“What dogs? What kind of dogs?”
“Bloodhounds. Big savage beasts. We brought one hundred of them from Cuba along with forty handlers. A colonel by the name of Quarrell arranged the importation. Once the Maroons heard about the dogs, they surrendered. Most of them were shipped off to Africa.”
“What happened to the slave who killed Austin?”
“He was burned to death alive. But before he died, he managed to free himself and fling a firebrand in the face of his executioner. I’ve never seen anything like it. But then, he was a Coromantee.”
The two men continued their foremast circling in silence, before Meredith added, “Just remember, in Jamaica you can do more damage with your mouth than with your fist.”
The man is a fool, thought Hartley to himself. But he said nothing.
* * *
The unthinking man asks, “What?” The thinking man asks, “Why?” This was not a truism known to Hartley Fudges since he himself was more unthinking than thinking. His tendency was to accept things as they were given and not ask why they were that way. This particular point of view was also paramount in Meredith’s way of looking at life. He accepted everything and took his assigned place for granted in whatever apparatus, however evil, was prevailing.
One monotonous day at sea, Hartley and Meredith were talking about slavery and whether or not it was good or bad. Meredith was decisive in his opinion: it was neither good nor bad, but necessary. Without slavery, Meredith said, sugar production in the West Indies would be impossible.
“But why?” asked Hartley. “Why do people have to be enslaved to cut the cane and make the sugar?”
“Because it’s tedious, backbreaking labor; no white man would want to do it. In fact, no black man wants to do it. But he has to.”
“But why?”
“Why, what? . . . I’ll give you a bit of advice,” said Meredith with an avuncular air that he used often on Hartley, who was beginning to hate it, “don’t ask why too often when you reach Jamaica. Some countries are why countries. Some are what countries. Jamaica is definitely a what country. And slavery is definitely not a why proposition. It’s strictly what. What do you need in order to complete the harvest? I need twenty slaves. But if you ask a question as a why question, you’re likely to get in trouble.”
“With whom?”
“Well, with your conscience, to begin with. And with the feeling of being ridiculous.”
“I don’t understand,” said Hartley.
“No, of course you don’t. But you will.”
“You’re being cryptic.”
“They outnumber us better than ten to one,” said Meredith with a shiver. “And what we’re doing with them is truly ridiculous. It is ridiculous to pretend that one man can own another like an animal. But we do it every day. The trick is to pretend that doing it is normal when it’s really ridiculous.”
“I still don’t understand,” protested Hartley.
“No, of course you don’t. But you will.”
Hartley was not satisfied. He felt as if the older man was being condescending and deliberately fuzzy with him. But Meredith was through talking about the subject and made it clear by strolling away, leaving the mystified Hartley standing near midship peering out at the encircling emptiness.
* * *
Three weeks passed slowly during which the friendship between Meredith and Hartley Fudges grew and developed. At the beginning of the fourth week the cry of “Sail ahoy!” rang from the crow’s nest and everyone on deck peered sharply at the horizon where a smudge of white indicated the presence of a vessel heading on an intercept course. The captain gave orders and seamen swarmed over the ratlines to set more sail. No one said anything to the passengers but Meredith muttered confidently to Hartley, “She’s a privateer. The captain’s going to try to outrun her.”
Flying every sail she was rigged to carry, the Mermaid increased her speed in the steady trade wind. Darkness fell and a nail clip of a new moon hung from velvety black sky radiating a feeble glow. The captain ordered all lights out and under a mountain of darkness the Mermaid drove to a night breeze, trying to put distance between her and the intruder. Hartley and Meredith stood on deck watching this cat-and-mouse game being grimly played out. The pursuing vessel was trying to position herself between the Mermaid and the Lesser Antilles, forcing her quarry to change course and take an unfavorable tack in the trade winds. Around one o’clock in the morning, it was obvious to everyone on deck that the distance between the pursuing ship and the Mermaid was closing and that within a few hours, at the present rate, the two would be within range of cannon fire. The Mermaid was a shadowy presence plowing a dark trail through the night while her pursuer, arrogantly ablaze with lights, bore down unrelentingly on her. Every stitch of canvas she could carry, the brigantine was flying, and in the watery dawn light the two ships resembled coy dancers who were swaying to a synchronized rhythm only they could hear.
