Casca 17: The Warrior

by Barry Sadler

  In two days they were in Levuka, and Larsen and the others were surprised at the English city they found on the small tropical island.

  The wharves were as well built as any in San Francisco, and ships were tied up from all over the world. There were three-masted deepwatermen, out of Bremen and Antwerp and London, carrying pots and pans, iron stoves, horseshoes, anvils and axes, shotguns and muskets, and a thousand items from Europe to ease the life of the men and women who were establishing homes in the newest British colony.

  From America, too, there were ships with farm tools and bicycles, buggies and drays, elegant clocks from New England, pocket knives and tableware from Pennsylvania.

  There was a junk from China unloading silks and satins, soaps and perfumes, and fine porcelains. They would carry back beche-de-mer and sandalwood and coconut oil and sharks' fins.

  And there were the slavers, known as blackbirders, mostly small, fast schooners similar to the Rangaroa. They were all clustered together on the western edge of the harbor, away from the main trading places and close by the offices of the Colonial Sugar Refinery Company.

  The company itself did not deal in slaves, but arranged contracts for its Australian planters. Indeed, through shrewd manipulation of the letter of the law, blackbirding was not slavery but recruiting of indentured labor.

  Each slave signed a contract, which, of course, he could not read. Nor was he offered the alternative of declining to sign. In return for the signature on the contract his recruiter received a cash payment that varied according to the slave's appearance, strength, and skills. Close by the CSR Company's offices there was a stockyard where the blackbirds were penned and awaiting valuation, and an auction block where their lives and liberties were hammered down to the highest bidder.

  But the auctioneer didn't say "sold" as the hammer fell. That would make it slavery, and the British Empire had outlawed slavery, long before the United States had.

  As the auctioneer brought the bidding to a close with a rap of his hammer he said: "Indentured by a contract of seven years to work as directed in the Colony of New South Wales, at the rate of three pence a day and all found."

  "All found" meant one bowl of rice a day. Anything else the slave might want—a piece of meat, some tobacco, a hat for shelter from the blazing tropical sun, a pair of pants, or the use of a woman—he would have to buy from the company store out of his three pennies a day.

  There was no pay for Sundays, but there was a day's work all the same—building, maintaining, and furnishing the Methodist church and its parsonage, which the company maintained on each of its properties for the good of the heathen souls of its indentured labor.

  At the end of his seven years under the lash, if the blackbird was one of the few who survived, the CSR Company paymaster would present him with an account that showed how he had spent his three pennies a day and how much more he was in debt to the company.

  The slave could not read the account nor add up its figures, any more than he could understand the new seven-year contract he was forced to sign to pay off his accumulated debts.

  And in the House of Lords in London, learned gentlemen made speeches congratulating each other on the splendid progress of the Colony of New South Wales, which was prospering without need of the evils of slavery, an example to all the world thanks to the practical and Christian system of indenture which had replaced the convict system.

  The small city of Levuka was laid out neatly around the harbor and up into the foothills of the mountains. The swampland had been drained and the waters diverted through a pleasantly meandering canal. The elegant ladies of the city, wives of the administrators of the colonial government and of the sugar company officers, promenaded the canal footwalls under their parasols, stopping to meet and chat at one or another of the pretty little bridges. There were several gentlemen's clubs, numerous churches, and a freemasons' lodge.

  The blackened ruins of the U.S. consul's residence stood out starkly against the green of the jungle behind it. No amount of inquiry could elicit for Larsen any explanation for the existence of a U.S. consulate in a city whose only real business was slavery.

  But the people of Fiji had looked at the biggest and the best house in the city, had come to their own conclusions about the activities of the consul, and burned his mansion to the ground.

  The U.S. government was outraged, and the president demanded that Cakabau pay compensation of ten thousand U.S. dollars, about a hundred times what the house had cost to build and roughly ten thousand times all the U.S. dollars in Fiji.

  But the cannibal king was just starting to enjoy his monarchy, and did not relish the implied threat that the U.S. might depose him and set up a democracy in his islands.

  So Cakabau had sought around for a village small enough to subdue easily but large enough to provide the number of slaves needed to justify a recruitment fee of ten thousand U.S. dollars. Navola filled the bill nicely, was sufficiently far away to minimize any repercussions, and moreover was on an uncharted island and therefore officially did not exist.

  Larsen refused to tie up the Rangaroa alongside the blackbirders, arguing with the harbormaster that he carried free men, not blackbirds. That they had chosen to sell themselves was not his concern, and he wanted no part of it. He unloaded the sail canoe that would carry Sonolo and the muskets back to Navola, and it bobbed on the tide alongside the Rangaroa. Before leaving Navola he had insisted that the islanders not offer themselves to the sugar company until after the Rangaroa had sailed.

  His ship had lost many weeks of valuable time, and Larsen pushed his crew and the local stevedores to turn the ship around in only two days, working late into the night with the aid of kerosene lamps.

  Sonolo and the others farewelled the Rangaroa from the wharf, then walked to the CSR Company's offices, where the selected hundred men signed their contracts and Sonolo collected the recruitment fee.

