Consciousness returned to me with the sensation of soft, delicate light
impinging upon my closed eyelids, and I opened my eyes upon the picture
of a sky of deepest, richest, purest blue, studded with wool-like tufts
of fleecy cloud, opalescent with daintiest tints of primrose and pink as
they sailed overhead with a slow and gentle movement out from the north-
east. The eastern horizon was all aglow with ruddy orange light, up
through which soared broad, fan-like rays of white radiance--the spokes
of Phoebus' chariot wheels--that, through a scale of countless subtle
changes of tincture, gradually merged into the marvellously soft
richness of the prismatic sky. A gentle breeze, warm and sweet as a
woman's breath, lightly ruffled the surface of the sea, that heaved in
long, low hills of deep and brilliant liquid sapphire around me; and
here and there a sea-bird wheeled and swept with plaintive cries, and
slanting, motionless pinions, in long, easy, graceful curves over the
slowly undulating swell.
I sat up and looked about me vaguely and wonderingly, for the moment
forgetful of the circumstances that had placed me in so novel a
situation, and at the instant a glowing point of golden fire flashed
into view upon the eastern horizon, as the upper rim of the sun hove
above the undulating rim of the sea; and in a moment the rippling blue
of the laughing water was laced with a long, broadening wake of
gleaming, dancing, liquid gold, as the great palpitating disc of the god
of day left his ocean couch, and entered upon his journey through the
heavens.
My forgetfulness was but momentary; as the radiance and warmth of the
returning sun swept over the glittering, scintillating, golden path that
stretched from the horizon to the raft, the memory of all that had gone
before, and the apprehension of what still haply awaited me, returned,
and, as quickly as my cramped and aching limbs would allow, I staggered
to my feet, flinging anxious, eager glances all around me in search of a
sail. The horizon, however, was bare, save where the long, narrow
pinion of a wheeling sea-bird swiftly cut it for a moment here and
there; and I sighed wearily as I resumed my recumbent position upon the
raft, wondering whether rescue would ever come, or whether it was my
doom to float there, tossing hour after hour and day after day, like the
veriest waif, until thirst and starvation had wrought their will upon
me, or until another storm should arise, and the now laughing ocean
should overwhelm me in its fury.
And indeed I cared very little just then what fate awaited me; for I was
so ill, my frame was so racked with fever and my head so distracted with
the fierce throbbing and beating of the wildly coursing blood in it,
that the only thing I craved for was relief from my sufferings. It was
a matter of the utmost indifference to me at that moment whether the
relief came from death or from any other source, so long as it came
quickly. My strength was leaving me with astounding rapidity, and I was
quite aware that if I wished to husband the little that still remained
to me I ought to eat; but the mere idea of eating excited so violent a
repugnance, that it was with the utmost difficulty I resisted the almost
overwhelming temptation to pitch my slender stock of sea-sodden biscuit
overboard. On the other hand, I was consumed with a torturing thirst
that I vainly strove to assuage by so reckless a consumption of my
equally slender stock of wine, that at the end of the day only two
bottles remained. Such recklessness was of course due to the fact that
I was unaccountable for my actions; I was possessed of a kind of
madness, and I knew it, but I had lost all control over myself, and
cared not what happened. More than once I found myself seriously
considering the advisability of throwing myself off the raft, and so
ending everything without more ado; and I have often wondered why I did
not do so; it was certainly not the fear of death that prevented me. As
the day wore on my sufferings steadily increased in intensity; my brain
throbbed and pulsated with pain so acute that it seemed as though a
million wedges were being driven into my skull; a host of weird,
outrageous, and horrible fancies chased each other through my
imagination; I became possessed of the idea that the raft was surrounded
and hemmed in by an ever-increasing multitude of frightful sea monsters,
who fought with each other in their furious efforts to get within reach
of me; day and night seemed to come and go with bewildering rapidity;
and finally everything became involved in a condition of hopelessly
inextricable confusion, that eventually merged into oblivion.
My next consciousness was that of a sound of gurgling, running water,
and of a buoyant, heaving, plunging motion; of flashing sunshine coming
and going upon my closed eyelids; of the vibrant hum of wind through
taut rigging and in the hollows of straining canvas; of a murmur of
voices, and of the regular tramp of footsteps to and fro on the planking
overhead; and for the moment I thought that I was aboard the _Tern_, and
just awaking from a sleep during which I had been haunted with an
unusually long series of peculiarly unpleasant dreams. But as I opened
my eyes and looked with somewhat languid interest upon my surroundings,
I became aware that I was in a small, plain, but fairly snug cabin, of
which I seemed to possess no previous knowledge; and at the same moment
a confused but rapidly clearing memory of what had happened came to me,
together with the knowledge that I had been rescued from the raft, and
was feeling very much better. But an attempt to move, preliminary to
turning out, revealed the disconcerting fact that I was as weak and
helpless as a new-born infant, so I was perforce obliged to remain where
I was; and in a short time I dozed off into a light sleep again, soothed
thereto by the hum of the wind, the gurgling wash of water along the
side of the ship, close to my ear, and the gentle heave and plunge of
the fabric that bore me.
