Sacred Hunger

by Barry Unsworth

  However, next morning they woke to clear weather and a succession of fine days followed. They drew closer to the coast, and made gradual way northwards with the current, scanning the shore as they went. Towards noon on the second day of this they sighted the green mouth of the entrada, with its long, curving sand bar on the north side, where the sea broke white in the shape of a sickle, just as Philips had described. They anchored in ten fathoms and the shore party put out in the punt with provisions for two days, Erasmus, Harvey and six of the crew armed with musket and cutlass.

  It was a day of clear sunshine, almost windless. The shore and the scrub beyond were completely deserted. Low waves broke on the sand with scarcely any sound at all. Erasmus was never to forget the sense of terrible incongruity that descended on him as he stepped out of the boat on to the white sand and felt the peace of the place settle round him.

  Before him the beach sloped gently upwards to a fringe of motionless palms. A flock of birds with black wings and white faces and crimson, blade-like bills rose and flew out to sea, keeping low over the water, making no sound. Here, he thought, or somewhere not far, perhaps on a day like this one, the fugitives had made landfall. It was hardly possible to believe it. There was no print of man anywhere to be seen.

  He began to walk up the beach. Feeling firm ground under his feet, he staggered slightly, after the weeks at sea. But the unsteadiness seemed to him due more to the shock of this hush that lay over everything.

  He came to a stop, glancing in something like bewilderment along the empty shore, with nothing in his mind but his own loneliness and the incongruous violence of his intentions.

  Such faltering was unusual and it did not last long. If anything, his resolution was strengthened by the difficulties that followed. It emerged that Harvey could not immediately locate the place where they had watered. He would know it when he saw it, he said, in an attempt to deflect his employer’s wrath. But he could see nothing directly before him, here on the shoreline, to indicate which direction it lay in.

  Since all he knew for sure was that the place lay south of the inlet, Erasmus judged it best to take the point of their landing as central and seek north and south from it along the coast. Creeks there were in plenty, running into the wetlands behind the shore; but they were not the streams of Harvey’s memory. It took two days of casting thus, with their escort now openly surly at being made to row long hours in the sun, before they came upon the stretch of slightly higher, rockier shore scattered with pines that Philips had described and Harvey now recognized.

  The springs were here right enough—there was fresh water below the ground over a wide area, emerging in pools among the rocky scrub. As if to compensate for his failure before, Harvey led now without hesitation, skirting the pools, plunging into the mangrove thickets that grew beyond them. Sweating profusely, stumbling among the intricate roots of the trees, sometimes floundering knee-deep in swamp, they kept a rough course between the shore and a chain of small brackish lagoons that ran parallel to it.

  The mouth of the creek, when they came to it, was dark as a cavern, roofed over with branches. There was no more than a foot or two of water in it, almost black and quite still, half choked in places with spreads of heavily scented, hyacinth-like flowers. Keeping as close as possible to the bank, they followed the channel as it wound inland. A crocodile, which had been sunning itself in a break among the trees, slithered without apparent haste down the bankside, broke the dark water into brief glitters and disappeared among a tangle of bushes. The creek began a wide curve away from the sea. Quite unexpectedly, following this round, they came upon the ship.

  She lay where the retreating water had left her, keel embedded in the mud bottom. In settling she had leaned heavily to port and the refuse of her decks had piled against the gunwales on that side.

  Creepers had found their way over her bows and clothed the ruined trellis of the forecastle railing.

  Drapes of pale green moss like horses’ tails had lowered on to her from the trees that arched overhead.

  Thick-stemmed vines had lassoed the stumps of her masts. Only the upper slope of her quarterdeck was left bare. She was tied down here, bound by the lacing of creepers, a rotting captive in this forgotten channel.

  From somewhere on the opposite bank Erasmus heard the sudden chattering cry of a bird. The smell of salt, mud and vegetable decomposition came to him, and the smell of the softened, worm-riddled timbers of the ship. He walked forward until he came level with her bows. There was the Duchess of Devonshire, eyeless and cracked and faded now, and her bosom crumbling, but still yearning forward in her pinions. She was turned away towards the farther bank: some distant ebb had tugged the ship athwart the stream. Boarding would be easier by the stern, he decided, where she was closer up. “I want no one with me,” he said. ‘allyou men will wait here. Space out along the bank and keep a watch.”

