I could see that Mendouca was pretty thoroughly ashamed of himself, for
despite his utmost efforts, there was a perceptible shrinking and
embarrassment of manner apparent in him during the progress of the meal.
Nevertheless, he exerted himself manfully to obliterate the exceedingly
disagreeable impression that he knew had been made upon me by his late
conduct; and it was evident that he was sincerely desirous of
re-establishing friendly relations between us, whether from any selfish
motive or not I cannot of course say, but I think not--I believe his
pride was hurt at his late lamentable exhibition of weakness, and he was
chiefly anxious to recover his own self-respect. Whatever his motive
may have been, his demeanour was a perfect blending of politeness and
cordiality that won upon me in spite of myself; and before the meal was
over I had determined to render him the small amount of assistance that
he had asked of me, reserving to myself the right to withdraw it at any
moment that I might deem fit. He seemed sincerely grateful for my
offer, and accepted it frankly and cordially with the reservation that I
had attached to it; and having accompanied me on deck and turned the
hands up, he informed them that I had offered to temporarily perform the
duties of chief mate, and that they were to obey my orders as implicitly
as they would those from his own lips; after which, as I had offered to
take charge until midnight, he said that he was tired and would try to
get a little sleep, and so retired below to his own cabin.
The breeze continued easterly, and very moderate, frequently dropping
almost calm, on which occasion we were almost invariably treated to
deluges of rain, with occasional thunder and lightning. Our progress to
the eastward was therefore slow, and for three whole days and nights
nothing occurred to break the monotony of the voyage. On the morning of
the fourth day, however, when I went on deck just before eight bells--it
having been my eight hours in, that night--I found the brigantine once
more before the wind, with a slashing breeze blowing after her, and she
with every rag of canvas packed upon her that could be induced to draw.
But, to my exceeding surprise, we were heading to the _westward_, and,
hull-down about ten miles distant, was another craft dead ahead of us,
also carrying a press of canvas.
I turned to Mendouca for an explanation; and in answer to my look of
inquiry he said--
"Yes, I want to overtake that brig, if I can. I am ashamed to say that
among us we let her slip past in the darkness of the early part of the
last watch, and so I missed the opportunity of speaking her. But I
believe I know her; and if my surmise as to her identity proves correct,
I think I shall have no difficulty in persuading her skipper to transfer
his cargo to me, and so save me the trouble and risk of returning to the
coast for one--a risk which was every day growing greater as we drew
nearer to the ground haunted by your lynx-eyed cruisers, to fall in with
one of which just now, with those niggers down in the hold, would mean
our inevitable condemnation, as I need scarcely tell you."
"Quite so," I assented. "But should you fail to overtake yonder craft,
you will lose a good deal of ground, will you not?"
"Oh, we shall overhaul her, if she be the brig I believe her to be, and
I have very little doubt upon that point," answered Mendouca. "She is a
smart craft, I admit, but the _Francesca_ can beat her upon any point of
sailing, and in any breeze that blows; and, that being the case, the
distance that we may have to run to leeward before getting alongside her
is a matter of indifference to me, since it will be so much of our
voyage accomplished."
"Have you gained anything on her since you bore up in chase?" I asked.
"About a couple of miles, I should think. But then the wind has been
light with us until within the last hour. If this breeze holds I expect
to be alongside her about four bells in the afternoon watch."
"By which time we shall have run close upon seventy miles to leeward," I
remarked.
"Nearer eighty," observed Mendouca. "We are going close upon thirteen
now. But, as I said before, that does not trouble me in the least,
since we shall be that much nearer Cuba."
