The Blackbirder

by James Nelson

One mile, then half a mile, and they could see more and more of the frightening condition that this ship was in. Shrouds and backstays hung loose, great gouges were shot out of the bulwarks. Strips of torn sail fluttered aft in the breeze. Those, and the inverted ensign, were the only bunting showing.

  ‘What the devil happened to you?’ James muttered to himself.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Joshua, standing by the main sheet.

  ‘I do not know … Attacked, maybe, or caught in a gale, short-handed. Plenty out there can do that kind of damage.’

  James studied the ship as they approached, and there was nothing about her that said ‘pirate’. She was armed, of course, but no more than any merchantman would be in those dangerous times. There were none of the rough-cut gunports of hastily rearmed ships, no forecastle or quarterdeck cut away to make a flush-deck vessel, as one often saw among the Brethren of the Coast. No, this one looked to be just what she appeared: a merchant ship in dire trouble.

  They were only a few hundred yards away when the smell reached them.

  Had they been downwind of her they would have noticed it miles before, but with the fresh breeze, it required they get much closer than that.

  James felt the foulness wafting into his nose, his mouth, his lungs. It made his hands clench, his stomach convulse like ingesting some airborne poison. It set the anger and hatred racing through him like fire on a powder train before he even understood why.

  ‘Dear God,’ he heard Sam behind him muttering. ‘A blackbirder.’

  A blackbirder: slave ship. And the smell, that of human beings packed in and battened down. Piss and shit. Blood. Pleading, desperate fear. The unknown. Worse, far worse than quiet death.

  Not for twenty years had James smelled that stink, but with one breath it all came back to him, and all the rage he had locked away in some small cage of his soul came tearing free again.

  The Northumberland was charging down on the slave ship, making right for her bows, and if something was not done immediately she would smash headlong into her.

  Someone was standing on the slaver’s bows, waving. A warning or a plea, James could not tell.

  He pulled his eyes from the battered vessel, pushed Cato from the tiller, grabbed it, swung it a bit to larboard. The sloop turned until she was on a heading to run down the blackbirder’s leeward side. The wind came over the sloop’s transom, the mainsail by the lee, fluttering, the boom right on the edge of sweeping across the deck in a great destructive arc, but James did not care.

  They passed under the blackbirder’s jibboom, just missed fouling the sloop’s shrouds on the spar, and passed down the ship’s side. Now, to leeward of the vessel, the smell enveloped them entirely, like a fog, so strong it seemed they should be able to see it. And from the hold – muffled and quiet – the screams, the cries, the rattling chains.

  James pushed the tiller harder over, swinging the sloop away from the slaver.

  ‘Damn it, James, be careful, you’ll jibe the damned …’ Sam started, got no further.

  ‘Shut it! Shut your gob!’

  James felt a wild anger, an anger that did not care what it destroyed, that tried to cause some destruction, some injury, if just for the release.

  And then, just as the big mainsail was ready to jibe and tear the sloop’s rigging apart, he swung the tiller back the other way. The sloop described a great arc, swinging back toward the slave ship, turning up into the wind, the sails flogging. She came to a stop at the base of the slaver’s boarding steps.

  James pushed his way through his gawking men to the bulwark that bumped against the high-sided blackbirder. A white face with equal measures of soot black and filth brown looked down at him, a man standing at the slave ship’s gangway. Clothes torn, hair wild, streaks of blood on his filthy shirt. Pistol in his belt. The face of a man who could not recall his last rest. But more defiant for it.

  James stopped, looked up. The man looked down. Then the man said, ‘Where is the captain of this sloop?’

  ‘I am the captain.’

  They held each other, stare for stare. James could see the narrowing eyes, could hear the debate in the man’s head.

  A nigger? A nigger coming to our aid?

  ‘Cast off,’ the white man said. ‘Leave our ship. It is no concern of yours.’

  Nigger.

  And then another man was there, just as haggard, but with the defiance beaten out of him, and the other man said, ‘For the love of God, Captain, let them aboard if they can be of some help.’

