The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection

by George MacDonald Fraser

  18. The Genius of Universal Emancipation, a newspaper published from 1821 to 1839 by Benjamin Lundy, an early American abolitionist. William Lloyd Garrison, perhaps the greatest of anti-slavery journalists, worked with Lundy before founding his own paper, The Liberator, in 1831 which ran until the end of the Civil War. Arthur and Lewis Tappan were dedicated New York abolitionists.

  19. The revolvers, by Flashman’s description, were probably early Colt Patersons of 1836 (single-action muzzle-loaders, five-shot, .40 calibre), although it is not impossible that they were Colt Walkers of the type produced for the Mexican War (six-shot, .44). The needle guns must be the Prussian Dreyse single-shot breech-loaders of 1840, which were the first bolt-action military weapons.

  20. The Dahomeyans believed that human sacrifices were messengers to the gods, and despatched about 500 each year, about a tenth of whom were killed at the “annual custom”, as the great ritual slaughter festival was called. The “grand custom”, held only when a king died, involved much greater bloodshed.

  21. King Gezo, a liberal ruler by Dahomeyan standards, made £60,000 a year from the slave trade, according to Royal Navy intelligence estimates, and also reorganised the army of Amazons, which had previously been composed of female criminals, unfaithful wives, etc. Gezo, by recruiting from all the unmarried girls of his kingdom, raised a force of about 4,000 fighting women, and there is ample evidence of their ferocity and discipline. Flashman’s description of them is accurate. Gezo ruled Dahomey for 40 years, dying of small-pox in 1858.

  22. Quite apart from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous villain, there was a Southern slave trader called Legree in Spring’s time.

  23. Methods of slave-packing varied according to a ship’s accommodation, but Flashman’s account gives a vivid impression of what a hideous business it was. His details of branding, sizing, and dancing are accurate; even so, it appears that Spring, despite his insistence on close packing, was a more humane skipper than most on the Middle Passage. Conditions on the Balliol College compare favourably with those on other slave ships of which contemporary records exist, and which tell appalling tales of human cargoes thrown overboard, epidemics, mutinies, and unspeakable cruelties. Even the sailors’ stories which Flashman retells give only a pale impression of the reality. Figures compiled by Warren S. Howard in his American Slavers and the Federal Law indicate that on average one-sixth of slaves shipped died on the Middle Passage. The Balliol College’s low mortality rate was not unique, however, in 1847 only three slaves died out of 530 aboard the barque Fame, running to Brazil.

  24. Captain Robert Waterman of the Sea Witch, one of the great Yankee tea clippers. His passages from China to New York broke all records in the mid-1840s.

  25. Blackwall fashion: competent but leisurely sea-faring, as opposed to the tough life aboard the packets.

  26. One of the slaver’s common ruses was to fly whatever colours seemed safest, according to their position at sea. In fact American colours were most common on the Middle Passage.

  27. Although Spain had banned the slave trade, Cuba continued to operate a large unofficial slave market, and cargoes were smuggled in as circumstances permitted. Possibly these did not appear favourable to Spring, and he determined to run to Roatan, a popular clearing house.

  28. On January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall found gold at Coloma, California. News of his discovery led to the great rushes of ’48 and ’49.

  29. Prices varied enormously from year to year, but the figures quoted generally by Flashman are above average. Possibly 1848 was a good year from the seller’s point of view.

  30. Slaves certainly were thrown overboard on the approach of patrol vessels (see the case of the Regulo which drowned over 200 in the Bight of Biafra, and the reported case of the clipper captain who was said to have murdered over 500 by dropping them with his anchor chain, both quoted in Kay).

  31. Abraham Lincoln was 39 at this time, and the physical description tallies closely with his first known photograph, taken in 1846. When he met Flashman he was in the middle of his only term as a U.S. Congressman, although he already had a successful career in local politics and as a lawyer behind him. As a Congressman he was not especially distinguished, and his bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia was never brought in.

  32. Cassius Clay (1810–1903), a fighting Kentuckian and fervent abolitionist, who later became President Lincoln’s minister to Russia.

  33. The underground railroad was a truly heroic organisation which ran more than 70,000 slaves to freedom. Founded in the early 1840s by a clergyman, its agents included the famous John Brown of the popular song, and the extraordinary little negress, Harriet Tubman, herself a runaway. She guided no fewer than nineteen convoys of escaped negroes out of the slave states, including infants who had to be drugged to escape detection, and is reputed never to have lost any of her many hundred “passengers”.

  34. The true identity of “Mr Crixus” can only be guessed at. Obviously he had adopted the name from the Gaulish slave who was a chief lieutenant to Spartacus in the Roman gladiators’ rebellion of 73 B.C.