This was serious news to me, for Cuba was about the last place that I
desired to visit, at least on board the _Francesca_, for I foresaw that
if once we got over there the difficulty of effecting my escape from the
accursed craft would be very greatly increased; indeed, I had quite
reckoned upon her being fallen in with and captured by one of our
cruisers, either while standing in for a fresh cargo of slaves, or when
coming out again with them on board, to which chance alone could I look
with any reason for the prospect of deliverance from my present
embarrassing and disagreeable situation. True, there was just a
possibility of our being picked up by one of the West Indian squadron;
but I had not much hope of that, our vessels on that station being
mostly slow, deep-draught craft, altogether unsuited for the pursuit and
capture of the swift, light-draught slavers, who, unless caught at
advantage in open water, could laugh us to scorn by the simple expedient
of taking short cuts across shoals, or seeking refuge among the shallow
lagoons that abound among the islands, and are especially plentiful and
spacious along the northern coast of Cuba. However, there was no use in
worrying over a state of things that I had no power to mend; I therefore
assumed charge of the deck, and allowed matters to take their course--
since I needs must.
The breeze continued to freshen as the sun increased his distance above
the horizon, and we went bowling along at a most exhilarating pace,
overhauling the brig ahead, slowly but surely; and when at one o'clock
the steward summoned me to the cabin to dinner, a space of barely two
miles separated the two craft. She had just hoisted Portuguese colours,
of which, however, Mendouca took no notice, somewhat to my surprise,
since he reiterated the statement that she was the craft he had believed
her to be, and that the captain of her and he were old friends. It was
my afternoon watch below; so when I rose from the dinner-table I said--
"Captain Mendouca, I have no wish to identify myself in any way with the
transaction you are about to negotiate; you must excuse me therefore if,
it being my watch below, I retire to my cabin."
"Very well, Dugdale," he answered, quite good-humouredly, "I can manage
the business perfectly well without you; if therefore _your
conscience_"--with just the faintest suggestion of a sneer--"will not
permit you to take an active part in it, you are quite welcome to stay
below until the affair is at an end, when I will call you."
I even thought that he spoke with an air of relief, as though my
withdrawal had smoothed away a difficulty. About an hour later I was
awakened from a nap by the sound of hailing in a language which I did
not understand, but which, from its decided resemblance to Spanish, I
concluded to be Portuguese. I could not hear what passed, nor did I
attempt to do so, being of opinion that the less prominently I was mixed
up with the affair, and the less I knew about it, the better. The
hailing soon ceased, and then the brigantine was hove-to, as I could
tell by the difference in her movements. I had the curiosity to rise
from my bunk and take a peep through the scuttle at the sea, but it was
bare as far as my eye could reach; so, as my state-room was to windward
as the _Francesca_ then lay, I came to the conclusion that the brig was
hove-to to leeward of us. The moment that our topsail was backed I
heard the creaking of davit blocks, and the other sounds of a boat being
lowered; and a few minutes later I heard the roll of the oars in the
rowlocks as she was pulled away from the ship. Then the hatches were
taken off fore and aft, and in about half-an-hour from the time of our
having hove-to I became aware that the first boat-load of slaves had
arrived alongside and were being driven down into the hold. The boats
now began to arrive in rapid succession, and there was a good deal of
bustle and confusion on deck, which lasted until close upon sunset, and
in the midst of it I laid down and went to sleep again, for want of
something better to do. When I awoke the dusk was thick upon the glass
of my scuttle, the steward was lighting the lamp in the main cabin, and
I could feel that we were once more under way again; concluding,
therefore, that the exchange had been completed, I rolled out of my bunk
and, slipping my feet into my shoes, left my state-room and went on
deck, where I found Mendouca in jubilant spirits, but rather
disconcerted, I thought, at my appearance.
"Hillo!" he exclaimed in English, "where the deuce did you come from,
and how long have you been on deck?"
"I came from my state-room, and have but this moment emerged from the
companion. Why do you ask?" said I.
"Because," he answered, "to tell you the truth you startled me, making
your appearance in that quiet manner. I thought you were going to stay
below until I called you?"
"It was _you_ who said that, not I," answered I. "And, to tell you the
truth, I felt tired of being below, and so--finding that you were under
way again--came on deck."
