Sacred Hunger (40 page)

Paris freighted the spoon with rice, then put it back down on the plate again: he saw now that the spoon was too big. He took some of the moist and sticky rice between his thumb and first two fingers and extended this towards the man. He was aware of the silence among the people looking on—some of the women slaves had joined the circle of seamen. There was a ring round him, cutting off the air. The stench of captivity came to him, from the man before him, the spectators white and black, the massed bodies of the slaves under the awning.

‘, t,” he said. “I want you to eat.” He could read no expression on the broad, flat-boned face, unless the approach of death can be an expression. The eyes were fixed on the strip of plank between his long and narrow feet. The mouth hung open, a spongy ellipse, allowing the pale loll of the tongue to show within it. As Paris crouched there, holding out in his fingers the sticky ball of rice, he knew that he was alone with this man, that the two of them were quite alone. The pale sky had clutched at them, gathered them into privacy, into some area of seclusion.

He did not know whose was the greater arrogance, his or this dying man’s.

‘, t it,” he said harshly. He reached forward and put the rice between the man’s lips, feeling the helpless softness of the mouth as he did so, pushing the food between the barrier of the teeth. He dipped his fingers again into the dish, moulding a new ball. The man’s mouth made no movement, his lips still hung slackly open; but as Paris again reached forward the eyes for the first time looked at him, registered his presence there, directly, immediately. Paris saw in the eyes the desire for death and recognized it as his own familiar; but in these same eyes that longed for the burden of pain to be removed there was what the surgeon had seen in his own looking-glass while the bread dissolved in his mouth —inveterate, unquenchable, the hope of life, the appeal to be saved. And Paris knew in that same moment that he had done a wicked thing to sail with this ship out of mere despair.

“Eat it,” he said again. He saw a blaze in the man’s eyes, saw the mouth work to gather its contents. The negro raised himself a little and his face strained forward with a curiously patient effort. With a deep gasp, almost a groan, the mouth opened and sprayed out its contents. Paris felt the warm shock of the rice and spit on his face and saw the negro’s head fall back against the ladder and his eyes turn upward.

Haines took a step forward, half raising his whip. “Let me give him a go with this,” he said.

“I’ll teach him spittin”.”

Paris got to his feet. ‘Stand clear of him,” he said. “Stand back from him.” There was an eagerness on Haines’s face. On an impulse he did not understand, Paris took a step towards the boatswain and thrust at him violently. The power in his arms was a revelation—perhaps most of all to the surgeon himself. Haines was a big man and well planted on his feet but he was sent staggering back.

Paris took out a handkerchief and wiped his face slowly. “There was not much gained by flogging him, even when he was alive,” he said, loudly enough for the captain and mate on the quarterdeck to hear. He glanced across the deck at the shackled men under the awning. They avoided his eye as usual, except for one tall and strongly built man, whom he recognized now as the first slave he had examined.

This man was looking at him steadily though without discernible expression; and he did not look away when their eyes met—an unusual thing.

The dead slave was thrown overboard at once.

He was followed two days later by a woman who, though eating her portions without protest, had been in a state of deepening lethargy for some time and was found dead on deck in the early morning with no sign about her as to the cause. Then the ship’s boy, Charlie, began to sicken with the same symptoms that Simmonds had shown. As his fever mounted, the hammering and clatter on the ship mounted with it: under the supervision of Johnson, the gunner, the men were sheathing the fore parts of the mainmast and a space of the deck forward of it with lead plate, so that the furnace could be placed amidship with more security, there being more mouths aboard now than the ship’s iron pot could boil for.

Charlie, whose surname nobody knew, who had experienced little but blows and hunger in his fourteen years, died shivering and vomiting, not knowing whether these heavy detonations of sound were within him or without.

Paris could fathom neither the one death nor the other.

Charlie had not berthed in any proximity to the second mate; he had not gone on the expedition to Tucker’s and so had not been exposed to any poisonous airs from the river. Paris knew there were sexual relations among some of the men. Simmonds, after contracting the disease, might have sodomized the boy and so communicated the contagion. From questions such as these comand from his own ignorance—he sought refuge where he could find it, in memories of the past, in attention to the daily trafficking for slaves that still continued.

