After seven weeks of tossing sea we saw the capes of Virginia, Cape
Henry and Cape Charles, and the _King William_ passed between
into that vast bay called Chesapeake. And now the agent of the Hull
owners aboard, Mr. Ransom, grew mighty busy. All of his cargo must be
freshened and heartened and persuaded with honied words, or drubbed
with hard ones, into looking healthy and smiling. It had been easier
work if his merchants had fed us and if there had not been so much
sickness from spoiled food and from the laithly crowding. Alas, David
Scott, and it taught you little!
But the land looked good after the salt foam, for few of the
merchandise were seamen. And they were young, and change is change. And
they understood, so many of them being parish poor, that it was better
go meet a master with a smile.
As for us six Scots, we had consulted. We meant devil-may-care! So we
laughed at the others and cracked our jokes. But it came with a shock
when, Fergus Ross having remarked to Mr. Ransom that he trusted some
rich planter meant to buy the whole of us, the agent, a cold man,
stopped in his going to and fro. “That’s not to be! Orders are, one
to one master. You’re plotters and we’ll have in Virginia no plots!
You’re rebels and we’ll scatter you! Moreover, back on you go the irons
till you’re sold.”
Angus Ross lengthened, then shortened, his face. “And not that shall
make me look sick and sorry, though your Whig world is the Devil’s
pleasant seat!”
“And what, may it please you,” asked the agent, “would have been your
Tory world? And I’ll tell you that. The Devil himself!”
So they had it. And we six wore irons again, wearing them already of
Party, as did the agent and others.
The land showed low and in part covered with forest, much of it being
pine. It was the autumn, and oaks and other drop-leaves stood in flames
of red and gold. We saw marshes turning tawny, and above them and above
the water flashed endlessly the sea birds. On the northern side the
great passage, sprang a jut of land with a fort. Morrison spoke behind
me. “Point Comfort, the Captain saith, where they landed first in
sixteen hundred and seven.”
Angus Ross asked, “Were there any kindly Scots?”
“I think not. They came on the next ship.”
“There are plenty now!” That was Billings the mate, passing us.
But we six, Highland and Lowland, young men, and our chains galling us
and our company soon to be parted, felt Loneliness and Exile. They
rose, gigantic dark shadows, from this low, strange country, where we
saw no mountain nor even a goodly hill, where there grew, they said,
neither gorse nor heather. When the ship came to Point Comfort and
dropped anchor before the fort, and the Captain went ashore in a boat
with his papers for clearance, we crowded with the others to mark that
place and the no great life about it, but Point Comfort gave our hearts
little comfort.
David Scott felt a kind of dread upon him. Twenty-two, and an overseer
and a tobacco field for one who loved the high glen and Mysie Johnston!
Back came the Captain. Weighing anchor, the _King William_ stood
into the River James that measured seven miles from shore to shore.
The cargo had never seen such a river. Presently we passed a rude town
named Norfolk with no little shipping lying in the roads before it.
By sunset we were a score of miles up stream, into the land. The land
was always low, and here stretched forest and here showed clearings
and brown fields and solitary good-sized houses with clusters of small
houses a-near, and running far into the stream thin, gray “landings”
like skeleton fingers. So broad was the river, we keeping in midstream,
that we missed the life of fields and road and wharf. All to us had
a melancholy spareness,--vast distances and the much forest and the
yellow, enormous river. The clearings were chiefly upon the northern
shore. There were a few ships upon the river or anchored about the
landings, and we saw cockle boats with gray handsbreadths of sail
and oared craft. But taken all together, to us, bondsmen and from
an ancient country, for all the beauty of the air and beauty of the
colored trees, loneliness and a melancholy spareness! The sun went down
behind long, long bars of purple cloud. The _King William_ came
to anchor for the night, and the ship’s lanterns made other lanterns
in the water, and the slow-marching stars, for all they kept the old
formation, seemed an alien host from them at home.
