Flash For Freedom! fp-3

by George MacDonald Fraser

  I had him! The knowledge was like a warm bath — with these papers at my command I could, when I got home again, turn the screw on the little shark until he hollered uncle. No longer would I be the poor relation; I would have evidence that could ruin him, commercially and socially, and perhaps put him in the dock as well, and the price of my silence would be a free run through his moneybags. By gad, I'd be set for life. A seat in the House? It would be a seat on the board, at least, and grovelling civility from him to me for a change. He'd rue the day he shanghaied me aboard his lousy slave ship.

  Chuckling happily, I sewed it all up again in its oilskin, and stitched this carefully into the lining of my coat. There it would stay until I got home and it could be employed in safety to my enrichment and Morrison's confusion, I reflected, as I went back on deck later, that it all came from my act of Christian kindness in listening by Comber's deathbed and comforting his last moments. There's no doubt about it; virtue isn't always just its own reward.

  Comber wasn't buried the next day, because one of the slaves died during the night, and when the watch found him at dawn they naturally heaved the body overside to the sharks. For some reason this sent Spring into a passion; he wasn't having a white man buried at sea on the same day as a black had been slung over, which seemed to be stretching it a bit, but a lot of the older hands agreed with him. It beats me; when I go they can plant me in with the whole population of Timbuctoo, but others see things differently. Spring, now, was mad about little things like that, and when eventually we did come to bury Comber on the morning after, and his body had been laid out on a plank by the rail, all neatly stitched up in sail-cloth, our fastidious commander played merry h—l because no one had thought to cover it with a flag. This on a Dahomey slaver, mark you. So we all had to wait with our hats off while Looney was despatched to get a colour from the flag locker, and Spring stamped up and down with his Prayer Book under his arm, cursing the delay, and Mrs Spring sat by with her accordion, She was wearing a floral bonnet in honour of the occasion, secured with a black scarf for mourning, and her face wore its usual expression of vacant amiability.

  Looney came back presently, and you wouldn't believe it, he was carrying the Brazilian colours. We were wearing them at the moment, this being the Middle Passage,26 so I suppose he thought he'd done right, but Spring flew into a towering passion.

  "D—n your lousy eyes!" cries he, "Take that infernal Dago duster out of my sight — would you bury an Englishman under that?" And he knocked Looney sprawling and then kicked him into the scuppers. He cursed him something fearful, the scar on his head bright crimson, until one of the hands brought a Union Jack, and then we got on with the service. Spring rattled through it, the shotted corpse went over with a splash, Mrs Spring struck up, we all sang "Rock af Ages", and the "amen" hadn't died away before Spring had strode to the unfortunate Looney and kicked his backside again so hard that he went clean down the booby hatch to the main deck. I've often thought how instructive it would have been for our divinity students to see how the offices for the dead were conducted aboard the Balliol College.

  However, this was just another incident which I relate to show you what kind of a lunatic Spring was; I suppose it stands out in my mind because the next few weeks were so uneventful — that may seem an extraordinary thing to say about a slave voyage on the Middle Passage, but once you are used to conditions, however remarkable, you start to twiddle your thumbs and find life a bore, I had little to do beyond stand my watches, help dance the slaves, and continue the instruction of Lady Caroline Lamb. She took to following me about, and had to be made to wear a cotton dress that the sailinaker ran up, in case Mrs Spring caught sight of her — as though she'd never seen naked black wenches before, by the hundred, Lady Caroline Lamb didn't care for this, and whenever she was in my berth she used to haul the dress off, and sit stark by the foot of my cot, like a black statue, waiting to be educated, one way or the other.

