The order was promptly obeyed; and in a few minutes I found myself,
heavily ironed, in the pitchy darkness of the lower hold, squatted
disconsolately upon the bed of shingle which constituted the ballast of
the vessel.
And what a situation for a young fellow of less than twenty years of age
to be in! The ship of which I had been placed in command lost--
foundered in mid-ocean, and, only too probably, all hands lost with her.
Our fate would never be known; it would be concluded that one of the
mysterious disasters that so frequently befall the seaman had overtaken
us; we should be given up as lost; and there would be an end of us all,
so far as our fellow-men were concerned. For whatever hopes I might
once have entertained of escaping from this accursed ship, I had none
now.
That Tourville would not be satisfied with anything short of taking my
life, I was convinced; and very soon I began to feel that I did not care
how soon he sated his vengeance; for confined below in the heat and
darkness of the stifling hold, with no resting-place but the hard
shingle for my aching body, breathing an atmosphere poisonous with the
odour of bilge-water, with only three flinty ship-biscuits, alive with
weevils, and a half-pint of putrid water per day upon which to sustain
life, and beset by ferocious rats who disputed with me the possession of
my scanty fare, I soon became so miserably ill that death quickly lost
all its terrors, and I felt that I could welcome it as a release from my
sufferings.
How long I remained in this state of wretchedness I cannot tell, for I
soon lost count of time and indeed at last sank into a state of semi-
delirium; but I think from subsequent calculations it must have been
about ten or twelve days after the date of my incarceration that I was
aroused once more to a complete consciousness of my surroundings by
observing that a change had occurred in the motion of the ship. She no
longer pitched and rolled as does a vessel in the open sea, but slid
along--as I could tell by the gurgling sound of the water along her
bends--upon a perfectly even keel except for the slight list or
inclination due to the pressure of the wind upon her sails. I
conjectured that she must have arrived at the end of her voyage and
entered the Kwara river, a conjecture that was shortly afterward
confirmed by the sounds on deck of shouted orders and the bustle and
confusion attendant upon the operation of shortening sail, soon followed
by the splash of an anchor from the bows and the rumble of the stout
hempen cable through the hawse-pipe. Then ensued a period of quiet of
several hours' duration, broken at length by the appearance of the
carpenter and another seaman who, having removed my irons, gruffly
ordered me to follow them up on deck.
I felt altogether too wretchedly ill, and too utterly indifferent
respecting my fate, to ask these men any questions, but contrived, by
almost superhuman exertion, to climb up the perpendicular ladder which
led to the deck; and when I presently emerged from the foetid atmosphere
of the hold into the free air and dazzling sunshine of what proved to be
early morning, I was so overcome by the sudden transition that I swooned
away.
I must have remained in a state of complete unconsciousness for several
hours, for when at length I again opened my eyes and looked about me the
sun was nearly overhead, and I was lying unbound in the bottom of a long
craft that my slowly returning senses at length enabled me to recognise
as a native dug-out canoe. She was about forty feet long by four feet
beam and about two feet deep; and was manned by thirty as ferocious-
looking savages as one need ever wish to see. They were stark naked,
save for a kind of breech-clout round the loins, and squatted in pairs
along the bottom of the canoe, plying short broad-bladed paddles with
which they seemed to be urging their craft at a pretty good pace through
the water. A big, brawny, and most repulsive-looking savage, who was
probably the captain of the craft, sat perched up in the stern, steering
with a somewhat longer and broader-bladed paddle, and urging his crew to
maintain their exertions by continually giving utterance to the most
hair-raising shrieks and yells.
It was the fresh air, I suppose, that revived me, even as, after my long
sojourn in the noisome hold of the slaver, it had prostrated me by my
sudden emergence into it, and I presently became conscious that I was
feeling distinctly better than I had done for some time past. For a
minute or two I lay passively where I was, in the bottom of the canoe,
blinking up at the pallid zenith, near which the sun blazed with
blinding brilliancy; and then, no one saying me nay, I slowly and
painfully raised myself into a sitting posture and looked about me.
We were in a typical African river, about three-quarters of a mile wide,
with low bush-clad banks bordered by the inevitable mangrove, while
beyond towered the virgin tropical forest, dense, impenetrable, and full
of mystery. The turbid current was against us, as could be seen at a
glance; I therefore knew at once that we were paddling up-stream. But
whither were we bound; of what tribe or nation were the negroes who
manned the canoe; and how had I come to be among them? Had Tourville,
with a greater refinement of cruelty than even I gave him credit for,
handed me over to the tender mercies of these savages, to work their
bloodthirsty will upon me, instead of himself murdering me out of hand?
If so, what was to be my ultimate fate? I shuddered as I put this
question to myself, for I had been on the Coast quite long enough to
have heard many a gruesome, blood-curdling story of the horrors
perpetrated by the African savages upon those unhappy white men who had
been unfortunate enough to fall into their hands.