With the dawn, passengers gradually appeared on deck to gather in groups at the railing of the Mermaid and ogle at the smudge of white on the horizon that marked the appearance of another ship. Word soon spread about what was really happening and a wave of anxiety swept over the passengers. Some women knelt down on the decks and prayed for deliverance. As the privateer closed on her, the Mermaid opened her gun ports, baring the teeth of four cannons she carried for self-defense. But even as the vessels inched nearer and nearer to one another, it was unclear whether the brigantine would be able to lose the privateer in her wake or whether the predator would come within range of delivering a crippling broadside. As the privateer drew closer, her lines and rigging became evident: she was a French-built frigate—a ship of war armed with twenty-four guns. She drew close enough to hail the Mermaid and order her to heave to or be fired upon.
The captain gave no reply but took the helm of the brigantine himself and sent the crew scurrying aloft to make little adjustments to the trim of her sails. The cat-and-mouse game lasted nearly two days. During that time the pursuer occasionally tacked as she tried to put herself between expected landfall and the Mermaid, but each time she did that maneuver, she lost ground to the brigantine who was driving for her first port that appeared in the distance fuzzy and dim like a pencil sketch.
On the third day when Hartley came on deck, he spotted the pursuing vessel coming about and heading for another set of sails on the horizon from which the Mermaid had come. A couple of hours later came the rumble of cannon fire and in the distance they could see the privateer had snared the other vessel with grappling irons and was pulling her close in a deadly embrace. On the deck, passengers watched impassively as the other ship was boarded to the occasional scream or report of musket fire. Hartley felt like he was watching a wolf devouring a lamb. The captain came on deck and a gentleman who wore a clerical collar hurried up to him and pointed to the carnage being enacted right in front of the Mermaid.
“Can’t you help, Captain?” the man asked.
“We are not a warship, sir,” the captain replied sternly.
“But what they must be doing to the poor ship,” the chaplain sighed, “to those unfortunate people.”
“I’m sorry,” the captain said gruffly. “We can only be grateful that it’s not us.”
Driving in a quartering wind with a bone in her teeth, the brigantine scudded away until the strange frigate that in the distance looked as if she had engulfed the other ship was sinking lower and lower on the horizon. After that, the chase was over. By evening the frigate and her prey were once again a smudge of white canvas against the blurry horizon. Night fell and the Mermaid, her lights blazing, her crew and passengers infected with the jubilation of escape, mingled on the deck to starlight with a celebratory air.
* * *
The next morning dawned to an empty sea and speckles of land rising shiny and glittery like unburied treasures ahead of the brigantine’s bowsprit.
It was the islands of the Lesser Antilles, all their unadorned beauty and splendor
magically magnified to the crew and passengers whose eyes for the last five weeks had been scraping against the barren spectacle of waves and a horizon as plain and threadbare as a hangman’s noose.
CHAPTER 7
After five weeks aboard the Mermaid, Hartley Fudges was sick of the sea. He was tired of its moods, of its never-ending changeableness. Many men grew to love its inconstancy with the longing of a child for a hardhearted mother. Hartley Fudges, however, had discovered that he was an unrepentant landlubber. The sight of the Leeward Islands sliding past the starboard of the Mermaid as the brigantine picked her way past the Lesser Antilles on course to Jamaica gave him a desire to feel the comforting contact of his feet with the unmovable earth. One morning he groaned to Meredith, “I’m sick and tired of being aboard a ship.”
“Not much longer now,” Meredith murmured. “In a couple of days you’ll get your wish for land.”