From this nap I was awakened by the somewhat noisy opening of my cabin
door; and upon opening my eyes I beheld a swarthy and somewhat dirty-
looking individual bending over me. From his appearance I at once set
him down as a Frenchman; and as I gazed up into his face with mild
curiosity, this impression became confirmed by his exclaiming in
French--
"Ah, monsieur, so you have come to your senses at last, eh? Good! I
knew I could save you, although Francois declared you to be as good as
dead when he brought you aboard! And now, mon ami, what do you say; can
you eat something?"
"Thank you," replied I, in the same language; "now that you come to
mention it, I think I can."
"Good!" ejaculated the unknown: "rest tranquil for but a short time, and
I will see what that rascal cook of ours can do for you. Stay! another
dose of quinine will do you no harm, just by way of precaution, you
know, although I think I have driven the fever out of you at last.
Permit me."
And, so saying, he laid a rather grimy hand upon my forehead for a
moment, and then transferred it to my wrist, remarking--
"Good! the skin is cool and moist, the pulse normal again. Ha, ha, my
friend, you will do, you will do; henceforth the cook must be your
doctor. All you need now is plenty of good nourishing food to restore
your strength. Now, drink this, and as soon as you have swallowed it I
will away to the galley."
While speaking, this individual had been busying himself with a bottle,
from which he extracted a small quantity of white powder, which he mixed
with water and then handed me the mixture to drink.
"Thank you," said I, handing him back the glass. "And now, monsieur, do
me the favour to tell me your name, in order that I may know to whom I
am indebted for my preservation."
"My name?" he repeated, with a laugh. "Oh, that will keep, monsieur,
that will keep. At present your most urgent necessity is food, which I
am now going to get for you. When I return I will tell you all you may
wish to know, while you are eating. For the present, adieu, monsieur.
If you feel disposed to sleep again, do so; sleep is nearly as valuable
as food to you just now. When I have some of the latter ready for you I
will wake you, never fear."
So saying, and before I could utter another word, he vanished, slamming
the cabin door after him.
His retirement caused me a sensation of distinct relief, at which I was
very greatly annoyed with myself; for had not this man doubly saved my
life, first by rescuing me from the raft, and afterwards by nursing me
through what I believed had been a serious illness? Yet, ingrate that I
was, even in the brief interview that I have just described I had taken
an unmistakable dislike to the man! It was not so much that he was
unclean in person and attire,--it was possible that there might be a
good and sufficient excuse for that,--but what had excited my antipathy,
when I came to analyse the feeling, was a certain false ring in his
voice, a subtle something in his manner suggestive of the idea that his
friendliness and heartiness were not natural to him--were assumed for a
purpose. Yet why it should be so, why he should have rescued me from
the raft and afterwards troubled himself to fight and drive out the
fever that threatened to destroy me, unless from a feeling of humanity
and compassion for my pitiable condition, I could not imagine; yet there
had been--or so I fancied--a fierce, shifty gleam in his coal-black eyes
during the few brief minutes that he had bent over me as I lay there in
my bunk, that seemed to reveal cruelty and treachery, rather than pity
and good-will. Let me describe the man. Standing there beside my bunk,
he had conveyed to me the impression of an individual nearly six feet in
height,--I afterwards found his stature to be five feet ten inches in
his stockings,--broad across the shoulders in proportion, and big boned,
but lean almost to the point of emaciation. His skin was dry, of an
unwholesome yellow tint, and shrivelled, as though he had once been
stout and burly of form but had now become thin, while his skin had
failed to shrink in the same proportion as his flesh. His eyes were, as
I have said, black, small, and deeply sunken in his head; his hair was a
dull, dead black, and was worn cropped close to his head; his black
beard was trimmed to a point; and he wore a moustache, the long ends of
which projected athwart his upper lip like a spritsail yard. His hands
were thin, showing the tendons of the fingers working under the loose
skin at every movement of them, while the fingers themselves were long,
attenuated, ingrained with dirt, and furnished with long, talon-like
yellow nails, that looked as though they never received the slightest
attention. Finally, his clothing consisted of a cotton shirt, that
looked as though it had been in use for at least a month since its last
visit to the laundress, a pair of grimy blue dungaree trousers, and a
pair of red morocco slippers.
