“So that’s where the wind blows!” said William Bartram. “I’ve marked
you through the day, walking in a cloud, and I said to myself, ‘What’s
wrong here?’ and ‘We’ll have it out the eve.’” He leaned back in the
great, fixed chair, in the cabin of the _Janet_, his pipe and
glass and bottle before him on the table. He only drank after supper,
and only wine, and no more than that leonine head of his could stand.
The yellow lantern light fell upon him. I liked him, had liked him
strongly, I knew now, when I was a boy; liked him to-day, and that
apart from all reasons for gratitude. There was that in our two
natures, for all our difference in years, that clung, that sounded
together. There would be great differences too, but we should never
escape, nor want to escape, from the liking.
“So it’s as a servant of the Royal African Company that you’re not
liking me?” he said without anger. “And you’re liking the _Janet_
no longer, because she’s built and decked and stocked for the slave
trade?”
“I have been in effect a slave; I don’t like slavery.”
He answered from behind a cloud of tobacco smoke. “It’s my own opinion
that it will not last forever. But in the meantime it’s the weary way
of this weary world. We’re all more or less slaves.”
“Yes,” I said. “More or less.”
“I take your emphasis. But the ‘less’ has always come on slowly and has
had to wait on time.--As for Negro slaves, Pharaoh owned them, and for
all we know, Solomon and David. Probably Pericles did, and certainly
Alexander and Augustus Cæsar. When you come to know Africa, you’ll see
that it’s just one great hunting ground for men and had always been so.
It’s recognized. Moreover, nothing would so break the public heart in
Africa as not to be allowed to trade enemies or the useless or their
own for what they want. When folk continuously enslave one another,
there’s no good shrieking about outside giants.”
Eboe Sam rose before me. I said, “Still you think it will not last.”
“I suppose one day we’ll all grow up,” he answered. “Europe, America
and Africa. Grow to some kind of a religious level. But now we’re in
and of the present world.”
“You tempt them.”
“Aye, they’re very temptable,” he answered.
He drummed on the table. “I will tell you, David. The _Margaret_
was my ship at the time when I came for a week to your father’s house.
I had had her then for three years, and I had her for four years
thereafter. Seven in all. She was a good ship, and I sailed her for
the East India Company. London to Calcutta, Calcutta to London again.
English goods and passengers going out, spices and ivory and fine
Indian weaves returning. Seven years--I sailed her for seven years,
and gave the people over me no trouble, and made the Company money.
Sailed her well! I could not tell you all the storms and plagues I
brought her through. And they praised me--they praised me in London
and Calcutta. If a great man of the Company was going out to India,
they used to say, ‘Go in Bartram’s ship.’ Storms and fearful calms and
plagues of kinds--those things happen in seven years--but I brought the
_Margaret_ and them in her safe to haven. And then in one night
came a typhoon that broke our masts and beat us down. Our seams opened,
the pumps were naught, we took to the boats. The _Margaret_ sank
before us. The boats parted company, two were lost that night. After
six days a Dutchman picked mine up. Three men and I only were alive
in it. We got at last to London. The Company had my record, and after
six months it gave me another ship, the _Falcon_. I sailed her
a year, then, passing Cape Saint Vincent, there shot out against us
two Moorish pirates. We fought them a day, they grappled and boarded,
we were afire. The officers and crew were slain or taken. I gathered
my strength and burst from those that swarmed upon me and leaped into
the sea. The murk saved me--the land was not so far--I swam and was
carried and a plank came by, and at dawn I was ashore.--I’ll not weary
you with the long road for a penniless man to London. I got there and
to India House and made my report, and old Hollingsbury said, as dry
as Sahara sand, ‘Your luck’s not so good as it used to be, Captain
Bartram.’ I knew what that meant. It meant ‘Nothing must happen to the
next ship, if so be you want to continue with the East India Company.’
But they gave me the _Good Adventure_, and inside three months she
was driven in a gale and staved to pieces on the Irish coast.”
