The _Janet_ took a fortnight for unlading, cleaning, mending
and preparing for the Jamaica cargo. We all kept fairly busy, seeing
that it was Africa. In my charge now rested merchants’ books, lists,
tallies, receipts. At some hour of the day I went over all with my
kinsman in the cabin, but the actual clerkly labor and the actual
supervision to a degree were mine. Bartram seemed satisfied and I was
glad to do it. I had a power of work in me when I turned that way.
After the first night I drank no more to excess of Daga punch. Bartram
had said, “Mind you what you are about, David! I’ve seen many a tall
ship wrecked on this coast. As for Rathbone Lace, I’m fair to hope he
couldn’t have been bred in Scotland!”
I laughed. “I’ve heard of Captain McKenzie.”
“McKenzie’s a changeling and a byword. He’s not the least like any
McKenzie at home.”
McKenzie was the captain of the _Darling_ and if Colley and others
told true, there were oceans in hell and he had long been sea captain
there. But the younger Lace did not seem to me quite of that energy.
I worked with him in the tally and transfer of cargo to the Daga
warehouse. Baker and Brown and Andrews and Hyde and Graves and others
worked also. Sometimes we were upon the _Janet_, sometimes on the
beach, sometimes in Daga fort, in the long warehouse, in the sunbaked
enclosure. Work began early but stopped when the sun stood a little
past noon. Except for an hour or so with Bartram, the rest of the time
until dawn again was my own.
I remember the sands of Daga that were so white. The boats--the native
boats--brought from the _Janet_ boxes and bales and casks. Black
men waiting knee-deep in the water lightened the boats and heaped the
merchandise upon the sand. Black men, a line of them, shouldered the
lighter things or carried between them the heavier, and bearing them up
the sloping sand vanished with them through the dark and low entrance
of the castle. They were powerfully built black men, naked save for
the loin cloth, belonging to and serving the Company. Among them some
worked mum as logs, others chanted and laughed and joked. So it had
been in Virginia. They were naked here; they had clothing there. Here
they used an African tongue, there they had learned or were learning an
English one. Here was home, there another race’s home. The sea struck
ceaselessly against the Slave Coast. So they carried in the goods that
were to buy for another continent their kind, maybe their immediate
kith and kin; maybe, if they displeased any here, themselves. Muskets,
rum and powder--tobacco, tools and gaudy cloth--crockery, beads and
mirrors. I saw the English multitude toiling to make all this with
which to buy, and that multitude themselves seemed slaves. And then I
shut all such thoughts and images under hatches and went and drank with
Rathbone Lace, and was myself--and not only in the drink--a slave.
At the warehouse toiled Baker and Brown with one or two nondescript
whites and a dozen blacks to help. The warehouse was inside the castle,
a long, shallow structure, stone against the stones of the wall. Around
spread the baked earth, a square big enough for a town market. The sun
beat on the stockade within the square where through the day was herded
the _Janet’s_ lading that was to take the place of boxes, bales
and casks. It was as large as a palaver ground. By dint of crowding,
its citizens could make a space for dancing, for the beaters of drums,
for exhorters and prophets, tellers of stories and starters of songs;
space too for the serving of meals which were plentiful. It was policy
to keep them cheerful. No one wanted pining skeletons for Jamaica or
anywhere else. Their drums and lutes were given them; they were urged
to dance, to sing, to eat. So far as their exhorters chose to encourage
them, these were given full swing. The ordering of the barracoon fell
to Berry the assistant and his helpers. Berry was not a bad sort, but
had a kind of wry joviality and a parental bearing. When he appeared in
the place it was always to say, in effect, “How well we’re getting on!
Let’s have a feast--but it’s nothing, you know, to the feasts they give
in Jamaica!”
Through the day, at intervals, the drums beat and there was singing
and dancing and noise. Till an hour before sunset. Then the square was
emptied, the drove vanished into those chambers within the walls, and
all was still.