The brig was about five miles astern, and, as far as I could see in the
fast-gathering darkness, still hove-to, which struck me as being so
peculiar that I made some remark to that effect.
"Oh no; nothing strange about it at all," answered Mendouca carelessly.
"Her people are getting their supper, probably, and are too lazy to
start tack or sheet until they have finished their meal. Bless you, you
have no idea what lazy rascals the Portuguese are; their laziness is
absolutely phenomenal; they are positively too lazy to live long, and so
most of them die early. More over, I expect her skipper is still below
poring over his charts and trying to make up what he is pleased to call
his mind what spot to steer for in order to get another cargo."
"Very possibly," I assented, with a laugh. "By the way, it is curious,
but I could almost fancy her deeper in the water than she was; does it
not strike you so?"
"Deeper in the water?" he exclaimed sharply. "No, I cannot say that it
does; and even were such a thing possible, it would need an uncommonly
sharp eye to discern it in such a light as this. She may be, however,
for that rascal Jose wrung enough good Spanish dollars out of me, for
his rubbish, to sink her to her waterways. But come, here is the
steward, so I suppose supper is ready, and if so we may as well go below
and get it, for I must plead guilty to being most ravenously hungry."
Notwithstanding which statement I could not avoid noticing that he toyed
a great deal with his food and ate very little; which was not to be
wondered at under the circumstances, for I afterwards learned that while
I was below in my berth, suspecting nothing worse than the purchase and
transfer of a cargo of slaves from one ship to another, a most atrocious
and cold-blooded act of piracy had been committed, and that, too, under
the shadow and disguise of the British flag; Mendouca having coolly
hoisted British colours the moment that I left the deck, and, in the
guise of a British cruiser, compelled the Portuguese brig to heave-to
and disgorge her cargo; after which he had confined the crew below,
bound hand and foot, and had scuttled their ship, leaving them to perish
in her when she went down! But of this I had not the faintest suspicion
until the tale was told me some time afterwards by one of the
_Francesca's_ own crew.
With the setting of the sun the wind evinced a very decided tendency to
drop, growing steadily lighter all through the first watch, until when
Mendouca relieved me at midnight the ship was moving at a rate of barely
five knots, although she was carrying studding-sails on both sides; and
when I went on deck again at four o'clock next morning it was a flat
calm, and the ship was lying motionless upon the water, with her head
swung round to the south-east; the swell, too, had gone down, and there
was every appearance of the calm lasting for several hours at least.
The appearance of the sun, as he rose, also confirmed this impression,
the sky being--for a wonder in that latitude--perfectly cloudless, and
of a clear, pure, soft, crystalline blue, into which the great luminary
leapt in dazzling splendour, palpitating with breathless heat that
promised to soon become almost unendurable. It was my custom to indulge
in a saltwater bath every morning in the ship's head, one of the men
playing the hose upon me for a quarter of an hour or so, and never did
that bath seem a greater luxury to me than on this particular morning,
for the heat came with the sun, and I envied the fish their ability to
escape it by sinking deep into the cool, blue, crystalline depths;
indeed I should most probably have been tempted to imitate them as far
as possible by plunging overboard and swimming twice or thrice round the
ship, had I not happened to have noticed a large shark under her
counter, when, to test the clearness of the water, I happened to lean
over the taffrail to look at the rudder and stern-post. Even the men
dawdled over the job of washing decks that morning, using a much greater
quantity of water than usual, and placing themselves where there was a
chance to get the hose played upon their bare feet and legs. And if it
was hot on deck, what must it have been down in the crowded hold? It
was Mendouca's habit to have the gratings put on the hatchways and
secured every night--when the weather would permit of the use of them
instead of the solid hatches--in order to prevent anything in the shape
of a rising on the part of the negroes; and all night long a thin,
pungent vapour had been rising through them, telling an eloquent tale of
the frightful closeness and heat of the atmosphere down there, while at
frequent intervals could be heard the sound of a restless stirring on
the part of the living cargo, accompanied by a long-drawn, gasping sigh,
as if for breath. There was usually a good deal of carelessness and
remissness manifested by the men in the removal of the gratings in the
morning. I have frequently gone on deck at seven bells--when it was my
eight hours in--and found them still on, although it was well understood
that they were to be taken off at four bells. I was always very
particular, when it was my morning watch on deck, to have the gratings
removed prompt to time; on this particular morning, however, I did not
wait until four bells, but took it upon myself to have the hatches
thrown open as soon as there was daylight enough to enable us to see,
clearly, and I am sure that the poor wretches below were grateful for
even so small a measure of relief.
