobb came and talked to the _Bright
Nancy’s_ seamen. The _Miranda_ would make the shortest tarrying at
Norfolk. She was what we saw, small and overmanned. Captain Bart would
take him, Captain Cobb, and the two mates as passengers to Baltimore,
and five seamen who would work for their passage. From Baltimore to
Philadelphia was no great way; by water or by land we’d get to our home
port. We seamen might decide among ourselves, by lot or any other way,
upon those five. What was now concerning him was the remainder. We
must look out for a ship that would bring us to Philadelphia. He had
saved money and papers from the _Bright Nancy_. He would pay us, the
five remaining, and take our word that, barring accident, we would get
back to Philadelphia and report. Her owners would want all accounted
for. He--Cobb--would get another ship presently, and if we wanted her
forecastle we must be at hand. So Captain Cobb, a bluff, short man.
We listened, agreed, and when he was gone drew lots to determine who
should cling to the _Miranda_ and who should be left at Norfolk to
seek another ship. Olafson and I both drew Norfolk.
It was falling toward dusk when this was settled. That night I dreamed
of Scotland and of Mysie Johnston.
Morning broke red with a kind of high, intense light striking the shore
that was now close to us.--I was again upon the _Janet_, again
upon the brig _King William_. Twelve years--what are twelve years?
And yet, a thousand years might hardly span from where I stood then
and where now--the dead fire and the kindled fire and the living fire!
The wind ran fresh; the light made the low shores beautiful; little
boats and two or three statelier ones were upon the green water; the
white gulls flew around and overhead. We came to Point Comfort that I
well remembered. We stood across to Norfolk.
Here it sat, the same town, but a little enlarged. I marked it under
the bright, blue, autumn sky. It was now October. The seamen of the
_Miranda_ began their chantey, the anchor slid down, cut the
water, and grappling with the earth became a root to hold the ship.
It held her no great while. The second dawn from the red, entering
one, we watched her forth from river mouth into the Bay, Olafson and
I, standing upon a wharf. The three left with us were sleeping or
waking at the Seaman’s Hearth. It was so early the wharf had few upon
it beside us two. The white mist clung to the great river and the low,
Virginian land. I said, “Olafson, I’ve never told you, but Bartram took
me upon the _Janet_ here. I was in trouble--I was fleeing.”
He answered in his Viking voice, “That may happen easily to a man who
follows the sea.”
“Aye, but I was not following it then. I’ll tell you some day about it
all. It’s enough now that though it’s many a year, Virginia is not
utterly without danger to me.”
“Then,” he said, “let’s take the first ship we may, big or little. And
I’ll make the inquiry while you lie close at the Seaman’s Hearth.”
But it seemed to me slight danger. Years and years, and I was never
known at Norfolk. And seamen looking for a ship are just that--few
men inquire further. Still I did not, in the days that followed, seek
crowded places.
No ship for Philadelphia presented herself. We heard however of the
_Indian King_ that would presently come in, receive her tobacco,
and go on to the Delaware. She at last seemed our best chance. Olafson
and I, after trials elsewhere, agreed to await her, seeing that we had
little choice but to do so. But all suddenly those that were with us at
the Seaman’s Hearth--Bush and Allgood and Reddy--announced that they
had signed with the _Marigold_ of London, sailing with tobacco a
week after the departure of the _Miranda_, and wanting men.
They went--a fickle lot--but Olafson and David Scott must stay for
Philadelphia.
The _Indian King_ came leisurely. We had sufficient money, and
none seeing aught in me but Jack awaiting a ship, I at last threw away
fear. It was October and gorgeous weather. Olafson and I lounged by
the water side, talking a little and watching all the craft, great and
small. He too had a power of silence. We might be together for hours,
and content with each other’s company, yet our words would never sail a
boat. The Seaman’s Hearth, just by the water, with a bit of a yard and
a broken landing, had so much custom and no more. Seamen came and went,
making, the most of them, short tarrying. The man and his wife who
kept the Hearth got used to two big men, quiet and giving no trouble,
waiting for the _Indian King_.