One morning, having an unoccupied hour, I found myself with Colley upon
the wall. Hard by stood one of those guns trained within, and near
to it talked among themselves three of Berry’s guards, white men who
looked much like pirates without a ship.
I said, “Do they ever rise?”
He answered, “Two or three times in ten years. When by chance there’s
among them some spirit of war and leadership.”
“Wallace or Bruce?”
“Anan?” he said. “I don’t think it goes as far as that. Anyhow, it’s
the most hopeless of enterprises! There’s a tradition that once they
burned and slew and swarmed away and were never taken, but it must have
been very long ago.”
I said, “In Virginia it was white slavery that was concerning me most.
But is there any difference?”
He said, “There you go again! When I look at them I do not see white
men and women.”
“No, but men and women.”
He swung round upon me. “Why, then, do you not make your choice?
Yonder’s a path into the forest and after a while another path and
another and another! You come to towns, palaver grounds, chiefs’
houses, black people, black merchants and traders, black princes and
priests, thousands and thousands of black people, the land’s so full!
Why not go preach to them? Or, better still, why not preach in the
factor’s house this evening? Preach to white men and the Royal African
Company?”
I answered him sullenly, “I am no preacher.”
“I thought,” he said, “that we agreed upon the _Janet_ that we
could not change the world. And I’ve thought at the factor’s and with
Rathbone Lace you were beginning to be fairly reconciled!”
I saw that I was, and I saw for a moment my blackness, I who had been a
slave.--Then Fanny and the drink and Bartram and the ship and Security
for David Scott, with clerkly work that did not come hard, and goodly
books with leisure to read them, and coin in his pocket, and some
seeing of the world after all, and friends. Security, friends, a good
ship and the blue, salt sea.--_And at any time I might quit!_
I was not lost enough to say brazenly to myself, “I will not quit just
yet.” But underneath, underneath consciousness, as it were, it was
said. “_I will not quit just yet. Jamaica? Perhaps not even then._”
Immediately, there in the sunshine, things shifted a little. I saw the
barracoon under a more favorable light. Under the light, in short, in
which Colley and Bartram saw it. Yes, there was a woman weeping there.
Yes, there sat a man in a gloom that darkened the sun around. Yes,
that knot yonder was sending forth a chant that could only be likened
to the one hundred and thirty-seventh psalm. Yes, there seemed some
wretchedness in the barracoon. _But was it so bad after all? Nothing
was idyllic in Africa, anyway. And one must live, and the shape of the
world is past our changing. And of course nothing in any one else had
the poignancy I found in myself. They did not feel as I felt._
I said, “Well, they are laughing over there! And that girl who is
dancing seems to enjoy her dance.”
Rathbone Lace came up behind us. “We’ve missed you and Mr. Markham, Mr.
Colley! You’ve been up the river?”
“Yes, up to Oil Palm village,” answered Colley. “There’s a man there
with a melancholy Mr. Markham wanted me to see.”
“Did you cure him?”
“It was to observe an interesting case. I don’t think it is curable.”
We leaned upon the parapet and looked down into the stockade. “Your
five hundred,” said Lace, “is about made up. Three hundred men, one
hundred women, seventy young boys, thirty girls under twelve. There
are a few lacking, but Gambo will bring them in presently. You’ve got
an unusually strong, good lot! Mandingoes, Fullahs, Dualas, Soo-Soos,
Ashantis and Coromantins.”
Said Colley, “Coromantins and Ashantis are fierce and bold barbarians,
Dualas and Soo-Soos are tractable as sheep, Mandingoes and Fullahs are,
so to speak, gentry.”
“Aye,” said Lace, “but in the market all alike.--When do you begin
lading?”
He spoke to me. I answered, “A week from to-morrow.”
“Then we’ll have time to go up the river for two or three days if you
like. You’ve never been up an African river. We’ll go up to Oil Palm
village in my boat. Saturday?”
“I’ll ask the Captain.”
