AT LONG WHARF
Four months from that red morning, the _Silver Fleece_ drew in past
Nix’s Mate and the low-buttressed islands in Boston Harbor, and with a
tug to ease her to her berth, made fast at Long Wharf.
All signs of the battle had long since been obliterated, overlaid by
other hardships, violences, evil deeds. Her bottom fouled by tropic
weed and barnacles that had accumulated in West Indian waters, her
canvas brown and patched, she came to rest. Of all the white men who
had sailed with her, nearly two years before, now remained only Captain
Briggs, Mr. Wansley, and the doctor. The others who had escaped the
fight had all died or deserted on the home-bound journey. One had
been caught by bubonic at Bombay, and two by beri-beri at Mowanga, on
the Ivory Coast; the others had taken French leave as occasion had
permitted.
Short-handed, with a rag-tag crew, the _Fleece_ made her berth. She
seemed innocent enough. The sickening stench of the slave cargo that
had burdened her from Mowanga to Cuba had been fumigated out of her,
and now she appeared only a legitimate trader. That she bore, deftly
hidden in secret places, a hundred boxes of raw opium, who could have
suspected?
As the hawsers were flung and the clipper creaked against the wharf,
there came to an end surely one of the worst voyages that ever an
American clipper-ship made. And this is saying a great deal. Those
were hard days—days when Massachusetts ships carried full cargoes of
Medford rum and Bibles to the West Coast, and came back as slavers,
with black ivory groaning and dying under hatches—days when the sharks
trailed all across the Atlantic, for the bodies of black men and
women—hard days and evil ways, indeed.
Very spruce and fine was Captain Briggs; very much content with life
and with the strength that in him lay, that excellent May morning, as
with firm stride and clear eye he walked up State Street, in Boston
Town. The wounds which would have killed a weaker man had long since
healed on him. Up from the water-front he walked, resplendent in his
best blue suit, and with a gold-braided cap on his crisp hair. His
black beard was carefully trimmed and combed; his bronzed, full-fleshed
face glowed with health and satisfaction; and the smoke of his cigar
drifted behind him on the morning air. As he went he hummed an ancient
chantey:
“Oh, Sharlo Brown, I love your datter,
Awa-a-ay, my rollin’ river!
Oh, Sharlo Brown, I love your datter,
Ah! Ah! We’re bound with awa-a-ay,
’Cross the wide Missouri!”
Past the ship-chandlers’ stores, where all manner of sea things lay in
the windows, he made his way, and past the marine brokers’ offices;
past the custom-house and up along the Old State House; and so he came
into Court Street and Court Square, hard by which, in a narrow, cobbled
lane, the Bell-in-Hand Tavern was awaiting him.
All the way along, shipmasters and seafaring folk nodded respectfully
to Alpheus Briggs, or touched their hats to him. But few men smiled.
His reputation of hard blows and harder dealings made men salute him.
But no man seized him by the hand, or haled him into any public house
to toast his safe return.
Under the dark doorway of the Bell-in-Hand—under the crude, wooden
fist that from colonial times, as even to-day, has held the gilded,
wooden bell—Briggs paused a moment, then entered the inn. His huge
bulk seemed almost to fill the dim, smoky, low-posted old place, its
walls behung with colored woodcuts of ships and with fine old sporting
prints. The captain raised a hand of greeting to Enoch Winch, the
publican, passed the time of day with him, and called for a pewter of
Four-X, to be served in the back room.
There he sat down in the half-gloom that seeped through the little
windows of heavily leaded bull’s-eye glass. He put his cap off, drew
deeply at his cigar, and sighed with vast content.
“Back home again,” he murmured. “A hell of a time I’ve had, and that’s
no lie. But I’m back home at last!”
His satisfaction was doubled by the arrival of the pewter of ale.
Briggs drank deeply of the cold brew, then dried his beard with a
handkerchief of purple silk. Not now did he smear his mouth with his
hand. This was a wholly other and more elegant Alpheus Briggs. Having
changed his latitude and raiment, he had likewise changed his manners.
He drained the pewter till light showed through the glass bottom—the
bottom reminiscent of old days when to accept a shilling from a
recruiting officer, even unaware, meant being pressed into the service;
for a shilling in an empty mug was held as proof of enlistment, unless
instantly detected and denied. Briggs smiled at memory of the trick.
“Clumsy stratagem,” he pondered, “We’re a bit slicker, to-day. In the
old days it took time to make a fortune. Now, a little boldness turns
the trick, just as I’ve turned it, this time!”
