North’s house, a commodious enough one, built of plastered stone, had
a verandah that commanded Kingston harbor much as the factor’s house
had commanded the far smaller haven of Daga. The climate was not so
different, nor for the matter of that the landscape and the tree and
the flower, save that tree and flower in Africa were vaster and more
varied. And the ocean struck here and the ocean struck there. Ocean,
Ocean, Ocean, just the same, striking Virginia, striking Scotland.
Colley and I stayed with North but went back and forth to the
_Janet_. Bartram stayed with the _Janet_, but came and went
ashore and to North’s. McNaughton I met at times in the street. Pomeroy
had, they said, a wife or a mistress in a tiny, deeply shadowed house.
And for our sailors, there existed the waterside and the town at large
and the Seaman’s Delight.
The uneasy spirit within drove David Scott to the sunbaked slave market
beside the barracoon. I saw our cargo sold, and only long usage could
make that selling less than frightful. Back I was upon the _King
William_, and they were selling me!
At North’s there was always punch or brandy neat, and servants and
servants to wait upon one. Colley and I slept in a great airy room,
with a net over the bed to keep out mosquitoes. North had no wife,
but a brown housekeeper. His table groaned, and at supper was always
company. Down by the water stood the house of the Company, with clerks
and ledgers and a great lounging place. North’s days were spent there,
and this was the place to find ship captains and traders and outfitters
and often sugar planters.
I saw little of Bartram these days. He seemed willing to give me sea
room in which to make decisions.
With Colley or alone I saw the scambling, hot and dusty, not so big
town that was Kingston. We were put in the way of getting horses and so
rode over the plain, between sugar fields and through untrimmed forest
to Spanish Town, where was the King’s House and the Governor, and some
kind of Parliament, and an Assembly room and a theater and a great
church and an inn. We put up at the latter and saw the sights. Spanish
Town was once, they said, St Jago de la Vega, before Cromwell put the
Spaniards to the sword and took the island. The old port town was Port
Royal that a great earthquake swallowed only sixty years ago. Then up
came Kingston in its place. Earthquakes still happened, earthquakes
and hurricanes and yellow fever and the pox, and threats at times from
Spain and from the French in Santo Domingo; and pirates infested the
surrounding seas.
There were British soldiers in Spanish Town--two or three companies, I
should guess. In the inn we found their officers gaming and drinking.
By degrees they began to speak to us at our small table, and when they
found an intelligent ship’s surgeon and his companion, to draw us in
to the general company. We did not meet the consideration which would
have been ours had we come from the man-of-war in the harbor, nor the
consideration due to a stately East Indiaman, nor even to a general
merchantman in the American Trade. The slaver had a dark mark over
the world, though the world demanded that she persist. She was like a
prostitute.
So they used a certain freedom and condescension of tone. It irked
Colley, I saw, but God knows it seemed only to put me back into
Virginia, where I had been a servant and laborer.
They wished to know of the sea and the cargo and Africa, and if we had
seen so and so who was upon the Guinea station. Colley would hold his
gentility and so minced in and out. But David Scott did not care. For a
moment he had been in the great parlor at Amory Hall, where there was a
fire burning, and a dance and young men and women laughing. And then he
sat thinking.
There entered a couple of men who also had been riding and who, greeted
by and greeting our officers, seemed folk of consideration, Jamaica
owners of the neighborhood, sib to English squire or Scots laird. One
seemed an amiable man enough, languid and drawling like North, but with
an educated tongue. The other was of coarser stuff. They drank and
the talk went on. The Captain of soldiers--a fine young buck such as
I might have found opposed to me at Culloden--mentioned our names to
Mr. Dalrymple and Mr. Crabtree, “Doctor Colley and Mr. Scott. From the
_Janet_ in harbor.”