He got up and walked the cabin twice and returned. “They who follow the
sea know certain things. To be called a fortunate captain is summer and
the fruits thereof. To be named an unfortunate captain is winter and
the blast that makes you shrink. The East India Company departed from
me. I had saved a little, but it wasna much. I had a hard year, David,
a hard year.
“And then Murchieson and Murchieson gave me the _Rose of Lorn_,
trading between Liverpool and Boston. And in a year, off Newfoundland,
in a fog, the _Lydia_, a barquentine, ran us down. When I got to
London this time I went to a woman teller of fates that I had heard of.
She said that I had entered a belt of trouble that had been waiting for
me, just as a ship might enter the doldrums or the Arctic seas. A star
was adverse to me and a number was my foe. Why?--Well, as to that, the
true I Myself had not been born in precisely the year 1720, as I had
mistakenly thought. The true I Myself was old enough to have earned a
world of good and ill.--And how wide did she think was the belt?--But
that she could not tell though she held that it was thinning. I could
not see that, David, when, after long, long waiting, I got just a
poor brig, the _Hannah Lisle_, owned by the Alleynes and plying
to Rotterdam. It was that or starve--and she burned at the wharf at
Rotterdam, the boat next her carrying powder and a spark reaching it,
none knew how. And what did it count that I did not set that fire, nor
had the eye of God to foresee such a thing? I was done for, David, done
for!--Did you hear no sound in all those years of my matters?”
“I was sent to school,” I said. “I lived with my mother’s brother in
Edinburgh, and he was a bookman and a dreamer. And then my own life
began to turmoil.”
“Well, so it was,” he said. “I had been a proud man, but that was over.
I found a garret and grew gaunt as a wolf there,--as gaunt as you,
David, when you came aboard. I knew owners and captains and seamen
enough, and many I knew would have given me a crust or a crown piece,
but I did not choose, as I did not choose to take my wage when my ship
was gone. What I had saved from my good years, having been always a
free spender, was all departed. And I did not believe, David, that I
would ever sail a ship again.”
He was silent, then poured wine with a steady hand and pushed the
bottle to me. “Then there came up my garret stair John Archibald that
had been mate upon the _Falcon_ and prisoner on the Barbary Coast
whence in six months he got away in a Spanish galleon that carried him
to Cuba, and from Cuba, by hook and crook, he got to Jamaica. He told
me all about it. Then came into Kingston harbor the _Swan_, a
Royal African Company ship, Captain Martin, wanting a mate. Archibald
appealed to Martin and got the berth. Two years afterwards Martin
retired. Archibald, who’s a queer chield, had kinsfolk above him in
station, with stock in the Company. He was given the _Swan_--is
her captain still--I saw him last trip at Daga. Well, David, to get
back to my garret! Once I had done him a good turn, and now he had come
up with me again, and he had not forgotten the bairn Gratitude. He
wanted me to go with him to see certain gentlemen. So I went, David,
having no chance in the world of an East Indiaman which is what I
would have much preferred. But beggars may not be choosers! And many
are willing to serve the Royal African Company.--Anyhow, I went with
Archibald. And like that, David, the luck turned! I came out of the
belt of darkness that woman talked about! They took to me.”
Color and vigor increased in my cousin’s face. “They saw and said that
those lost ships were not lost through me. They were willing to try
me. They talked of the _Janet_ that was building, that was nearly
ready for the sea.” Bartram’s voice rose almost to a shout. “David
Scott, in three months I trod her poop deck and took her down to the
blue water. And she’s seven years old, the _Janet_, and no man
quarrels more with William Bartram. If a star was my antagonist, he has
taken his war elsewhere!” Again he rose from his chair and walked the
cabin, then stopped before the window and looked forth upon a dark blue
night powdered with those orbs or beings or whatever they are. When
he spoke his voice had sunken and was not addressed to me. “He is no
longer in the sky; he is dead or obscured, banished as I was banished!
But as for the _Janet_, she and I are one!”
He turned toward me. “Since the days of Elizabeth this trade’s been
going on. Tudors and Stuarts and the Hanover Family have all been able
to put up with it! Parliaments no less--the Royal African Company has
its parliamentary grants. And all the pillars of the world, the big
pillars and the little pillars. If you could see now a list of the
Company supporters! It’s imposing, man, imposing!”
