Sacred Hunger (65 page)

In this manner, singing and dancing, they advanced until they were within twenty yards of the pavilion, when they halted and stood silent, their only movement the deep rise and fall of their chests. For perhaps a minute they stood thus, then the two chiefs came forward with a fast dancing step and Erasmus saw now that the objects in their hands were long-stemmed pipes tied with feathers.

Without hesitation, still dancing, they entered the pavilion and advanced to the white men. Erasmus watched while they stroked the faces and hands of the Governor and Superintendent, neither of whom moved a muscle, with the feathers of the pipes. Then one came to him. He felt the soft brush of the feathers and smelled the ignited tobacco in the bowl of the pipe.

He met for a moment the gleaming, strangely impersonal eyes of the Indian below the beaded headband. Two braves came forward from the ranks, loaded with dressed buckskins, some of which they laid on the floor and some on the table. The remaining headmen advanced and sat in their places. A pipe was held out by the bowl and the white men smoked solemnly in turn, followed by the seated chiefs.

There was a further interval of deep silence, then the Superintendent rose to his feet and began to speak in slow, deliberate tones, pausing frequently to allow his interpreter time to translate.

He declared himself happy that the chiefs and warriors had accepted the invitation for this meeting and kept their word for the hour. He believed they would be well pleased with what they were going to hear from the Governor and from himself. He introduced Erasmus as an emissary from the King of England.

He requested his Indian brothers earnestly to listen and pay attention to the words that would be said to them.

At the conclusion of these remarks he took one of the strings of beads from the table and dropped it with deliberate movements on the earth floor, where it fell with a muffled crash. This ceremony, and the words which had preceded it, were greeted by the Indians with complete silence and impassivity.

The Governor now came forward to the table.

Glancing keenly at the expressionless faces of the chiefs on either side of him, he began speaking in his usual brisk, direct and somehow confiding fashion: “Friends and brothers, the Great King, my master and your father, after driving the French and Spanish from this land, was graciously pleased to appoint me to govern the white people in this part of his newly conquered dominions.

“I know and love the red people. I have lived long with them and I am acquainted with their customs and manners. The Great King knows that I will do everything in my power to keep up peace and harmony between his white subjects and his red children.

‘allyou are apprehensive and have been told that the white people are desirous of getting possession of your hunting grounds. Your fears are ill-founded for my sentiments with regards to the hunting ground of an Indian nation are well known. Such of you as have been in the Cherokee nation must know and all of you must have heard that in the Treaty signed at Charleston after their defeat I spoke against taking their ancestral lands and I prevented it. If I did that for a people with whom I had been at war, who had been prevailed upon by the French to strike their English brothers, you may be sure I will do nothing to the harm of your people who have always been our friends…”

Erasmus listened to this with feelings of distinct approval. He had heard a lot of speeches in his time, and this was a good one, though it was difficult to read anything in the set faces of the Indians.

Campbell spoke with a kind of gritty dignity that was native to him and made his appeal to matters that lay within the knowledge of his audience. And the accent of sincerity in his words was unmistakable; his voice had grated with feeling when he spoke of his defence of the beaten and demoralized Cherokee. Once again it came to Erasmus that Campbell would be an excellent man to head his Florida Land Company.

The Indians who sat beyond the pavilion were motionless, their eyes fixed on the speaker. The sun was high now; these preliminary ceremonies had taken up the morning. Sunlight lay on the white feathers and the beaded ornaments and the smoothly muscled bodies. Campbell paused to take up a string of beads and drop it from shoulder height to the floor.

“Your profession is hunting,” he said. “You therefore must have a large tract of country, but it is your interest to have your English brothers near you. They only can supply you in exchange for your skins with clothes to cover you and your wives and children, with guns, powder and ball for your hunting andwitha number of other things which you cannot make for yourselves though you cannot exist without them. To induce the white people to live in your neighbourhood you will no doubt think it reasonable to assign them a certain district of country to feed cattle and raise provisions, for without lands they cannot maintain themselves, much less supply you.”

