Sacred Hunger (51 page)

She was continuing to kill others; not on a grand scale, but steadily, day by day, as the dysentery gained ground in spite of all Paris’s efforts.

This second attempt to quit Africa had been hardly more successful than the first. Perhaps the monkey was not deemed sacrifice enough and Thurso’s tutelary spirit, in the arbitrary way of powerful beings, simply abandoned him; or perhaps, having lived longer than any man was supposed to in this trade, he had exhausted luck and credit alike. Whatever the reason, in the following weeks the Liverpool Merchant was subject to every perversity of weather possible in those waters at that time of year. The northeast trades fell shorter than usual for the season and she lay too far south to find them. Less than thirty leagues out she found herself again becalmed, prey to the currents flowing eastward into the Gulf of Guinea, edging her back towards the shoals. Day after day she dawdled in a latitude some points south of seven degrees, in that equatorial region of light currents and whispering convergence of breezes known as the Doldrums, where opposing winds meet and die in slow rises and wandering uplifts of air.

They had promises of change: light rufflings of the sea were perceived at a distance, like gentle strokes of a cat’s paw over the surface, forerunners of a steadier breeze. From aloft Hughes saw these fugitive traces and following an old superstition he scratched with his nails at the backstays and whistled for a wind.

But no wind came. The canvas hung slack.

The negroes were listless and sullen under their awning, whose fringes hardly stirred. The fear that had made them quick-eyed and febrile was quite gone from their faces. Their looks were fixed and heavy now, their limbs slow and reluctant, as if fear had been stilled by something worse.

Sea and sky joined seamlessly in a single tone of hot white, burnished and slightly smoky. The ship rested on the sea as if in some substance thicker and more inert than water. Yet this lifeless sea had its moments of energy. The clawing strokes across the surface deepened sometimes to a strange rippling or seething motion. Occasionally a line of foam would break in the vicinity of the ship, bearing an evil-smelling, gelatinous scum. A fierce argument, almost leading to blows, broke out in the forecastle between Blair and Lees as to the nature of this stinking freightage, one contending it was dead spawn, the other decayed fragments of jellyfish.

Tempers were short among the men, with only dirty work to do and not enough to eat—their food was rationed now, on Thurso’s orders. Cavana, whose hatred for the captain had not rested since the murder of his monkey, put it about that Thurso had pocketed the money that should have been laid out on provisions. This was consistent with what they knew of him and was believed for the sake of the grievance it afforded. A muttering grew up against Thurso, though not yet in his hearing.

To Paris, seeing the strange seething motions that sometimes disturbed this pale and fiery sea without bringing the faintest of breezes, there came the obscene suspicion that creatures were feasting just below the surface, growing fat on the polluted scum—a filth to which the ship herself added daily, tipping the bodies of the dead and the ordures of the living into the placid waste around, obliged from time to time to have her longboat hoisted out so that she could be towed forward, out of the zone she had fouled.

He was in those days prone to sick fancies, induced in part by the ravages of disease among the negroes, which he found himself powerless to prevent. In the later stages of the dysentery they grew too weak to use the necessary buckets, especially the men, who were still chained together in pairs, and their quarters below and parts of the deck amidships became noisome. Paris used all the means known to him of combating infection, working to keep the slaves washed down and the decks well scraped, and to purify the tainted air below.

He had the slaves’ rooms swabbed out with vinegar and he smoked the area between decks with tar and brimstone.

Thurso too played his part, united with the surgeon in his urgent wish to keep as many of the negroes alive as possible. He gave orders for wetted gunpowder to be burned in iron pots in different parts of the vessel—a long-tried disinfectant which he swore by. But in spite of all efforts the deaths continued. And now, to add to his troubles, Paris began to find scorbutic symptoms among the crew.

McGann was the first. He had just assisted, with Sullivan, in throwing a dead woman slave over the side, and he came to Paris complaining of a disabling feebleness in his knees experienced while doing so.