  One other thing I should mention, because it turned out to be important, was the behaviour of Looney. Whether Spring's hammering had driven him even more barmy I can't say, but he was a changed man after Comber died. He'd been a willing, happy idiot, but now he became sullen, and started if anyone spoke to him, and took to muttering to himself in corners. I cuffed him smartly to make him stop it, but he wouldn't; he just blubbered and mowed and shuddered if Spring's name was even mentioned. "He's the Devil!" he whined. "The b––y Devil! He bashed us, for nowt. He did, the ––." And he would crawl away, whimpering obscenities, to find a place to hide. Even Sullivan, who was softer with him than most, couldn't prevail on him to do his duties aft as steward, and the cook's Chinese mate had to serve in Spring's cabin.

  So we ran westward, and then north-west, for about a month if I remember rightly, until one morning I learned that we were out of the Atlantic and into the Caribbean. It all looked alike to me, for the weather had continued fine the whole way and I'd never worn more than my jersey, but now a change came over the ship. Each day there was gun drill at the long nines and twelves, which struck me as ominous, and you could sense a growing restlessness among the hands: where men off watch had been content to loaf before, they now kept watching the horizon and sniffing the wind; either Spring or Sullivan was always at the after rail with the glass; whenever a large sail was sighted Spring would have the guns shotted and their crews standing by. As the weather grew even hotter, tempers got shorter; the stench from the slave-deck was choking in its foulness, and even the constant murmuring and moaning of the cargo seemed to me to have taken on a deeper, more sinister note. This was the time, I learned, when slave mutinies sometimes broke out, as more of them died — although only five perished all told in our ship — and the others became sullen and desperate. You'd been able to feel the misery and fear down on the slave-deck, but now you could feel the brooding hatred; it was in the way they shuffled sulkily round when they were danced, heads sunk and eyes shifting, while the hands stood guard with the needle-guns, and the light swivel pieces were kept armed and trained to sweep the decks if need be. I kept as well away from those glowering black brutes as I could; even the sharks which followed the ship didn't look more dangerous — and there were always half a dozen of them, dark sinuous shapes gliding through the blue water a couple of fathoms down, hoping for another corpse to come overside,

  I wasn't the only one in a fine state of nerves on the last week's run along the old Spanish Main; apparently even Spring was apprehensive, for instead of running up north-west to the Windward Passage and our intended destination — which was somewhere on the north side of Cuba — he held almost due west for the Mosquito Coast, which if anything is a more God-forsaken shore than the one we had left in Africa. I saw it only as a far distant line on our port beam, but its heavy air lay on the ship like a blanket; the pitch bubbled between the planks, and even the wind seemed to have come from a blast furnace door. By the time we stood into the bay at Roatan, which you'll find on the map in the Islas de la Bahia, off the Honduras Coast, we were a jittery, sun-dried ship, and only thankful that we'd come safe through with never a Yankee patroller or garda costa in sight.27

  We dropped anchor in that great clearing-house of the African slavers, where Ivory Coast brigs and schooners, the Baltimore clippers and Angola barques, the Gulf free-traders and Braziliano pirates all rode at their moorings in the broad bay, with the buinboats and shorecraft plying among them like water-beetles, and even the stench of our own slave-deck was beaten all to nothing by the immense reek of the huge barracoons and pens that lined the shore and even ran out into the sludgy green waters of the bay on great wooden piers. One never dreams that such places exist until one sees and hears and smells them, with their amazing variety of the scum of the earth — blacks and half-breeds of every description, Rio traders with curling mustachios and pistols in their belts and rings in their ears, like buccaneers from a story-book; Down Easter Yankees in stove-pipe hats with cigars sticking out of faces like flinty cliffs; sun-reddened English
tars, some still wearing the wide straw hats of the Navy; packet rats in canvas shirts and frayed trousers; Scowegians with leathery faces and knives hanging on lanyards round their necks; Frog and Dago skippers in embroidered weskits with scarves round their heads, and niggers by the hundred, of every conceivable shape and shade — everyone babbling and arguing in half the tongues on earth, and all with one thing in common: they lived by and on the slave trade.