I did so. Bartram gloomed a little, then said, “Africa is biting you,
David. Well, you’ll have to have it over with. There’s no saving a man
from himself.” He drummed on the table. “My self didn’t come to me as
Rathbone Lace, but perhaps as an ill a man.”
I said that I didn’t quite understand him, but the Inner Man did
understand. The Inner Man is never less than clear-eyed.
Lace and I with five Negroes went up the Daga River in a boat carrying
little food, for we would get that ashore, but with a great jug of
Jamaica rum.
At first, to either hand there spread great coverlets of mud, forlorn
with rubbish of the forest and the sea, and the water was dull and
brackish. I saw here crocodiles and many a wading bird. By degrees,
this changed to soil, black and loose and unfathomably rich. Here began
the great trees and the marvelous blossoms. Here I saw parrots. The
black men rowed us on, and now and then we drank. At times a forest
overarched the stream so dense that there was as little seeing into it
as into a stone wall. At times we passed clearings where there seemed
to have been old cultivation. At times the trees were set as in a
park, and a path ran by the water, a manifest, cheerful, trodden path.
“Africa is full of paths,” said Lace. “Even the caravans know in the
desert the way to go.”
“We are far, far away from the deserts.”
“Yes. There are few people in the desert. But the Africa we know about
is full of people, and these are their roads.”
“What size is the Africa we know about?”
“God or the Devil knows!” he answered. “The size of Europe, maybe.
Trade comes to the Coast from as far away as Russia--were we in London
or Bristol. Down a hundred rivers like this and over a crisscross
forever of forest paths.”
“The Coast is their Ind or Ophir.”
“You seem to read poetry.--Every black or brown kingling at any
distance whatever, and every soul in the territory that he rides, knows
that muskets and knives and rum and toys grow on the Slave Coast.”
“The marvel is that they do not all see, having used one another for so
long for money, that the day will come to each when he shall be used in
like fashion.--But we do not see that either, in Europe.--It is like
shipwreck, or plague aboard. Each seaman thinks, ‘They die, but I shall
escape!’ Africa and Europe and Asia and America. Four seamen.”
“You philosophize,” he said. “I’ve never had time for it, nor for
poetry. Negroes are Negroes and born to wait on their masters.”
The five boatmen had among them a little English--all the Africans
attached to Daga had so much or so little--but if they understood or
did not understand was all one to Lace. They pulled the boat and had
black bodies and faces, with hair unlike a Christian’s.
David Scott had never dreamed of the trees and flowers and beasts and
flitting birds and insects of these lands. Overpowering beauty and
strangeness now were around him, up the Daga. Wonder came upon him,
and a clutch of the land upon his heart. The Negroes began to sing.
He knew that too--that there never were any people who loved singing
more. Rathbone Lace yawned, drew his wide straw hat over his face and
went to sleep. David Scott sat in a kind of dream between the pinions
of strangeness and beauty. All along his life had been beginnings
of sensibility here, but now on the upper Daga these gathered to a
head, burst and expanded. Beauty! I came over the frontier, into Her
kingdom--but yet was I unprofitable to Her--an unprofitable servant.
The moments passed, green and gold and purple. I could not follow the
words of the boatmen’s chant, but the air was now richly cheerful and
now a wailing plaint--but from the one end to the other ran music.
It broke and ceased. The man in the prow said something in his African
tongue, then all seemed to listen. Rathbone Lace took the cover from
his face and sat up.
“Drums. They sound like Gambo’s.”
The Negroes acquiesced. “Gambo’s.”
“He’s bringing in,” said Lace, “the balance of your lading. Row on,
boys, to the opening yonder.”
We shot from a deep, gold-spangled shadow into full sun. It shone upon
a narrow, grassy plain but little raised above the water, with a brown
path running beside it. Now I heard the beating, as of quite a little
host coming.
“Do they bring them in with drums?”
“Why, they come more quickly so,” he answered. “Everybody walks
better to drums and horns. They keep time. And then, it’s for Gambo’s
importance.”