But I was not going to allow myself to be frightened or discouraged by
dwelling upon stories of that kind; I was feeling so far better that the
desire to live had returned to me. I even experienced some slight
sensation of hunger, and there was no doubt at all as to the fact that I
was parched with thirst. I therefore turned to the savage who was
flourishing the steering paddle and, first pointing to my open mouth,
went through the motions of raising a vessel to it and drinking. The
man evidently understood me, for he shouted a few--to me quite
unintelligible--words, whereupon one of the paddlers about the centre of
the canoe laid in his paddle for a few moments, did something dexterous
with a spear and a brownish-grey object the size of a man's head, and a
minute later my lips were glued to a luscious cocoa-nut, the extremity
of which had been deftly struck off with the blade of the spear,
disclosing the white-lined hollow of the cup within brimming with a full
pint or more of the delicious "milk," which I swallowed to the last
drop. Then, breaking off a strip of the husk and using it as a spoon, I
proceeded to scrape out and hungrily devour the soft creamy fruit that
lined the shell, and thus made the most satisfying and enjoyable meal
that had passed my lips for many a day. Shortly afterward, the strength
of the ebb current increasing so greatly that we were able to make
scarcely any headway against it, our steersman headed the canoe in
toward the western bank of the river, and we presently entered a narrow
creek up which we passed for a distance of about a quarter of a mile
until we reached a practicable landing-place, when the canoe was secured
to a stout mangrove root, and all hands stepped out of her, the
steersman taking the precaution to draw my attention to the spears and
bows and arrows with which his party were armed, as a hint, I suppose,
of what I might expect should I be foolish enough to attempt to escape.
We pushed our way through the thick bush for a distance of about a
hundred yards, and then reached a small open space, where we bivouacked;
a party of ten disappearing into the bush, while the rest remained to
kindle a fire and, evidently, to look after me and make sure that I did
not give them the slip. At length, after the lapse of about half an
hour, the party who had vanished into the bush returned, singly or by
two's and three's, some bringing in a monkey or two, others a few brace
of parrots, one man a big lizard like an iguana, another a fine deer,
until each of the ten had contributed something to the common larder,
when the fire was made up, a plentiful supply of food cooked, and all
hands set to with a will, each apparently animated by a determination to
show all the others how much solid food he was capable of putting out of
sight at a sitting. They very civilly offered me a choice of their
dainties, and I accepted a tolerably substantial venison steak, broiled
over the fire by being suspended close over the glowing embers upon the
end of a stick. Off this I contrived to make a fairly hearty meal,
after which, following the example of the others, I stretched myself out
in the long grass under the shadow of a big bush, and quickly fell into
a deep sleep.
I was aroused from my slumbers, some hours later, by my savage
companions, who intimated to me, by signs, that the moment had arrived
for us to take our departure, and we accordingly wended our way back to
the canoe, taking our surplus stock of food with us, and, embarking,
soon found ourselves once more afloat on the placid bosom of the broad
river, the downward and opposing current of which had by this time
greatly slackened under the influence of the flood tide which was
evidently making fast.
Keeping well out toward the centre of the stream, and paddling steadily,
we now made rapid progress in a northerly direction, the river gradually
widening and shoaling as we went, until, by the time of sunset, we found
ourselves progressing up a comparatively narrow deep-water channel with
wide expanses of shallow water on either side of us, dotted here and
there with dry patches of mud or sand upon which crocodiles lay basking,
in some cases in groups of as many as six or eight together, while
occasionally the great head of a hippopotamus appeared for a moment,
only to vanish again with a little eddying swirl of the mud-charged
water as the creature dived.
While the sun still hovered a degree or two above the tree-tops on the
western bank of the stream, the moon, now nearly full, sailed gloriously
into view above the clumps of vegetation that shrouded the eastern bank;
and the gradual transition from the ruddy, golden light of the dying sun
to the flooding silver of the brilliant moon, with the ever-changing
effects that accompanied the transition, presented a spectacle of
enchanting beauty such as I had never up to that time beheld, even at
sea. But, beyond a low muttered word or two and a grunt, apparently
expressive of deep satisfaction at the appearance of the unclouded moon,
the savages took no notice of the magical loveliness of the scene; and
while I sat entranced and practically oblivious of everything else, they
merely paddled the harder, conversing in low tones among themselves. Of
course I did not understand a single word of what was said, yet, so much
did I gather from the glances that they flung about them, and the
emphasis and accent of their speech, that I shrewdly suspected them of
anticipating the possibility of attack from the shore.