Hartley didn’t really believe this, but within the next two days Jamaica loomed off the brigantine’s port, emerging out of the sea in a diorama of vivid green mountains, shimmering pastures, and grinning white sand beaches. What struck Hartley most was the garish blend of blue and green hues as if a deranged artist had spilled dripping paint over every mountain and valley. It was this rich tapestry of color that had inspired Columbus to rhapsodize in his journal that Jamaica was “the fairest island that eyes have beheld.”
The Mermaid skirted Jamaica, heading for her dorsal side, and for hours the island bewitched the sea-weary passengers with a coquettish peep show of her contoured green valleys and swollen mountains. Hartley sat on the bow of the ship riveted to the spectacular unfolding of the island, wondering what lay ahead of him. It occurred to him that he could die there, but he shrugged off that possibility with a young man’s cockiness. Meredith appeared at his side and pointed to a tangle of masts and spars that loomed above the shoreline and was almost hidden against the backdrop of green hills.
“Falmouth,” he said. “Our destination.”
* * *
Twenty-first-century Falmouth is a town in a stupor; nineteenth-century Falmouth was a bustling port that handled the export of sugar and rum and the importation of slaves. In 1805 when Hartley Fudges arrived, Falmouth was already thirty-six years old, having been established in 1769 by Thomas Reid, a plantation owner. It had been pressed into service as a port not because it made a good roadstead for oceangoing vessels but because it was conveniently located near some one hundred plantations worked by 106,000 slaves, who produced an avalanche of rum and sugar for the English.
The harbor was thick with ships swinging at anchor in an open unprotected bay, their rigging and masts and spars making a tangled cobweb against the skyline. Enormous big-bellied canoes called lighters crawled in a ragged line like giant ants to and from the ships, loading and unloading them. Sometimes the oarsmen and laborers broke into a chantey as they worked to unload the ships of tools, agricultural implements, and other manufactured goods, or formed a human chain to transfer barrels of sugar and rum to their gaping holds. Ashore, at the very edge of the sea, were rows of cut-stone warehouses and government buildings abuzz with scurrying overseers, slaves, dockworkers, shipwrights, carpenters, and hawkers and peddlers. On the day Hartley landed, the harbor was a thicket of masts and spars and stays and rigging from some thirty anchored ships.
The Mermaid was met by a pilot boat and escorted to her place of anchorage between two enormous barks whose masts and spars towered over her own. Dressed in their Sunday finery, passengers swarmed the brigantine’s deck, everyone talking eagerly at once, their mood ranging from quiet joyfulness to open jubilation at finally and safely arriving. Never had land looked lovelier to the festive passengers, and the harbor rang with their excited chatter intermingled with the noises and cries from the lighters and anchored ships.
After an agonizing wait, the passengers of the Mermaid along with their luggage were ferried to shore by a lighter. They then milled around in a cavernous cut-stone warehouse, waiting to have their travel documents examined. An hour or so later, Hartley and Meredith found themselves in a crowded street swarming with slaves, laborers, and townspeople thrown together in an exotic, helter-skelter mix.
It was a hot, dry day with a February sun England felt only occasionally in August and the heat was so strong that it swept over the streets like a coarse broom. Everywhere Hartley looked were brown and black faces mixed in with a sprinkling of white, and in spite of the sapping heat, everyone seemed energetic, talkative, and vigorous. Hartley overheard snippets of talk coming from every side of him and realized with a shock that most of it was incomprehensible.
“What language are these people speaking?” he asked Meredith who seemed to have almost instantly blended into the surrounding sea of humanity.
“Jamaican,” said Meredith, adding over his shoulder, “stick close to me and watch out for pickpockets.”
While Meredith made arrangements to hire a wagon to transport them and their luggage to the plantation, bargaining with a burly brown man over price, Hartley was possessed by a feeling recently landed travelers often have of being in a dream. The whole colorfully chaotic scene seemed staged for his benefit, and he glanced from one strange sight to the next like a giddy theatergoer who had just blundered into the middle of a melodrama.