A long, wooden trumpet blared as though in confirmation, and out of
the shadow of cotton trees and palms and bamboo emerged into the tawny
meadow a procession headed by Gambo with his musicians and tailed
by half a dozen of the trader’s armed men. In between moved perhaps
seventy men and women and children, divided into three squads and tied
one to another with rope. Each squad had for guard a couple of men with
muskets and cutlasses. They came on without at first seeing our boat
masked by a clump of canes. The great sun lighted their almost naked
bodies, their faces, intelligent and unintelligent, the rope about
their necks and their wrists. Only the children were unbound. Nine, ten
and twelve-year-olds, they trotted beside their elders.
Slaves under thirty are the valuable slaves. Men and women, most of
this band were young, though Gambo had acquired a few at middle age.
They seemed of different tribes, for some were charcoal black, and
others deep brown, and others light brown with almost straight hair.
Some were low-browed, flat-nosed and thick-lipped, with a great,
protruding jaw, and some had by no means that coarseness but were well
featured, with a black or brown comeliness. The figures of many were
strong and fine. The young boys and little girls had grace, forlorn or
impish as the case might be.
The drums had ceased to beat. All moved a few paces in silence, when a
woman with a high, quavering voice, burst into a chant of parting. A
man joined in, then a woman, then others, men and women, till all the
company of bondfolk were singing as they marched to the slave ship.
They sang upon the brown, African road an eerie, wild and tragic chant.
David Scott sat in a dream listening, for it linked to that perception
of Beauty. And again he was hearing Negroes singing at Amory Hall,
singing at dusk, in the quarter, after work, singing before and after
the white parson’s religious instruction, singing at funerals. The
tongue was changed but the music was the same. All the rolling ocean
was an illusion, this land and that neatly joined.
The chant broke. One viewing the river had made out our boat. Gambo’s
powerful, unctuous voice rolled out a command; all halted. The armed
men made motions with their muskets. Lace, standing up, shouted, “Daga,
Gambo!”
The boatmen pushing the boat head into the bank, we jumped out, Gambo
and his lieutenant Big Man--I never knew his real name--affably
assisting. The company of slaves was no longer afoot but sitting and
lying amid the grass, instantaneously resting where rest was to be had.
Lace and Gambo talked in a fearful mixture of English and African that
I could not as yet completely understand. I gathered that the trader
was discoursing troubles and expenses.
Big Man moved back to the sunken troop and I went with him. A woman
with a child beside her, roped as she was, managed to fling herself in
the dust and grass before me. Her hands touched my ankles, she laid
her face against my shoe, then gathered herself to her knees and cried
to the white man to be let to go back with her child to her village
and her hut, where two children screamed for her. Big Man, when I
asked what she said, got through to me with that much. He also offered
to beat her away. I prevented the blow that was falling, but I said,
“Tell her it’s useless--that I can’t--that I have no power,” and I drew
myself from her grasp and removed a few steps, when a man began to cry
to me, “White man master--white man master!” There followed gibberish
to me, wildly and energetically spoken. I turned and found Lace beside
me. “What is he saying?”
“He says he is from Calabar and was in the employ of the factory at
the mouth of the Camaroons River. He says he has favorably known white
men and white men have favorably known him, and that he was their
interpreter when any journeyed up to the mountains. Then he went
home to Calabar, and there happened a great war--three years ago, I
gather--and since then he has been a slave of a king on the Benwe. The
king sold him to an Arab slave merchant--he escaped and swam a river
trying to get home--a second caravan captured him--he escaped again,
and has been far up Daga River for a long time in a village, the same,
he says, that the woman who has spoken lives in. Then lately there fell
a war, what war he does not know, but it was for slaves. The village
was burned and its strong men and women carried away. It was all in
the dark, and the leaders in the war quarreled, and one marched away
with no more than a dozen out of the village and he among them. That
was a month ago, and a week ago he was sold for a knife and some powder
to Gambo. The moral of it all,” said Lace, “is that having worked
for white men and done, he says, his best, he thinks that white men
can hardly mean to put him on a ship.” Lace laughed. “_I_ don’t
listen to their stories, bless you! But you are new to it, Scott, so I
translate.”
