Sacred Hunger (32 page)

A ship is a public place and the Liverpool Merchant was little more than a hundred feet long from stem to stern. Paris would have been surprised to learn the extent to which his words and actions had been noted.

Cavana maintained silence for some moments more to see if the surgeon had more questions. He discovered in himself a reluctance to let this conversation come to an end.

He said, “They don’t use hard enough wood for it, these days. They should use greenheart or ironwood for the pins.”

“I see, yes.” Paris thought he could detect the accents of Wales in the other’s voice, much muted. He looked up briefly to see Hughes still straddling the boom, his bare feet against the smooth projections of the saddle on the bowsprit.

Beyond him the sky was darker now and there was a hush over everything, presaging rain.

“There is quite some wear on the pins then?”’ he said.

Cavana looked for some moments at the face of the surgeon. He saw nothing there but a serious and kindly attentiveness. “Well, the pins now,” he said at last. Unaccustomed feelings of friendliness rose in him. He was suddenly glad to have this work to do and to explain; and he felt something like gratitude towards this vague-seeming man for providing the occasion. “The pins,” he said, almost eagerly, “they have got to be as hard as you can get and they have got to fit snug because the wheel that is inside the shell of the block turns on them, d’you see; the hole is bored through the middle and the block-maker must take care to make it a one-tenth part less than the measure round of the pin.”

Paris, to whom this had not been entirely comprehensible, nodded gravely. “Well,” he said, “I can see that the choice of wood is of first importance.”

‘I know about all manner of blocks,”

Cavana said. He paused a moment, then added— and Paris did not know what a mark of favour was being shown him—”I was apprentice to a block-maker for the navy. I worked three years in the dockyards at Plymouth.”

‘Did you so? But you left it for the sea?”’

“I took to the sea, yes.” Cavana looked down again to his work. He had spoken on a brusquer note which Paris at first thought due to the nature of his question, pressing too closely on the man’s past; but then he saw that Barton had appeared and was sniffing at the air on the starboard side of the mainmast. Facing that way, Cavana had seen him sooner. Paris knew he would not speak again now and felt sorry for an occasion lost.

He turned away and moved to where Barton was standing. The mate gave him good-day and directed sharp looks towards Hughes and Cavana, whose head was now down over his work.

“Rain before long,” he said. “The men ashore will get a good wettin”.”

‘What are they gone for? I saw that there were casks for water, but they had cutting tools in the boat also.”

“Aye, they are gone to cut stanchions to make a barricado.” Seeing that Paris had not understood this, Barton gave his peering, strangely benevolent-seeming smile. There was nothing he liked better than the chance to deliver some felicitous phrasing. “The barricado,” he said, “is a fence we makes with wood stakes clear across the foremost part of the quarterdeck. Now you may ask what is the use of that. But you have to bear in mind, Mr Paris, that when we have our full copplement of slaves aboard, it might amount to two hundred and more. They will be kept below at night but in fair weather, in the daytime, they will be allowed up for air and exercise—they has to be let up if you want ‘em alive an” kickin’. Captain Thurso usually makes “em dance for a half hour or so in the mornin” an’ that gener’ly answers the purpose pretty well. Now you think of all them black heads gettin’ together an’ talkin’ soft in their own lingo—we don’t know what they are sayin’ an’ we can’t stop “em whisperin” together. You may not think it to look at “em, now that they are mallancholy and cast down, but they are treacly sly devils. If you could open up one of their skulls you’d find a plan of the ship printed in there. They knows all sorts of little things you wouldn’t suppose.

They knows where keys is kept, they knows where the gun chest is, they knows where they can get hold of spikes to break their fetters. While we are in sight of land is the dangerous time.” Barton made a theatrical gesture towards the shore. “There it is,” he said. “Before their very eyes. They waits for the right moment, then they rushes the quarterdeck, an” they are desprit by then so they ain’t easy to stop. So we build a fence across an’ we stick two of the swivel cannon through it. Think of the effect, Mr Paris. There they are, plottin’ mischief agin us, like the varments they are. Then they see this fence.” The mate paused again to make a spreading gesture with his palms to show the breadth and impenetrable nature of the barricade. He rolled his ferret’s eyes to indicate the consternation of the negroes, faced with this obstacle to their plans. ‘They see the mouths of the guns pokin” through,” he said. ‘Think of the effect on ‘em. It’s all in the mind, sir.” Barton tapped his head and winked at Paris, to whom it came now that the mate was a considerable artist. The rain, which had been threatening so long, now began to fall, the first slow and heavy drops making distinct and separate sounds of impact on the deck and the stretched canvas of the slave awning.

