* * *
To Hartley Fudges, London had been a tolerant, indulgent landlady, and taking his leave of her was a heart-wrenching experience. He took a coach back to the family mansion, where he supervised the packing of a chest with his clothes and personal effects. While there, he encountered his father, who was about to leave on a business trip to Edinburgh, and they had a heart-to-heart.
“Plotting to kill your bother in a sham duel so you can inherit my estate,” his father chided. “Really, Hartley, you surprise me. You can’t expect to profit from someone else’s death.”
“You did,” Hartley shot back.
“The difference is, I didn’t kill anyone or try to kill anyone.”
“But someone did.”
“Yes, of course. God did. But God can kill anyone He pleases. After all, He made everyone.”
Hartley hung his head as if repentant and remonstrated very little in his own defense, and after a session of browbeating his son, the old man softened, handed him a letter of introduction to John Austin, an old school chum, and quietly gave him one hundred pounds. They took their leave of each other on the front steps of the family mansion which loomed behind them glittering with rows of mullioned windows and looking like an overdressed matron. They hugged briefly, ceremoniously, conscious that they may never see each other again.
Hartley made a last-minute call on the widow Bentley whom he had been courting, hoping against hope that she had changed her mind. It was still early in the morning and she saw him briefly in the dining room where she was taking breakfast. Her morning face, without her elaborate makeup, had a shriveling fleshiness that bespoke of the approach of hideousness. She was in a playful humor and while she munched on a croissant, they exchanged quips and witticisms.
“I’ve met your brother,” she remarked, looking up at him impishly.
“I have no doubt,” Hartley retorted, “that he’ll fail your test.”
“Oh, no,” she giggled, “in fact, he’s a perfect five inches. Exactly what I’m looking for.”
“Madame,” Hartley said irritably, “why would you want a Pekinese when you could have a wolfhound?”
“Because one nips while the other bites.”
Hartley gave up: he’d had enough of this coded drawing room talk, a language he despised. He sprang to his feet abruptly, said a curt goodbye, and strolled decisively out of the room tracked by the amused gaze of the widow.
CHAPTER 6
The Mermaid, a brigantine, slipped her shore hawsers early one gray February morning and caught the outgoing tide to open sea. Dawn had not yet broken, and a cloying darkness hung over the estuary like an enormous cobweb. Even in the morning stillness the Mermaid flew a full but limp complement of canvas—three square-rigged sails on her foremast, a gaff-rigged mizzen on her aft mast, and three working jibs.
The Mermaid was in her early teens, nautical middle-age for a wooden boat, and showing signs of aging. She was the same pedigree as the Baltimore clippers, glorious sailing vessels that in 1805 were still hatching on the drawing boards of New England shipyards. But there was no glory left in the Mermaid. She had been roughly used most of her life as a beast of burden. Her sails, once white, were now the drab color of a drought-stricken lawn. Her rigging seemed to sag and be impossibly tangled; her ratlines dangled like loose suspenders. Yet she gave every sign of being a sprightly sailor, especially in the rakish tilt of her masts and the conspicuous sheen of her deck.
She had made the passage to Jamaica several times, usually hauling tools and provisions to the island and barrels of sugar and rum back to England. On this voyage she carried a crew of eighteen, thirty-two paying passengers, and fifteen shackled slaves who were crammed in the forward hold and whose presence, had it been widely known, would have been contentious. The House of Commons had already proposed legislation prohibiting any British ship from transporting slaves, but the measure had been bottled up in the House of Lords. On March 25, 1807, the proposal would finally become law, levying a fine of one hundred pounds for every contraband slave found aboard a British ship. Rather than pay such a steep fine, captains in danger of being boarded and searched by a British warship would resort to the brutal strategy of throwing chained slaves overboard.