He rapped on the table for another pewter of Four-X. Stronger liquors
would better have suited his taste, but he had certain business still
to be carried out, and when ashore the captain never let drink take
precedence of business.
The second pewter put Captain Briggs in a reminiscent mood, wherein
memories of the stirring events of the voyage just ended mingled with
the comforting knowledge that he had much money in pocket and that
still more was bound to come, before that day’s end. As in a kind of
mental mirage, scenes arose before him—scenes of hardship and crime,
now in security by no means displeasing to recall.
The affair with the Malay war fleet had already been half-obliterated
by more recent violences. Briggs pondered on the sudden mutiny that
had broken out, ten days from Bombay, led by a Liverpool ruffian named
Quigley, who had tried to brain him with a piece of iron in a sock.
Briggs had simply flung him into the sea; then he had faced the others
with naked fists, and they had slunk away forward.
He and Wansley had later lashed them to the gangway and had given them
the cat to exhaustion. Briggs felt that he had come out of this affair
with honors. He took another draught of ale.
Beating up the West Coast, he recalled how he had punished a young
Irishman, McCune, whom he had shipped at Cape Town. McCune, from the
supposed security of the foretop-gallant yard, had cursed him for a
black-hearted bucko. Without parley, Briggs had run up the ratlines,
and had flung McCune to the deck. The man had lived only a few
minutes. Briggs nodded with satisfaction. He clenched his right fist,
hairy, corded, and turned it this way and that, glad of its power.
Greatly did he admire the resistless argument that lay in all its bones
and ligaments.
“There’s no man can talk back to _me_!” he growled. “No, by the Judas
priest!”
Now came less pleasing recollections. The slave cargo on the
west-bound voyage had been unusually heavy. Ironed wrist and ankle,
the blacks—men, women, children, purchased as a rather poor bargain
lot from an Arab trader—had lain packed in the hold. They had been
half starved when Briggs had loaded them, and the fever had already got
among them. The percentage of loss had been a bit too heavy. Some death
was legitimate, of course; but an excessive mortality meant loss.
The death rate had risen so high that Briggs had even considered
bringing some of the black ivory on deck, and increasing the ration.
But in the end he had decided to hold through, and trust luck to arrive
in Cuba with enough slaves to pay a good margin. Results had justified
his decision.
“I was right about that, too,” thought he. “Seems like I’m always
right—or else it’s gilt-edged luck!”
Yet, in spite of all, that voyage had left some disagreeable memories.
The reek and stifle of the hold, the groaning and crying of the
blacks—that no amount of punishment could silence—had vastly annoyed
the captain. The way in which his crew had stricken the shackles from
the dead and from those manifestly marked for death and had heaved them
overboard to the trailing sharks, had been only a trivial detail.
But the fact that Briggs’s own cabin had been invaded by vermin and by
noxious odors had greatly annoyed the captain. Not all Doctor Filhiol’s
burning of pungent substances in the cabin had been able to purify the
air. Briggs had cursed the fact that this most profitable trafficking
had involved such disagreeable concomitants, and had consoled himself
with much strong drink.
Then, too, a five-day blow, three hundred miles west of the Cape
Verdes, had killed off more than forty of his negroes and had made
conditions doubly intolerable. Once more he formulated thoughts in
words:
“Damn it! I might have done better to have scuttled her, off the
African coast, and have drawn down my share of the insurance money.
If I’d known what I was running into, that’s just what I _would_ have
done, so help me! I made a devilish good thing of it, that way, in the
old _White Cloud_ two years ago. And never was so much as questioned!”
He pondered a moment, frowning blackly.
“Maybe I did wrong, after all, to bring the _Fleece_ into port. But if
I hadn’t, I’d have had to sacrifice those hundred boxes of opium, that
will bring me a clear two hundred apiece, from Hendricks. So after all,
it’s all right. I’m satisfied.”
He drained the last of the Four-X, and carefully inspected his watch.
“Ten-fifteen,” said he. “And I’m to meet Hendricks at ten-thirty at the
Tremont House. I’ll hoist anchor and away.”
He paid his score with scrupulous exactness, for in such matters he
greatly prided himself on his honesty, lighted a fresh cigar, and
departed from the Bell-in-Hand.
Cigar in mouth, smoke trailing on the May morning, he made his way to
School Street and up it. A fine figure of a mariner he strode along,
erect, deep-chested, thewed and sinewed like a bull.
In under the columned portals of the old Tremont House—now long since
only a memory—he entered, to his rendezvous with Hendricks, furtive
buyer of the forbidden drug.
And as he vanishes beneath that granite doorway, for fifty years he
passes from our sight.