  That same afternoon the hundred sailed for the Tweed River in New South Wales, locked in the hold of Captain Bentley's famous blackbird schooner Albatross.

  On the next morning's tide Sonolo and his crew set out for Navola, carrying ten brand-new Bonehill muskets.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Casca had long since decided against any attempt at enslaving the cheerful, happy, essentially harmless people of Navola, or their neighbors in Lakuvi.

  But he urgently needed to make some money, and slaving had been his purpose in coming to these islands. Nor, in the time that he had been in the Pacific islands, had he seen any prospect of any other way of turning a sizable penny. He certainly had none of Larsen's revulsion for the trade. He'd been a slave himself more than once, and had owned slaves without number. As far as he could see, the practice of slaving was as much a part of the human race as warfare or thievery or deception. He was as happy to be a slaver as he was to fight, steal, or deceive, as circumstances might demand.

  But stranded on the most westward of the Cannibal Isles, way outside any shipping lanes and without arms, men, or a ship, he could not see how he was to accomplish the trick of obtaining such a cargo and getting it to Australia.

  Cakabau's threatened raid seemed to present the nearest thing he was likely to find to an opportunity. If the slaver, Savage, carried the raiders to Navola in his ship, as seemed likely, then there was a chance to defeat Cakabau, capture his men, seize the ship, and sail it to Australia.

  The plan had a few ragged edges, but for the moment nothing else presented itself, so Casca continued to think along these lines.

  One considerable difficulty was legality. Everything he'd heard convinced him that the coterie of one-time thieves and forgers who ran Australia liked everything to be scrupulously legal, which was what accounted for slaves being processed through the recruitment center in Levuka rather than being shipped direct from capture to the Tweed River, legality, and the temper of the Irish-slaves who made up the alternative labor force of Australia.

  The Paddys, who themselves had been similarly
dragged in chains from their homes in Ireland, deeply resented the efforts of the landowners to import slaves while they were seeking work for pay. Whenever they could, they attacked slaver ships as they docked, overpowering the authorities by the sheer fury of their unarmed assault and freeing the blackbirds, who would run away and join the bush tribes of aboriginals.

  The planters, the slavers, and the CSR Company would all be badly out of pocket, and lacked any legal base for the pursuit of their escaped workers. So the company insisted that the indenture contracts be signed in another, suitably respectable British colony prior to the labor's arrival in Australia. The company could then send the New South Wales Police Force to recover their indentured workers at the public's expense.

  Even the now free Paddys had never been referred to as slaves, although doomed to work under the lash. Through another ingenious manipulation of the letter of the law under the system known as British Justice, they were known as convicts. Which meant that they had been convicted—usually tried and found guilty of some serious offense, such as snaring a hare on the lands that their families had owned for the past thousand years but were now the property of the English judge trying them. These offenses, together with others—such as the wearing of the green or the poaching of a trout from his Lordship's stream—merited hanging, and the English judges were liberal in handing down death sentences.

  A merciful British government would then commute these sentences to a life of penal servitude in the police colony of New South Wales.

  The hapless Irish, with their firm belief in an eternity of paradise hereafter, and having been economically denied even the prospect of sin, would have preferred to escape their sorry plight at the end of a rope, but the option was never extended.

  In the police colony they were allocated to slave either on government works or for landowners such as Sir Joseph Banks, the private owner of Cuba, founder of the Royal Society and the man who had sent Bligh and the Bounty to Tahiti on an errand to carry breadfruit seedlings at public expense to Cuba to feed his African slaves.

  Australia was a fair bit larger than Cuba, and Sir Joseph had found it expedient to share its ownership with a few dozen or so cronies and relatives.

  After the mutiny against Bligh the control of the penal colony was seized by the warders—the New South Wales Corps—military criminals who had been given the choice of hanging in England for crimes such as cowardice, desertion, and forgery, or acting as screws in New South Wales. Once Bligh was deposed, they established the world's first police state, as proclaimed in the Government Gazette of the day, along with a virtually free issue of rum similarly proclaimed, which kept the entire population rotten drunk for some weeks, ensuring that the coup went unresisted and virtually unnoticed.

  The convict slave who cranked the press for the Gazette that falsely accused Governor Bligh of treason and announced the rum issue, received as his reward the right to run the colony's only newspaper. The new masters of the colony gave him the Government Gazette printing press, and the Sydney Daily Times was born.

  By 1867 affairs in the colony had been so nicely managed that in London Sir Warwick Fatfeld, Chairman of the Bank of New South Wales, would leave the Threadneedle Street boardroom of the bank and stroll to the House of Lords, where he could make a pretty speech congratulating his cousin—the chairman of the Colonial Sugar Refinery Company of New South Wales—on his splendid achievement in providing cheap and plentiful sugar for the tables of the Empire without the necessity of indulging in the disgusting and un-Christian practice of slavery.

  At their gentlemen's club he had already privately congratulated his cousin on the splendid contribution the CSR Company had made to the family coffers.

