The Blackbirder

by James Nelson

  He ran his eyes over the ships and brigs and snows at anchor, more out of habit than any thought that he might find the one he was searching for. His eyes settled on one ship anchored further to the east, away from the central part of Whydah, and he stared at it but his thoughts were elsewhere, with Governor Nicholson, explaining how he had searched the entire coast and had found nothing.

  And as he stared, and as his mind traveled back over the Atlantic, back over the water they had just crossed, an odd something began to gnaw at him, like a dream he had told himself in his sleep to remember but on waking could not. It was the dull sensation of knowing there is something one must not forget, but forgetting what that something is.

  And so he stared and he mucked around in the silt of his mind, trying to find what it was under there. So much had he come to accept the fact that he would not find James’s ship, it took him a good five minutes before he realized that it was the French merchantman, or something very like it, that he was looking at now.

  ‘Dear God …’ He stood up straight, knocked the pewter mug off the caprail. It bounced once on the channel and then plunged into the blue water, but Marlowe spared it never a thought.

  ‘Whatever is it?’ Bickerstaff asked, but Marlowe turned and fled aft and picked up the big telescope from the binnacle box and trained it forward. He shook his head as he stared through the glass. The ship was a mile and a half away – he could see none of the little details that would give him absolute confirmation – but nothing that he saw told him he was wrong.

  He felt the emotions crashing together like surf coming across either side of a sandbar: the thrill that he might have found them, the relief that it might soon be over, the fear of disappointment, the dread of finding King James and killing him or bringing him back to an even worse death, the confusion of conflicting loyalties and desires.

  The more he tried to make his life a simple thing – a wife, a home, a planter’s life – the more it eluded him, the more his problems grew in complexity, like a vine out of control, wrapping itself around him.

  Bickerstaff was there, but too polite to inquire, so Marlowe said, ‘I think perhaps that is the Frenchman, yonder. James’s Frenchman.’

  Bickerstaff cocked an eyebrow, which for him was tantamount to a shout of surprise. Marlowe handed him the glass and he trained it forward, though he did not have anything like the seamanship to pick out the tiny details that might distinguish one ship from another.

  ‘Hmmm,’ said Bickerstaff, thoughtfully. ‘They fly no flag, and their sails are not stowed in any manner that would do a captain credit, if he were concerned about such things, and the yards all askew.’

  Marlowe smiled. Bickerstaff was right, and it was a good indication that this was the right ship and he, Marlowe, had missed it entirely. He was too busy looking at the steeve of the bowsprit, the sheer, the number of black-painted wales, the somewhat archaic lift at the peak of the mizzen yard, to even notice the more obvious clues. Sometimes knowledge just got in the way.

  ‘You think it is King James?’

  ‘I think it might well be,’ Marlowe said. ‘I am sorry now we put those mad Frenchmen ashore in São Miguel, they could have told us for certain.’ Then after a moment’s reflection he said, ‘No, I am still glad to be shed of them. But I think we will clear the ship for action and go to quarters and be ready when we come up with them.’

  This order he passed to first mate Fleming who had it relayed in bellowing voices along the deck and below, an order that took the Elizabeth Galleys entirely by surprise. None of them were still abed; it being past dawn, the watch below had been roused and were making a clean sweep fore and aft and seeing to breakfast and attending to those many jobs that needed doing before breakfast and the change of watch. It was a steady routine that had gone unbroken for several weeks now, since their fight with the Frenchman, and there had been no indication that things would be different that morning.

  For that reason there was more staggering around, more dumb looks, more questions than Marlowe would have preferred. But still the men fell to with credible speed, casting off guns, arranging tubs of match and buckets of water, fetching out cutlasses and pikes.

  They were a good crew, disciplined, happy enough. Griffin’s death had been like pulling a rotten tooth: painful at first, but in the end a vast improvement.

  Fifteen minutes later they were ready, as the sea breeze carried the Elizabeth Galley inshore, closing, closing with the Frenchman. Marlowe kept the glass trained on the ship, but he could see nothing out of the ordinary. A few figures moved around the deck, and they looked to be Africans, though it was still too far to tell. A plume of smoke rose from just abaft the foremast, but it looked like nothing more sinister than a galley fire.

  ‘Where there is smoke, there is breakfast,’ Marlowe observed to Bickerstaff.

  ‘Where there is breakfast, there is no fear of imminent attack.’

  That was true enough, and it added to the confusion of the thing. And then overhead the Galley’s main topsail gave a slap as it collapsed and then snapped full again in a fluke of wind. They were losing the sea breeze. Soon it would be dead calm, and after that the wind would fill in right on their nose.

  ‘Mr Fleming, let us see to the anchor. We’ll carry on as close as we can.’

  The wind held for ten minutes more, then came in puffs that began to box the compass, and then died away altogether, leaving the Elizabeth Galley to drift beam on to the incoming seas. She wallowed side to side in those swells that marched on under her keel and then flung themselves in breaking foam onto the beach a mile away.