The town was small enough. It took no long time to view it over. It
was a place of trade and shipping as against Williamsburg that was of
Government, a College, and Polite Society. Not that Norfolk, either,
lacked a small polite world of merchants and retired sea captains and
lawyers and others. It had inns other and better than the Seaman’s
Hearth. Officers from British and foreign ships were seen in these,
and planters on business, arriving in wherries or their own sloops, or
if of the neighborhood, on horseback. What with the coming and going
of many seamen, of nations more than one--for often one heard Spanish,
French or Dutch--and with frontiersmen appearing from the forests west
and south with their wares and on their own business and quick, after
their kind, to take offense, the town had the name of a quarrelsome
one. To meet that condition the officers of the law were numerous and
arbitrary; there were a prison, a stout mayor, a court and lawyers.
Olafson and I examined this borough, and then we sat by harbor side
or walked afield--long walks, through October, into the land south of
the James. Pine trees and other trees and rich and tangled brakes, and
tobacco and tobacco. Now and then a good house, with Negro quarters
near, oftener small houses built of logs; oftenest no house at all,
but autumn forest, marshes, ancient, abandoned Indian fields, streams,
autumn forest coloring like a sunset.
Olafson was not of an impatient kind and David Scott had learned to
curb it. We walked dreamily, soberly, content to await the _Indian
King’s_ good time. Meanwhile there was beauty of a low, forested
land and sighing reeds by still, winding water, of magnificent single
trees, and of a clear, pure, high heaven. I felt it as I had never
done--it gave my heart a contented ache. Years ago I should have said
that I hated Virginia, but now I had passed that bewilderment. These
old, old forests, these still flowing waters, these fields, these
horses, dogs, and others of four feet, these flying folk, these hasty
roads and houses of log and now and then of frame and brick, the
infrequent humans passing, white and black and colored and now and
then a red man, the old and young, the child, the woman, the man, the
mounted and afoot--all were now to me as they had not been. In this
kingdom, when one enters it, long progressions happen in short times.
I was not as I had been when I was in Virginia before and grew less
so all the while. Now the momentary feeling of that evening at the
inn in Charlestown had come to keep house with me. Compassion, hope,
admiration. All things--David Scott with them--had become soul rather
than body, with spirit our ultimate.
Olafson and I talked at times. I told him one day, walking under pine
trees, having just passed a great, ragged, tobacco field, of why and
how I had been in Virginia. He said at the end, “We’d better be more
careful! The _Inez_ that’s going to Baltimore this week is a poor
thing, but I think that her master will take us. Or one of us. You go.
We’ll find each other at Philadelphia. The _Indian King’s_ too
much delayed.”
But that finger with some meaning in it was laid again upon my
shoulder. I did not take, or move to take, the _Inez_.
The days went by. It became evident that weather or some need had
delayed the _Indian King_. But Olafson and David Scott were happy
enough. There is something beyond happiness. Each morn when I waked I
touched that. It held for a longer or shorter while, then faded through
the day. But with each succeeding morn it renewed itself, though with
an infinite variety. It was not dependent upon place or outward history.
October was flying, and still I waited. Perhaps I was waiting for the
_Indian King_, perhaps not.
There came a splendid, frosty morning. The frost vanished, the
windless, sunny day grew warm. Olafson and I debated whether we should
walk afar or go down to our favorite landing and watch the water and
its life. We went to the landing, out to the end, and sat upon the gray
boards, our feet above the green water lapping the piles, our shoulders
against unsawn logs brought down by some raft. Usually this was a quiet
place, a lesser wharf and landing with no great business, but from it
we could watch well the movement of the water world. So we sat there,
and the sun warmed our backs, and the half hours passed, and we did not
trouble to talk, being so much at one.
I was in Philadelphia, telling Philip Smith that I would go to England.
Olafson’s voice entered my ear.
“That sloop is making in here.”