They seemed to know the _Janet_ and asked of Captain Bartram,
“Holy Bartram,” said Mr. Dalrymple with drollery. A military man of
superior rank entered the room; the officers present rose and saluted
and then all sat to drink again. The newcomer proved an authoritative,
talkative person, just back from Kingston and from dinner aboard His
Majesty’s sloop of war _Nemesis_. Wishing to talk about the
posture of affairs at home--they all, Dalrymple and Crabtree and the
soldiers, called England “home”--he talked and the others deferred
or put forward just the starters he wished. He talked of the French
and Prussia and Austria and the Ohio Company and Pelham and Pitt and
Ireland and Scotland. His remarks upon the last-named were intemperate.
I said, “I am a Scot, sir. The country is poor but not villainous.”
He swung himself around in his chair and stared at me.
“And who the devil, sir, are you?”
“I am from the _Janet_,” I answered. “The country is poor but not
villainous.”
Mr. Dalrymple intervened. “A nephew, I believe, Major, of Captain
Bartram of the Guineaman _Janet_. You know how are the Scotch,
sir! He means only properly to stand for his own.”
“I mean,” I said, “that the country is poor but not villainous.”
The Major swallowed. “Well, sir, it is villainous in part. You,
doubtless, are an exception.”
“Every land is villainous in part. For instance, England----”
He suddenly roared. “Yes, England too! Haven’t I just been saying so?
In short, I don’t feel like quarreling, Mr. whoever you are from the
Guineaman!”
“David Scott, sir.”
“Well, Mr. David Scott, I don’t think the _waur_ of you for
finding good under your own rooftree! I’m supposing, of course, that
you were not ‘out’--as the saying is--in ’45, or that you were ‘out’ on
the right side?”
“I was ‘out’ on what I considered the right side----”
Colley’s voice, that was a clear, penetrating one, made itself heard
with suddenness and completeness. “A soldier with the yellow fever. As
we came into Spanish Town----”
“Another!” exclaimed the Captain.
“I don’t think I could be mistaken,” said Colley. “He had every sign
and was making for the hospital. Have you ever thought, sir, of moving
the men bodily to a mountain top? The higher you go, the less of the
fever.”
Mr. Crabtree followed him, though certainly without any notion
of serving David Scott. “I’ve thought the same. I’ve thought of
balloons--and I tell you what I’ve thought too, Doctor. I’ve thought it
is the mosquitoes.”
“The mosquitoes!”
The soldiers laughed and no one picked up again the former topic. As
for Colley and me, our eyes met and said, “We’ll sit just long enough
to show that we’re not chased, then pay and depart.” The company now
was upon a ball to be given at King’s House in honor of the officers of
the _Ariadne_, upon the ball and the fever and the sugar crop and
the Maroons, which last word I think I first heard here. We were about
to rise when a young white man in a very poor dress, who seemed to have
been riding, entered the room. He had in hand a package, and standing
by the door he coughed twice and at last attracted the attention of Mr.
Dalrymple.
“Bulkeley! What are you doing here? Oh, did I leave that behind?”
“Aye, sir. Mr. Robinson, he sent me after you with it.” Advancing to
the great table, he extended the package, which seemed of papers. The
planter took it.
“All right, Bulkeley! Wait outside. I’ll have a note to send back to
Mr. Robinson.”
Bulkeley in his poor dress touched his forehead and went out. He was,
I saw, a white bondsman, indentured servant in Jamaica like those in
Virginia. Dick Merry rose before me.
When Colley and I had bowed to the company and paid our score and left
the inn’s big room, we found him leaning against the wall outside. I
wished to stop to talk, but Colley said, “For God’s sake, David!” and
whistled to the black hostler who brought our horses. We mounted and
rode through Spanish Town, past the cathedral and the other wonders.
At last we found ourselves out upon a road running between groves of
logwood in blossom and the harvest field of a fabulous number of bees.
We had it to ourselves, save for a wagon drawn by four oxen with three
or four black men walking alongside that was disappearing into the
distance.