  The anchor was let go and the bow came around to point into the waves, making the ship pitch rather than roll, an altogether more comfortable motion. And when she finally snubbed to a stop at the end of the anchor hawser, they were no more than one hundred yards from the suspect ship.

  Both ships were pointing into the waves and so were nearly in line with each other. Thomas stood at the taffrail, scrutinizing the other.

  He could see that the people aboard were indeed Africans, but they appeared to be women. He could see no one that he could positively identify as a man. Perhaps all the men were ashore. That would explain the absence of alarm. But how odd. Why would they do that? Why would James go ashore in Whydah, of all places? It made no sense at all. The disparate parts could not be made to fit.

  But that was all right. He did not have to understand everything. The facts were these: he had found a ship that looked very like the one James had taken. Aboard that ship were African women. Not slaves bound in chains and ready to be stowed down but women walking the decks free, cooking, going on with life.

  That was not at all what one would expect to see aboard a ship anchored off Whydah.

  And that meant that he had found King James.

  CHAPTER 31

  James did little that day but watch and hide. When the others awoke, they crept down to the tree line and knelt beside James and watched the Elizabeth Galley coming to her anchor. They watched as her men brailed up the sails, laid out along her yards, and stowed the canvas as the ship finally came to a rest one hundred yards to seaward of their captured French merchantman. They said nothing.

  Each one of the men crouching at the forest edge was intimately familiar with that ship. Indeed, so obsessed had Marlowe been with her fitting out that there was not one of his people who had not had a hand in it, from the men who had pounded home trunnels and drifts and stepped masts and hove out rigging gangs, to the women who had seen to making hammocks and outfitting the great cabin with curtains and cushions and even building some of the lighter sails, to the children who had been given tar brushes and buckets of slush and put to work at the messier jobs for which their juvenile indelicacy made them ideally suited.

  The Elizabeth Galley was a part of their home, a fixture from the docks at Jamestown. After all they had endured, and all the miles they had sailed, there was something unreal about seeing her here. It was as if they
had walked down the forest trail and come upon Marlowe House itself, transported whole and set down on that strange land.

  Good Boy was the first to speak. ‘Goddamn, I ain’t never been so happy to see anything in my life.’ A muttering of agreement followed.

  James frowned, kept his eyes on the ship. The boys were reacting, they weren’t thinking. They were so far from everything they knew, hunted by strangers with whom they could not speak, in a land such as they had never seen before. Of course they would be relieved to see something, anything, familiar, even if that thing had come to carry them all back to the gallows.

  Or perhaps not.

  He himself was a dead man, he knew that. Everyone knew him, the black man who had fought at Marlowe’s side, the arrogant nigger who commanded the Northumberland. There would be nothing but the noose for him if he returned, and if the court did not deign to put it there, the mob surely would, and the white-suited Frederick Dunmore, Esq., leading the way.

  But it was just possible that no one knew the identity of the young men with him. If Sam and William had kept their mouths shut, then Quash and Cato and Good Boy and Joshua might be able to return and blend back in with the others at Marlowe House and no one the wiser.

  But the first step was begging Marlowe for his mercy, and that was asking a lot: asking a lot of Marlowe and of himself. He had never asked anyone for mercy before, and not surprisingly he had received little of it during his life. He would never ask for himself. But for these others, whose lives had been destroyed by his own unchecked rage, for them he would humble himself.

  He was about to lead them out onto the beach when he saw movement on the Elizabeth Galley’s deck. ‘Hold a moment,’ he said. They remained where they were, crouched at the tree line, watching as the Galley’s longboat was swayed over the side, as a party of men climbed down and took their place on the thwarts. The sunlight flashed on the white oar blades as they were raised up in two lines, and then the boat was under way, pulling for the French merchantman.

  It covered the distance quickly, the oars pulled by expert hands. It swept around the stern, circled, disappeared from sight around her bow, then reappeared again.

  ‘What he doing?’ Joshua asked.

  ‘Marlowe don’t know it ain’t a trap,’ James said. ‘He don’t understand why he don’t see no men on board. He going to take a good look before he goes aboard her.’

  The longboat stopped under the Frenchman’s counter, and though they were too far to hear any conversation, King James could well imagine the one that was taking place. Marlowe was looking for the white crew, trying to find out why this ship was manned by African women alone. Marlowe could speak a bit of the patois of the coast; he might even be able to communicate with one of them.

  Five minutes of that, and then the longboat pulled up to the Frenchman’s side and one by one the men boarded her. James could not identify any of them in particular, but he had no doubt that one was Thomas Marlowe and another was Francis Bickerstaff.

  Bickerstaff. He would be the key to this thing. He would be the calm voice of reason. If there was to be any cooperation, any mercy or forgiveness or contrition between two headstrong, arrogant, stubborn men such as King James and Thomas Marlowe, then it would be through the intercession of Francis Bickerstaff.

  They watched for another ten minutes, but nothing of note happened, nothing at all that they could see. Marlowe and his men would be searching the ship, deck to keelson, moving carefully in case it was a trap.