As the day advanced the heat grew intolerable, and the consequent
suffering of the blacks more intense. It is the custom on board
slavers, I believe--at least it was so on board the _Francesca_--to feed
the slaves twice a day, the food consisting of a fairly liberal quantity
of boiled rice, farina, or calavance beans--these latter being used on
account of their great fattening powers, whereby the slaves are
maintained in a tolerably good condition of body--with a pint of water
at each meal. Mendouca made it a rule to vary the diet of the slaves as
much as possible on these three articles, one or the other of which was
given every third day, he having found that the poor wretches thus
thrived better, and took their food with more enjoyment than when fed
during the entire voyage upon one kind of food only; and whenever the
weather was sufficiently moderate to permit of it, he always had
one-half of the slaves on deck for an airing during the time that the
other half were being fed below, thus allowing room for the men who
dispensed the food and water to move about, and also for the slaves to
use their hands in the process of feeding; and on the particular morning
of which I am now writing it was unspeakably moving and pathetic to
note, as I did, the feverish eagerness and longing with which the
unhappy creatures waited and watched for the arrival of the moment when
they might come on deck and breathe for a few brief minutes the pure
and--to them--cool and refreshing outer atmosphere. My heart ached with
pity for them, and I determined that I would utilise my presence on
board this accursed ship by doing everything in my power to ameliorate
as far as possible the condition of the unfortunates that were
imprisoned within her. And I made up my mind to begin on that very
morning, if, when Mendouca made his appearance, he seemed to be in a
temper amenable to persuasion.
When he came on deck, however, the conditions appeared anything but
promising, for he was in a frightfully bad humour at the calm, cursing
the weather, his own ill-luck, and everything else that he could think
of to execrate. I allowed him to give unrestrained vent to his
ill-humour for some minutes, and when at length he had calmed down
somewhat I said--
"And yet it appears to me that this calm, about which you are
complaining so bitterly, may be made excellent use of, if you will, to
benefit and increase the value of your property."
"Indeed? in what way, pray?" he demanded.
"Well," said I, "there is no sail trimming to be done in this weather,
and it would be downright cruelty to send the men aloft to work about
the rigging in this blazing heat; why not therefore spread an awning
aft, here, and set the entire watch to work, beneath its shade, to patch
up such of your canvas as needs repairing? And while they are engaged
upon that job I will see--if you approve of the plan--whether I cannot
get the negroes to take a bath in batches in a studding-sail rigged on
the fore-deck, and thus rid themselves of some of the filth that is fast
accumulating on their bodies; it will do them more good and tend more to
keep them in health than a double allowance of food for the remainder of
the voyage. And when they have done that they can be divided into two
gangs, one on deck to draw and pass water, and the other below, with all
the scrubbing-brushes and swabs that can be mustered, to give the
slave-deck a thorough cleansing. That is what I should do, were they my
property."
"Well," he said musingly, "I dare say it would do the rascals a lot of
good, and would certainly make the ship sweeter--I'll be bound that she
could be scented a mile away in her present condition. But who is to
undertake the supervision of such work? Not _I_, I tell you, frankly;
and I believe the hands would refuse, to a man, were I to attempt to set
them to such work."