  The captain turned, shoved the man with more force than James would have thought he had in him, screamed, ‘Shut your mouth!’ and James was on the boarding steps, scurrying up, Cato and Joshua and Sam right behind him.

  He stepped through the gangway onto the deck, met the captain’s loathing with hatred of his own, looked around at the destruction.

  Lines lay strewn about the deck, great tangles of rigging draping off the pinrails and lying in heaps in the scuppers. One of the small cannon amidships, aiming down into the hold. Smashed bits of grating, smashed bits of rail, smashed barrels, bottles, crates of cabin stores torn open, their contents scattered around.

  The doors to the binnacle box were half torn off their hinges, hanging open, swaying with the rocking of the ship. There was a wide black scorched circle on the deck where someone had apparently built a fire, an inconceivable thing on a wooden ship.

  Black patches on the deck, swirled into bizarre patterns, marking those places where people had thrashed and bled their lives away. Chains. Netting full of stone, bent to fathoms of rope, ready to carry the bodies, living or dead, to the ocean floor.

  James’s hands were trembling. A film of sweat covered his body. He could smell its unhealthy odor, even over the stink of the slaver. His jaw ached from the pressure with which he clenched his teeth together.

  James turned slowly to the slaver’s captain and the five white sailors who stood behind him. At the gangway stood Cato, Joshua and Sam, William, Good Boy, and Quash.

  ‘What happened?’

  One of the sailors replied, addressing his words to James. ‘We was took by pirates. They used us horrid, for days. Killed half our men. Took two dozen of our nig … Negroes, and before they left, set the rest loose. Stood off in their boats, watched us fighting to … to get them down below again.’

  James breathed, loud, panting, trying to get control. He could see it before him, like a play, the desperate blacks pouring out of the hold, not knowing what to do because they did not understand enough to form a plan, just wanting to be free of the hold.

  And then on deck meeting guns, cutlasses, cannon. The cannon blast down through the hatch, canister shot tearing men, women, children apart in the darkness, the dead and wounded left below. Too dangerous to open the hatches. Wounded on deck thrown overboard. Retribution taken, a lesson for those listening below, and then over the side.

  The trembling had turned into shaking, King James’s arms and hands vibrating like a luffing sail. A keening sound formed in his throat. James realized that he had no control over himself, like a sleepwalker, some part of his mind was in control but he had no control over it, some dark part that he did not know was there.

  He heard Sam saying, ‘James, James, get ahold of yourself, this here is for the Court of Admiralty …’

  He met the captain’s eyes, saw no sorrow, no remorse, only malevolence there.

  ‘Get off my ship, nigger.’

  James stepped across the deck, moving on the captain. ‘Nigger?’

  ‘I said get off my ship!’ the captain shouted, and as James advanced he jerked the pistol from his belt, pulled back the lock with his palm.

  James’s hand fell on the handle of his sheath knife and before he could think, the steel was clear of the sheath and he was advancing into the barrel of the captain’s gun.

  ‘Nigger?’

  ‘Draw a blade on me? You’ll hang for this, you black bastard!’

  They were a yard apart. Tw
o men motivated by hatred alone, neither able to think beyond the moment.

  The captain raised the gun higher, the round hole at James’s head. James took a great stride, grabbed the barrel, twisted it. The gun went off, the bullet tore through James’s shirt, thudded into the deck, and the knife shot forward and plunged hilt deep into the man’s chest.

  Then, screams, shouts of rage. The white men behind their captain surged forward. James felt hands grab him, a fist strike the back of his head, but he could not take his eyes from the haughty captain’s face, the wide eyes, the blood erupting from his mouth.

  A cutlass flashed over him and James gritted his teeth and waited for the deathblow but then his men were there, the crew of the Northumberland, surging into the slaver’s crew with fists and sheath knives. They were all fighting – his men, the blackbirder’s men – slavers and former slaves locked into it. A gun went off, steel clashed on steel, someone screamed. A great brawl was taking place around him and James knew he had to stop it.