  It was time to confront him, time to prostrate himself before Thomas Marlowe and beg for the lives of his men. James looked up and down the beach, as far as he could see from their place of concealment, saw a dugout canoe pulled up in the sand. It would be a tricky thing, getting through the surf, but they would do it.

  He turned to his men, was ready to order them forward, when he heard something else: voices, a number of them. They were not close, and were all but drowned by the crashing surf, but in the lull between the breakers he could hear them, talking loud.

  ‘Come along,’ he said, and rather than leading his boys out onto the exposed beach he led them back into the forest, deeper than where they had slept that night, to a place where the thick undergrowth hid them completely. ‘Wait here. I be back.’

  James headed off through the woods, moving fast, despite the thick tangle of vegetation. He knew instinctively where each foot should fall, and the next, and the next. He moved silently, more silent than was necessary with the crash of waves a scant fifty yards away, following the line of the beach, moving toward the voices. He was amazed at how quickly the woodcraft he had known as a child came back, as if the knowledge of it was embedded in the ancient earth of that continent, and he needed only to be reunited with her to have all that dormant skill wake again.

  They were standing at the trailhead, where the packed forest floor gave way to the fine sand of the beach. James could hear them clearly even before he could see them, and though he did not understand the words, he recognized the rapid, clipped sound of the Kwa language. They were Kru, Madshaka’s elite.

  Another dozen steps and he could see them at last, in glimpses through the foliage, but it was enough to tell him what he needed to know. They were heavily armed, a hunting party, eight out of about twenty of the Kru who had stood by Madshaka. Apparently his place at the slave factory was not so secure that he was willing to send off even a majority of his private army.

  The Kru might have been sent to hunt for James and the rest, but they were not hunting now. Rather, they were pointing out to sea, talking fast among themselves, with wild gestures, and again James did not need to know the language to understand what was being said. They were discussing the arrival of the Elizabeth Galley, the significance of the longboat going over to her.

  Despite the rudimentary seamanship that James had drilled into them, ships and the sea were not their world. They would not recognize the Elizabeth Galley from the brief encounter they had had on the other side of the Atlantic. They would not know how to interpret this new development.

  James knew already what they would do – send two men back to inform Madshaka of the Galley’s arrival, post two to watch the ships for further activity, send the remaining four off to hunt the Virginians – and five minutes later they did just that.

  The hunters split up and James receded back into the woods, moving diagonally until he could see a section of the beach. He had no fear of his men being found out. They would have been nearly impossible to discover in any event. And while eight well-armed men might have made a vigorous and effective search, the hunters now were outnumbered and looking for an enemy they knew to be armed with cutlasses and knives at least, and so they were not putting any great effort into the task.

  James watched for ten minutes as they made their perfunctory inspection of the tree line, looking for where the Virginians might have entered the forest, and then worked his way back to his men.

  They spent the remainder of the morning there, hiding, resting, eating what wild fruit James was able to obtain.

  Noon, with the sun overhead, beating down on the beach but unable to penetrate to where they hid, and more voices drifted up from the shore: chatter, then the crash of surf, chatter, crash.

  James made his way to the tree line once more. Madshaka and the eight hunters stood, feet in the swirling sea, staring out at the two ships that bobbed in unison like dancers and tugged at their thick anchor cables.

  Madshaka was making wild gestures, twirling around now and again when his fury got the better of him. The Frenchman represented a fortune to him, stuffed as it was with booty and slaves for the reselling. Even the ship itself, sold at a fraction of its value, would be worth more than most Africans would see in a lifetime.

  Twelve hours before, Madshaka had all that, plus King James’s very life depending on a single word from him. And now, in just half a day, it was coming apart, and Madshaka was not the kind who would let that happen. There was no life that Madsha
ka would not expend to protect his empire.

  James knew now who Madshaka was.

  And he knew Madshaka was not stupid, and he was not rash. He would do everything in his power to get the Frenchman back, but he would not attack in the daylight and he would not make a headlong assault against an overwhelming enemy. The capture of the slave factory told James all he needed to know about Madshaka’s tactical mind, and so he rested easy through the daylight hours, certain that no move would be made until dark, certain that Madshaka would not move until he thought he could win.

  The sun went down in a great show of red and orange, filtering through the sands that were lifted off the African deserts by the steady winds and drawn up into the far reaches of the sky. And then it was dark and King James roused his men, led them slowly toward the beach.

  Flickering light danced over the Frenchman’s lower masts and through her gunports. The women had lit their nightly fire. James could picture them gathered around it, sitting cross-legged, holding in their laps their children, or the children they had adopted out of the ‘cargo,’ rocking slowly to the rhythm of some sad song of the Ibo or the Yoruba or the Aja.

  And from the Elizabeth Galley, a single anchor light forward, and the big stern lanterns, and below them, the brightly lit great cabin. Marlowe and Bickerstaff and probably Fleming drinking their port, the remains of dinner spread before them.

  The five men waited, silent, for the most part, as the moon climbed higher and higher and first the fire aboard the Frenchman faded away to nothing and then the lanterns in the great cabin were extinguished one by one until there was nothing to be seen of either ship, save for the lanterns burning topside aboard the Galley.