That steady look of the negro exercised his mind in the days that followed, though it was not repeated. It was the first time he had actually been regarded by any of these people.

He could not decide if it had been a look of enmity or a recognition of something.
It was as if
, he wrote in his journal,
the life of the eyes was transferred from the man who spat at me, who died, transferred from him to the other…

Fanciful, no doubt, he thought, sitting late in his cramped cabin, unable to sleep, for all the cradling motion of the ship. He felt that he was changed. He had become prey to superstitious fancies, as he had to impulses of violence.

Close weather lately, with lightnings and variable winds. The slaves have had to be kept under hatches a good part of the time—Barber has fitted the platforms and bulkheads now. Tapley is in irons up against the windlass, and has been so since yesterday. It seems that he seduced one of the women to go with him below, and there lay with her brutelike in view of those of his companions not on deck. It was not a rape, all are agreed, so he may escape flogging. He is a sly, rat-like man, Tapley.

At daybreak there came several canoes alongside us with traders to offer their services. They were sent back ashore by Captain Thurso to purchase slaves and rice, he having provided them on trust with trade goods. One came back within two hours with a man and two girls, bringing our number to eighty-three. There is in the offing now, as well as the Frenchman and a Danish slaver newly arrived, a London ship, the Astrid, Captain Cockburn. In mid-morning Thurso went over to her in the punt, having been told she had eight slaves aboard to change for ivory. He returned shortly with that clamp-jawed, staring look of his when he is in a rage; it seems he could not take the slaves on Cockburn1 s terms, which was sixty bars per head round. According to Barton, there were but three of the slaves sizeable and two of the remaining five under three foot six inches. “Sixty bars for dwarfs now,” Barton said, and laughed—though not so Thurso would hear. Barton keeps me informed, though not out of friendship—I do not believe he has feelings for anyone. It may be that he thinks to ingratiate himself for the sake of my uncle; but I believe he enjoys using some tone of disrespect to compensate for his usual sycophancy.

Trade is slowing down. The local dealers will very seldom bring a slave to the ship to sell, and the boat trade is dearer and more precarious. As a consequence, whenever any do bring a slave, Thurso is obliged to accept him, being in fear that if he refuses, he will not get the chance of another.

Meanwhile, the French are rumoured to be paying eighty bars for an adult male. ” The crappos are trying to ruin us,” Barton said. I do not know whom he means by “u”’; the ruin has been total for some aboard this ship already. I suspect we shall be leaving here soon and proceeding further along the coast to eastward, now that trade is slackening. We have lost two slaves and several more look very listless and low and will scarce move except they are whipped, though I cannot determine any disease in them. It is as if they cannot emerge from the shock of their capture…

Sometimes in storm weather the shore had fluttered with disabled swallows. They crouched lower for his approach, without strength to escape. In his hands they pulsed with that same pulse. He had taken a bird and warmed it between his hands or inside his jacket, brought the life back until it was able to fly. Sometimes, released from his hands, they circled once around him before flying away; in gratitude, or so the child had believed— and the belief had survived all the man’s science.

It was Wilson who had come upon the dead woman.

He told the story at the time favoured for stories, in the first of the twilight, before the night watch was set, when it was still early enough for most men to be on deck.

The captain was making his usual walk on the weather side of the quarterdeck, twelve paces forward, twelve back; Barton stood alone on the lee side and Johnson was at the weather gangway, mending a tear in his jacket by the lamp there.

Haines, having seen to the coiling of the ropes, was smoking a pipe with Morgan in the galley. Two of those on half-watch, Hughes and True, were amidships guarding the slaves. The others were lying on the forecastle, smoking, talking together. It was a relaxed time on the ship, a time for speculation and hyperbole.

“She were crawled right under the gangway,”

Wilson said. “Behind the gangway ladder, up agin the side. Hardly space for a cat in there. She were crawled under, among some bread butts.” He had been sent forward with Calley shortly after turning-to that morning to wash down the deck, and had found her there, in the first light of the day, lying on her side, knees drawn up, in the narrow space between the butts. “Not a mark on her,” Wilson said.