We watched her; she was from the river, not the sea. That and the look
of her brought back something--the tang of up country, of the forests,
of the gray landings like long forefingers, of the brick great houses
and the fields. The wind was light, she came slowly.
I heard Olafson’s voice again, “There are more and more folk upon this
wharf. We had better go walking.”
“Not yet,” I said, and now I was upon the _Janet_, and Bartram
seemed to be saying something, saying it solemnly. I answered Bartram,
“God knows we all have sinned and sin! But there is Something that has
ways and means of its own to draw us forth.” And then I was not on the
_Janet_ or in Philadelphia or England, but somewhere where the
Something spoke. And it was not Something, it was All, it was One. From
that I came stilly, quietly down to the gray wharf and the gleaming
water under the October sky.
The sun shone warm. A small crowd--not a great one, fifteen or twenty
perhaps--was gathering upon the wharf. The sloop might be expected. A
great, laughing black man with a pole came by me and I thought, “You’re
like Pickaninny.”
The sloop grew in size. I saw her kind--that she belonged to some
planter--was bringing tobacco and other matters downstream and would
take back goods, and likely enough had on board her owner. She came
on, a fair creature; she was close and they prepared to bring her
alongside the wharf. Behind us two seamen some one shouted a welcome
and voices answered from the sloop. Then strangely, strangely, to David
Scott, there began to play a flute. A shaggy man in a squirrel-skin
cap, seated cross-legged on the deck by a heap of pelts, breathed into
the instrument, and the soaring, dropping notes relimned for me the
River James from a sycamore south of Daniel Askew’s to the side of the
_Janet_.
Without thought, of its own accord, my hand went up to that scar across
my forehead. Neither swiftly nor slowly I got to my feet and turned my
back upon the sloop. There were folk upon the wharf, but not enough to
impede movement. I walked away, Olafson following me. They saw but two
seamen, so fulfilled with ships that a mere river craft was no magnet.
When we were quit of the wharf I spoke. “I know that flute player. He
would not say my name if he thought, but he might not think.”
We returned to the Seaman’s Hearth and ate our dinner. Afterwards the
question was if we should stay by the Hearth or should take a long walk
into the country. We went, and the smell and feel of it come back to
me to-day, and the goodness of Olafson. We returned under a tremendous
sunset, red and purple ships of the gods on a golden sea. That night I
slept sound and deep, and when I waked at dawn it was with the sense of
having been in a far country, far and great and dear.
Olafson and I ate breakfast. That over, I said that we would not mew
ourselves up because that old Indian trader and flute player was in
town, or more probably somewhere upon the edge of it. The chance of
meeting was very slight, and he was not an enemy; he was a friend. If I
could meet him where none other was by I should like it.
Olafson still demurred. He said that he did not know how it came to
him but he had a sense of danger. But I was restless. I could not stay
within--I was drawn forth--and when he proposed the country again I
said no. At last we went to the water side to watch for the _Indian
King_, but to another wharf than that by which lay the sloop from up
river.
The _Indian King_ did not appear to-day, either. Toward noon we
began our return to the Seaman’s Hearth. We might have taken obscure
ways but we did not. When Olafson proposed it I shook my head. So we
came into the principal street.
Before us rose the chief tavern of the place--we made to pass it; there
were loungers about, and a knot of men emerging from the house, two or
three important persons, it seemed, with satellites. Together they were
enough to halt us; we made to go around in the dusty street and a voice
said, “Those are seamen. Ask them, Colonel!”
We were stopped. Another voice spoke. “Are you men from the _Indian
King_? Is she in?”
Olafson answered No. As for me, I said nothing. The questioner was
Colonel Giles Amory. There he stood, now a quite elderly man, but still
firm and fine. Two or three neighbor planters were with him, come down
upon his sloop, a new one that I had not recognized. I knew his old
one, the _Daphne_. Moreover, he had with him one who still served
as his clerk, though now with pay--Gervase Morrison, to wit--and also
the overseer Barget. All were older, but there came around me a glamor
of Amory Hall and Old Mill quarter. The Negro there behind Barget--it
was Pickaninny.
