I liked Colley, McNaughton and William Bartram. I did not like
Pomeroy. I liked Geordie and the mulatto cook, Tom and his quadroon
helper Don, which was short for Adonis. These two were free men,
manumitted on his death bed by the planter their owner. They made a
deal of it, carried it written as it were about them. Yet were they
bound to the _Janet_, year after year, for one told me that they
rarely went ashore in any port. I did not like Davis the boatswain. I
liked Llewellyn the carpenter. Of the seamen whose names were quickly
learned, I liked certain ones and certain ones I did not like and to
others I was indifferent. There were no saints among them, but on the
other hand few forthright scoundrels.
I knew now that that numerousness of her seamen which had struck me at
the first belonged to her as slaver. She must have enough to allow for
sickness and death, and enough to handle and cow those five hundred
that would be brought aboard. I learned that many seamen signed for
Slave Coast ships when they were muddled with drink or otherwise
deceived. Llewellyn the carpenter told me this. “Wherever there’s a
sail and a mast and a hull, there’s danger. Seamen know all that.
Britain’s got her ships of war, and the Newfoundland trade and the
North American trade and the regular West Indian and Bermudas trade,
and the East Indian trade and the Grain Coast and Ivory Coast and Gold
Coast trade and the Slave Coast trade. Seamen don’t wait to get old to
die--not on any ship! But seamen die quicker and in more ways in the
slave trade than in any going. And if they don’t die outright, they
move ashore at last with some bad disease. And so they die anyhow. I
_have_ seen old ones sitting watching the sea that were on a slave
ship in their youth and manhood, but they aren’t many. No, they’re few!”
But Llewellyn, too, said that the _Janet_ was a good ship. No
man--no captain nor anybody else--could have helped that sickness
voyage before last. “Yes, fifteen seamen--God rest them!”
It was the first time I had heard that word aboard. “Do you believe in
God?”
“Oh, aye!” he answered. “Most carpenters do.”
“You lost eighty Africans.”
“Aye,” he said. “God rest them too!”
Days and days went by like beads on a string, easily slipping beads.
As I had read Gervase Morrison’s books on the _King William_, so
now I read my cousin Bartram’s. He had as many as fifty, the most of
them the Greeks and Romans done into English. But there were also
modern books, poets and philosophies and histories, and full in the
middle of his shelf a Bible. It had his name written in it and the fact
that it had been given him by his mother, on his tenth birthday.
In boyhood I had read every book that came my way and would go far out
of my way to get one of which I had heard. Then another life rushed
upon me and spoiled the old life. And then I came to Virginia. One
didn’t read at Old Mill quarter nor at Daniel Askew’s. But now the
hunger returned and I read and read.--And do not think I do not know
that reading is an opiate!
I read Herodotus, Tacitus and Livy, and I read Homer in George
Chapman’s version. It was so good a place to read--the _Janet_
going, not coming from Africa! Very clean she was, with the salt air,
warm not cold, searching all her empty spaces. Cabin and poop deck
were free to me, and I had also the diminutive room that had been
Philip Smith’s. I wondered sometimes about this man, and why he left
the _Janet_ at Philadelphia where apparently, once or oftener,
she had touched. I had space and sea quiet, with all the sounds of
good weather. I read and I read, and my hand went out for the dram
that Geordie brought. Or Colley, his fever now only a memory, came and
talked, his intense blue eyes aiding. Or in the cabin after the sudden
dusk, when the yellow lanterns were lighted, William Bartram talked.
We talked in the cabin there about many things, but not about the slave
trade. Early in the passage he had set his great foot upon that topic.
“It’s my business to sail this ship and see her laden and deliver
her cargo as undiminished as may be. I’m no thinking of resigning. I
loved the _Margaret_ that I had so long, but she’s dead and now I
have married the _Janet_. And you’ll please leave your reasoning
and objecting alone! If I’m no for listening, I’m no for listening.
And you’ll kindly, David, do no preaching nor you-know-what-kind-of
questioning among the officers and crew. It’s not healthy for them
nor any. I’ll be obliged if you will take it that those are Captain’s
orders. I’ll have no mutinies, David, even from one man.”
He was captain of the _Janet_. I recognized that. “I’ll make no
trouble,” I said, and saw not, indeed, how I could make it. And I spoke
to my conscience that was not in robust health. “_It’s but this
voyage; we’ll make a change when we come to Christian lands. We’ll go
ashore and stay ashore._”
“And I’m noticing, David,” he said, “that there’s a lure for you in the
wine and the dram. You’re too Scots not to know that a hard-drinking
Scot throws his soul away. I’d advise you to put the ship about while
there’s time.”
“Have you seen it affect me, sir?”
“Why,” he said, “not precisely ‘affect.’ But you’ve a way of setting
it to solve problems and I never heard of a one that it solved!”
I answered with moodiness. “It may not resolve but it makes one forget.”
“It’s better not to wish to forget. Face your life! At any rate don’t
make a dram your angel!”
He spoke with vigor, and Colley told me afterwards that he had a strong
feeling upon the subject.