The Mermaid drifted gently with the tide, her longboat, manned by six rowers, hovering protectively nearby in case of trouble, her deck swarming with a dozen crewmen who stood by in case they were needed. Below deck most of the passengers slept. The exception was Hartley Fudges, who stood on the poop deck looking at the city with the intensity of a departing lover. Matching his somber mood was a winter sky that daubed the color and sheen of a brown rat over the spires and steeples of London.
“Wind ahoy!” rang out from the crow’s nest. Hartley felt a soft breeze caress his cheek and playfully tug at his sleeves. The sails of the Mermaid fluttered and partly filled and the ship spurted forward with a gentle motion, her bowsprit knitting the seam between the drab dawn sky and the ugly green sea.
* * *
In 1805, an ocean voyage between England and Jamaica was not for the fainthearted. Depending on the weather, the journey could take anywhere from four to eight weeks. Navigation techniques were still primitive, and the possibility of getting lost was very real. Charts on the New World were notoriously inaccurate, and while many of the Indians were peaceful and welcoming, others were savagely territorial and would attack any vessel that ventured too close to their shores.
Calamitous weather aside, the most serious threat to a voyaging ship came from privateers. Little more than run-of-the-mill brigands, the privateer was a marauder supposedly authorized by a government to prey on enemy shipping—a sort of commissioned predator. But, in fact, the privateer did pretty much as he pleased and was not scrupulous about attacking only the enemies of the licensing government. Privateers prowled the shipping lanes of the West Indies preying on fat Spanish galleons and other vessels.
Privateers or not, the Mermaid would sail the route to Jamaica from England that was established by Columbus himself and took advantage of the prevailing winds and currents. She would steer for the Canary Islands and cruise southward parallel to the coast of West Africa, beginning her westerly run only after she had fetched up the Cape Verde Islands. Making landfall near Guadalupe, she would catch the strong trade winds that would send her scudding past the Leeward Islands on a heading for the Greater Antilles and Jamaica.
Aboard the Mermaid was the typical grab bag of European profiteers, adventurers, and plunderers. Jamaica has always bared her bosom to hard men who would use her without tenderness or love. The exception to this observation were the aboriginal Indians whose lifetime briefly overlapped the arrival of their exterminator, Columbus, and whose reverence for the land became apparent only after they had become extinct, leaving virtually no trace of their presence. The European replacements aboard the Mermaid consisted of dispossessed second sons like Hartley Fudges; landless Irish farmers; overseers and plantation functionaries; indentured servants; and, most wretched of all, shackled slaves gasping for breath in the sweltering, vaporous confines of the forward hold where they lay suffocating in the miasmic fumes of their own excrement.
The stark reality aboard a small vessel like the Mermaid was that every life hung on the soundness of the ship and the skill of the captain, a fact that tended to relax the class distinctions rigidly observed on land where everyone lived with the belief that he was in a separate boat. There would be some casual if cautious intermingling among different groups of passengers, except for the Irish and the English, between whom there had always been bad blood.
Most of the passengers were going to Jamaica for purely selfish reasons. The landless Irish, for example, were being lured by the government’s offer of free arable land to white farmers who would cultivate it. By then the dwindling population of white people on the island was drowning in a tidal wave of black slaves. In 1805, there were approximately twenty-one thousand white people to three hundred thousand slaves. Th
is imbalance was only exaggerated by the passing years. Whites simply did not thrive in the West Indies, particularly Jamaica, with colonizers suffering a mortality rate of over 50 percent within the first three months of their arrival. That kind of grim statistic was one reason some English writers of the day had begun calling Jamaica a “graveyard.”
* * *
In addition to being risky, a voyage from England to Jamaica in 1805 was agonizingly slow and cumbersome. Passengers were thrown together in close physical contact that was anything but intimate. You saw the same faces every day but often did not know their stories. Greetings were exchanged daily with strangers whose names you did not know but who could not be ignored without being rude. But eventually, as the days dragged past, casual acquaintance was established among the passengers. Hartley, for example, as the weeks passed, found himself saying good morning to a middle-aged Irish gentleman at the same spot in the companionway that led to the deck, merely because every day they both happened to get up at the same time. Once on deck, Hartley would encounter the familiar crew faces and exchange small talk with other gentlemen and ladies whose daily orbit happened to correspond with his.