I said, “I considered it the right side. But now I think Tory and Whig
are just on the same side and that it’s not a particularly important
one!”
“_I_ think,” he answered, “that in another five minutes you might
have found yourself apprehended. What possessed you?”
“I don’t know, Colley,” I said, “except that I love Scotland. Listen to
the bees in all that yellow stuff!”
We rode on. “Mosquitoes!” he said. “How could it be mosquitoes?”
Leaving these trees, we came to a great planting of sugar cane, many
acres, breathlessly still now in the drop of the wind. Half-naked black
men were cutting, cutting, a large gang of them, dim and dimmer down
the rank field where the cane was head-tall. They felled the stalks
with curiously shaped knives, somewhat like a short cutlass. We made
out two armed white men standing watching, and in a moment a third, on
horseback, came along the road that seemed an unfrequented one, and
stopped at our greeting. I recognized an overseer, with some of the
marks of Barget, but harder.
“Good day!” quoth Colley. “The cane seems prime.”
“’Tis so, sir.” He stood in his stirrups and shouted something to the
nearest white man, who shouted it in turn to the next. In the distance
rose the tall chimney of a sugar mill, and there was a movement
toward it across the great field as of a monster serpent, a dragon of
antiquity. We seemed to catch a sight of oxen too, and of heaped wagons.
“New slaves?” said Colley.
“Just so, sir,” answered the man on the horse. “Out of the
_Silver_, no longer ago than Christmas. Coromantins, too. The
worst of the lot!”
“But they’re in demand.”
“They’re big and strong as an ox. That’s why,” replied the overseer.
“But, God! they’re hard to tame! And when they find that they can’t
kill you--unless they wish to be burned alive--they run off. Clear away
to the mountains and feed the Maroons! We’ve been breaking these in
for a month.” He had pistols, a knife and a great whip, and his white
helpers were similarly armed.
“Are they broken yet?” I asked, and he answered with satisfaction,
“Pretty well!” and I saw Eboe Sam who also had been fierce and haughty.
He departed into the field, following the line like a serpent. Colley
and I rode back to Kingston, to North’s house, to the verandah and
the hammocks and the bowl of punch. It was an easy, easy life and it
attacked with the power of a tiger. To lie and dream, to lie and think
that you were thinking!
Two days after Spanish Town we rode into the Blue Mountains, starting
before sunrise, our destination a “pen”, as their plantations are
called well up toward the clouds that hid the purple heads. The owner
was a Mr. Browne, a connection of North’s, and the latter had suggested
our going, but indeed Colley had been before. It was not a sugar
plantation, but Browne experimented with coffee. And as planters are
as hospitable as Highland chiefs, no need for forewarning. It had been
so in Virginia and was so in Jamaica.
When we left the plain and began to climb, the road grew profoundly
poor. But all around was beauty--around, above, below, where now the
plain and harbor spread, a shield all vert and argent. We saw the
ships, could make out the _Janet_.
“There she is!” quoth Colley, and “There she is!” I followed. Still
we climbed while strange trees pressed about us and rich and strange
flowers, and we heard water falling. From shoulder to shoulder we saw,
in an amber light, the plain and the mountains and the sea. I said, “It
is a beautiful island!”
He agreed. “A man might live here very well if he had means and place.”
“There would be forever warmth and light, even if you had neither.”
“Yes,” he said. “But toil. Warmth and light and toil.”
The day was well on when back among the hills we came to cleared land,
to growing coffee and to flat, stone drying-places called barbecues
and finally to a house of wood and stone that was Browne’s Folly,
where we were going. At once the great shady bloomy yard before it
seemed to swarm with Negroes. A great bell rang, we dismounted, a Negro
house servant, not at all unlike several I remembered at Amory Hall,
appeared to tell us with unction that “the Captain” was out but would
be in ere long and that we were at home. He showed us a big untidy
room, and a blowsy mulatto girl brought us water for our hands and
faces; and the butler, if that was his denomination, returned with
glasses and a squat bottle of rum. There seemed no hostess. “I don’t
know if he ever married,” said Colley. “He’s an old man now.”