He ended on this with another ceremonial dropping of beads. The Superintendent spoke again briefly, emphasizing that a boundary had to be ascertained, leaving them to determine the limits but recommending them to behave in such a manner as would show their gratitude to the Great King, by whose permission they enjoyed the advantages of trade.

A profound silence followed these words. None of the headmen seated in the pavilion said anything at all.

But for the fiery expression of the eyes, their faces might have been cast in stone. After perhaps ten minutes —though it seemed much longer to Erasmus—a young man in the front rank of those outside the pavilion stood up and advanced to the table. In vehement, broken-sounding sentences, strangely at odds with the hesitant English of the interpreter, he began to complain of the high prices the dealers were asking for trade goods. The Superintendent, he said, had promised to lower the rates at a meeting with his people at Pensacola six months before. He was Sempoiaffe, he was a leading man of his nation, but he was not the mouth of his nation and was not seeking to answer the Governor’s talk, he left that to the chiefs, but he wanted to say that this thing had been promised and had not been done. Also, it was his opinion that if all the country was going to be settled by white people his people would find nothing but rats and rabbits to kill. Would the white people give them trade goods in exchange for rats and rabbits?

Throughout this the chiefs had remained silent but short grunts of approval had come from the men seated in the open. The speaker dropped a string of beads to the floor and looked full at the white men before returning to his place. His eyes flashed and Erasmus saw the deep intake of his breath and realized that he was moved, though whether by anger or some other emotion he could not tell.

In reply, Watson said that he had not promised to lower the trade as it was not in his power to do so and that he had said the same thing at Pensacola. He appealed to Tallechea and Captain Aleck and the other chiefs who had been present at that meeting whether they had not heard him say so, and Erasmus saw that some of the seated inside the pavilion nodded in agreement.

No other speaker now presented himself and after a further period of unbroken silence and immobility on the part of the Indians, the Superintendent declared the meeting adjourned till the following day.

Not much was said by either Watson or Campbell as they returned to Still Augustine. The three men did not meet again till dinner and only then did it become fully apparent to Erasmus just how badly this opening session of the conference had gone.

“But it seemed to me that you were listened to with respectful attention,” he said. “None of them spoke in rejection of a boundary line.”

“Sir,” Watson said, “they are devious, they set their meanings out by a system of signals.

None of the principal men spoke at all, which is a bad sign to begin with. He who spoke is a leading warrior among the Kasihta Creeks, but not of headman rank. What he said about trade prices was a mere piece of bravado and fabrication.

Everybody knows I made no such promise.”

“He knew it too then?”’

“He knew it perfectly well,”

Campbell said. “He wanted to put us on the defensive. I have seen it before often enough—they argue from emotion more then you might suppose. What he said about rats and rabbits was just as much beside the point. That fellow’s town is on the east side of the Chattahoochee River, up in Georgia. He was talking about Georgia, not Florida.”

“It is all one land to them,” Watson said.

“They have not yet learned to think in terms of state boundaries.”

“What is likely to happen tomorrow then?”’

“We shall see,” Watson said, with deepened gravity. “Tomorrow the chiefs will speak and then we shall see. But I am afraid it will not be easy. The signs are bad. We must hope that with God’s help they will be brought to see reason.”

After dinner Redwood asked Erasmus for the favour of some words in private. The major had come from his quarters on foot; it was a fine evening and Erasmus offered to walk some way back with him.

At this hour the streets were almost deserted. Sand and dust had drifted thickly, muffling their steps. The houses were shuttered and silent for the most part. The concrete of sand and ground shell with which they were built had crumbled with time, giving their outlines a softened, abraded appearance in the faint moonlight.