  But best of all I remember a big fellow all in dirty white calicos and a broad-brimmed Panama, holding on to a stay in one of the shore-boats that came under our counter, and bawling up redfaced in reply to some one who had asked what was the news:

  "Ain't ye heard, then? They found gold, over to the Pacific coast! That's right — gold! Reckon they're pickin' it up fast as they can shovel! Why, they say it's in lumps big as your fist — more gold'n anyone's ever seen before! Gold — in California!"28

  5

  We landed all our slaves at Roatan, herding them down into the big lighters where the Dago overseers packed them in like sheep, while Spring conducted business aft of the mizzen-mast with half a dozen brokers who had come aboard. A big awning had been rigged up, and Mrs Spring dispensed tea and biscuits to those who wanted it — which meant to Spring himself and to a wizened little Frenchman in a long taffeta coat and wideawake hat, who perched on a stool sipping daintily from his cup while a nigger boy stood behind fanning the flies off him, The other brokers were three greasy Dagoes in dirty finery who drank rum, a big Dutchman with a face like a suet pudding who drank gin punch, and a swarthy little Yankee who drank nothing at all.

  They had all made a quick tour of the slave-deck before it was cleared, and when they bickered and bid with Spring, the Dagoes jabbering and getting excited, the other three mighty calm and business-like. In the end they divided the six hundred among them, at an average price of nine dollars a pound — which came to somewhere between seven and eight hundred thousand dollars for the cargo. No money changed hands; nothing was signed; no receipts were sought or given. Spring simply jotted details down in a note-book — and I daresay that after that the only transactions that took place would be the transfer of bills and orders in perfectly respectable banks in Charlestown, New York, Rio and London,

  The niggers we landed would be resold, some to plantation owners along the Main, but most of them into the United States, when smugglers could be found to beat the American blockade and sell them in Mobile and New Orleans at three times what we had been paid for them. When you calculate that the trade cargo we'd given to King Gezo, through Sanchez, had been worth maybe a couple of thousand pounds — well, no wonder the slave trade throve in the forties.29

  I said we sold all our slaves, but in fact we kept Lady Caroline Lamb. Spring had decided that if I persevered with her instruction in English, she would be worth keeping as an interpreter for later voyages — such slaves were immensely valuable, and we had actually made our last trip without one. I didn't mind; it would help pass the time, and I felt somehow that it was a feather in my cap.

  To her Spring also added about a dozen mustee and quadroon girls sent aboard by the brokers, who wanted them shipped to America where they were destined for the New Orleans brothels. Spring agreed for a consideration to take them as far as Havana, where we were to load cargo for our homeward trip. These yellow wenches were quite different from the blacks we had carried, being graceful, delicate creatures of the kind they called "fancy pieces", for use as domestic slaves, I'd have traded twenty Lady Caroline Lamb's for any one of them, but there was no chance of that. They weren't chained, being so few and not the kind who would make trouble anyway.

  We didn't linger in Roatan. Slaves from the barracoons came aboard with a load of lime and scoured out the slave-deck, and then we warped out of the bay to cleaner water, and the pumps and hoses washed out the shelves for twenty-four hours before Spring was satisfied. As one of the hands remarked, you could have eaten your dinner off it — not that I'd have cared to, myself. After that we made sail, due north for the Yucatan Passage, and for the first time, I think, since I'd first set foot on that d––d ship, I began to feel easy in my mind. It was no longer a slaver, I felt — well, give or take the few yellows we were carrying — we had turned the corner, and now there was only Havana and the run home. Why, in two or three months, or perhaps even less, I would be in England again, the Bryant affair — how trivial it seemed now ! — would be blown over, I would be able to see Elspeth — by jove, I would be a father by then! Somebody would be, anyway — but I'd get the credit, at least, Suddenly I began to feel excited, and the Dahomey Coast and the horrors of that jungle river were like a nightmare that had never truly happened. England, and Elspeth, and peace of mind, and — what else? Well, I'd see about that when the time came.