"If they will rig me a studding-sail, or an old fore-course for'ard, I
will do the rest--or _try_ to do it," said I.
"Will you?" exclaimed Mendouca, in surprise. "Then I am sure you may,
and I heartily wish you joy of the job."
"Very well, then, I will set about it the first thing after breakfast,"
said I.
And I did. I got the poor wretches forward in batches of thirty,
induced them to stand in the basin-like hollow of the sail, and then set
half-a-dozen of their number pumping and drawing water, and playing upon
their fellows with the hose, or sluicing buckets of water over them, and
the exquisite enjoyment, the unspeakable luxury of that bath, as the
cool, sparkling liquid dashed upon the filth and sweat-begrimed bodies,
was a sight to see! Enjoyed it? Why they revelled in it, so that it
was with difficulty that I could get them out; the stony look of
hopeless, utter despair faded temporarily out of their eyes, and some of
them actually _laughed_! It was by no means a pleasant or a savoury job
that I had undertaken, but witnessing the keen enjoyment that I had thus
bestowed made it the most delightful that I had ever been engaged in.
It occupied me the whole morning to pass the entire cargo through the
bath and secure the thorough cleansing of their persons, and the whole
of the afternoon to get the slave-deck properly cleansed and purified;
but when the sun set that evening the ship was once more sweet and
wholesome, while the slaves had--taking one with another--been on deck
and actively exercised for about half a day instead of about twenty
minutes morning and evening. As I had said, it did them more good than
double rations for the entire voyage. Even Mendouca was fain to
acknowledge that the day, instead of being wasted, had been well spent.
We had been hoping all day that with sunset a breeze would spring up
from _somewhere_--I think nobody was very particular as to the quarter
from which it should come, so long as it came at all--but our hopes were
doomed to disappointment; the sun went down in a perfectly clear sky,
and there was no sign whatever of wind from any quarter. The same
weather conditions prevailed all through the night; and when the sun
rose next morning there was still not the slightest sign of wind, while
the glass exhibited a slight tendency to rise. Under these
circumstances I thought I would endeavour to secure a repetition of the
proceedings of the previous day, and so well pleased was Mendouca with
the improved appearance of the blacks when, as usual, half of them came
on deck at breakfast-time, that he readily gave his consent; and
accordingly the poor creatures were again treated to the luxury of the
bath, while the slave-deck received another thorough scrubbing to
cleanse it from the filth accumulated during the night. And thus the
negroes were enabled to pass a second day in pure air, to the great
improvement of their health and spirits; indeed, the ecstatic delight
with which they lingered over their bath, and the cheerfulness with
which they afterwards worked at their task of drawing water and
scrubbing, chattering almost gaily together all the time, were, to me,
most eloquent testimony as to the miseries that they had previously
endured, cooped up, tightly wedged together, _day and night_, in the
close and noisome hold.
I must not omit to mention a very curious phenomenon of which I had
often heard, but had never before beheld until this day. It is known
among sailors as the phenomenon of "the ripples." I was on the
forecastle superintending the bathing operations when it first made its
appearance, the sky being at the time clear and cloudless, with the sun
blazing in its midst like a huge ball of living flame, while the water
was so oil-smooth and glassy that it was quite impossible to distinguish
the horizon, or to determine where the sea ended and the sky began. It
was hotter than I had ever felt it before; dressed only in a thin shirt
and the thinnest of white trousers, the perspiration was gushing so
freely from every pore of my body that my light and airy garments were
saturated with it, while the atmosphere was so stagnant that it seemed
impossible to inhale a sufficiency of air for breathing purposes. Under
these trying conditions we were, of course, all anxiously watching for a
breeze; and it was with a feeling of exquisite delight that, happening
to look abroad toward the north, I saw the horizon strongly marked with
a line of delicate blue, indicating, as I believed, the approach of a
thrice-welcome breeze. In the exuberance of my delight I shouted to
Mendouca, who was reclining in a hammock aft slung from the main-boom,
and, of course, under the shelter of the awning--
"Hurrah! here comes a breeze at last, although I do not know where it
has sprung from, for there is not a cloud to be seen."