The rain came down on the shore party as they worked among the mangrove thickets in the tidal swampland bordering the estuary, chopping at the bases of the stems, knee-deep sometimes in the salt mud, stumbling and cursing among the arching roots of the mangroves. The rain obliterated all sight except of what was immediately before them and all sound but that of itself. It fell with a loud continuous drumming on the patient leaves, so thick and fleshy that they barely dipped under the onslaught. Within a minute the men were wet to the skin, their clothes clinging to them. Under the eyes of Haines they worked on without a pause, figures so completely beset by water as to seem almost submerged, the deluge from above indistinguishable from the sprays they shook on themselves as they wrenched at the branches.

The downpour ended abruptly, as at some signal. The surge of the sea came back to them with a curious kind of tentativeness, like a vessel filling slowly. From somewhere nearby there came the low, bubbling celebration of pigeons, then a series of fugitive chatterings from further in among the dripping trees. It grew hotter. The sun was concealed but all-pervasive, spreading below the leaden skin of the sky with the energy of poison, until the whole was suffused and livid with it. Each of the men there, sweat replacing rain as they toiled on in the sickly heat, felt in some fashion that the sky was infected.

Steam rose from the ground, from the foliage of the trees and their soaked clothing. Their sweat prickled them and the stinging creatures of the swampland, taking to the air again, guzzled the sweat as a sauce to the blood. There was a sweet heavy smell of flowers and odours of decay rose from the spongy ground and from the brackish slime of the fallen mangrove leaves.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Sullivan groaned, slithering in mud, bedevilled by mosquitoes, grasping at the wet stems to force them down enough for a blow of his axe.

“I thowt you had finished wi” that gibrish, long ago,” Billy Blair said, slapping at his neck, his small, blunt-nosed, belligerent face moist and furious beneath the red kerchief round his brows. ‘allyou said as much, anyway. But it is dawnin” on me that you canna be trusted, Sullivan.” Billy felt an equal fury at the wretched discomfort of the work and at Sullivan’s inconsistency in the matter of religion for adding to the baffling nature of the universe.

‘I was born for better things,” Sullivan said, pausing to wipe away sweat and mucus from around his mouth, and leaving a smear of blood from the numerous small cuts on the back of his hand.

“Yeh,” sneered Billy, “playin” the fiddle in a crimp-house.”

‘allyou can keep your snot-box out of me fiddlin”,” Sullivan said, on a note of anger rare with him.

These two might have fallen out further if McGann had not chosen this moment to voice some thoughts. His life was given over to small stratagems; his motive for philosophizing now was to obtain a breathing-space. ‘Well, takin” it a’ in a’,” he said, ‘we are still men, aren’t we?”’ Sun and rain and a salty diet had set up a flaking process on McGann’s face; strips of dead skin hung from brows and cheeks.

Amidst this patchy ruin his pale-lashed blue eyes surveyed the world with an expression of spurious calculation. “There is aye someone worse off than yoursel”,” he said. ‘We are free men, we can gang an” come as we please, not like them blackies we hae took on board.”

‘allyou try it, shipmate,” Wilson said, face narrow-eyed and sardonic below the stained white cotton headband, the heavy bones of his shoulder-blades standing out under his soaked shirt.

“Ye dinna see what I am gettin” at,”

McGann, said. “I am talkin” aboot freedom. I am talkin’ aboot -“

‘Get on, you Scotch runt,” hissed Haines from close behind him, having approached silently on purpose to startle and affright. “You make talkin” an excuse for not workin’, and I’ll make you sing while you work. You know what song, don’t you?”’

The pile of trimmed stakes grew steadily on the clearing of shingle above the moored yawl.

By mid-afternoon they had enough. While they were loading the stakes a bushpig came through the mangroves and briefly into the open. Haines fired his pistol at it but the creature fled, with no squeal to register a wound. However, the shot brought a prize of another sort: within twenty minutes of it a number of wary black men arrived by canoe from further upriver.

