by Jan Needle
“You see?” he said. “The perfect system, is it not? Easy, constant contact between the Scotch and us, no chance at all that other ships might see. Now down our lanterns come, and Big Angus’s will follow. At every turning of the glass, we do it once again. And in the morning, now the weather’s easing, we’ll come up to her and take the silver off. Then ho for Port Royal, and our hero’s welcome in Jamaica! Capital!”
Gunning staggered onto the quarterdeck at this point, dropped his bottle, and stood and yelled profanities as the shattered glass and brandy spread around his feet. Captain Kaye, incandescent with a sudden fury, ordered him to leave the deck and go below, or better still to do his duty and bring them closer to the galleon. Gunning laughed, sat heavily, then rocked back and forwards in apparent mirth, calling for more brandy from Black Bob, who was nowhere to be seen. Kaye, almost screeching, called for Arthur Savary and his marines, and when they came running, in various stages of undress, ordered them to arrest the drunken master and carry him below to lock in irons.
Before they could touch him, Gunning was swaying on his feet, his leer become a bitter scowl.
“Capting, you are a fool,” he said. “Those Scotchmen are accursed villains and all on board here knows it except you. I will below, and gladly, and if you catch up with those bastards, I will stand you a puncheon of fine spirit when we reach Port Royal. They are gone, sir. You have lost ’em. How long will it be before you see it?”
“Savary!” roared Kaye. “Do your duty, sir! Why, never have I heard such insolence! If this man was a Navy officer, he would hang, I promise you!”
“Oh stop your blustering and shake out them reefs,” said Gunning. “I know why you’re desperate, man, even if no other bugger do. Christ, I need another bottle. Bob! Where are you, boy? Black Bob!”
As Savary approached him, very gingerly, with his soldiers, Big Jack blundered at and through them, scattering them like pins, and stomped to the companionway and down. The marines and officer, aware of how ridiculous their aspect, clattered after him, more to remove themselves from sight than for a sensible intention. Dick Kaye, in a paroxysm, roared to officers and men to shake out everything, to get her lifting, to notice that the wind was now a gentle breeze (which it most certainly was not), to get her under way, and handsome! He shouted forward to Holt for another signal to be made, and he shouted aloft for Phillips to report a sight of them. Phillips did respond, after an aching pause, but said there was no sign at all; the sea to leeward was invisible, a field of blackest black. Will shouted at the other lookout men, to cover Phillips’s back, and all reported similar.
Then Holt’s signals went up, and after some delay — and to general astonishment — the reply came, distant and very dim. Slack Dickie almost danced in triumph at his rightness and made the signal yet again, in fifteen minutes time — to not a flicker. He demanded cleaner glasses, then, and bigger wicks, then caused burning bundles to be hoisted up, and all to no avail. Sail was piled on sail, until a royal blew out of its boltropes and Biter took a roll that looked at one stage as if it would roll her over, and after one more hour, a gunpowder flare was blown out of a bow chaser that lighted up the sea all round them and near choked all men on board with smoke and burning sulphur. In the black that followed this Chinese display, men saw many flashes in their eyes, but none of any substance from ahead. When dawn came the sea was black and empty, then dark blue, then turquoise, streaked with white. Still empty, though, a heaving, pale blue void. And up aloft, it was discovered, Abel Phillips was asleep.
The search went on three days, and the argument over Phillips’s fate repercussed far longer, both among the people and the officers. For Captain Kaye chose to blame the prize ship’s loss not on the Scotchmen, or indeed the filthy weather and the onset of the night, but on his chosen lookout’s dereliction. Phillips’s crime was discovered when the captain called for him before full daylight and got no reply. It was still blowing very hard, and any man aloft can fail to hear, but it was not above a minute before the “awful slackness” was established beyond doubt. In fact, Phillips was so hard asleep that he could not be made to move even when prodded hard by little Ratty Baines, who elected to spring aloft to do the captain’s finding-out for him. Rat Baines, when offered, was not the man to miss an opportunity, and smacked the lookout’s face from left to right and back again, then twisted his ears to try and wake him up. But Phillips was like stodgy pudding, and in the end Holt sent Tommy Hugg aloft to see, and ultimately to lift him down across his hulking shoulders. On the quarterdeck, when deposited, Phillips dropped in a heap, was poked about some more, and finally rallied himself and stood. His face was marked most clearly where the slaps had hit. Blue bruises in the shape of Rat Baines’s fingers.