On this particular route that the Mermaid followed, the weather was temperate and mild, with a refreshing trade wind coming off the quarterdeck and a daily afternoon shower that cooled down the ship. But occasionally, a squally weather front would roll over the ocean and the Mermaid would toss and prance with a herky-jerky motion that would make some passengers seasick. The crew would quickly herd sick passengers to the lee side of the ship where their vomit would not be wind-borne all over the deck. Seamen would go swarming up the ratlines to take in sail, and for an hour or so the Mermaid would buck and roll frantically. But then the wind would ease and the rain would lift and the sea and the sky would blur in the twilight, and with the falling darkness the stars and constellations blazed with luminosity and brilliance that would enchant the stoniest heart.
One day, two weeks into the journey, Hartley and other passengers who happened to be on deck saw the hatch of the forward hold open and shackled slaves being brought up on deck for fresh air while the crew cleaned out their filthy habitation. During a lull in the transfer, a slave wearing leg irons that tethered him to another suddenly darted for the bowsprit, flung aside a crewman armed with a musket, and leapt overboard, taking his screaming fellow captive along in the suicide plunge. Weighted down with the irons, the two were immediately swallowed up by the bottomless blue, leaving behind a quick, shuddering ripple. Women screamed, men gasped, crewmen rushed to the deck rail. The Mermaid didn’t even heave to for a perfunctory search—the unfortunate men were clearly lost. She simply kept her course while armed crewmen drove the other slaves away from the deck railing.
“That’s a Coromantee for you,” a burly Irishman muttered to Hartley. “Shackling him to an Ibo was pure stupidity.”
“Why is that?” Hartley asked.
“Because they’re very opposite people in temperament. The Ibo wants to stay alive. The Coromantee wants to cut your throat. They’re like the Maroons.”
“You seem to know a lot about both people.”
“I should,” the man chuckled, “I’ve managed them for twenty years in Jamaica.”
“Where in Jamaica?”
“The Mount Pleasant plantation. I’m the head overseer there.”
Hartley was startled. “That’s where I’m going!” he cried. “I have a letter of introduction from my father to John Austin, the resident manager.”
The burly Irishman looked stunned. “Austin is dead. He was murdered by a Coromantee slave six months ago. I’m going to be the new resident manager.”
“My name is Hartley Fudges,” Hartley said, extending his hand.
The Irishman shook it vigorously. “Sinclair Meredith, at your service, sir. You’ve caught me in the place I hate the most—the ocean. I wish man would learn to fly. It’d make coming and going to Jamaica so much easier.”
“Learn to fly!” Hartley grinned. “You mean, like a bird?”
“No, sir. I mean better than a bird. Faster and higher, making this ocean seem to us like a pond. And mark my word, sir, one day it will happen.”
Hartley burst into a wild laughter. The Irishman looked at him and shook his head with an impish grin.
“I like a man who laughs,” he said. “It gets lonely in the bush. But no one is ever lonely as long as he can laugh.”
* * *
It was, Hartley would later admit, a providential encounter. And any sleuth who would go poking around into the cast of characters, as well as the tangled events that had to happen for him to meet Meredith, was certain to find God’s fingerprints all over their meeting. That the Almighty would micromanage an individual’s affairs was not an official teaching of the English church to which Hartley belonged, but it fell within the range of nineteenth-century Anglican beliefs. Nevertheless, whether or not God had anything to do with it, a friendship quickly emerged between Hartley and his godsend, Meredith. Over the next few days, the two men could be seen strolling the decks of the Mermaid talking about everything under the sun and the moon. It was quickly settled between them that Hartley would be given a position under Meredith, to whom he would report, and Hartley accepted this without quibble. Already he had found, what many of his like would find, that life abroad, away from the peering, judgmental eyes of other Englishmen, gave him considerable flexibility in his behavior and professed outlook. He hadn’t even set foot on Jamaican soil but already was anticipating its liberating effect on him.