They were armed with short, thick-shafted spears decorated with white feathers below the blade. And they were carrying palm wine in calabashes, which they offered with gestures and guttural sounds to sell.

Some close bargaining followed, at which the seamen were at a disadvantage, it proving impossible for them to keep eagerness for the liquor out of their eyes.

Billy’s kerchief and a copper ring belonging to Deakin were all that the negroes seemed interested in, once they had clearly understood that the gold band in Haines’s ear and the hand-axes were not negotiable.

Neither Wilson nor Calley nor Sullivan had anything at all to offer. The bargain was finally clinched by Haines, who dug in his waistcoat pocket and produced a brass button. ‘Here you are, I’ll throw this in,” he said, and perhaps there was something in his voice and manner, and in the quality of stillness now investing all the white men, that caused the negroes to close on the offer.

“Let me see that button,” Sullivan said, but he was too late comx was in the black man’s hand now; attempts to retrieve it might have led to dangerous misunderstandings. “That was my button,” he said to the boatswain. “That button was off me coat.”

“What are you talkin” about?”’ Haines said carelessly. His eyes were on the wine. ‘Get out of the way. Come on, lads, it is share and share alike, hoist the liquor up on the beach.”

Thus Haines, with assumed good-fellowship, sought to appear to the others as the provider of the feast, so as to keep a semblance of authority. A natural leader might have carried this off, but a natural leader would have been more loved than Haines, who in fact was not loved at all and knew it, but was led into unwisdom now by his wish to get drunk.

The negroes departed with dignity and without farewells, making upstream again, their paddles dipping in perfect unison. The first of the gourds began to pass round the seated circle of men. The wine was clouded and sweetish, still fermenting slightly, very potent. The men had eaten nothing since morning. For perhaps half an hour all was harmony and accord among them. The drink passed round. It was cooler now and they were grateful for the leisure after their hours of toil, and for the ease that came to their limbs with the slow onset of drunkenness.

Sullivan, however, brooded. He was a convivial soul, especially in his drink, but he sat silent now. He was not vindictive like Wilson, who was at odds with the world and could not absorb his wrongs without violence. Life had dealt blows to Sullivan. Vagrancy and beggary, interspersed by spells at sea, had been his condition for almost as long as he could remember and he had seen the inside of prison more than once; but he had been blessed with a spirit of optimism, feckless perhaps, but saving him from that saddest of human destinies, which we call learning from one’s mistakes. Sullivan had a short memory for mistakes as well as for wrongs. But to be robbed and then treated with contumely is hard to bear. To see Haines making play with what he was convinced was one of his buttons had caused him deep offence.

By the time the third calabash began circulating, drunkenness was general and advanced. The talk had turned to money and what it could buy. It was the opinion of Wilson that money could buy anything.

“If a man has enough on it,” he said, “it’ll buy him owt i” the world. Anythin’ an’ anybody.” His deep-set eyes had a glinting look and there was a quarrelsome note in his voice as he looked round the circle of faces. “I know the world,” he said.

“Nobody’s sayin” you don’t,” Blair said, roused as always to combativeness by any hint of it in another. He leaned his small, pugnacious face forward, blinking to get the hulking Yorkshireman into focus. ‘no use yappin” on, shipmate,” he said. ‘Billy Blair knows the world better’n any man here, but that’s no bleddy argument. What about them that has all the money they need an” live in palaces an’ have servants to wait on “em? What about the Prince o’ Wales or the Archbishop o’ Canterbury? Are you sayin’ King George would be interested in yor money?”’

Wilson’s head sank down and he passed a tongue over his lips as he considered this. ‘Kings an” bishops, is it?”’ he said with slow displeasure. ‘Why is tha bringin” them in?”’

‘nobody has everything they want,” Deakin said in his fiat, expressionless voice, to which the drink had made no difference. “There would always be something, if you could find it out. Might be only some little thing.”

“Some little thing,” Calley said in slurred echo of his friend. He smiled slackly, his eyes wide and unsteady. What could it be? he wondered. Something he might find himself, a piece of coloured stone, a bird’s feather…