“I could hardly hoist her over,” he said, ‘an” she was nae mair than a bag o’ bones hersel’.

There’s a weakness in a’ me joints.”

He was a noted malingerer and exploiter of situations, so Paris did not at first take these complaints very seriously. However, his breath was very offensive and upon looking into his mouth Paris found the gums to be of an unusual livid redness and very soft and spongy—the small degree of pressure necessary in the course of the examination caused them to bleed freely.

‘Then there is me legs,” McGann said dolefully, beginning to roll up his trousers, which hung even baggier on him now.

The skin of the legs was marked by several black and livid spots. They were equal to the surface of the skin, Paris saw, and resembled an extravagation under it, as if from bruising.

“The slightest thing an” I fall to pantin’ an’ catchin’ for breath,” McGann said.

Paris nodded. ‘allyou have got scurvy.”

“Oh, aye?”’

Something in McGann’s manner told Paris he had known this already. “Your present diet is not sufficient,” he said.

McGann’s voluminous cap, from which he would not be separated, fell forward over his brows. From below it his small, tight-featured face looked up with a kind of dogged tenacity at Paris. “Tis true that I’m a’ways hungry,” he said. “I cannot get enough to eat. If I could get a extry bit o” rice pudden, me strength would come back to me.”

“I understand that you are hungry,” Paris said, “but if you ate twice the amount it would not make any difference to your condition. The cause lies not in the quantity but in the nature of the food, at least so I suppose.” He paused for a moment, then said rather helpessly, “To be frank with you, McGann, I am not at all sure what it is that causes these symptoms. It is a deficiency of nutriment, as I believe. I have heard that lemon juice can do much for the condition, but we have nothing of that sort aboard.

I will make you up a gargle and see how that answers.”

McGann showed himself sceptical of this remedy and generally disappointed and dissatisfied. Only the hope of getting extra rations had brought him, Paris now realized. Though not very confident, he made up a gargle of acidulated barley water and obliged McGann to take it.

Alerted now, he noticed during the following days a similar bloating of complexion and listlessness in other members of the crew. As far as he could ascertain, none of the negroes showed symptoms of scurvy and after some pondering he came to the conclusion that the reason for this must be the green peppers which had been served with their rice while supplies lasted.

There had been no other significant difference in diet.

The prolonged calm and attendant sickness brought out different things in people, depending on temperament and circumstances. To the inward-looking Paris, with his abiding sense of guilt, the stagnation was also moral, and he was prey to depression and morbid imaginings.

The people of the crew, less privileged in respect to space, grew more quarrelsome among themselves and more resentful of those set over them. Haines and Barton still drove the men but they went more warily and kept a loaded pistol at their belts.

Thurso too went armed, aware of the feeling against him. The captain was living in a purgatory of his own. He took his meals generally alone, in sombre silence. When on deck he spoke only through Barton. His small, raw-veined eyes darted suspicious glances from under their heavy brows as if seeking in the faces of those around him some clue as to the culprit, the killer of his merchandise, the agent of this blighting calm. He conveyed to Paris a definite impression of derangement.

Only Delblanc seemed largely unaffected—though this was a mistaken impression, as Paris came afterwards to realize. In fact, in this succession of unchanging days, Delblanc changed more profoundly than anyone, though this was not obvious at the time because he seemed merely to become more definitely himself. Scrupulously shaved, his hair dressed carefully, in cambric shirt and elegant, close-fitting breeches, he moved about the ship, talking in his frank and engaging style to any of the crew with leisure to listen.

What reflections he made in the silence of his cabin and how far he seriously attempted to foment revolt, or even hoped for it, was never made clear —he did not himself declare it. But there is no doubt that in this waste of the ship dragged her stench through the water and dead negroes continued to be cast over the side, Delblanc underwent a sort of conversion, of profound consequence for all of them, slaves and seamen alike. And the first sign of it was the way he sought to make converts.