“She must have been took sick and crawled in there.”

There were things about this discovery that Wilson did not speak of to the others. He had thought her asleep.

Her back was to him and in the carelessness of her condition the waistcloth had ridden up over her buttocks to show the brandmark high on the left one. Calley was over on the other side of the deck. There was no one else near. Moving the butts clear, he felt half suffocated with eagerness. By good luck—as he thought —she did not wake. It was his idea to take her from behind while she was still too sleepy to make effective resistance. He had lowered himself against her and had a hand over her mouth before he felt the chill of the body and realized that he was jammed up against a corpse.

“Shark meat,” he said now, with resentment; Wilson never forgot an injury and this death seemed one to him, cheating his lust. Light from the forecastle lamps glinted on his dark stubble as he turned his face slowly from side to side. “That’s all she were, shark meat.”

“I never seen her,” Calley said. “I was on the other side. I seen her but I didn” find her. Wilson shouted to me come an’ looka this.”

He wished he could have been the one to find her and have something to tell.

‘allyer couldn’t find yer own cock in the dark,”

Libby said. The dead jelly of his eye emitted a thin, satiric gleam. “Yer lost yerself, didn” yer, and had to be brought back by the quashees?”’

A rare moment of felicity came to Calley.

‘Well, I got two eyes,” he said, “so I got more chance o” findin’ things than what you have.”

This unexpected riposte set Blair chuckling.

‘That’s reet, lad, you ha” twice the chance o’ some,” he said; and this support and the fact that Blair had laughed at his joke, secured him Calley’s affection for ever.

‘They dies of melancholy,” Barber said, round the stem of his pipe. “I have seen it over an’ over.

They sets their minds on dying. I have been on ships where it spread like a plague. You put “em below just as usual, two by two, an” they looks just the same as ever, an’ in the mornin’ you find a dead an’ a livin’ man chained together an’ that is the first you notice any difference between “em.”

“When one dies, others will follow,”

Sullivan said, glancing about him as if disturbed in a dream. “It was Simmonds set it loose, God rest his soul. Death has sailed with every ship that ever put out of port. Once he gets loose, there is no conf” him again.”

‘He is the only free fuckster on this ship then,” Wilson said, “cept for the captain.”

‘It is true that a curse will sometimes fasten on a ship,” Davies said. “There was the
Black Prince
, Captain Bibby, which I sailed with in forty-four. We were tradin” on the Gambia an’ the captain was a tartar—this one is a saint to him.

He would flog a man every day for one reason or another. I seen him drown a black woman in a swill tub with his own hands for tryin’ to pass a marlin-spike to one of the men slaves. I tell you, he was a devil. He had given out arms and ammunition to the natives ashore so they could make a war-party to take slaves, an’ in exchange he’d taken eight men aboard as pawns.”

‘What is that?”’ Blair asked.

“They are relatives of the chief or people belonging to the chief that offers themselves for it, on the agreement that unless slaves are furnished within a certain time, or goods to the value of what has been loaned, the pawns will be carried off instead. Our agreement was for three days, but Bibby did not wait the due time, he took advantage of a favourable wind to up anchor and make off. The result was that another ship was attacked by the natives in revenge, the
Molly
, it was, for no other reason than she was a Liverpool ship. She wasn’t a slaver even, she was tradin” for beeswax an’ pepper. The captain an’ the mate an’ five crew were taken an’ tied to trees an’ had their throats cut. The English sent a sloop from Goree with a platoon of troops an’ a cannon to punish the blacks for this outrage, an’ they burned their village over their heads an’ killed several of them an’ one of the soldiers was killed in the fightin’. Now all this blood was on Captain Bibby’s head, as he had broke the bond. But there was a curse on that ship from the moment of leavin’. Bibby lost two-thirds of his negroes by the bloody flux on the Middle Passage, includin’ all but one of the pawns he had taken, an’ so it was paid back to him.”