  These words came as a disappointment to Harvey, who had hoped to accompany his master aboard. He had convinced himself that there was something of immense value on the ship, which only Kemp knew about, this being the only thing he could think of that could explain what they were doing there. All he got in the event, however, was mud on his back from Erasmus’s boots. The ship’s side was rather far for a leap, especially as she was tilted so awkwardly. Too impatient to wait for a bridge to be made, Erasmus swung over to the stern post by means of a rope, using Harvey’s back as a launching pad. Taking advantage of the footholds afforded by the carving of the quarterheads, he climbed up over the side, encountering as he did so the raddled, reproachful stare of the Merchant, still in periwig and cocked hat, still with hectic traces of red in his cheeks. Above this, affording an excellent toe-hold, was the scroll of the City of Liverpool in blistered gilt.

  A final effort brought him on to the deck. Here he stood clear in the sunshine. He heard faint scuttling sounds from among the warm boards. A delicately fronded, fern-like plant grew thickly amidst the burst planking of the deck where the rotted wood had mixed with leaf mould and drifted dust to make a soil. With a small shock of surprise he heard the humming of bees from somewhere and moments later two tiny, buff-coloured birds flew up out of this undergrowth and disappeared among the foliage on the opposite bank.

  He began to make his way forward, moving crabwise along the slope of the deck. A debris of broken staves and a section of mast lay over the after-hatch, too heavy for him to lift aside. He went on towards the main hatchway. He saw a snake, dandified as only the very venomous can be, in bands of red and black and yellow, go slithering across some feet of open deck and disappear below a pile of broken casks and scraps of cordage.

  He drew the cutlass at his side and went forward. The intensity of his purpose was near to choking him now. He would have braved any danger to get below and find his cousin’s cabin, though what he expected to see there he did not know.

  The hatchway was open, though partly grown over with bindweed. The stairs were in place, leading down.

  At the foot he began to make his way aft again, leaning awkwardly against the portside bulkhead to keep his balance against the tilt. Shafts of light came through from the gaps in the planking overhead. Some yards along he found a skull and a scattering of bones, part of the ribcage still in its hoop. Had Philips mentioned human remains on the ship?

  He could not remember. An adult this, but whether black or white it was not possible to determine.

  Hardly big enough to belong to Paris… There were two more skeletons, one of them a child’s, lying a little further, at an angle to the bulkhead.

  The discovery, his aloneness in these unaccustomed surroundings, took all guard from his thoughts. As he stood in this dim, cluttered place, he could not defend himself against the knowledge that there had been terrible suffering here, in the heart of the ship; it was as though the timbers gave off the odour of it. It had survived this ruin, would survive the dust the ship was destined to …

  This was no more than an aberration, a brief deflectio
n of purpose. Next moment he was shuffling on again, through the broken sunlight. He had been over the vessel often enough with his father to remember where the surgeon’s quarters lay, but the dimensions of the cabin were not so easy to make out now; the light inner bulkhead had fallen in, as if from some splintering blow. There was a litter of old yarn and bits of tackle that had jolted down here with the tilt of the ship. But the frame of the bunk was still there, loose at the foot where it had swung free from the splintered partition.

  Erasmus kicked at the rubbish, dislodged a rusted band of iron and some pieces of curved wood, saw beneath these a curled shape, a snake he thought at first, then saw it was part of a belt. He picked it up. The leather had rotted and the buckle was missing, perhaps cut off. It was narrow—not a seaman’s belt. He began to look about him with more purpose. Below where the planking had buckled and split he found a glass stopper with a round lid, of the type apothecaries use for small bottles and phials. This mark of his cousin’s presence was as precious to him as a token of love and he pocketed it with care. However, apart from a small china inkwell, he found nothing more of any interest. It was clear that the cabins had been diligently picked over, and probably more than once.