A man may go through life and remain ignorant of himself; he may think himself as other than he truly is and he may die with this illusion still intact, because no circumstance of his life has obliged him to revise it. Perhaps this is true for most of us.

Delblanc had regarded himself as an artist of a sort, a drifting person, rather a failure. He had espoused theories of liberty and equality, as many do who feel they have made no mark on the world; but these had been diluted in society at large and by his own diffidence. Now, in the present circumstances of the ship, he found a world reduced, concentrated, the perfect model of a tyranny. He was driven to question his life’s purposes.

Quite frequently, on some corner of the deck or in Delblanc’s more spacious cabin, he and the surgeon would continue the discussions that had begun with their first meeting. Paris’s liking for the other persisted, grew stronger. There was a warmth, a personal attractiveness about him and a patent sincerity impossible to resist. Even without this Delblanc would always have held a special place in his affection and regard: it was to Delblanc that he had laid bare his soul that night at the fort, in the moonlit room, with the death-mask of the governor seeming to follow his every word and movement…

However, they could never altogether agree.

Delblanc’s contention was that any people, any nation or group, could change their condition immediately and radically by changing their habits of mind. “Let the most oppressed people under heaven once change their thinking and they are free,” he said, his brown eyes shining with that extraordinary openness and undefendedness of expression, his hands—which were shapely and strong— gesturing sharply. He had recently developed a habit of gesture curiously at odds with the gentlemanly nonchalance of his bearing, abrupt, almost fierce, controlling and delimiting, cutting off possible dissent. “Even these people on the ship,” he said, “both black and white, for they are imprisoned both.”

And Paris, weary and oppressed, suffering these days from a sort of feverish insomnia, would marvel at this pristine shine of Delblanc’s, the freshness of his face and clothes, his philosophical empressement, the increasing eagerness of his manner, in which, though this was not to occur to the surgeon until later, there were already the signs of that fanaticism which would so profoundly affect them all. “We can change our situation by thinking, you say,” Paris would reply. “But whence comes this faith of yours that thinking can be changed? You are like a man who wants to build the upstairs rooms before he is sure of the foundations.

Do you believe that habits of mind can be so easily reversed? For myself, I do not believe so.”

“If ideas are not innate—and they are not— they cannot be so deeply lodged as to be beyond uprooting,” Delblanc would say, with one of his eager, delimiting gestures. “It is only a question of supplanting one set of associations with another. I am convinced of it… I know it in my heart and mind, Paris. Man can live free and not seek to limit the freedom of others so long as no one seeks to limit his.”

So these discussions between them took usually an accustomed course. But Delblanc’s sense of mission was growing and he did not limit himself to Paris. Anyone at all—the weasel-faced Tapley, swabbing down the decks, a disgruntled Billy Blair coming up from scraping the slaves’ quarters, Morgan in his galley trying to find some new disguise for the rotten beef commight find himself addressed by Delblanc and asked whether he did not agree that the state of society was artificial and the power of one man over another merely derived from convention.

Delblanc’s manner was the same with all, friendly and open. At first, tactics lagging behind conviction, he made no concession to any imperfections of understanding in his audience. “By nature we are equal,” he said on one occasion to a vacantly smiling Calley. “Does it not therefore follow that government must always depend on the consent of the governed?”’ He was bookish and he used the language he knew. He even spoke to McGann, asking him whether he did not think it true that the character of man originated in external circumstances and could be changed as these were changed.

The men listened, or appeared to listen, out of deference, because he was a gentleman, because he was paying for his passage. Delblanc saw soon enough that he was using the wrong language with them and was beginning to try out a different one until warned by Thurso in terms not very civil that if he persisted in thus distracting the crew, he would be confined to his quarters for the rest of the voyage. “I will silence his blabbing,” he swore to Barton. “I will board him up in his cabin.” This proved unnecessary. One look at the captain’s face was enough to convince Delblanc. It was in his reaction to this threat that he showed the quick grasp of realities that later came to distinguish him. A man can do no good locked up in his cabin. He went more circumspectly thereafter.