I could not tell Olafson; Colonel Amory held him in talk of ships. I
made to go away myself, but a man, a planter whom I did not know, put
himself in front of me. “Are you of the _Inez_ then?” To this day
I do not know what was their insistence about these ships. They had
some business with them, but I do not know what.
But I was held. And in a moment, glancing toward him, I saw that
Gervase Morrison recognized me. He recognized, but he would not tell;
he turned his gaze away. It had scarcely happened before I knew that
Pickaninny----He became ashy, his eyes bulged; I saw him quiver
all over, and I thought, “Now he will tell,” for I knew how often
excitement and drama force the Negro past reticence. But he did not
tell. I saw him stand, gather and control his big, excited body, and
turn his face away.
It was Barget. I felt him looking at me--it was idle now to go--I might
burst through the crowd, take to my heels, and that would be but to
shout, “After me! I have reason to run away!”
He moved a little nearer--the overseer whom I knew so well--older,
all weather-seamed and bitten, with graying hair, but the same. Years
rarely alter a man beyond recognition--and if he have a great, known
scar upon his forehead.
His eyes were upon me first--the all of me--then upon that scar. His
lips parted; he cried, “David Scott! Yon’s David Scott!”
Colonel Amory swung around from Olafson, “David Scott!”
Barget seized me. I said, “I’m not your man, Barget. Don’t you remember
that Daniel Askew bought me?”
“He’s dead!” he answered. “And a runaway’s to be apprehended, no matter
whose he is, nor how long gone!”
And well enough David Scott knew that! There was commotion--another man
was helping Barget, though I made no resistance. Olafson would have
fought but I did not wish that and cried to him that naught could be
done and not to try it. It was Colonel Amory who interrogated me.
“Well, Scott! And where have _you_ been?”
I smiled. “A good many places, Colonel! Out of these parts and into
them again. Olafson here and I were upon the _Bright Nancy_ that
sank a while ago, this side Hatteras. We were seeking to get back to
Philadelphia. Except for being seamen together, he has naught to do
with me--a free, Danish sailor.”
He still stared. “It’s been years!--How old are you?”
“Something over thirty-nine.”
“Well, by Gad! you know the law. You were sold for a servant when you
might have been hanged. You ran away--and here you are again! In the
King’s name I apprehend you and commit you to the gaol here. Daniel
Askew is dead, but we’ll notify his son Geoffrey.” He continued to
stare. “Well, you’re big, and somehow you’ve grown in bearing. You seem
calm enough. Maybe you’ve learned wisdom. We all have to learn it one
day!”
I answered him, “Yes, we all have to--one and all. I don’t propose to
give you any trouble, Colonel Amory. I’d like to speak if I may to
Gervase Morrison and Pickaninny. And if you’ll be so good as to give me
two or three minutes with my friend here I shall thank you.”
He gave them, being in much a kindly man and kinder now that he was old
than when he was young. Olafson and I spoke together, Barget watching.
Olafson’s face worked. “What can be done? Something must be done!”
“What should it be?” I asked. “Nothing now that comes to me is useless,
Olafson. Do I look unhappy?”
“No!”
“It was at Daga that I was unhappy--and at My Fancy--and on the
_Janet_. And of old here in Virginia also. But I shall not be so
again.--I’ll give you a letter for Philip Smith.”
We spoke together a little longer, and then I must go to gaol with
Barget and a helper or two and a constable who had appeared. Olafson
kept with us. Barget, walking beside me, was willing to answer
questions. Williams? Williams had retired--he, Barget, was full
overseer. Old Mill quarter? Well, a different crowd was there now.
As for him he lived in Williams’ house. Did I remember Dick Merry?
Well, Merry’s seven years was long out, and then he had worked for the
Colonel for wages, and now for three years had been under overseer.