Captain Kaye — obscurely aware that his conduct in this act was under observation — called Mr Grundy up to give a fair assessment. The surgeon prodded Phillips cruelly and with clear contempt, and pronounced him a malingerer. Phillips stood blinking, indifferent, perhaps not even hearing what was said. His face was pale, his eyes were glazed, and the spreading bruises rather horrible. There was also, from his mouth and nose, a small amount of vivid blood.
“Well,” said Captain Kaye, examination over. “You have been asleep aloft, in dereliction of your duty, man. You are lucky that you did not fall. And while you slept, the ship that you were watching for has disappeared. Made signals as arranged, no doubt, to no acknowledgement from us, who did not see them. Now that is serious. Now that, sir, to our enterprise, is damn near fatal. It is an enemy, a prize, stuffed to the gunwales with Spanish plate. And you have lost it. You will be flogged.”
William was close while this went on, and an almost overwhelming heaviness fell upon him. His breath quickened, for he knew that there was nothing he could do. Abel Phillips, barely on his feet, his eyes unfocused on the captain’s face, made no reply, indeed no sound beyond a little sigh. It came to Bentley that this punishment was not for Phillips, in reality, but for Jack Gunning, to blame his drunken mocking of the loss of easy riches, and Jack Gunning neither knew, nor cared. Misuse power where you can, thought Bentley gloomily: a first rule for the weak.
“Well, sir?” said Slack Dickie to Phillips, harshly. “What say you to that?”
“Captain Kaye,” said Bentley. His voice was low and clear. “I think this man is ill, sir. He shows clear symptoms of the scurvy. You cannot — ”
He stopped himself. Kaye’s eye was on him. It was almost wild.
“Ill, sir? That is not what Mr Surgeon says.”
Grundy was beside them on the quarterdeck. His face was pasty, and there was a growing tremor in his hands and lips. Another twenty minutes without a drink, Will knew, and the doctor would be in a worse state than the patient. He felt disgust for him, though, not pity.
“Perhaps, sir,” he said, “perhaps Mr Grundy’s experience — ”
“Malingerer!” snapped Grundy. “A clear-cut case! I have been at sea for years, sir, and I never saw a clearer case! How dare you, sir!”
Kaye’s tension eased. How pleasant, to have his dilemma solved so neat. “It is what their lordships pay him for,” he told Bentley, mildly. “What man who keeps a dog barks for himself? A fool.” Suddenly he spotted the boatswain emerging from the forward hatch. “Mr Taylor! Clap this man in irons, if you please. When the weather eases, I will have him flogged. Unless,” he said to Phillips, “you care to rise aloft once more, and peel your eyes, and find our fortune? No? I thought as not.”
Phillips, in fact, had not understood, or made response at all. Taylor arrived, looked at the captain with blank eyes, and detailed two men to escort the transgressor down below. Grundy was dismissed and almost staggered as he made for the companionway. On a moody whim, Kaye went aloft himself to use his telescope, and stayed up there half an hour. But the Caribbean Sea, white-flecked but moderating by the minute, showed no other ship or boat at all. And as the weather eased, they set more sail and plunged on ever faster. It was their only hope.
Kaye was not an unfair man, as he argued it to his officers in the cabin, and he held off with the punishment for as long as possible. The Biter swept the seas downwind, then, when they assessed they must have caught or passed their crippled quarry willy-nilly, took a board to the west of their trajectory, then worked back to the east. The mastheads were manned from dawn till darkness, and — triumph of hope over common sense — men were put to lookout through the night. Kaye had arranged his signals with the Lamont brothers, and nothing would persuade him that they had let him down. After near three days, when the sea was calm and turquoise, he did give in somewhat it seemed, but could not bring himself to call the searching off. He re-named it as a wreckage watch, and insisted the Spaniard must have gone down in the storms. No one argued with him, naturally, and to an extent, some of the lower people enjoyed his private pain, which as the time wore on grew almost touchable. Even the loss of a galleon stuffed with silver was not worth crying over from the common point of view. Their share of prize money was a paltry one to start with, and very prone in most of their experience to strange evaporation, not unlike a plum-duff fart on Sunday. They only hoped the Scotchmen choked themselves to death on too much greed.