* * *
The most immediate danger to Hartley and other newcomers did not come from lurking pickpockets, but from a source that was barely visible: the mosquito.
Nineteenth-century Falmouth, for all its industry and wealth, was an unhealthy town wedged between swamplands that provided the perfect hatcheries for the yellow fever mosquito. In 1805, yellow fever was the scourge of Jamaica. It is spread by the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which flourished in the wetlands where humans lived. Magnified, the Aedes aegypti would be shown to be a loathsome monster, but its tiny size hides its gruesomeness. Little larger than a few specks of dirt, it has a shiny body wrapped in a chitinous shell that, under the microscope, makes it look armor-plated. Its legs are bent and strutted like the wings of a biplane, and its translucent abdomen bloats and turns red when the insect sucks blood from its victim. The mosquito is a killer but not an assassin. Its aim is not to kill the host, but to suck the blood it needs to survive. To do this, it injects its victim with an anticoagulant to enable the blood to flow freely—that is, when the virus is transferred.
Three to six days after being infected, the victim has symptoms that are flulike—body aches, a raging high fever, chills, headache, and vomiting. For many people, the indisposition ends a week or so later after a respite in bed. But many others, while appearing to briefly recover, develop a massive infection that shuts down the kidneys and liver, causing the jaundiced yellow complexion that gives the disease its name. The fatality rate in such cases, which number about one in six, is around 50 percent. Even today, there is no treatment for yellow fever beyond the usual preachments about bed rest and plenty of fluids.
Hartley Fudges, along with the other passengers of the Mermaid, was the proverbial “sitting duck.”
* * *
Meredith said he knew of a boardinghouse where they could have a room for the night, and in the blazing heat the two men set off briskly toward it. The section of the town they passed through was laid out tidily with houses that crouched right on the edge of a rutted marl road that had no sidewalk, and every now and again the men would have to stop to allow a dray cart or carriage to squeeze past. Maidservants hanging clothes out to dry peered sullenly at them.
Soon they reached a white house that was practically indistinguishable from its neighbors except for a wooden fence protectively encircling a scruffy lawn whose bare spots bespoke a recent drought. Meredith knocked on the front door, and a black servant wearing a uniform opened it.
“Is your mistress at home?” Meredith asked.
The maid mumbled for them to wait here and they stood in the entrance of the front door from which perch Hartley examined the drawing room, which was
furnished and trimmed in a style and with materials that belonged in an English cottage. The chairs and tables, along with the decorative touches, were of such strong English influence that the entire ensemble—from the porcelain figurines on display on a whatnot to the antimacassars on the stuffed chairs—might have been found in the house of a chartered accountant in London. Hartley was no expert but the small and tidy house struck him as vainly struggling to maintain the prissy decorum of a tea party among desolate and vulgar surroundings. Even as they stood in the foyer they could hear the noise of the waterfront like a distant boisterous drumbeat.
The landlady came and greeted Meredith like an old friend. They rented two rooms and had a quiet dinner. While they ate she stopped by their table and bluntly asked Meredith, “What’s England going to do about that madman Napoleon?”
Meredith paused in his chewing and replied, “The king hasn’t told me yet.”
“Well, he better get up the gumption to do something. I know about those little Frenchmen. They’re like cellar rats. Always spreading trouble.”
Then she wandered off to make small talk at another table.
“What on earth did she mean?” Hartley asked.
“She’s worried about Napoleon,” Meredith said evenly.
“Here, in Jamaica, they worry about Napoleon?”
“They worry about everything that an Englishman in London might worry about.”
“But why?”
“Because Jamaicans are worriers. And they think they are part of us.”
After dinner, they went for a walk through the neighborhood of Georgian homes and took in the bracing sea air. They then returned to the house and went to bed early. Before he fell asleep, Hartley fed a swarm of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Lying in bed, he could hear them whining around his face and occasionally feel the piercing stab of a bite.
The Family Mansion Page 7