This suspicion was strengthened, a little later on, by the fact that as
we approached a certain bend in the river our timoneer edged the canoe
in toward the eastern bank, until we were completely plunged in the deep
shadow of the vegetation that grew right down to the water's edge, as
though he were desirous of escaping observation; at least there was no
other reason that I could think of for such a manoeuvre, for by this
time the current was running up quite strongly, and under ordinary
circumstances it would have been to our advantage to have remained in
mid-channel, where the full strength of it would be felt. But if this
was his object he was only partially successful; for we presently
arrived abreast of a bay, or it may have been the wide entrance of a
creek, many of which branched off the main stream on either hand, where
the forest receded so far that, for the distance of fully half a mile,
we were compelled to traverse a space of water completely flooded by the
brilliant rays of the moon, and before we had accomplished half the
passage a quick ejaculation of mingled annoyance and dismay from the
steersman caused me to glance toward the western bank, from an opening
in which half-a-dozen canoes were darting out with the evident
determination to intercept us if possible. Fortunately for us, however,
we had already passed the spot from which the pursuing canoes were
emerging, this spot now bearing well upon our port quarter; but, on the
other hand, our pursuers would presently obtain an important advantage
over us, since they would soon reach the deep channel, where the upward
current was now running strongly. I feared that when they arrived in
that channel they would turn the bows of their craft up-stream and avail
themselves of the advantage afforded by the strong current to endeavour
to pass ahead of us and cut off our retreat; but in the eagerness of
their pursuit they seemed to lose sight of this advantage, for they
continued to head straight for us, while we, impelled by the full
strength of our thirty paddles, now plied with desperate energy by our
freely perspiring crew, gradually drew out and threw our pursuers still
further on our quarter. Yet they were steadily nearing us, and I did
not see how we could scrape clear without something in the nature of a
fight.
All this time we were heading straight for a low, heavily timbered point
which marked another turn in the course of the stream, and I could see
that our people were straining every nerve to get round this point
before being overtaken. At length, with a mighty stirring up of the mud
by our deep-plunging paddles in the shallow water, we shaved close round
this point and almost immediately afterwards darted into a narrow creek
so completely overgrown with vegetation that the boughs of the mangroves
and other trees united over our heads, forming a sort of tunnel, the
interior of which was so opaquely dark that it was scarcely possible to
see one's hand before one's face. Yet our helmsman seemed to know the
place perfectly, for he stood boldly on, urging the crew to continue
their exertions. At length, after we had traversed a full hundred yards
or more of the creek, we sighted a spot ahead where, doubtless in
consequence of a wind-fall, or some similar phenomenon, the dense bush
had been levelled, leaving room for a patch of clear moonlight, some ten
yards in circumference, to fall full upon the channel of the creek,
revealing every object, even the smallest, within its boundary with a
clearness and distinctness that was positively startling. Arrived here,
the canoe was sheered in alongside a spot where the mangroves grew
thickly, and some twenty of our crew, laying in their paddles, hastily
seized their bows and arrows and, springing ashore, swiftly vanished
into the adjacent deep shadow, while the canoe, with the remainder of us
on board, pushed across the patch of moonlight into the darkness beyond,
where she was forced beneath an overhanging mass of foliage, in such a
manner as to lie perfectly concealed.
Hardly had this been accomplished when we heard from the river the
exclamations of our pursuers, startled at our sudden and, at first,
inexplicable disappearance. But it did not long remain inexplicable;
some sharp eye soon detected the entrance of the creek and suspected
that we were concealed therein, for, after a few minutes spent in
animated discussion by the occupants, the pursuing canoes were heard
cautiously approaching. It was evident that their knowledge of the
creek was not nearly so complete as that of our own steersman, for
whereas we had contrived, despite the pitchy darkness, to navigate the
crooked channel without running foul of anything, we could hear the
continual swishing of foliage and the bumping of the canoes as they
encountered the overhanging branches or collided with the mangrove roots
on one side or the other. We were thus able to follow the progress of
their approach with the utmost precision, and the moment that the
leading canoe--a craft manned by some twenty most villainous-looking
savages--emerged from the darkness into the patch of brilliant
moonlight, she was greeted with a murderous discharge of arrows at short
range which put the greater part of her crew _hors de combat_. She was
closely followed by another canoe of about the same size, the occupants
of which were treated to a similarly warm reception. A warning shout
from one of the survivors of this second discharge was raised in time to
save those behind from pushing forward to meet a similar fate, and now
the quick twanging of bowstrings and loud shouts from those ashore and
afloat told that a fierce battle was raging. But our people, from the
advantage of their position, had very much the best of it, and at length
the pursuers were beaten off and compelled to retreat precipitately,
with the loss of nearly two-thirds of their number and two canoes,
which, with their wounded occupants, were left in our hands, while our
party escaped absolutely unscathed. The wounded of the enemy, numbering
eleven, would have met with but short shrift at the hands of their
captors, but for the interposition of the man whom I have termed our
timoneer, who seemed to be a petty chief. This individual carefully
examined his prisoners and found that three of them were so severely
wounded as to afford little hope of their recovery; these three he
therefore despatched with the most callous sang-froid by driving his
broad-bladed spear into their throats, after which they were flung over
the side; the remaining eight, who appeared to be only temporarily
disabled, were trussed up, hand and foot, with thin, tough, pliant
creeper, cut from the adjacent jungle, and bestowed, without much
consideration for their comfort, in the bottom of our canoe. The
captured canoes were then sunk by means of a few large stones placed in
them to take them down, and then heeled until the water flowed in over
their gunwales, when they quickly vanished beneath the turbid, foetid
waters of the creek. This done, our people made preparations for the
continuation of their journey.