  On the point of leaving, obscurely disappointed, he pushed with a sort of vindictive violence against the frame of the bunk. He felt the head of it swing heavily round, then check against the splintered bulkhead. There was some obstruction there, something reinforcing the partition. Forcing the frame as far as possible from the wall, he saw a small cavity there, which had perhaps been fronted with panelling or some light veneer. He could see nothing inside, there was not light enough, and he was unwilling to put his hand where his eye could not follow it. He found a piece of wood and poked with it in the cavity. His stick encountered some object there that took up nearly all the space.

  When he reached in, his fingers touched the side of a wooden box.

  It seemed to him afterwards that he had known from the first touch what this box would be, so that when he drew it out there was no surprise, only a sense of confirmation.

  The lacquer was roughened and pitted, but the resinous varnish had held off the damp and the gold and blue design of peacocks on the lid was as clear now in this narrow space where he stood as it had been the afternoon thirteen years ago when amid the tea-cups and the talk of her ailments his mother had made a present of it to Matthew Paris. He remembered with absolute clarity the quality of the light, the gown his mother had worn, his cousin’s courteous gravity, in which there seemed always something sardonic, and his large hands taking the box…

  Holding it carefully he went some paces forward to where the sunlight shafted through from gaps in the deck above. There was no lock but the wood had warped; he had to use some force to open the lid. Inside was a loose sheaf of papers and a stoutly bound book edged with red leather. A glance at this told him that it was a journal of some kind; the pages were covered with the angular writing he recognized as his cousin’s. The loose sheets too bore his cousin’s hand. There were words and phrases crossed out here and there. He took a sheet at random, raised it to the light and looked at the first few lines:

  Thus it is that while the heart remains unharmed, life can chance to be restored lo all parts, and health recovered. But if the heart be either chilled or affected with some grievous ill, it must needs be that the whole animal will suffer and fall into corruption..

  .

  Erasmus looked up towards the source of light.

  There was a spider’s web directly above him, the strands dusty-looking in the sunlight, the fawn-coloured host motionless in the centre.

  Vaguely at first, then with a sudden tightening of the throat, he remembered how his father had enjoyed singing Paris’s praises, how delighted he had been to be sending such a well-qualified surgeon with the ship. Among these accomplishments of his nephew had been the fact that he was translating a medical work from Latin, a treatise on the heart.

  Erasmus could hear the voices of the men stationed on the bank. The angle of the sun had changed in this brief space of time: the light fell now directly on his face, the web was in shadow, scarcely visible. Within these rotting bowels of the ship he sensed a life that had cautiously resumed, faint scurrying sounds, minute displacements. This crumbling structure, coffin of his father’s hopes.

  .. But it was Paris who had deserted him, left him to die in ignorance. This box, which had been a parting gift, these papers, he had not forgotten them, not overlooked them: he had left them here because they belonged to a life that was over, one to which he had not intended to return; either that or he had been no longer among the living when the ship was drawn up here.

  Erasmus replaced the papers, closed the lid.

  One or the other it must be—it was the doubt that had brought him so far. If his cousin was dead, the ledger could be closed.

  If he were alive he had to be found and hanged.

  Somewhere in this wilderness they might be still, those who had survived. The stories of the Indians came to his mind. Stories or legends, Philips had not seemed sure… They would never have stayed here among the swamps. They would have made for higher, drier ground. Unlikely they had gone so very far, hampered and burdened as they must have been, and in such difficult terrain. His mind moved among possibilities with an insistent logic. They might not have stayed together, they might have scattered, gone their different ways. But there was safety in numbers. They might have made northwards in a body for Georgia or Louisiana. But that would have meant hundreds of miles through Spanish territory, with hostile Indians all along the northern borders. Could the remnants of the crew have abandoned the negroes and escaped by sea, perhaps to Cuba or Hispaniola?

  But he did not believe it. He was convinced, in a way that went beyond logic, that this ingrate jail-bird cousin of his had compounded his crimes and made his disgrace complete by siding not only with the mutinous scum of the crew but with the runaway blacks as well.

  The conviction transcended his hatred for Paris.

  That high sense of justice that he had experienced during the voyage returned to him now. “It is not finished,” he said in a low, impulsive mutter.