  Another cousin, the saintly and venerable Bishop Forthdike, of the Anglican Church of New South Wales but conveniently pensioned off to London where he could enjoy the cricket, would rise in his seat in the same exalted chamber to confirm that his colleague, the Right Reverend Morris Ormond, Moderator General of the Methodist Church in Australia—but, of course, being Methodist, not a member of the House of Lords—had told him of the happy lives the indentured Fijians enjoyed on the New South Wales sugar fields, of their devotion to their church, and the selfless way they devoted their Sundays to working on their churches and on their pastors' houses and to tending the crops of the pastors and their families.

  A month later, in Sydney, Sir James Fatfeld would run an editorial in the family newspaper, the Sydney Daily Times, extolling the speech his brother Sir Warwick had made in the Lords and calling for his further well-merited advancement and preferment in the peerage of the British Empire.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The return of Sonolo's canoe with its cargo of ten muskets was an occasion for great rejoicing in the village. Semele, Mbolo, and Casca each rode in the stern of a twenty-man canoe to greet Sonolo at the opening in the reef, while every other craft in the village hung back a little behind them

  The three canoes traveled abreast from the shore, Semele and Mbolo pulling as lustily on their paddles as Casca was on his. If any one of the three was tired when they got to the reef, it was Casca, and he resolved once again that he must spend more time in the canoes. It irked him to see these old men plying their paddles so effortlessly when he was starting to tire.

  Sonolo dropped his sail as soon as he had negotiated the opening to the reef, and lines of plaited vines were passed aboard to be taken up by the three canoes. The sixty men ceremoniously towed the sail canoe to the beach below the village, and where every man, woman, and child who could not fit into one of the boats waited.

  The three canoes ran up onto the beach and a hundred hands seized the lines to haul the sail canoe ashore. Semele, Mbolo, and Casca took up positions on the beach, and the single crate containing the guns was placed before them with great ceremony. Casca was impatient to inspect the contents, but was forced to sit in silence while Sonolo told the entire story of his voyage from Levuka to the island. The great kava bowl was brought from the chief's house, the whale's tooth on its long rope placed at Sonolo's feet, and he was offered the first bib of kava.

  The second bib was offered to the crate, and Mbolo clapped in acceptance on its behalf, took the bib and poured it over the crate, clapped his hands three times, intoned "matha," and returned the cup.

  Now, thought Casca, but he was deceived. The bibo passed next to Semele, then to Mbolo, then to himself, and then it seemed around the entire population of the village. Although it was not yet noon, Casca began to wonder if he would get to see the guns by daylight.

  Eventually, when some protocol that Casca could not even guess at had been satisfied, Sonolo shouldered the crate and the whole village headed for the chief's house.

  Casca looked around for a keg of gunpowder, and not seeing one, began to feel very uneasy.

  At the chief's house the whole procedure was repeated again, this time Casca noting that his own importance had somehow been subtly diminished, although only very slightly.

  "The hell with rank," he muttered to himself, just so long as he got the full works."

  But still Casca had to wait.

  Sonolo now went into a detailed description of the island of Ovalau as seen from the sea when he approached it on the deck of the Rangaroa. This was followed by an immensely more detailed description of the town of Levuka.

  In spite of his impatience Casca was moved to admiration. A trained engineer surveyor in Caesar's legions could not have done better, could not even have done as well.

  Sonolo described the arc of buildings that spanned the waterfront, and the British fort that guarded the harbor, although most of its guns were trained inland as a precaution against insurrection; Cakabau's white palace with its flag flying, a miniature replica, it seemed to Casca, of Buckingham Palace in London, where the King of England lived. Sonolo described the many ships that jammed the roads in the harbor, the dress of their seamen, and the strange cargoes he saw unloaded.

  He explained his
interview with the CSR Company agent, the signing of the contracts, and then, to Casca's complete astonishment, he recounted the auctioning of each of the hundred men, ending each individual tale with the amount for which each man was sold.

  As he got to this piece of information everybody in the room would cheer at the figure, and then there would be some spirited conversation as all of the sold man's most intimate friends confirmed that he was well worth the price.

  These prices ranged between three and ten pounds, amounts which meant nothing to the islanders, but they cheered just the same. But to Casca the sums indicated that human flesh was indeed cheap in these parts. Assuming that the plantation owner also had to pay Captain Bentley a pound or two for the transportation of his men, he would be buying his slaves for less than fifty American dollars each.

  "Too damned cheap," he muttered to himself, and quickly realized that the company agent had probably organized a closed auction to swindle Sonolo of the true price of his tribesmen.

  As far as Casca could tell, Sonolo had been similarly swindled in the price of the muskets, as almost all of the money received for the men had apparently gone to their purchase.

  At last, and after much more ceremony, the crate was opened, and Casca was relieved to see that they were first class, muzzle-loading, cap and ball muskets made by Bonehill, one of the best English gunsmiths. He was even more relieved to see that the crate contained ramrods, a plentiful supply of shot and caps, and ten powder horns.

  Sonolo set up a demonstration of the power of the weapons. He used a number of men to represent the logs of the outer palisade of the village, and set up his musketeers behind them. Other men representing Cakabau's warriors took up some of the muskets and went through a dumb show of expending their charges uselessly on the stockade logs, each of which reacted comically by clutching at himself as if hit with something like a flying stone, while the defending musketeers crouching behind him laughed lustily.