But our leader, whose knowledge of the river seemed intimate enough to
entitle him to a certificate as branch pilot, had no inclination to
incur the risk of leaving the creek again at the point where we had
entered it, and thus very possibly falling into a cleverly arranged
ambuscade. On the contrary, he proceeded to push boldly on up the creek
for a distance of several miles, much to my astonishment, for the
waterway generally was so narrow as scarcely to afford room for two
canoes to pass abreast, and I was momentarily expecting that this creek,
like so many others of the African rivers, would abruptly end in a mud-
bank overgrown with mangroves. Contrary to my anticipations, however,
when a dozen times or more the banks closed in upon us in such a manner
as to suggest that our further progress was about to be stayed, we would
suddenly emerge into a comparatively wide channel, and push merrily on
for a mile or more ere we encountered our next difficulty. In this
manner we must have traversed a distance of nearly twenty miles when, to
my amazement, and also that of most of the canoe's crew, I think, we
suddenly emerged from the tunnel-like channel that we had been
navigating for something like five hours, and found ourselves once more
in what was undoubtedly the main stream of the river, and so far away
from the spot at which we had diverged from it that it was nowhere to be
seen. The moon had by this time risen so high in the sky as to be
almost directly overhead; there was therefore little or no shadow on
either bank of the river to shroud us from observation, nevertheless we
continued to cling closely to the eastern bank for several miles
further--the tide having now turned and being against us--until at
length, the current becoming too strong for us, our leader found a
practicable landing-place, and all hands, except the unfortunate
prisoners of war, scrambled ashore and, hastily lighting a fire,
disposed ourselves to sleep around it.
Now, it will probably be thought by many that I was submitting to my
uncertain fate with far greater philosophy than wisdom; but this was by
no means the case. The fact was that I had no sooner awakened to the
consciousness that I was a prisoner in the hands of African savages than
I made up my mind that I could not too soon effect my escape from them;
for although I have just spoken of my fate as uncertain I felt that, in
reality, there was very little uncertainty about it. It was so rarely
that a white man fell into the hands of the negro savages that when one
had the misfortune to do so they generally made the utmost of him. And
that "utmost" was usually something in which prolonged and agonising
torture figured largely. But it would obviously be worse than useless
to attempt to escape until an opportunity occurred of at least a fair
prospect of success; for to attempt and _fail_ meant the extinguishment
at once of all further hope. And, up to the present, I had not had a
ghost of an opportunity. My captors had taken good care of that,
although they had been kind enough to leave me unbound. But now, when
all hands must be feeling the effect of fatigue after several hours of
strenuous labour at the paddles, and were likely to sleep soundly, it
was possible that, by biding my time, I might be able to steal off to
the canoe and cut the bonds of the captives who had been so callously
left in it, when it would be strange indeed if, out of gratitude for my
release of them, they were not willing to help me to make my way back to
the mouth of the river, where I should of course have to take my chance
of finding a ship the master of which would be willing to receive me on
board. It was not, perhaps, a very brilliant prospect, but I felt that
it was at least preferable to that to which I might look forward if I
remained in the company of my present owners; and accordingly when my
sable companions disposed themselves to sleep, I apparently did the
same, but summoned all my energies to aid me in the task of resisting
the tendency toward somnolence that I felt stealing over me.
But this was not nearly so easy as I had believed it would be. If I
closed my eyes for a few seconds a delicious languor seized me, my
thoughts began to wander, and it was only by an almost painful effort
that I succeeded in, as it were, jerking myself back to full
consciousness. My intention was to remain awake until all my companions
had become wrapped in slumber, and then effect my escape from them; but
to my chagrin I found that while it was almost impossible for me to
remain awake, my captors or owners--I scarcely knew which to consider
them seemed restless, watchful, and all more or less upon the alert.
Finally, while waiting and watching for signs that they were succumbing
to the influence of the drowsy god, I lost all control of myself and
sank into a profound and delicious slumber.