Trade Wind (4 page)

“Come on! come on, blast you!” muttered the Lieutenant, apparently urging the threshing paddles to greater speed: “We can’t let that chousing scug get away from us this time. God damn this wind! If only…’ He turned abruptly to snap out an order to the coxswain demanding another knot from the engine room. Two, if possible.

But half an hour later the schooner was not only still ahead of him, but appeared to be increasing her lead. And though the
Daffodil
’s guns had scored several hits, a cross swell combined with the uncertain light had not been conducive to good shooting, and none of them had served to slow the slaver’s pace.

Lieutenant Larrimore, fuming, was recklessly ordering the fires to be stoked to danger point, when a lucky shot cut away the schooner’s steering sails. She yawed and lost way, and five minutes later another shot ripped through her mainsail and the taut canvas split and fell idle. The crippled ship hauled down her colours and hove to—though only backing her fore topsail, and leaving her fore and aft sails still set The Lieutenant, observing this last, remarked grimly that Rory Frost must think he was born yesterday.

“If he imagines that he can trick me into lowering a boat, and then pile on sail and run for it while we’re getting back on board again, he’s much mistaken.”

He picked up a speaking trumpet and yelled through it:

“Lower your sails at once, and come aboard!”

The breeze distorted the reply so that the words were unintelligible, but the coxswain, who was peering through a telescope, ripped out a sudden oath, and said: “It ‘aint the
Virago
, sir. Same build, but she’s a shade sharper forrard, an’ she ‘aint got the port’oles.”

“Nonsense! There isn’t another ship in these waters that Here, give me that.”

He snatched the telescope and peered through it at the drifting moonlit ship with the torn mainsail, and then put it down again and said heavily: “Damn and blast!”

“Probably a genuine Yankee after all,” said the Assistant-Surgeon apprehensively.” If she is, we’re for it.”

“Hell to that! she’s a slaver—you can smell her,” snapped Lieutenant Larrimore.’ I’m going aboard.”

He picked up the trumpet again, and shouted through it, and this time the reply was audible:

“
No understand Inglese!
”

“That’s a relief. Try him with French,” suggested the surgeon.

The Lieutenant’s French, however, produced no result, and losing patience he issued a curt order to the gun’s crew to fire at the slaver’s jib halyard block and to continue doing so until it was cut away.

“Good shooting,” commended Lieutenant Larrimore, watching the halyard block come rattling down. “Lower a boat. I’m going over.”

“You cannot board me!” yelled a bearded man in a peaked cap, whose suit may have once been white, but which even by moonlight showed blotched and stained with dirt and sweat of many seasons. “It is illegal! I am
Americano!
I report you to your Consul! I make much trouble for you!”

He appeared to have learned to speak English with remarkable rapidity.

“You can report me to the Archangel Gabriel if you wish,” retorted the Lieutenant, and scrambled aboard.

Five years in the East African Squadron should have inured Daniel Larrimore to horrors, but he had never got used to the sight and stench of human suffering, and each time he witnessed it, it seemed to him like the first time—and the worst. Mr Wilson, the coxswain, a hearty, grizzled mariner newly out from home, took one look at the schooner’s crowded and filthy deck and was instantly and violently sick, while the Assistant-Surgeon turned an unhealthy green and found himself feeling oddly faint as the intolerable stench took him by the throat.

The ship was crammed with naked slaves: their emaciated black bodies patched with festering sores, their ankles and wrists chafed and bleeding from heavy iron fetters or gangrenous from ropes that had been tied so tightly that they had eaten into the dark flesh. The schooner’s hatchways had been secured by iron crossbars, and pressed against them from below were the heads of men, women and children who had been packed into the hot, dark, airless space as though they had been bales of cloth; crouching ankle deep in their own filth, unable to move and barely able to breathe, and chained together so that the starving, dying, tortured living were still manacled to the decomposing bodies of the fortunate dead.

Apart from the crew there were three hundred captive negroes on the schooner, and of these eighteen were found to be dead, while a dozen more lay on the deck, huddled together at the foot of the foremast and dying of disease and starvation.