So course was set at last for Port Royal, at their current rate a further two days or more, and Bosun Taylor was ordered to set up the grating so Phillips could be punished for his costly sin of failing to pick up the Scotchmen’s signal. Jack Gunning, by this time, was as sober as a judge once more — indeed he swore that he would never touch another drop — and told the captain roundly that the lookout man was innocent of any crime. It was, unfortunately, red rag to a bull, and any doubts that Kaye may have harboured were washed away in ire. But in the face of Will and Sam’s unspoken opposition, he allowed that six would serve the purpose, although it was insanely generous of him and hardly worth the laying on.
Six lashes, though, served the purpose very well, as Holt for one had feared they would. In fact, Phillips started bleeding after two, from nose and mouth, and all around the eyes, and on the third stroke his head dropped sideways on his neck, and he vomited a scarlet haemorrhage, and died. In his back, it was noted as they cut him down, the cat had dug deep grooves, the skin unbroken, like blue-black valleys across a white and blotchy plain. Next evening, near becalmed not far offshore a bare few miles before the Palisadoes, they heard appalling screams drifting from what Gunning assessed must be a cane plantation just beyond the beach. They smelled a smell that some of them identified as flesh, on fire. The heat of the night, when they at last dropped anchor just inside the harbour mouth, was almost overwhelming.
TWENTY-THREE
The punishment they chose for Bonzo was a savage one, but not abnormal, so Deborah was told. She could not believe that, though, and nor, it seemed to her, could many of the slaves. There was mutiny in the air, strange ululating noises that induced a great unease in her. Fido and the other drivers switched attitude themselves, became rank oppressive and aggressive, laying about them with whip and cane at any provocation, or at none. Within two hours of the rumour going round of Bonzo’s dreadful fate, two more cane-cutting men had had their long knives torn off them, and been beaten to the ground then penned up and bound alongside him. That night the drumming started, which made even Bridie nervous in the house. Mabel, Maude, and Mildred were like frightened birds and avoided conversation with the white women. Bridie told Deb that drums were banned, the use of them could lead to execution, then laughed.
“If it blows up this time, though mo chroí,” she said, “the executions will be arsy-versey, won’t they? The white ones will be first, that’s you and me and Master and his Seth, except that they’ve got guns, of course. The Africs speak through drums, that’s why they’re not allowed, and for all I know they could be beating up an army while we talk.” She called out: “Mabel! Kwaamyaeer, mayad, waas cahlinya!” Mabel, reluctantly, did come across, but her response to Bridie’s stream of subsequent Kreyole was minimal. Dismissing her, the housekeeper told Deb that they were of a different camp now; it was whites and blacks as separates, not household women all as one. Moira, she added soberly, had miscarried that afternoon. Not by accident.
In the morning, on the day of punishment, there were three more men in irons, and a site prepared for the “starring” of all six of them. One was a little boy, no more than twelve years old or so, who had been caught up a tree by Fido’s bloodhounds (human variety) with a makeshift drum. Both wrists had been already broken — sharp lesson for a drummer boy — but he was still to be destroyed, on Master’s order. In case the thought of revolt still clung in some “simple minds,” Deb learned, Sutton’s drivers were being “beefed up” with some whites. Although he did not use white labour because of the expense, neighbours could be relied on in a situation to do their best to help, not from altruism but for self-interest. If Sutton’s slaves ran riot and the hacking whim became a passion, it could spread like wildfire. Sutton’s plantation was small, but on two sides of it were richer holdings, owned by richer men. Nearest, indeed, was Sir Nathaniel Siddleham, who had three sons and two lovely daughters, and therefore much to guard from harm. The sons, Jeremy, Jonathan, and Joseph, enjoyed a lark — the bloodier the better — so would certainly be there.