Mendouca sprang up in his hammock at this news, and looked in the
direction to which I was pointing; then sank back again, disgustedly.
"Pshaw, that is no breeze--worse luck!" he cried. "That is only `the
ripples.'"
"The ripples?" I ejaculated. "Surely not. It has every appearance of
a genuine breeze!"
Mendouca, however, was too intensely disgusted to reply. Meanwhile, the
streak of blue, stretching right athwart the horizon, was advancing
rapidly, bearing straight down upon the brigantine, and soon it became
possible to see the tiny wavelets sparkling in the dazzling sunlight,
and to detect a soft, musical, liquid-tinkling sound, such as one may
hear when the tide is rising on a flat, sandy beach on a calm summer's
day. But by this time I had made the disappointing discovery that the
blue line was merely a belt of rippling water about a quarter of a mile
wide, with a perfectly calm, glassy surface beyond it, and, as there was
no advance-guard of cat's-paws, such as may usually be seen playing on
the surface of the water as forerunners of an approaching breeze, I was
reluctantly compelled to acknowledge to myself that Mendouca was right.
And so it proved; for although the line--or rather belt--of rippling
water not only advanced right up to the ship, giving forth a most
pleasant and refreshing liquid sound as it came, and lapping musically
against the brigantine's sides for a few minutes when it reached her,
but also passed on and traversed the entire visible surface of the
ocean, finally disappearing beyond the southern horizon, the whole
phenomenon was absolutely unaccompanied by the slightest perceptible
movement of the air. This curious disturbance of the ocean's surface
was twice repeated on that same day.
The long, hot, breathless, and wearisome day at length drew to an end,
and still there was no sign of wind; the night passed; another day
dawned; and still we lay, like the craft in Coleridge's _Ancient
Mariner_, "as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean." That day
too waxed and waned without the sign of so much as a cat's-paw to revive
our drooping hopes; and although during the succeeding night we were
visited by a terrific thunderstorm, accompanied by a perfect deluge of
rain, during which a few evanescent puffs intermittently filled our
sails, and moved us perhaps a mile nearer Cuba, when day again dawned
there was a further recurrence of the same staring, cloudless sky of
dazzling blue, the same blazing sun, the same breathless atmosphere, and
the same oil-smooth sea. And as these days of calm and stagnation
succeeded each other with relentless persistency, I kept up the custom
of bathing the negroes and thoroughly cleansing the slave-deck, until at
length the poor creatures actually grew fat and merry, so that Mendouca,
despite his fast-growing impatience and irritability at the continued
calm, was obliged to admit that he had never seen a cargo of "black
ivory" in such promising condition before. This, however, was not all;
for while superintending these bathing and scrubbing operations I talked
cheerfully and pleasantly to the fellows, giving them such names as Tom,
Bob, Joe, Snowball, and so on, to which they readily answered, instead
of abusing them and ordering them about with brutal oaths and obscenity,
as was the habit of the crew; and although the poor wretches understood
not a word of what was spoken to them either by the crew or by myself,
yet they readily enough distinguished the difference of manner, and not
only so, but they seemed to possess the faculty of interpreting one's
meaning from the tones of one's voice, so that they quickly grew to
understand what I wanted them to do, and did it cheerfully and with
alacrity. In this manner, with persistent calm recurring day after day,
we passed no less than the almost incredible time of over three weeks
without moving as many miles from the spot where the wind had deserted
us, Mendouca's temper growing steadily worse every day, until at length
he became absolutely unbearable, and I spoke to him as little as
possible. And the climax was reached when one day the steward, who had
been sent down into the hold to overhaul the stores, came on deck with a
face as long as the main-bowline, and reported that there was only food
and water enough in the ship to last ten days longer.