“Bring ‘em up,” ordered Dan Larrimore, his voice as hard and expressionless as his rigid face. He stood back while they were drawn up through the small hatches to collapse on to the deck where some lay still and moaned, while others crawled feebly to the scuppers and licked the salt water with tongues that were blackened and swollen from thirst.

More than half of the captives were children. Boys and girls whose ages ranged from eight to fourteen years, who had been captured by men of their own race to be sold into slavery for a handful of china beads or a cheap knife. Young and defenceless creatures who had committed no crime against humanity, but who represented a fat profit in counted coin, and whose hands were needed for planting, tending and picking the sugar-cane and cotton on rich plantations on the other side of the world. In Cuba and Brazil, the West Indies and the Southern States of America. “And we dare to call ourselves Christians!” thought Dan Larrimore bitterly. “We have the infernal impudence to send out missions to the heathen and preach sanctimonious sermons from our pulpits. And half Spain and Portugal and South America light candles to the saints and bum incense and go to Confession, and can hardly move for priests and churches and statues of the Virgin. It’s enough to make one vomit…”

A dazed, emaciated negress stumbled towards the rail, holding in her arms the body of a child whose skull had been crushed, and seeing that the ugly wound was fresh and bleeding, Dan said sharply: “How did that happen?”

The woman shook her head dumbly, and he repeated the question in her own tongue.

“My son cried when your ship came near,” said the woman in a parched whisper, “and the overseer feared that you might hear and struck him with an iron bar.”

She turned away from him, and leaning over the rail dropped the little body into the sea. And before he could stop her, or even realize what she was about, she climbed onto the rail and leapt in after it.

Her head surfaced only once, and as it did so a black, triangular fin sliced through the water. There was a swirl and a splash and the sea was stained with something that would have been red by daylight but that by moonlight showed only as a spreading patch of oily darkness. Then the shark sank out of sight, and die woman with it. Presently other bodies were sent to join them as the dead were separated from the living and flung overboard, and the scavengers of the deep tore them in pieces and dragged them under, and the waves washed the sea clean again.

The slaver’s boats were lowered and her hapless cargo—dazed, apathetic and convinced that they were merely falling from the clutches of one set of brutal captors into the hands of another and possibly worse one—were transferred to the
Daffodil
to the accompaniment of hysterical threats from their late owner.

The schooner’s Captain stormed and raged, calling down curses upon the collective heads of the entire British Navy, and shouting that his name was Peter Fenner, and that he was an American citizen and Perfidious Albion would be made to pay dearly for having fired upon him. But his log had been written in Spanish, his flag lockers proved to contain the flags of a dozen different nations, and his papers gave his name as Pedro Fernandez and his “Country of residence’ as Cuba.

“What do you propose to do with him?” demanded the Assistant-Surgeon, gulping brandy from a bottle that he had found in the Captain’s cabin—for he, like the coxswain, was new to the realities of slave trading. “If we take him back to Zanzibar they’ll only keep him there for a month or so, and then ship him off to some place like Lourenço Marques where he’ll be treated like a prodigal son and allowed to get off scot free. And we haven’t enough coal to take him to the Cape.”

“I know. That’s why we’re going to leave him here.”

The slaver’s Captain, smiling broadly, spoke insolently over his shoulder, and in Spanish, to his first mate:

“You see, Sanchez? They can do nothing. They dare not hold us, and when they have gone we shall go back and pick up more slaves, and these pigs will not even know.
Por Dios!
What fools are these English!”

Lieutenant Larrimore returned the smile, though less pleasantly, and remarked in the same language: “But not too foolish to speak Spanish—which is unfortunate for you Señor
Perro
(dog) is it not?”

He turned back to the Assistant-Surgeon and continued as though there had been no interruption:

“We’re well clear of the land and the wind seems to be dying down again, so I shall sink his boats and confiscate his canvas. We’ll let him keep some food and water—about the same amount, and in the same proportion, that he seems to have considered sufficient for those poor devils. Agreed?”

“Agreed!” said the Assistant-Surgeon briskly. “I shall enjoy seeing to it.”

They finished the brandy and returned to the deck, where the boarding party unbent all the sails and removed every shred of canvas (‘Nothing to stop them using their bedding to rig up a jib,” suggested the Lieutenant unkindly), unreeved all the rigging, threw guns, bunting, and every movable object overboard, let go both anchors to the limit of their chains, and dealt drastically with both food and water.