Deb found Bridie’s attitude to the troubles, and the way she talked of them, quite difficult to hold down. The words lark and bloodier struck her as unusual, used in such conjunction, and the easing of her mood now she knew that there would be men with guns in plenty to keep the blacks in check was also hollowing. The whole thing, in fact, became festive as the day drove on, with many slaves given time off from working to clear a site for punishment. Deb herself was put to preparing special food and drink for the white guests and their white guard men, all of whom arrived with guns and clubs in prominent display. Sutton and his son oversaw the work, while the three Siddleham brothers stood about conversing with each other, ignoring them in most part, drinking wine. They also flirted hard with Deborah, whom they professed to find more wonderful as the wine went down, and on whom their advances became more pressing. They ranged in age from seventeen to twenty-five or so, were dressed like London gentlemen, and (as she saw it) considered themselves God’s gift. She had met rich men before, although not this rich, perhaps, but never ones who so clearly had no work to do.
“Oh, Deb, Deborah!” said the middle one, whose name she thought might have been Jonathan, but did not care to know. “Why do you stay here in this awful hole? Come fly with me. We have a house two miles away or so which is a palace compared with Sutton’s filthy hovel! Why came you here? You cannot let him or his monsters touch you! Come with us, and be our sisters’ serving maid!”
“Monster,” corrected the youngest, with a laugh. “One of the monsters boiled himself alive, or got boiled anyway so there’s only one. You’re lucky there, Deb,” he added. “Imagine Little Ammon ’twixt your lovely thighs! He’s not sweet and clean and gentle like I could be if that is what you wanted! Come take a walk, my love. My pistol is not the sole thing I keep cocked!”
Seth Sutton, who had heard this quip, ordered her roughly to fetch jugs of beer and rum because the entertainment was to start. Deb called to Mollie for some help, and to Mabel, and was shocked to see their frightened, tear-filled eyes.
The clearing, or arena, had become a crowded place. All field-work must have ceased, all field hands, men and women, brought down to see the fun, or learn a lesson through their witness. Deb took her position on the white side, nearest the house, waiting on the whim of all the men. They formed a phalanx of armament, Alf Sutton in the middle with a burning torch in hand, Seth with another, while the Siddleham brothers and their men ranged outside them, with longer guns and pistols ready. The bringing in and tying down of the six sacrificial victims was the task allotted to the blacks.
Fido, in a coloured shirt, directed operations, and he revelled in it. The prisoners were brought in as a group, and those who still had clothes were stripped stark naked
. All were silent, as if all protest had been beaten out of them, except the little boy with broken wrists, who squealed from time to time when the fractures were manhandled. Fido and his fellows slashed out with their whips or canes at every moment, and blood ran down dirty skin almost from the first. Then the prisoners were pushed and directed to their squares of death, and forced down to their knees or buttocks, then kicked out till they lay down flat, their faces to the sky. Then, their arms and legs were pulled out till they lay like starfish, and their wrists and ankles chained to wooden stakes. Around their waists another chain was snaked, and shackled onto metal bolts driven into the dirt.
Now it was the women’s turn. Fido barked orders that were not Kreyole, but even Deb could almost understand. Beyond the house-yard, by a small wood shelter containing fuel, stood Mabel and the other house-women that she knew. Not all — Moira, despite orders to the contrary, had stayed away, had in fact disappeared, maybe had run. But the others, eyes down and sullen, gathered the makings of a fire, armful after armful, and brought and dropped them by the staked-out men. As they returned for more, Fido’s cohorts began to kick the sticks and brushwood into piles around the feet and hands of all the “starfish,” while from the crowded onlookers began a mournful chant, low and rhythmical, that rose and fell so subtly that Deb was not sure she heard it in reality. As the first flames licked off the Suttons’ burning torches into the piles of kindling, the low moaning became a kind of vocal whoosh, long-lived and musical. To be drowned out by tearing, shrieking screams.
“That’s how tha’ll die!” yelled Alfred Sutton, moving from Bonzo to another writhing slave. “Tha killed my son and I’ll kill thee, tha bastard! By finger and by toe, by ankle and by wrist, and when the time grows right I’ll roast tha bollocks off an’ all. The lot of you! The whole damn lot! Tha’ art murderous! Th’ art coal-black murdering scum! He wa’ my little son!”