  I should have known better, of course. Whenever I'm feeling up to the mark and congratulating myself, some fearful fate trips me headlong, and I find myself haring for cover with my guts churning and Nemesis in full cry after me. In this case Nemesis was a dandy little sloop flying the American colours that came up out of the south-west when we were three days out of Roatan and had Cuba clear on our starboard bow. That was nothing in itself; Spring put on more sail and we held our own, scudding north-east. And then, out from behind Cape San Antonio, a bare two miles ahead, comes a brig with the Stars and Stripes fluttering at her peak, and there we were, caught between them, unable to fly and — in my case, anyway — most unwilling to fight.

  But not John Charity Spring. He turned the Balliol College on her heel and tried to race the sloop westward, but on this tack she came up hand over fist, and presently from her bow-gun comes a plume of smoke, and a shot kicked up the blue water off our port bow.

  "Clear for action!" bawls he, and with Sullivan roaring about the deck they ran out the guns while the little sloop came tearing up and sends another shot across our bows.

  Now, in my experience there is only one way to fight a ship, and that is to get below on the side opposite to the enemy and find a snug spot behind a stout bulkhead. I was down the main hatch before the first crash of our own guns, and found myself on the slave-deck with a dozen screaming yellow wenches cowering in the corners. I made great play ordering them to keep quiet and settle down, while overhead the guns thundered again, and there came a hideous crash and tearing somewhere forward where one of the Yankee's shots had gone home. The wenches shrieked and I roared at them and waved my sheath-knife; one of them ran screaming across the tilting deck, her hands over her face, and I grabbed hold of her — a fine lithe piece she was, too, and I was taking my time manhandling her back to her fellows when Sullivan stuck his head through the hatch crying:

  "What the h—l d'ye think you're about?"

  "Preventing a slave mutiny!" says I.

  "What? You skulldng rascal!" He flourished a pistol at me. "You shift your d—-d butt up here, directly, d'ye hear?" So reluctantly I dropped the wench and went cautiously up the ladder again, poking my head out to see what was what.

  I'm no judge of naval warfare, but by the way the hands were serving the port guns we were in the thick of a d––d hot running fight. The twelve-pounders were crashing and being reloaded and run out again like something at Trafalgar, and although from time to time there was the shuddering crack of a shot striking us, we seemed to be taking no great harm; the deck watch were tailing onto a line while Sullivan was yelling orders to the men aloft. He bawled at me, so I scrambled out and tailed on to the line, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the sloop running across our bows, her broadside popping away like fury, and the scream and crash of shot just overhead sent me diving for the scuppers. I fetched up against the rail with a crash, wondering why the blazes I'd been fool enough to come out from cover just because Sullivan told me to — instinct, I suppose — and then there was a rending crackle from overhead, something hit the deck with an almighty crash, and somebody fell on top of me. I pushed him off, and my hand came away sticky with blood. Horrified, I watched as the
body rolled into the scuppers; it had no head, and blood was pouring out of the neck stump like a fountain.

  All this had happened in a matter of minutes. I climbed unsteadily to my feet and looked around. A great tangle of cordage and splintered timber lay between the main and mizzen masts; looking up I saw that our main top mast had come away, and for a moment I felt the ship floundering and rolling helplessly. Someone was shrieking beneath the wreckage, and Sullivan was jumping forward with an axe and a dozen men at his heels to try to clear the tangle away. Beyond them Spring was at the wheel, hat jammed down as usual, but his orders were lost in the crash of one of our port guns.

  What happened in the next five minutes I barely remember; I know that we were hit again, and for a time you could hardly see across the deck for acrid powder smoke. I crouched beside the rail, palpitating, until the clearing party came dragging their mass of wreckage and I had to jump away as they bundled it overside. Our guns had stopped firing, and presently I was aware the Yankee wasn't firing either, so I chanced a look.