At times David Scott’s stomach turned against this work, and he waited
but for Jamaica and freedom. At such times he saw that he and Bartram
and McNaughton and Colley and Pomeroy and the others were slaves; aye,
that the Royal African Company, supporters and Parliamentary grants and
all, was a slave. Daniel Askew was a slave. Colonel Giles Amory was a
slave.--David Scott was in slavery.
At such times he sent Geordie for a dram, and then, for such a length
of time, he saw things differently. It was not so bad a life. All life
was a picture and a play and great emotions surged through it!
Again, he might be as cool and as much himself as the Tron clock. From
Africa to the Indies was a small hell. Granted! But there had been
and might be again the great empty ship from the Indies to Africa. He
liked that, and there would be the ports, the Indies and the coasts of
America, England where he might risk it, and Daga where was none so bad
company. A man must live! If there were iron walls against him where
he might wish to live and prosper, then he must even live and prosper
where he might.
_Because he had been a slave and knew, therefore he must not
enslave._
He said to himself, so cool and at himself, that he was not enslaving.
That was the Company, Daga, England, America and the earth. A man was
a puny thing and must go with the crowd! And the slaves being enslaved
anyhow, they might even profit by having for slaver among the others
one named David Scott. He saw things that even Bartram could not see,
how to combine kindness with rule. They might benefit. So he reasoned,
the losing soul, so cool and clear! Had it been a shipload of white
slaves--had he been an ancient Roman bringing slaves from Britain,
slaves enslaved in much the same ways, it would in the end have been
much the same. _He_ was not responsible, but the order of affairs.
And other moods possessed him, and chiefly, “Let sleeping riddles lie,”
and “Take it as it comes.”
The golden and blue days, the starry nights went by. Over-thronged,
foully smelling, with some sound of mourning always, the _Janet_
that I had thought so clean and light ploughed her way. Bartram gave me
work to do--kept me at it, not unwilling, for it killed the thinking
when I could not drink. Under his apparent self-sufficiency he was a
lonely man, craving his own, missing son or brother or friend. I came
to meet a need, having the same blood as himself, understanding his
liking for books, understanding his wish to be kindly, and his passion
for the native land, understanding his pride and his self-ponderings.
We could journey together, talking little, but sticking no thorns one
into the other, and on occasion giving each other help. He troubled me
no more about wine, rum and brandy, though his eye was watchful there.
Nor did he argue any more about the _Janet_ and her freight, nor
did I argue any more here. The action is the thing that has the clarion
voice. I did Philip Smith’s work. Once I asked McNaughton why he left
at Philadelphia.
The mate looked at me from under red tufts of eyebrows. “Ah, he was a
brittle chield! He developed scruples.”
“You call that being brittle?”
“If this is your wark and your living, Mr. Scott, I do. Aweel, he’s
doubtless howked himself to death in an almshouse. He wasna fit for
much when he left us.”
I slept in this man’s small, small cabin, and at times I felt him.
And at times, waking in the night, I felt the slave deck below, and
the fetid blackness, and the bodies close, close to my own, sighing,
pressing, straining for space where was none.--But then the comfortable
dwarf within me slammed the door against that silent calling.
The stars rose, crossed and departed my window. The cold dawn, the
solemn dawn, rode into the field, and then, his mood brightening,
decked himself with the violet and the rose. The golden cap of the sun
parted the purple sea. And here was the day, to better or to worsen.
At first the horde we carried had seemed all of a piece, sex and adult
or youth the only distinguishing marks. All were bare; all had a jargon
that only painfully was I learning to interpret and find a language
like my own; all were dark, dark of skin though with shades in that
nighttime. All were crowded, all were captive; the same destiny was to
all; they were already slaves. At first the one looked like the other.
But at last the observant eye parcelled out even in that swarm. David
Scott had vision to use and must use it. He watched the cargo and could
not choose but watch it.
It had been so in Virginia also. At first one had seemed like the
other. Then it had emerged that Old Hannibal was not Joe, nor Joe,
Pickaninny, nor Pickaninny, Eboe Sam.
Colley sometimes stood beside me, gaunt and hollow-eyed, for there was
something, he said, in every voyage that poisoned him. “Then quit it!”
I answered one day. “Spring to the first shore and run!”
“Take your own medicine!” he said. The sun was shining, the rigging
humming. We look down from the poop upon a corner where naked men were
playing some game with a kind of dice, bits of wood that they had
secured somehow and most ingeniously marked. “In God’s name what have
they got to dice for? They can’t even sell themselves any longer.”