  35. The Sultana’s record for the trip was five days and twelve hours exactly, set in 1844. Although often exaggerated, the performance of the Mississippi steamboats was extraordinary, and reached a peak with the run of Captain Cannon in the “good ship Robert E. Lee” in 1870, when the 1218 miles from New Orleans to St Louis was covered in three days eighteen hours fourteen minutes. Normally a big sidewheeler could easily maintain an average of over 12 m.p.h. upstream.

  36. Mr Bixby was later head pilot of the Union forces in the Civil War. His other claim to fame is that he taught the craft of steamboat piloting to Mark Twain.

  37. Mustee, a shortened form of musteefino or musterfino: loosely, a half-caste, but particularly one who was very pale skinned. Strictly speaking, the child of one black and one white parent is a mulatto; the child of a mulatto and a white is a quadroon (one quarter black); the child of a quadroon and a white is a mustee (one eighth black). It is a curious feature of colour prejudice that any admixture of coloured blood, however small, is deemed sufficient to make the owner a negro.

  38. Thanks to Flashman’s vagueness about dates, it is impossible to say in exactly which week he and Cassy were contemplating their journey up the Ohio. It must surely have been early spring in 1849, in which case Flashman must have spent longer on the Mandeville plantation than his narrative suggests; he was there for cotton-picking, which normally takes place in September and October, but can extend into early December.

  39. There can be little doubt that Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was living in Cincinnati at the time, must have heard of Cassy and Flashman crossing the Ohio ice pursued by slave-catchers, and decided to incorporate the incident in her best-selling Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was published two years later. She, of course, attributed the feat to the slave girl Eliza; it can be no more than an interesting coincidence that the burden Eliza carried in her flight was a “real handsome boy” named Harry. But it seems quite likely that Mrs Stowe met the real Cassy, and used her, name and all, in that part of the book which describes life on Simon Legree’s plantation.

  Incidentally, Mrs Stowe timed Eliza’s fictitious crossing for late February (which she calls “early spring”); this provides a further clue to the time of Flashman’s crossing in similar weather conditions.

  40. A “who’s-yar” (usually spelled hoosier): an Indianan, supposedly deriving from the rustic dialect for “who’s there?”, although this is much disputed. In fact, although Lincoln spent most of his youth in Indiana, he himself was a Kentuckian by birth.

  41. But not for much longer. Lincoln’s term in Congress ended on March 4, 1849, which can only have been a few days after his meeting with Flashman in Portsmouth; it is curious that their conversation contains no mention of his impending retirement.

  42. The Butterfly, a newly-built slave ship, was captured before she had even reached Africa, let alone taken on slaves. After a fierce lega
l battle she was condemned.

  43. From Flashman’s account of the adjudication, it is obvious that he has greatly simplified the procedure of the court; no doubt after half a century only the highlights remained in his mind. Procedure in slave-ship cases varied greatly from country to country, and did not remain consistent, and many such cases were never even printed. So bearing in mind that what he is describing was a form of preliminary hearing, and not a slave-ship trial proper, one can only take his word for what happened in the Balliol College adjudication.

  As to Flashman’s allegations of corruption and pressure exerted in slave-ship cases, one cannot do better than quote the words of a contemporary skipper, Captain C. E. Driscoll (see Howard), who boasted flatly: “I can get any man off in New York for a thousand dollars.”

  44. The owners of a ship arrested as a slaver, but subsequently acquitted, might well be in a strong position to claim damages from the arresting party. For this reason there was some reluctance in the late 1840s, especially among American Navy officers, to capture suspected slave-ships, for fear of being sued.

  Copyright

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Harper

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  77–85 Fulham Palace Road

  Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by Barrie & Jenkins Ltd 1971

  Reissued by Collins 1981

  Reprinted by Collins Harvill 1988

  Copyright © George MacDonald Fraser 1971

  George MacDonald Fraser asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library

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  HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

  Source ISBN: 9780006511274

  Ebook Edition © 1971 ISBN: 9780007325672

  Version: 2013–09–17

  FLASHMAN AND THE REDSKINS

  From The Flashman Papers, 1849–50 and 1875–76

  Edited and Arranged by

  GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER

  Dedication

  For

  Icimanipi-Wihopawin

  “Travels-Beautiful-Woman”

  from Bent’s and the Santa Fe Trail

  to the Black Hills

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Explanatory Note

  Maps

  Introduction

  The Forty-Niner

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  The Seventy-Sixer

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Appendix I: The Mysterious Lives of Frank Grouard (1850–1905)

  Appendix II: The Battle of the Little Bighorn

  Notes

  Copyright

  Explanatory Note

  A singular feature of the Flashman Papers, the memoirs of the notorious bully of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, which were discovered in a Leicestershire saleroom in 1966, is that their author wrote them in self-contained instalments, describing his background and setting the scene anew each time. This has been of great assistance to me in editing the Papers entrusted to me by Mr Paget Morrison of Durban, Flashman’s closest legitimate relative; it has meant that as I opened each new packet of manuscript I could expect the contents to be a complete and self-explanatory book, needing only a brief preface and foot-notes. Six volumes have followed this pattern.