  ‘Enough! Enough!’ James shouted, and the volume and authority of his voice made the fighting men step back, weapons lowered, glaring at one another but not moving.

  It was silent, save for men gasping for breath or moaning in agony.

  There was a dead man at the tip of King James’s knife. A white man, a ship’s captain. James had killed him.

  And in this way he had ended his own life as well.

  CHAPTER 4

  The battle had lasted no more than a minute.

  James let the body of the captain slip from his knife. It stared up, wide-eyed, from the deck. It seemed surprised. James could not imagine why.

  Aft, two of the slaver’s crew were dead, another cut badly across the shoulder. Armed though they were, those exhausted, half-crazed slavers had been no match for the Northumberland’s men.

  The three living men of the blackbirder’s crew sat on the deck, hands up in surrender. One was weeping, sobbing, tears running down his stubbled cheeks. Around them, James’s men held them at bay with their own weapons.

  They thought they were finally safe, James reflected. Thought they had come through it at last, reached the safe embrace of the Chesapeake, and then this. Death at the hands of black men.

  James took a breath. The anger was gone, it had dissipated with that one cathartic thrust. But now he had to think, because everything that he had come to know and depend upon was over, for him, for his men, for every person aboard that tortured blackbirder.

  ‘What the hell have we done? What the hell have we done? They’ll fucking hang us for this.’ Retching. It was Sam, puking with abandon. He was smeared with blood, his coat and shirt torn in the melee.

  Under it all, under the noise of the sobs and the retching and the shouting, was the sound from the hold; clanking, screaming, moaning.

  And despite those many layers of noise whirling through his head, James could see the essential truth of Sam’s words.

  They would fucking hang them for this.

  The black men; himself, Cato, Joshua, the others – all would be lucky even to live that long. No jail would hold them until a trial. They would be dragged from their cells and beaten to death. A warning.

  God, he had to think.

  ‘James …’ Cato now, the tone of that one word pleading.

  ‘Get them people up from below. Break open them hatches, get them people on deck.’

  It was something to do. Forward motion, the next step, and it gave James a moment to think while the others were occupied, allowed him to think without a dozen eyes boring into him, as if trying to peer through his skin and find an answer that they thought must be there.

  ‘James …’ It was Sam now, his eyes wild with panic. ‘I don’t blame you for what you done, don’t blame you, but this ain’t my fight, you see? I didn’t want no part of this …’

  ‘Go. It ain’t your fight, so just go. Take them’ – James nodded toward the three surviving members of the slaver’s crew – ‘take them aboard the sloop and go.’

  ‘Take the sloop? But how …? What about you?’

  ‘We ain’t going back. Not to Virginia. Nowhere in America.’

  ‘You’re going to sail this blackbirder? She’s near a wreck, food and water’s probably gone …’

  ‘It don’t matter. We gots no choice. Whatever condition she in, we gots to go.’ He had not decided that so much as understood it. They could never go back, not if they wished to live to week’s end.

  Lucy. Dear God, had she seen this coming? Some premonition? He had heard of women having such things. He had called her foolish. Now he might never see her again.

  And then William was at his side too, tugging on his shirt, his dark eyes wide. ‘I don’t want no part of this neither. I ain’t gonna hang for this.’

  ‘You got no choice, boy.’

  ‘I didn’t have nothing to do with killing them people,’ William protested, which might have been true. James had not seen the fight. ‘I don’t want no part of this.’

  ‘It don’t matter,’ James said. ‘They’ll hang you just for being here, and you a black man. Don’t you see that?’

  ‘I ain’t staying.’

  James looked at him for a long moment. The kindest thing he could do would be to chain William to the deck, make him come. But he had no reason to think that the fate of the men on the ship would be any better than what waited for William back home.

  ‘All right. Go with Sam.’ James turned from William and addressed the former deep-water sailor. ‘Tell Marlowe what happened. Tell him the truth. Gonna be a lot of stories told, but I want Marlowe to know the truth.’ That was important.