“I know the world is with the trade,” I said.
“Well, the world maun live!” he answered, with a kind of fierceness.
“It’s all inwound--it’s all so inwound. Things are built upon it to an
extent you’d hardly believe. In all lands and all ranks. You ask the
first merchant or lawyer, aye, or teacher or parson you meet! Planters,
of course--but everybody beside planters. Fairly anybody.”
“Custom and Gain.”
“Aye, precisely. Custom and Gain. They’re Rulers. As for me, I’m a
plain sea captain, with my bread and salt to earn. I don’t set up to
be wiser or more moral than quarter-deck and forecastle of Society and
they that own my ship!”
I said, “Yet you would scorn, for gain, to become a pirate.”
He answered with violence. “You’re daft! It’s not the least the same!”
And I was so muddled in those years that I did not know if it was. The
comparison would never have come into my mind but for Culloden and
thereafter. And Culloden and thereafter were already fading away. I
said dully, “I have been a slave, overboard in the rough sea, while the
ship you call Society sailed by.”
He answered, “You were a white political, sold into limited servitude.
Africans are black barbarians, and all the reasoners will tell you that
in the end if not just at the beginning, it’s a happy exchange to the
West Indies, let alone Virginia, New York and New England!”
He came back to the table, and suddenly he was entirely the reasonable
and weighty person he had appeared in our earlier intercourse. “I would
ask you, David, did you not see a good deal of happiness among them in
Virginia?”
I saw Pickaninny dancing, and heard Old Joe fiddling and the negro
women laughing, and the children squealing and tumbling about, and I
thought of the suave self-importance of Colonel Amory’s house servants,
and of real contentment in good work in field and shop, and of
religious ecstasies that I had witnessed. Even at Old Mill quarter that
was the black books’ quarter, I could remember jollity.
“Yes,” I said. “I have seen what you may call happiness. But I never
saw or heard of a black man or woman who had not been enslaved and
brought from Africa against their will. They or their parents or
grandparents. And if I have seen what looked like contentment, I have
seen misery too. Always against their will and like animals, and still
they are bought and sold and worked like animals. But they are men and
women.”
He poured wine and put it at my hand. And yet I know that he did not
then know that this way lay one of my cities of destruction. I pushed
it aside, and then I took it back and drank. And straightway the false,
smirking lights began to play.
“You see, it’s not the life I would have chosen,” said my cousin. “I
don’t say that I greatly like my errands, for I don’t, but I do them.
And I would have you observe, David, that my work begins and ends with
the handling of my ship and cargo. The Negroes are already enslaved
and in barracoons up and down the coast. It’s the factors that collect
and deliver them. The captains but see that they’re brought as safely
as may be across the water. And look you, if I were not sailing the
_Janet_, another would be--and likely a rougher man, David, likely
a rougher man! For look you another thing, David. D’ ye know what I am
called at Whidah and at Daga and Calabar and Bonny? ‘Holy Bartram!’
And that because the crew that sails with me and the blacks I carry
are _not_ ill-treated. Just as far as my power goes they are well
treated, and that’s more, man, I grant, than can be said for all slave
ships and captains.”
“I’m thinking,” I said, “that I must go this voyage because I am here
upon the ship. But at your return port I will leave you, thanking you
for great kindness and hoping some day to repay it.”
“You will do about leaving the _Janet_ as you please,” he
answered. “As for thanks and payment, I’m not asking them, David. But
I would not swear I was going until I had looked things over a bit.
You’re not very safe on land, and the sea gets a grip. If you took
another vessel you’d have to give some account of yourself and to ship
before the mast. Here you could render me a deal of help as my cousin
and maybe clerk at times, with the sea to live with and my collection
of books if you like them. McNaughton’s got his points beside being a
good officer, and our surgeon, Colley, that you haven’t seen yet, for
he has a touch of fever, is a man of parts. The old Guineaman isn’t so
bad, you know.”
He ended quietly--asked if I would have more wine--said it was a braw
night and that it might be six weeks and more ere we sighted the coast,
and took up his cap to go outside.