“He’ll take wine after supper, but if it wasn’t that there _would_
be mutinies, I don’t believe that he’d have a drop of rum or brandy in
the spirit room! Drunkenness anywhere, land or sea, is to him the king
viper. He’s capable, if he didn’t have the _Janet_, of going on a
crusade to deprive the beast of his head. Sometimes he’s funny----”
David Scott thought, “Because the presence of some viper is on his
soul. He’s striking at it over yonder, when it’s by his ankle, under
the log.”
But I ceased, in cabin, to question the backgrounds of trade, and when
I spoke with Jack Dannet and his like I did not again ask, “How do you
like it?” or “What do you think of it yourself?” Colley and I sometimes
disputed, off to ourselves, with the wind singing and the blue sea
sheering away. But one day he said, “You’re here and I am here--on the
_Janet_. Unless we are prepared to jump into the sea let’s stop
the argument! You’re just easing your soul with it, anyhow.”
And I saw that I was, and that it was taking the place of action. Then
I said to myself “Hypocrisy!” and ceased to assert that there should be
no slave ships nor slavery. When I left this ship then I might begin
once more.
Moreover, after that talk with William Bartram, I had collared Geordie.
“Geordie, a dram in the morning and a dram at night, but no dram in
between!” and thought that I had done well and killed the snake. I
looked at Geordie severely, and he was a queer imp. He said now,
“Forgive me my sins, sir, and I’ll try to do better!” and so elfish
was he with light-gray eyes and flaxen locks and slim as a reed in a
bog, that it passed, as did all his comments, for elfishness and not
impudence. So I drank less, though I lusted for the foregone cups.
When I had been a week upon the _Janet_ my kinsman tried me out
with a blank book and a pen and a paper of figures and other matters.
Now it chanced that I had done some clerkly work for that uncle with
whom for a time I had lived, and that he was particular and taught
me thoroughly. I could have clerked in Virginia as well as Gervase
Morrison, but I was bought for a tobacco hand and woodcutter. But now
Bartram was pleased. “You’re a better man than was Philip Smith! I
see that you may be very helpful to me, David, if you’ll leave strong
drink alone. There’s nothing like kindred if everything else is
provided.”
After that I had an hour or two of work each day. He was upon--in the
great blank book--a transcript for his owners of all the voyages of
the _Janet_. In a month I became deeply learned in her fortunes
and her trade. I had a kind of gift for this kind of thing. I could
do it well and with the mind. I saw the pictures of all I was putting
down, but I began to see them coolly. Even then, even so soon, feeling
was dulling, Self-Interest, the promising devil, sitting fast upon my
shoulder!
The _Janet_ ran on, piled with canvas, through fair weather. A
week, two, three, four, five. Sometimes at night, before I fell asleep,
there filed before my eyes James River and Amory Hall and Old Mill
quarter and Daniel Askew’s and tempest-tossed forest wet as the sea
and Christian Todd’s boat under a sycamore. Going off, I heard now his
flute and now a Scots pipe screaming a pibroch in a glen. I slid into
dreams, some good and some bad. Once I dreamed that I lay in Sandy
Scott’s barn, and it was afire, and Helen Scott brought me a great
book, and I said, “Now this will show me the way out for it is the book
of Holiness.” And I clasped it, but it turned into Eboe Sam, and we
wrestled and tried each to throttle the other, and a great voice like
thunder cried “The soldiers are coming!” And the fire that was laying
hold of the straw and the rafters began most awfully to laugh. I woke
and lay trembling, bathed with sweat. There dawned a morning. I went
on deck. Pomeroy, leaning against the rail, turned his bull head and
spoke. “Africa, Mr. Scott----” I followed his nod and saw the mountains
of Sierra Leone.
We coasted south by east, turned the great hump at Cape Palmas and
coasted east. There were days and days of this, so huge is Africa. We
passed the grain, the ivory, the gold lands. They all dealt in man-gold
likewise; slaves might be acquired in any bight or river mouth. But
the Slave Coast proper was our end, where rose by the ocean the most
factories or forts or castles, French, Portuguese, Dutch and English.
Daga was one of ours, built seventy years before. I knew much about it
now from the great book and Colley and McNaughton.
There came a day. The sea was strongly blue and flowed in long waves.
We had been standing in to land, were close now, could see the fringing
cocoanut palms and the low land behind and then hills, blue and
emerald. Turning a white prong of shore, we sailed into a deep and
narrow bay where emptied a sizable river.
“Daga Bay,” quoth McNaughton at my shoulder. “Yon is Daga.”
The sea ran into surf against a shore of dazzling sand. Drawn up
on this lay a row of sharp-prowed, narrow boats. The burning sand
stretched on and was met by palm trees. I, who had never seen a palm
tree, knew them well enough. Stretched on and met palm trees and some
low, green growth, hard and staring in the sun, and a big square of
whitened masonry, big and low, with gateway and embrasures and guns
in these, and under its shadow a huddle of huts. Only there was no
material shadow just now. The sun stood at noon and all was blindingly
light. Behind the walls rose a kind of keep, and from this floated the
British flag.
_And David Scott, an escaping prisoner, was back in Edinburgh on a
wild night, a witches’ night._ There, there, I had seen Daga that
lay now in my path!