  Once more he lifted his face to the broken sunlight. “The debts are not paid yet. If he is alive, I will find him.” As always, he gathered his surroundings to him, took them to witness.

  He promised the silence and dilapidation around him, the whole rotting hulk of the ship, that he would find his renegade cousin wherever he was skulking—find him and see him hanged.

  40.

  As soon as Erasmus Kemp had rejoined the ship she weighed and set a course northwards for Still Augustine. In the southwesterly land breeze she made good time. Erasmus stood at the rail scanning the coast through a telescope, but he saw no sign of human habitation, only the pale stretches of the shore and the low line of scrub beyond it, broken occasionally by dark, dome-shaped belts of forest like sudden islands. When they were still south of Cape Canaveral the wind veered eastward, obliging them to stand further out for fear of the shoals, and he lost all sight of the coast.

  Late in the afternoon, after some hesitation, he settled down to look at the journal. Some reluctance he did not fully understand, some fear of being mastered, held him back, though he was conscious of no curiosity in regard to his cousin’s thoughts and feelings, only of the desire to find evidence of his crimes.

  He began at the later pages—evidence would be here, if anywhere. The ink had faded badly in places and mould had attacked the edges of the leaves here and there, but a good deal was legible still. He turned the leaves, his eyes moving impatiently over the obliterated passages. The journal gave off the faint, sweetish perfume of neglect.

  … perhaps seeing some advantage to be gained from me as the owner’s nephew, a matter he refers to frequently and with significant inflections. He is sniffing for a source of power, or preparing to shift allegiance. Certainly Thurso may not now be such a star to follow. Feeling among
the people against him is strong, it can be sensed in the men’s looks and multerings among themselves. Cavana has scarce said a word since the casting overboard of his monkey..

  . a favourable wind, but the terrible deity who may have sustained Thurso all these years of his trading for slaves shows himself whimsical at last, as we see in these calms that have descended on us and keep us still among the shoals with seldom enough wind to give the ship steerage way, for she is now so foul she will not feel a small breeze.

  April 20

  Woke this morning to strains of “Nancy Dawson”, played by Sullivan for the negroes to dance to. It is in his face that he does not much relish this use to which his music is put, but Thurso… considerations of humanity, but for the sake of his “prime”, that is the four per cent promised him by my uncle on every slave reaching Jamaica and sold there. I care not if we never reach Jamaica nor any… Dancing will not keep them alive while the bloody flux moves among them; this demon was with us when we set sail from the coast and grows apace in spite of all my efforts to air and fumigate their rooms below deck.

  Almost every morning now we bring up dead shackled to the living. Yesterday one of the women was delivered of a dead baby, which Libby threw over the side.

  April 26

  I continue, in spite of these terrible conditions, to hold long conversations with Delblanc, and they are a solace to me, though I think him not enough of a realist. He maintains there could be a world, a society, without victims and without injustice, where the weakness of one was not an invitation to the strength of another, except to succour or protect. I go so far with him as to believe it true that the moral character of man is formed by what happens to him in the world and that our nature originates in external circumstances. Why then do we languish under wars and tyrannies? Delblanc would say it is due to the harmful effect of government upon us, government being powerful for evil only and powerless for… conditions on this ship one would be bound to agree. We are a sick and disaffected body of men, with a human cargo constantly dwindling, presided over by a man who grows every day more mad in appearance, hoarse and staring, with congested-looking features, and accompanied always… flogged a man today only for going to complain about the condition of the salt beef, which is black and glazed over and clearly putrid, as I have myself verified… Barton sends those he does not favour to scrape and swab out the slaves’ quarters, a task much hated by reason of the poor creatures sometimes being so enfeebled by the flux as not to have strength to reach the necessary-buckets. There are four of these in each of the apartments. It often happens that those who are placed at a distance from the buckets, in endeavouring to get to them, tumble over their companions in consequence of their being shackled. These accidents, though unavoidable, are productive of continual quarrels, in which some of them are always bruised. In this situation, unable to proceed and prevented from going to the tubs, they desist from the attempt; and as the necessities of nature are not to be resisted, they ease themselves as they lie.