As I lay there in the bunk, recalling the appearance of my rescuer, and
trying to evolve therefrom some definite impression of the man's
character, I became aware that the duty of the ship seemed to be carried
on with a very unnecessary amount of vociferation and contumelious
language. An Englishman will sometimes, in critical or urgent moments,
garnish his orders with an expletive or two by way of stimulus to the
crew; but upon the occasion to which I am now referring there was not
the slightest excuse for anything of the kind. The weather was fine,
the wind moderate, and we were evidently not engaged upon the
performance of some feat of complicated or difficult navigation; for the
course remained constant, and there was neither making nor shortening of
sail. It simply appeared that the officer of the watch happened to be
one of those distressing and trouble-making individuals who regard it as
incumbent upon themselves to continually "haze" the men; for he was
constantly bawling some trifling order, and accompanying it with a
running fire of abuse that must have been furiously exasperating to the
person addressed.
After an absence of about half an hour, the man who had already visited
me returned, this time bearing a large bowl of smoking broth, and a
plate containing three large ship biscuits of the coarsest kind. The
broth, however, exhaled a distinctly appetising odour, which had the
effect of again reminding me that I was hungry; so, with my visitor's
assistance, I contrived to raise myself into a sitting posture, and
forthwith attacked the contents of the bowl, previously breaking into it
a small quantity of biscuit. The "broth" proved to be turtle soup,
deliciously made, and, taking my time over the task, I consumed the
whole of it, my companion meanwhile giving an account of himself, his
ship, and the circumstances attending my rescue.
"My name, monsieur," he said, in reply to a question of mine, "is
Lemaitre--Jean Lemaitre; a native of Fort Royal, in the island of
Martinique, and owner as well as Captain of _La belle Jeannette_--the
schooner which you are now honouring with your presence. I am in the
slave-trade, monsieur,--doing business chiefly with the Spaniards,--and
exactly a month ago to-day I sailed from Havana for the Guinea coast.
We came west and south about, round Cape San Antonio, stretching well
over toward the Spanish Main, in order to avoid, if possible, those
pestilent cruisers of yours, which seem to be everywhere, and are always
ready to snap up everything that they can lay their hands upon. By
great good fortune we managed to dodge them, and got through without
being interfered with; but it threw us into the track of the hurricane,
and necessitated our remaining hove-to for twenty-six hours. Four days
later, as we were sailing merrily along, we saw something floating ahead
of us, and ten minutes later we all but ran down your raft, on which we
saw you lying face downwards, while the sharks were righting each other
in their efforts to get at you and drag you off. Francois, my mate, was
for leaving you where you were,--asserting that you must surely be dead,
and that to pick up a dead man would make the voyage unlucky,--but I am
a humane man, monsieur, and I insisted upon heaving-to and sending away
a boat to bring you aboard. The boat's crew had a hard job of it to
drive off the sharks, and to get you safely into the boat, monsieur;
and, even _so_, the creatures followed the boat alongside--to the number
of seventeen, for I counted them myself. Francois suggested that we
should throw you to them, declaring that you were as good as dead
already, and that it was a shame to disappoint the sharks after they had
waited so patiently for you; but I am a humane man, monsieur,--as I
believe I have already mentioned,--and I would not listen to his
proposal. So I had you brought down below and placed in this spare
cabin, where I have attended to you ever since,--that was ten days
ago,--and now, behold, the fever has left you, your appetite has
returned, and in another week, please the good God we shall have you on
deck again, as well as ever you were."
"Thank you, monsieur," said I. "I am infinitely obliged to you for the
humanity that prompted you to pick me up--despite the dissuasions of
your mate, Francois--and also for the trouble you have taken in nursing
me through my illness. Fortunately, I am in a position to make
substantial recognition of my gratitude; and upon my return to Jamaica--
as to which I presume there will be no difficulty--it shall be my first
business to take such steps as shall insure you against all pecuniary
loss on my account."
"Ah, monsieur," exclaimed Lemaitre, "I beg that you will say no more on
that score; it hurts me that you should think it necessary to mention so
mercenary a word as that of `reward.' We are both sailors, and although
we have the misfortune to be enemies, that is no reason why one brave
man should not aid another in distress, without looking for a reward.