“And you can thank us,” said Lieutenant Larrimore in conclusion, “for leaving you a compass.”

He climbed over the side and was rowed back to the
Daffodil
in the first pale light of dawn: unaware that behind him a dhow that had also been lurking in the hidden bay, and that had left it as soon as the chase had moved far enough out to sea, had slipped away unseen and set her course due south for a rendezvous that was no more than a pin-point on a well-thumbed chart.

3

Captain Thaddaeus Fullbright of the
Norah Crayne
, ninety-eight days out from Boston, glanced at the barometer for the fourth time in ten minutes, and frowned. The sea was as flat and as motionless as it had been for the past three weeks, but the glass continued to fall, and although it was midday the sun was still veiled by a hot, tarnished haze that was neither fog nor cloud.

It was an ugly and unseasonable haze, and it disturbed Captain Fullbright, for this was normally the season of swift passages; of roaring blue seas and scudding cloud shadows. But ever since they had rounded the Cape they had met with nothing but this unnatural calm and these rusty, hazy days. The
Norah Crayne
had idled up the coast of Africa, often making less than a knot, and now it began to look as though they would be lucky if they made land in another ten days.

“If at all!” muttered Captain Fullbright. And was startled to discover that he had spoken the words aloud.

It was a measure of his anxiety that he could even entertain such a thought, let alone put it into words, and it occurred to him that at this rate he would soon be emulating Tod MacKechnie, that maundering old Scotsman back in Durban who had discoursed so depressingly on death and the Judgements of Jehovah.

“
Bah!
” said Captain Fullbright, addressing himself impartially to the barometer and the shade of the absent MacKechnie. He turned his back abruptly upon both, and staring out at the flat leagues of tarnished silver, wondered pessimistically what further mischances might lie in wait before he saw Boston harbour again.

It had been a bad voyage so far, and he regretted this as much for his wife’s sake as his own, for it was not often that Amelia was permitted to accompany him. The owners had never previously encouraged it, and she would not have been here now if a cousin of the Craynes’ had not happened to be the only lady among a long list of male passengers, and Josiah Crayne, being strongly opposed to Miss Hollis travelling unchaperoned, had not personally requested Amelia’s presence.

Mr Crane would have done better, thought Captain Thaddaeus wryly, to prevent his young cousin from sailing at all. But then Miss Hollis appeared to be a headstrong young woman who was obviously accustomed to having her own way, and Josiah Crayne had probably found it less fatiguing to let her have it than to attempt to argue with her. It was also possible that he was not altogether sorry to be temporarily rid of her!

Captain Fullbright grinned to himself; and immediately suffered a twinge of remorse. It was plumb ungrateful of him to criticize a girl who had heroically conquered her own nausea, and reversing their roles, nursed her chaperone through several bad bouts of seasickness. His poor Amelia—she had been so delighted at the prospect of accompanying him on this voyage, but he feared that it was proving a sad disappointment to her, for it had been an ill-fated trip from the start. The weather had been stormy and inclement, and at Bermuda one of the cabin stewards had been left behind in hospital with broken ribs. A deckhand had been swept overboard and drowned off the Cape Verde Islands, and another died from an outbreak of malignant fever in the Gulf of Guinea. And now the Trades had failed!

“It’s a gey ill year,” Mr MacKechnie the ship-chandler had said in his dockside office in Durban as he checked the list of stores that the Captain was buying: “Aye, a verra ill year! I doot but it’ll be the waurk o’ the Lorrd as a punishment on the sinfu’ worrld for the continuin’ evil o’ slavery. First ‘twas the rains failed and then “twas the winds. And now there’s a tale that awa’ back in the bad lands there’s a pestilence broke out that’s killin’ off the tribes like a black frost’ll kill the greenfly, until soon there’ll be naebody left alive in Africa, and a’ the great land will be as empty as the back o’ me hand! “Tis the Judgement o’ the Lorrd, and if ye are a wise mon, Mr Fullbright, ye’ll keep awa’ frae the coast this trup.”