We sat awaiting the Captain--Colley did not know how he got the
title--in deep and comfortable chairs on a verandah with a great view.
Some kind of quarter seemed to extend from the house at the back, or
some kind of cultivation to go on in the immediate neighborhood, for
numerous voices made themselves heard, rich Negro voices, men and
women. I said, “They sound mighty gay and cheerful.”
“This pen’s got the greatest name for good nature. Browne’s an oddity
with some notion in his head. North says he has money in the funds at
home or he could never do it. He says the place makes him nothing.
Rather he’s always putting in----”
“All these Negroes speak English after a sort. They don’t seem recent.”
“They aren’t. Browne believes in their breeding and so keeping up the
stock. Most planters go the other way about. When their number is
worked off and getting low, they buy more out of Africa. North says
Browne hasn’t bought for a long time. There are some here who were born
in Africa, but they’ve almost forgotten it. He doesn’t work them hard
either; there are always two or three to a one-man job.”
“How old a man is he?”
“Browne? Seventy, I imagine, though he doesn’t look it. He came out to
Jamaica young.”
“What does he do when the population grows too great?”
“Sells, I suppose,” said Colley. “Yes, of course. Junia at North’s was
raised here.”
I listened to the laughter somewhere beyond a thicket of fruit trees.
“I should think that they would miss it here when they’re sold.”
“Yes,” he answered dreamily, “I should think so.”
“They have no say in it,” I said. “This island is like Virginia, only a
deal more so. That’s the climate, I dare say, and the fact that it’s an
island, and the history of these seas.”
“These seas and these islands have a terrible history,” he said. “Well,
that is man!”
It seemed not to trouble Colley, or not to trouble him at that time.
And David Scott, upon this mountain shoulder, with the tropic day about
him, the light and the air and good-natured sound, with a long deep
chair in which to stretch his limbs, with drink at hand if he wanted
it, wrapped in leisure, wrapped in balm, said No! to his eternal
querying, said, “Don’t trouble me now--don’t trouble me ever, if you
can manage it!”
Browne came home and proved to be a white-haired, strong old man,
with a round face and a kind of perpetual beamy look not unmixed with
whimsey. He greeted us hospitably, the Negroes grinned when he spoke,
the dogs sprang up on him and a parrot flying down from a mango tree
perched upon his shoulder. “Universal Benevolence!” I thought. “Father
Christmas!”
We had supper of an untidy abundance but well cooked. One hardly
counted the attendance, but saw dark countenances come and go, and that
one and all seemed happy enough. After supper, we sat upon the verandah
in the warm, rose-shot dusk and smoked and talked. He had an easy, old
man’s loquacity. He wanted to hear about the _Janet_ and Daga and
Bristol, Liverpool and London, but with a touch of disinterestedness.
“I said to myself forty years ago, ‘This thing ought to be better
managed! Buy enough women--make them all, men and women, comfortable
and happy enough--and see what will happen according to Nature! In
short, raise your own Negroes and don’t be forever spending fifty
pounds for a raw Ashanti or Eboe stark from the Slave Coast!’ So I
began with this place and thirty odd, male and female, and a few
children. It’s paid. They’ll tell you, of course, in Kingston that
it hasn’t, that I make nothing. But I do. I make the satisfaction
of seeing a theory _work_--and as you know, young men, there’s
nothing in the world like that! If the Indies and the Continent, North
and South, would go about it my way--be indulgent to them and give a
feast for every baby--there’d be enough right in America in a hundred
years to cultivate all the fields we’re likely to want cultivated. Then
all the cost and worry and loss of bringing them from Africa might be
stopped for good and all. Turn the slave ships into spice and oil and
cotton ships. That’s a deal healthier trade for all concerned!”