“Have all of them stories?”
“Any one can make up a tale. I have known funny ones in my day! But
many are as dumb as cattle.--Pshaw, they _are_ cattle!”
He looked the company over with the supremest indifference as to
certain things, but with merchant keenness upon others. “Gambo’s
done pretty well! They’re a mixture. He’s bought from King Timbu who
collects from all quarters. But they seem sound.--Big Man, club that
fellow if he will not hush!” The man from Calabar subsided. The woman
with the child sat with her head upon her knees. “A lot of them have
been slaves before. Gambo says that there are two witches also and
three women sold by their husbands and a thief or two.”
I looked at the witches, two young, thin, great-eyed women, more
heavily bound than the others, as though for stigma. Their companions
seemed in part to shrink from them and in part to feel a dim
enchantment and a hope that if they were propitiated something to the
good might yet happen. Their village had sold them for the good of
the village and for rum. The three wives seemed much as other women.
Perhaps they had brought scandal and commotion and strife and adultery
into the family and were justly punished, or perhaps newer loves
and jealousy and revenge had somewhat to do with it, or perhaps the
husbands merely ached for muskets and tobacco and rum. What the couple
of thieves had stolen did not appear, but here they were, going to
the sugar islands. I have known in England of a boy hanged for taking
loaves of bread, and it’s not so long since in Scotland we burned three
women for witchcraft.
The woman and the man were not the only ones to find voice. Two thirds
of the troop were making appeal--a distressful noise of many in
trouble. There was a clamor around us until Gambo, Big Man and two or
three of theirs began to lay about them with whips and the butts of
muskets.--David Scott turned and walked away. He went back to the boat
and sat there with a stony face.
Lace returned at last. “Gambo’s a jewel! With a little direction he’d
make a great merchant. There’s a small world of native traders in
Africa and he’s of the best.”
“Are they going on now?”
“Yes. There are the drums.”
They were beating and the long, wooden trumpet blared. I looked through
the cane and saw the squads in motion.
“How many are bought or caught and shipped overseas in a year?”
He considered. “If you take all the factories from end to end of the
Coast--British, French, Portuguese, Dutch and so on--it’s a big number.
Seventy thousand or a little above, I should think.”
“A year!”
“A year. We British have any number of factories, a few large like Daga
and many small ones, and more than half the trade. All the English
ports together may send out not so far from two hundred ships, big
and little. Perhaps the British total may be between thirty-five and
forty thousand Negroes a year. Ships and seamen, manufactured goods,
establishments on the Coast and so forth--I don’t know how many
million pounds are invested, nor the number of investors. It’s very
great.”
The drums beat, beat, beat. Gambo and Big Man and the armed others,
the drummers, the trumpet man, the three groups of slaves for the
_Janet_, passed across the meadow and vanished into the shadow of
gigantic trees. “Get on, boys!” said Lace. “It is hot here in these
canes. More rum, Scott?”
That afternoon we reached Oil Palm village, named so by Daga of old
time because of its many of these trees and the oil they furnished.
For long it had been a kind of pet place, rendezvous of traders,
depot at times for merchandise for the interior, provider of guides
and go-betweens, center of intrigues, under the protection of two or
three factories, a supple favorite of many years. The chief or head
man was a creature of Daga, the four or five hundred villagers bowed
with the chief, and the surrounding clans kept hands off the “white
man’s people.” Daga maintained here a big clean hut, and had often on
the ground a clerk or other emissary. Oil Palm village flourished to
the eye and grew sleek and prosperous, without fear of damage, under
the gracious shadow of that great tree, the British. A good many vices
grew up with its prosperity. It had somewhat the function, for wearied
traders and men from the factories, of a Capua. A bland, suave, dusky,
noisy place.
Here Lace and I abode for two days and nights. There was plenty of rum,
and there were women.