A young man, all clean bronze, threw and leaned back and laughed.
Another, sitting cross-legged, cupped the bits of wood in his hand,
shook and cast them. Four others, thick-lipped, with woolly heads and
bandy legs, subservient somehow to the main two, laughed and jabbered
and clapped their shins. “Two great lords gaming,” said Colley, “and
their followers and cup-holders. I’ve seen the same when I had a look
one day at White’s.”
“This ship makes you sardonic,” I said. “I don’t know what it makes me.”
“There is,” he said, “a thoroughly abominable two months or rather
less, followed by a somewhat longer term of comparative happiness. I
live for the comparative happiness. We all do.”
I was looking at a woman seated with downcast eyes, a child of nine
across her knees. Now I saw that it was the woman who had cried to
me up the Daga River, who had two children at home. If she felt me
staring at her I do not know; perhaps she did. At any rate she raised
her eyes and stared back. She was hollow-eyed, her face and frame were
thin, her breasts hung lank. A dark light as of recognition entered her
countenance and turned into hatred, blank scorn and hatred. She stared
at me leaning there, then with a most deliberate insolence slowly
moved her body until I had only her dark back and shoulders and her
face was for the sea.
Colley had followed my eyes. “I thought she would die, that Eboe woman.
She would have gone, I’m pretty sure, but for the child. I worked it
so. I said--black lingo--‘You don’t want to leave her, now do you?’ and
it worked like one of their ju-jus.” He finished reflectively. “Mother
and young one like that are usually bought together, but not always so,
by any means. So it may be that she’ll have to leave her anyhow.”
In the middle of the swarm--the deck was black with them; they had
little room to move about--a man was laughing, a rich, subdued,
whole-hearted laughter.
“That fellow there must be clean of sin.”
“You laugh and I laugh.”
“Not like that----”
“If he’s clean of sin there’s one there--and there’s one there--who is
not.”
It was a sullen and violent brute to whom he pointed, and a crafty and
apelike one. “Yes,” I said, “they are mixed.”
Those nearest the barricade began to speak to us clamorously, men and
women. They made appeal for increase in the water ration, for more and
other food, for a little rum, for license to stay, when it came dark,
this side the hatches, for medicines, for news of where they were
and where going, for release, for return to Africa, for justice and
knowledge and joy and freedom. They made no discrimination--we were
white men--it was enough. We were in the magic, wizards and evil kings,
all! No one ever knew when gusts of passion and of desperation would
take them. Something of this kind happened now, appeared and spread
and mounted. From a few many become involved. There grew a dizziness
of faces and upswung arms. Voices ran the ladder of excitement into a
deep-throated yell. Like a levin flash came a certain tension. Colley
raised his voice. “‘Ware, Michaelson!’ Ware, Dory!” A man above us
shouted “Mr. Pomeroy! Trouble here, sir!”
Pomeroy was at hand, McNaughton came running. The deck showed now a
ferment as of determined bees. A leader started forth, then with a yell
there came, as a comber comes, a dark mass against the barricade where
they thought it weakest. Then I saw Bartram, tawny as a lion, with a
lion’s roar.
“Too late for soft words, Mr. McNaughton. The tall one, you, Dory!
Fire!”
Dory fired, and the tall one, the leader, fell. “Burke! Take that man
yonder!” and the one to whom Colley had pointed fell. The wave recoiled
upon itself, broke. A moan ran through and over like the moan of foiled
waters. Bartram shouted to the insurgents in their own tongue, “Who’ll
die next?”
This way and that they looked into the mouths of pistols and muskets,
and upon cutlasses that flashed and dazzled and made dread, and beside
these there was only the shoreless sea. They feared the sea that was
their severing foe, they feared the ship--sailed and tiered ships being
the highest magic,--they feared the white men’s guns and swords. Blight
struck them, they wilted, withered, sank into an abject, wailing or
silent mass.
The two dead men were lifted and thrown into the sea, and the blood
mopped from the deck. There was no further punishment. Bartram was not
sanguinary, nor loved in any way immoderation.
Days and nights--days and nights--days and nights, and the reeking
ship went on. Week on week until we had counted six. The log showed
an average voyage. There had been better, said Colley, and there had
been much worse. We lost three seamen, two in storm, one from sickness.
Others were ailing, but it was always so. There were four hundred and
seventy slaves on deck or under hatches. The loss of that thirty made
for them that much more room, but still a stranger would have wondered
where that thirty could have been stored.
We were now upon the Indies. I remember the cry of “Land ho!” and how
it thrilled, for there was none upon the _Janet_ who did not now
wish land.