I said, “You’d stop the warring and kidnapping and buying and bringing
them. But you’d keep those who are this side the ocean slaves forever.
Those that you have, and their children, slaves.”
“Yes,” he said. “Treating them always kindly. There isn’t any other way
to get the work done.”
“No, I suppose not,” I answered.
_Who would clear the land, who would tend tobacco and coffee, who
would make the sugar, who would make the rum?_
The rose dusk changed to violet dusk, with a beat as of wings and the
dry voice of an army and an army of insects. A white and glowing star
set itself above a palm tree. Voices throbbed from the hidden huts of
black men and women and children, mellow voices, voices that laughed
and sang.
I said, “Set them free and if they will work for you, pay them their
wages.”
The old planter knocked the ashes from his pipe. His face was round
and pleasant as the moon and on the whole as unenergetic. “That’s for
Utopia,” he said. “No, no, they’re children! Best to own and command
them like children. But children are not sent us to be harshly dealt
with. That’s my point. I like children and like to see them happy.”
He was a still more benevolent Colonel Amory.
One might live rather happily in an island within an island, with a
vast household of “children”, with a soft abundant Nature dropping
flower and fruit around. Be happy, lose edge, become rounded like a
pebble in a river bed. Be happy and at the same time pretty good,
making happy “children” around one, not over-working them or
over-punishing them, giving them their little pleasures.
After all, they were barbarians--as the Romans said we Scots were. God
knows how long we had been barbarians there in the northern forests
when the Romans came. White--black; black--white. Red, yellow, black,
white. If Great Nature loved the white so, why did she not make all
white? White marble is beautiful, and copper and bronze and ebony are
beautiful.
“No, no!” said old Mr. Browne, as though he had answered my thought.
“They are naturally inferior and of course we must recognize it. But
make them happy--make them happy!”
We soon went to bed. Colley said he was dog-tired and slept, but I lay
awake, and the tune in my head went, “When the _Janet_ sails, do I
sail with her? When the _Janet_ sails, do I sail with her?”
Had I money I could live like Browne, who had begun this life when
he was as young a man--live as kindly as one might, considering all
things--live in a Jamaica of wonderful colors and tumbled mountains and
forever summer--live with black folk around me whom I would buy and at
need sell, but whom I should treat kindly in the meantime--kindly, with
only just such hardness as would ensure their working. But I had not
money, so why dream of all that?
I might, through Bartram’s influence with North, obtain a situation as
clerk in the Company’s house, with the ledgers and the other clerks,
and the coming in of slave ships and the tallying and recording. But
so I should have changed naught, being still with the Royal African
Company.
I might become clerk or bookkeeper or overseer to some planter--be as
Barget or Williams.
Somewhere on these mountains, on unoccupied land, I might build for
myself a hut and thatch it with palm, plant yams about it, and there
live as a hermit, a solitary, an eccentric; now and then earning a
little from some greater neighbor, enough to buy rum with, a little
meal, a gun, a suit of clothes a year. And I liked that better, but not
well enough.
I could earn somehow doubtless--enough to live doubtless--and somehow
keep a still tongue doubtless--and the years might pass like heavy
lilies, growing on the edge of mire, falling, falling, one by one, upon
the mire.
The sea and Bartram. The sea and Bartram and the _Janet_. Turning
in bed, I made that choice, flung my arm over my eyes and went to sleep.
But waking in the night, I heard as though it were the echo of a deep
voice. “There are other ships than slave ships coming, going, and you
might go upon one.”
I said back, “I should not be so advantageously placed. I should be
under much more restraint.” And turned upon my side and went to sleep
again.
Before dawn I woke once more and that same deep voice was saying,
“God.” Just that, just the one word. It should have been enough. But
I at once grew deaf to it, putting what I thought to be David Scott’s
needs between me and it.