  Sam nodded and he and James looked at each other, neither man sure of what to say.

  ‘God speed you, King James,’ Sam said at last.

  ‘And you.’

  Then Sam turned to the white men at his feet and James turned his attention forward and both understood that that had been their last meeting on earth. James could think of no other words, not with the raging confusion, the terror, and the uncertainty in him.

  He had not felt such things for twenty years, not since the last time he had walked the deck of a slaver, iron manacles on his wrists and ankles.

  King James left Sam to his business and walked forward to where Joshua and Cato and the others were using belaying pins to knock out the wedges that were holding the tarpaulins over the mainhatch gratings. Cato’s hands were trembling and he fumbled the pin, dropped it to the deck, swore, snatched it up again.

  This was his moment to think, but nothing would come, no solid ideas, only swirling impressions and overwhelming desperation, and he was drawn instead to whatever horror lay beneath the heavy canvas.

  ‘Here,’ Cato said, ‘grab hold there.’ Joshua grabbed on to the larboard corner of the tarpaulin as Cato grabbed the starboard. From below the cloth the sounds from the hold were muffled but loud, a vast array of voices in tones of anger and fear and sorrow to the point of abandon. James recognized the cadence of African languages, but he could not make out any of the words.

  Now and again the sound was punctuated by a wailing, or a screaming or what sounded like a loud entreaty to God. The people in the hold would have heard the anchor cable running out, would be able to sense that the ship was no longer under way. They would know something was about to happen, and their experience would tell them that any change meant some fresh misery.

  Cato and Joshua looked at each other, apprehensive. But the thing had to be done.

  ‘Go,’ James called, and the two men walked forward, peeling the tarpaulin back off the hatch.

  The stink rolled up over the deck and enveloped them, and James was staggered to realize that what they had smelled before had been but a watered-down taste of what the hold contained. It was more than just the smell of bodies and waste. It was festering wounds, rotting human flesh. Death and decay in that closed, hot, sweltering hold.

  ‘Oh, dear God!’ Quash exclaimed. Good Boy retched and vom
ited on the deck. James clapped his hand over his mouth, took shallow breaths, tried to keep himself from vomiting as well. Joshua and Cato dropped the tarpaulin, staggered away.

  The cacophony from the hold rose in pitch. Pleading, wailing, and still James could understand no word of what they said. Slavers, he knew, purposely mixed people from distant tribes in their ships so that they would not be able to communicate, to organize and plan. What if none of these spoke Malinke? How would he talk with them? And did he himself remember enough Malinke? It had been more than two decades since he had used that tongue with any frequency.

  Dark fingers reached up through the holes in the grating, like tiny arms reaching out, beckoning help. They had to get those people out, but now James’s men were too revolted and too terrified to approach that black hole.

  They were saved the trouble. From below a voice cut across the wild jumble of sound, giving an order in some language foreign to James, and with an organized effort the fingers grabbed ahold of the grating and pushed it aside.

  James’s men were silent, staring at the hatch, which seemed to move of its own accord. And then from below a black figure emerged, stepping carefully up the ladder, clearly unsure of what was waiting on the upper deck. He blinked and squinted and shielded his eyes from the dim evening sun, looked around. He stepped over the combing, still in a half crouch, ready to move if attacked.

  James stepped forward, hands up, palms out. The man looked at him, looked around the deck, seemed to relax a bit as his eyes moved from black face to black face.

  He looked back at James, straightened his stance. He was a big man, six feet tall at least, powerfully built and well proportioned. Handsome. He smiled with big white teeth set against dark skin. Held up his hands. Addressed James with words that James did not understand.

  James stared at him, shook his head. The man said something else, it sounded like a different language, and James shook his head again.

  The man squinted at him, looked closer, and then spoke again, slowly, and the language was Malinke. Slow, uncertain, but clearly Malinke. James’s native tongue, at once familiar and foreign. Images of his father, of his village, swam before him as he heard the words: ‘I am Madshaka. Are my people safe to come up?’