With sunrise rose another mood. Sick, sick, we were heartily sick
of the ship! Any land that we might come to still was earth, and
adventures might be predicated. In short, as the sails were made,
as the sailors with their chantey raised the anchor, as the river
turned red-gold, as the fresh wind filled our nostrils and the gulls
screamed about the ship, as the cook served us a far better breakfast
than usual, and the Captain sent forward with his compliments a small
measure of rum for each man, we became the courageous soldiers of
Novelty. When a canoe with Indians passed us we crowded to the side and
exclaimed at the raree show.
Now a good wind took us farther up that wide river, and still in the
early, gay morning, we sighted Jamestown that was our destination.
We six Jacobites stood together.
Our lot seemed the hardest upon that ship. The others had determined
periods. Five years, even seven years, pass! But for all we knew we
might never be our own men again, opposite us standing an infuriated
Monarch and Party that might reign, if not forever, still until earth
covered us. We wore irons, were marked “dangerous” as though we were
powder flasks beside a fire. The comfort of company, alikes together,
was going from us. Those around us seemed better off.
But David Scott, looking at those youths peaked and early wizened, or
dull, sodden, branded by ceaseless, hopeless labor, or fever-bitten,
restless and weakly turbulent, felt a sudden pride and glory in “big
David Scott.” So perhaps did Angus Ross in Angus Ross and MacLean in
MacLean and MacLeod in MacLeod. Pride and glory of the body!
That Jamestown enlarged before us, and it seemed but three or four
brick houses and a bit tower as of a church, and a landing, and around
this sloops and small boats. It seemed, at tide at least, an island,
and it was shady with great trees, green and yellow and crimson.
Morrison stood beside me.
“Here beginneth a new chapter. Rather a pretty place! Well, English
made it and here come English to it--English and Scots. As to
indentures and seven years’ service and so forth, we’ve known all that
since Father Jacob served Laban. Earlier still, I make no doubt! It’s
venerable--can be defended. As to you six, mercy has been shown you.
Mercy is venerable too.”
“There’s something in a book I once read about ‘the tender mercies of
the wicked.’--The wicked! Well, I’m that and will be that too!”
“Is that what you Scots name second sight?”
“I dinna ken----”
“It’s a pity,” said Morrison. “I have ‘kenned’ it as you say, also.
Kenned wickedness. It doesn’t pay. It’s never paid.--But I’m no
preacher. I’m only a ‘sair’ piece of shipwreck that says, ‘Look out!’”
As though he were echoed, the mate cried “Look out!” and the anchor,
rattling down, clutched the bed of the River James. The bare masts
and spars and rigging of the _King William_ gently rose and fell
against a bluebell sky. We were riding close to the landing that was
crowded with folk, and boats were putting off to us.
“Those are gentlemen of the country,” explained Mr. Ransom, “coming off
to buy you lusty fellows! Range yourselves, and remember that the worst
thing that can happen to you is not to be liked! Look at yourselves
when five and seven years are over and be smiling and brisk!”
A good big boat was speeding toward us. Negroes rowed her and the cargo
of the _King William_ who had never seen such before stared as at
a dark miracle. “Negroes! Why did God make them black? Have they got
souls?”
“Black men and red men and yellow men and white men, that’s the way
they mount in importance----”
“The saints and the angels are white. All the ruling people in heaven
are white. There couldn’t be yellow or red or brown or black angels----”
“Maybe they have half-souls. Dogs and horses have quarter-souls. Look
at that big one laughing!”
The boat came closer and there were three white men seated in the
stern. One, the tallest and biggest, had a gold-braided hat and a fine
coat.
“That’s one of the first gentry,” quoth Mr. Ransom, “and probably a
heavy purchaser. That’s Colonel Amory.”
“Indeed!” said Morrison. “Then I’m to keep his books. Well, he looks
polite enough! Hardly an ogre.”
So far from that was he that one and all preferred to be bought by
him. Even when other boats arrived and other planters, most of them
well enough looking, much like English squires and Scots lairds.
But he bought only three men beside Morrison who was already his
consignment,--that quite young boy who had said that the world was both
so and not so, a ditcher and woodchopper named Dick Merry, and that
Culloden man, David Scott.