As to your return to Jamaica, no doubt that can be managed upon our
return voyage--"
"Your return voyage!" I interrupted. "Can you not manage it forthwith,
captain? I can make it quite worth your while to up helm and run me
back at once. It is of the utmost importance to me to return to Port
Royal with the least possible delay, and--"
"Alas, monsieur, it cannot be done," interrupted Lemaitre, in his turn.
"A cargo of slaves is even now awaiting me in the Cameroon River, and my
patrons in Havana are impatiently looking forward to their delivery. If
I were to disappoint them I should be ruined, for I have many
competitors in the trade to contend with, especially since all this talk
has arisen about making slave-trading illegal. No; I regret to be
obliged to refuse you, monsieur, but there is no help for it."
"At least," said I, "you will transfer me to a British man-o'-war,
should we chance to fall in with one?"
"And be myself captured, and lose my ship for my pains!" exclaimed
Lemaitre. "Oh no, monsieur; we will give your ships a wide berth, if we
fall in with them, and trust to our heels."
"Nonsense, monsieur," I returned. "Surely you cannot suppose I would be
so ungrateful as to permit any such thing. I am a British officer, and
should, of course, make a point of seeing that, in such a case, you were
held exempt from capture. My representations would be quite sufficient
to secure that for you."
"Well, monsieur, we will see, we will see," answered Lemaitre; and
therewith he took the empty soup bowl from my hand, and retired from the
cabin, slamming the door, as usual, behind him.
For the next three days I continued to occupy my bunk, my strength
returning slowly; but on the fourth I made shift, with Lemaitre's
assistance, to get into my clothes, and crawl on deck; and from that
moment my progress toward recovery was rapid. Meanwhile, the "hazing"
of which I have spoken continued at regular intervals, day and night,
and I soon ascertained that the individual responsible for it was none
other than the Francois who so kindly suggested that I should be hove
overboard to the sharks. This fellow was evidently a born bully; he
never opened his mouth to deliver an order without abusing and insulting
the men, and as often as not the abuse was accentuated with blows, the
sounds of which, and the accompanying cries of the men, I could
distinctly hear in my cabin. That, however, was hardly the worst of it;
for I soon discovered that Lemaitre, the skipper of this precious craft
in which such doings were permitted, was a drunkard; for every night, at
about nine o'clock, I used to hear him come below, and order out the rum
and water; after which he and Francois, or the second mate,--according
to whose watch below it happened to be,--would sit for about an hour,
drinking one against the other, until the language of both became
incoherent, when the pair of them would stagger and stumble off to their
respective staterooms.
This was my first experience of a slaver, and a most unpleasant
experience it was. The vessel herself,--a schooner of one hundred and
twenty tons register,--although superbly modelled, a magnificent sea-
boat, and sailing like a witch, was rendered uncomfortable in the
extreme as an abode by her filthy condition. Cleanliness seemed to be
regarded by Lemaitre as a wholly unnecessary luxury, with the result
that no effort was made to keep in check the steady accumulation of dirt
from day to day, much less to remove that which already existed. Even
the daily washing down of the decks--which, with the British sailor, has
assumed the importance and imperative character of a religious
function--was deemed superfluous. Nor were the crew any more careful as
to their own condition or that of their clothing. It is a fact that
during the whole period of my sojourn on board _La belle Jeannette_ I
never saw one of her people attempt to wash himself or any article of
clothing; and, as a natural result of this steadfast disregard of the
most elementary principles of cleanliness, the little hooker simply
swarmed with vermin.
But, bad as it was, this was not the worst. The crew, from Lemaitre
downward, were a low, brutal, quarrelsome gang, always wrangling
together, and frequently fighting; while, as I have already mentioned,
the one predominating idea of Francois, the chief mate, was that they
could only be kept in order by constantly and impartially rope's-ending
them all round. Possibly he may have been right; at all events, I found
it far easier to excuse his behaviour after I had seen the crew than I
had before.
All this time Lemaitre had been behaving toward me with a rough, clumsy,
off-hand kindness that his personal appearance would have led no one to
expect, and which, try as I would, I could not bring myself to regard as
genuine, because, through it all, there seemed now and then to rise to
the surface an underflow of repressed malignity, not pronounced enough
to be certain about, yet sufficiently distinct to provoke in me a vague
sensation of uneasiness and distrust. To put the matter concisely,
although Lemaitre was by no means effusive in his expressions of good-
will toward me, and although there was a certain perfunctory quality in
such attentions as he showed me, there was with it all a curious subtle
something, so intangible that I found it utterly impossible to define or
describe it, which yet impressed me with the feeling that it was all
unreal, assumed, a mockery and a pretence; though _why_ it should be so,
I could not for the life of me divine.