  The seventh volume has proved to be an exception; it follows chronologically (to the very minute) on to the third packet,* with only the briefest preamble by its aged author. I have therefore felt it necessary to append a résumé of the third packet at the end of this note, so that new readers will understand the events leading up to Flashman’s seventh adventure.

  It was obvious from the early Papers that Flashman, in the intervals of his distinguished and scandalous service in the British Army, visited America more than once; this seventh volume is his Western odyssey. I believe it is unique. Others may have taken part in both the ’49 gold rush and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but they have not left records of these events, nor did they have Flashman’s close, if reluctant, acquaintance with three of the most famous Indian chiefs, as well as with leading American soldiers, frontiersmen, and statesmen of the time, of whom he has left vivid and, it may be, revealing portraits.

  As with his previous memoirs, I believe his truthfulness is not in question. As students of those volumes will be aware, his personal character was deplorable, his conduct abandoned, and his talent for mischief apparently inexhaustible; indeed, his one redeeming feature was his unblushing veracity as a memorialist. As I hope the footnotes and appendices will show, I have been at pains to check his statements wherever possible, and I am indebted to librarians, custodians, and many members of the great and kindly American public at Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Minneapolis, Fort Laramie, the Custer battlefield, the Yellowstone and Arkansas rivers, and Bent’s Fort.

  G.M.F.

  * * *

  * Published in 1971 under the title Flash for Freedom!

  Maps

  Introduction

  In May, 1848, Flashman was forced to flee England after a card scandal, and sailed for Africa on the Balliol College, a ship owned by his father-in-law, John Morrison of Paisley, and commanded by Captain John Charity Spring, MA, late Fellow of Oriel College. Only too late did Flashman discover that the ship was an illegal slave-trader and her captain, despite his academic antecedents, a homicidal eccentric. After taking aboard a cargo of slaves in Dahomey, the Balliol College crossed the Atlantic, but was captured by the American Navy; Flashman managed to escape in New Orleans, and took temporary refuge in a bawdy-house whose proprietress, a susceptible English matron named Susan Willinck, was captivated by his picaresque charm.

  Thereafter Flashman spent several eventful months in the Mississippi Valley, frequently in headlong flight. For a time he impersonated (among many other figures) a Royal Navy officer; he was also a reluctant agent of the Underground Railroad which smuggled escaped slaves to Canada, but unfortunately the fugitive entrusted to his care was recognised by a vindictive planter named Omohundro, and Flashman abandoned his charge and beat a hasty retreat over the rail of a steamboat. He next obtained employment as a plantation slave-driver, but lost his position on being found in compromising circumstances with his master’s wife. He subsequently stole a beautiful octoroon slave, Cassy, sold her under a false name, assisted her subsequent evasion, and with the proceeds of the sale fled with her across the ice-floes of the Ohio river, pursued by slave-catchers who shot him in the buttock; ho
wever, he succeeded in effecting his escape, and Cassy’s, with the timely assistance of the then Congressman Abraham Lincoln.

  With charges of slave-trading, slave-stealing, false pretences, and even murder hanging over his head, Flashman was now anxious to return to England. Instead, mischance brought him again to New Orleans, and he was driven in desperation to seek the help of his former commander, Captain Spring, who had been cleared of slave-trading by a corrupt American court and was about to sail. Flashman, who throughout his misfortunes had clung tenaciously to certain documents from the Balliol College – documents proving the ship’s slaving activities with which Flashman had hoped to blackmail his detested father-in-law – now offered them as the price of his passage home; Captain Spring, his habitual malevolence tempered by his eagerness to secure papers so dangerous to himself, agreed.

  At this point, with our exhausted narrator quaking between the Scylla of United States justice and Charybdis in the person of the diabolic Spring, the third packet of the Flashman Papers ended – and the next chapter of his American adventure begins.

  THE FORTY-NINER

  Chapter 1

  I never did learn to speak Apache properly. Mind you, it ain’t easy, mainly because the red brutes seldom stand still long enough – and if you’ve any sense, you don’t either, or you’re liable to find yourself studying their system of vowel pronunciation (which is unique, by the way) while hanging head-down over a slow fire or riding for dear life across the Jornada del Muerto with them howling at your heels and trying to stick lances in your liver. Both of which predicaments I’ve experienced in my time, and you may keep ’em.