“I have been making enquiries among the Indians here, as I promised you,” Redwood said as they walked along together. “I am afraid I have not been able to find anyone with knowledge of a settlement in the south of the peninsula. In a way, the times are against you. Some might have known of it who left with the Spanish. As you know, the region is depopulated at present.

There are practically no Europeans and the Indians that remain are a sedentary sort of people, who scrape a living here, God knows how.”

“Well, it cannot be helped.” Erasmus had not allowed himself to hope for much from the major’s enquiries, but he was none the less disappointed.

“I am grateful for your efforts on my behalf,” he said.

‘There is no point even in trying to engage a guide from among them,” Redwood said. “However, I have not failed altogether.”

They were passing a tall, deep-balconied house, which showed some light behind the shutters. As they went by a sound of voices and laughter came from somewhere on the upper floor.

“These are about the only places which show any sign of life,” Redwood said. “The whores didn’t all follow the Spanish to Cuba.” He stopped on this, as if suddenly struck by an idea.

“We are about halfway now to my quarters,” he said. “It might be rather long for you to walk back the whole way. What do you say to breaking a bottle inside here? I don’t suggest we try the girls.

I could head you in the direction of something much better if you were ever interested in that line. These have been worked pretty hard by the Spanish and some of our men use them, though there is a brothel nearer the barracks.

No, but the Mother Superior here, Mama Rosalita, knows me. I have been here on occasion to deal with affrays and pay for damage. She will give us a room out of the way and serve us a bottle and we can talk in peace. What do you say?”’

“I say yes.” He had no particular desire for more to drink but Redwood had not told him everything yet, he had paused at a crucial point, perhaps by design. It came to Erasmus that there was some loneliness about the major for all his conviviality.

They passed through the overgrown garden, knocked, were admitted by the massive Senora Rosalita. It was at once clear from her manner that Redwood was a highly regarded visitor. They were shown without delay to a room at the back of the house and served by the senora herself with a sweetish, dark red wine.

‘That’s better.” Redwood unbuttoned his tunic and stretched his long legs before him. “I don’t know how it is,” he said, following some train of thought of his own, ‘b that preachy fellow Watson sets my teeth on edge, for all I might drink at dinner. Anyway, as I was saying, I did not find anyone in Still Augustine, but I have been given the name of an Indian who lives at Matanzas, about fifteen miles away. He is a Lower Creek, the same breed as those you saw today, but he lives solitary. His name is Nipke, though he seems also to be known as the Young Soldier. I am told he knows the southern regions well, having taken part in raids against the Timucua Indians during the war. We paid them a bounty for the scalps of any Indians friendly to the Spanish, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Any that were not with us were regarded as being against us.

It was part of the policy of terror adopted by our forces to unsettle the region. You couldn’t always tell who the scalps had belonged to, but the bounty was paid all the same. The point is that this Nipke has worked for the English before and so he knows the clink of guineas, which makes him easier to talk to. He may not know of your fugitives, but he knows the terrain and will be skilled at following tracks and moving quietly.”

“He sounds just the man.”

“If you are interested, we might ride over to Matanzas tomorrow and see if we can find him. I could spare an hour or two in the morning. Things are at an awkward pass here but there is no danger while the treaty is under discussion. It is the only way, if you want to come to terms with this Nipke. If we send for him, he may come next week or next month or he may not come at all.”

Erasmus hesitated. “I should like it of all things,” he said. “I am anxious to get the matter settled. But I am due to attend the conference tomorrow.”

“As to that, I fancy Watson and the Governor will not mind your absence, quite the reverse in fact, they will be able to put it to good account.”

“How do you mean?”’

“Things have not gone well today, I gather, and they seem likely to go even worse tomorrow. It will be found necessary to sow dismay among the Indians, for that is the surest way of disuniting them—that and the jealousies among them and their fears of being left out when it comes to the presents. The ships have been sighted, by the way, did you know?”’

“No.”

“They are expected to cross the bar some time tomorrow morning. That will strengthen our hand considerably.