From Meredith, he also learned some interesting tidbits of information about the island that would soon become Hartley’s home. The older man was a student of the country’s history and had at his fingertips many facts about sugar production and skirmishes between England and Spain over possession of Jamaica. Nearly every morning he and Hartley would pace the forward deck, circling the foremast and chatting amiably within earshot of the occasional moaning that drifted out of the forward hold. Meredith’s attitude toward the peculiar institution of slavery was both clear and morally ambiguous.
“Theoretically,” he explained primly to Hartley, “I’m against slavery. It’s a cruel, brutal business. But I’ve got a job to do, so I do it.”
They trod the wooden deck of the Mermaid in a contemplative silence while Hartley digested this revelation.
“I’m not sure how I feel,” Hartley said humbly. “I don’t have enough experience to say one way or the other.”
Circling the foremast and doing their best to keep away from the working crewmen, the two men exuded the academic air of master and student in a scholarly chat.
They discussed John Austin, the man whom Hartley’s father had written to and whom Meredith was going to replace.
“His murder could have been avoided. If I had to give you one piece of advice it would be this: try to show respect to everyone you meet.”
“Surely not to the slaves.”
“Especially to the slaves.”
“Why?”
“Because they have nothing to lose. I warned Austin. But he wouldn’t listen.”
“What did Austin do?”
“He had a slave punished before his woman, their children, and everyone in his family. It was so unnecessary. I told Austin, ‘You go too far. Whip him in private, the fellow is prepared to accept his punishment but not in front of the people who matter to him. He’s a proud slave.’”
“How can a slave be proud?” Hartley scoffed.
“Pride is all they have left. It’s the only consolation in a wretched life. Most slaves will put up with beatings. But they draw the line at humiliation and insult. Austin wouldn’t listen to me. A week later, the man he punished hacked him to death with a machete. In front of English visitors too.”
They strolled the decks in silence before Hartley asked, “You mentioned the Maroons. Who are the Maroons?”
“They’re a mixed-blood people, the descendants of Indians, Spaniards, and
African slaves. We’ve had two wars with them. The first was when we landed in 1655. The Maroons took to the hills and started a war. They slaughtered practically every patrol we sent among them. They were excellent at camouflage and would pick off our men at will. We started patrolling two men to a horse, one facing front, the other facing back. Even today, the area of the island where the Maroons settled is marked on the English maps as The Land of Look Behind. Finally, the government offered the Maroons 1,500 acres of land in the interior of the island where they could live as a separate people if they would agree to hunt down and return any escaped slaves who tried to hide among them.”
“They agreed to hunt down their own people?”
“They didn’t regard the plantation slaves as their people. That’s what you have to remember about living in Jamaica. Your skin color may be the same as another man’s but it doesn’t automatically make him your ally.”
They walked some more, following the roughly elliptical orbit of planets and skirting close to the forward hold where the slaves were packed.
“The second war,” continued Meredith, “was because of something similar to what Austin did. Two Maroons were flogged in public for pig stealing. Many who witnessed their punishment were plantation slaves, who jeered them. So a war started. But how unnecessary a war! If the men had been privately punished, there would have been no war. I warned Captain Craskell, the superintendent, that there would be trouble if he insisted on the public humiliation of the Maroons. But he wouldn’t listen. So we had a drawn-out war.”
“That was long ago, though, wasn’t it?”
“Ten years. Not so long. It was a very destructive war. At least three plantations were destroyed and all the white people on them murdered. The only thing that saved us were the dogs and the fact that only one group of Maroons, the Trelawneys, were involved. The other four Maroon tribes refused to fight.”
The Family Mansion Page 6