“You might have done something like that yourself! The world moves and
there’s been a lot of changes. The Colonel’s daughters are all married
and there are grandchildren now. And my daughter Nelly is dead--she was
a rare and good one!”
So we came to Norfolk gaol, Olafson moving near me, walking as in a
dream, his blue northern eyes upon ships and seas. As for me, I cannot
say that I did not feel captivity. I did. But it was not heavy upon my
soul as once it had been....
It was not heavy when, in two or three days, the son of Daniel Askew
came and claimed me. I remembered him as a frightened boy, shuddering
always away from his father. Now he was not demon like the other, but a
timid, blustering man.
It was not heavy when Barget came and told me that Colonel Amory had
bought me from Geoffrey Askew, bought me back to Amory Hall and the
woodcutting and the tobacco. “Aye, and I hope you’ll determine to bide
with us now!”
I laughed. “Aye, for a while anyhow, Mr. Barget, seeing there’s some
reason, I think, why I should and must. But you know none of us is
going to bide forever in our common slavery. Not you, not me, not
Pickaninny, not the Colonel.”
“You must not talk that way,” he said. “It makes against contentment.”
“There is high contentment and there is low contentment,” I said, and
left it at that.
Olafson came to tell me good-by. He and I were well enough used to
danger and what is called disaster--well enough used to partings. But
the tears stood in our eyes when we said good-by, tasting the sea,
the wind and the ships. I had the means to write a long letter to
Philip Smith and I had done so. I said that I had a conviction that I
would be held some years in Virginia, how many I did not know, though
I guessed at seven. That I did not intend to run away again. That I
felt in my soul that there was some reason on the part of Life that is
Higher for things being as they were. It might be that my knowledge
was to encrease, here, withdrawn again from liberty of the body. Outer
knowledge, inner knowledge. I felt that a time would surely come when
I should be used in other ways. Then perchance I might see him again,
then perchance I might go to England. It was all in the future’s
keeping. But now I was not astounded, cast down, or wretched. I begged
him to believe that, and that I should remember him, having in effect
remembered him ever since I came first upon the _Janet_.
I gave the letter to Olafson. We said good-by; he went, he sailed away
from Virginia upon the _Indian King_.
Another day and another in Norfolk gaol--and Colonel Amory had ended
his business in this borough. His sloop, the _Amaranth_, waited. I
trod again the gray boards of the wharf, and went down into the little
ship. Barget said, “I’m responsible, so I’ll just tie a rope around you
and to the mast,” and did so. In an hour the Colonel came aboard and
the sails were made.
Toward noon Gervase Morrison found or made an opportunity to speak to
me. “Well, David Scott----”
“Well, Gervase Morrison----”
“Are you witheringly unhappy?”
“No, not in the least!”
“Well, that’s a gain!” he said. “You used to be unhappy. I need not lie
awake of nights for you then?”
I smiled. “No, you need not. And how are you and how have you fared?”
“Oh, on the dead level road and so-so! I am my own man, as it is
counted, but I do not know that it counts very far.”
“Not so far but that there is a further.”
He answered with a dry disconsolateness. “There always is--only how to
set foot upon that road! Well, I’m rather glad to see you, though sorry
you come back so. And what has been your life?”
“In part a blind and ill one,” I said. “Then my own Self struck me,
Morrison, and I see!”
He stared, then he said, “Well, sight is a blessed thing!” and was
called away.
We sailed up the River James. I watched the shore and thought of the
_King William_, of Scotland and the Indies and Africa, of the
_Janet_, of Bartram and Colley and McNaughton and others. The
air breathed fine, the banks were golden and crimson. I thought of
the forest and the woodcutter’s task--one of the oldest in the world.
The ax and the hoe--old, old.... I thought of Old Mill quarter and
the servants and slaves there. I thought of the fields. I heard Old
Hannibal singing,
“When have I done with the trouble of the world?
Ooh! when have I done?”
A time would come--a time would come--when Earth should put on Heaven.
I thought, I felt, I lived. I knew my work. I was upheld.
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.
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