Killigrew of the Royal Navy

by Jonathan Lunn

  Killigrew of the Royal Navy

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  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

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Killigrew of the Royal Navy

  Jonathan Lunn

  For Macer

  Chapter 1

  The Prize

  You could always tell a slave ship from any other vessel.

  The sharks knew that.

  Any ship that crossed the Atlantic could expect at least a couple of sharks to follow in her wake in the hope of catching some scraps tossed overboard by the cook. But a slave ship would have a couple of dozen fins slicing through her wake. Sharks were not the most clever of the ocean’s denizens but they were patient and they knew from experience that sooner or later there would be deaths on board a slave ship and when that happened there was nothing for it but to throw the body over the side. Often a member of the crew would die, usually from yellow fever, but twice as often it would be one of the slaves. The sharks did not discriminate between black and white. To them it was all food.

  The sharks could tell it was a slaver from the stench.

  Mate Killigrew could smell it now as he was rowed across from Her Majesty’s paddle-sloop Tisiphone to the Maria Magdalena: a compound of stale sweat, urine, excrement and vomit. Even on Her Majesty’s yacht Victoria and Albert the sanitary arrangements for the crew were primitive at best, and on most ships the stench of the effluent which gathered in the bilges could be overpowering to a landsman during high summer. On a slaver, the sanitary arrangements for the slaves were non-existent.

  ‘Sweet Jesus!’ one of the rowers gasped as they approached the slave ship. ‘What a stench! She stinks like the nethermost pit of Hell!’

  ‘Keep silence in the boat, there,’ ordered Killigrew. He sat in the long boat’s stern, his saturnine face turned towards the Maria Magdalena. His mind was already on the deck of the slaver, planning what tasks the prize crew would have to perform once on board, and putting them in order of priority.

  There were fourteen men crammed in the Maria Magdalena’s long boat. The three officers – Mate Killigrew, Assistant Surgeon Strachan and Midshipman Parsons – all wore navy-blue pea jackets, white kerseymere pantaloons, and peaked caps. Killigrew was also entitled to wear the China War Medal but he preferred not to. He was not proud of having taken part in that small but dirty conflict, which some called the Opium War, even though he had been promoted to mate – a halfway house between midshipman and lieutenant – as a reward for his part in the taking of Chingkiang-fu in 1842. That was five years ago now, but still the nightmare of that butchery sometimes haunted his dreams.

  The remaining eleven men were all ratings and wore no uniform as such, except that they all drew their clothes from the purser’s slops and there was inevitably a uniformity to their white trousers, blue jackets and broad-brimmed straw hats.

  Killigrew glanced across to where Strachan sat with his handkerchief held delicately over his nose and mouth. The assistant surgeon was in his early twenties, the same age as Killigrew, with blue eyes behind wire-framed spectacles and a tangle of light brown hair. A graduate of the University of Edinburgh, where he had qualified as a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries, Strachan was a relative newcomer in the navy. Killigrew suspected the assistant surgeon could not have graduated very high in his class at medical school, otherwise he could have worked in a country practice: far more pleasant than a paddle-sloop in the Tropics, and far more remunerative than the nine pounds and sixteen shillings a month he earned as an assistant surgeon.

  It was six bells in the afternoon watch, or three o’clock, as the landsmen would have it. The Tisiphone – 160 feet long from stem to stern, with a single funnel between the two masts – and the Maria Magdalena were hove-to alongside one another about fifty yards apart. The sun beat down mercilessly on the shimmering blue sea. Back in Britain it was winter but the Tropics knew nothing of winter and summer, only the dry season and the wet season. It was the dry season now and hardly a breath of air disturbed the sails of either vessel.

  During the first part of the chase a fresh off-shore breeze had propelled the swift Baltimore-built barque along at a good twelve knots which the paddle-sloop, with her sails and her engines, had barely been able to match. But the Tisiphone had persisted, her crew knowing that as long as they could keep the slaver in sight then time and the doldrums were on their side. Eventually, as the morning gave way to afternoon, the breeze had slackened and died, leaving the Maria Magdalena helpless. A blast of chain shot from the Tisiphone’s sixty-eight pounder had brought down the slaver’s upper spars and she had run down the American colours she had been flying, colours which Killigrew did not doubt were false.

  The Stars and Stripes was a good flag of convenience for slavers. Both the British and the Americans maintained an anti-slavery squadron off the coast of West Africa, but the British one was by far the larger and more active of the two. The United States did not have a treaty with Great Britain to allow British ships to stop and search US vessels: the memory of the War of 1812 and its primary cause – the Royal Navy’s unjustifiable habit of stopping American merchant ships and pressing their crewmen into service on board British men-o’- war – still rankled with American politicians and naval officers who were old enough to remember those days. Thus no vessel of the Royal Navy could stop an American ship, and no vessel of the United States Navy could stop a British one. All the slavers had to do was hoist the Old Glory when chased by a British vessel, or hoist the Union Jack if chased by the Americans. Any Royal Naval officer stopping a ship flying the US flag had to be damned sure of his ground if he did not want to spark off a diplomatic incident.

  The starboard side of the barque loomed over them and Killigrew glimpsed the surly faces of some of the crewmen left on board. As soon as the Maria Magdalena had surrendered, the Tisiphone’s captain, Commander Standish, had ordered her master to cross over to the paddle-sloop with a dozen of his crewmen. Those men were now captives under the muskets of the Tisiphone’s marines, while the rest of the slavers waited on board the barque for Killigrew and his men to board and take command of the vessel.

  ‘Way enough,’ said Olaf Ågård. One of the Tisiphone’s two quartermasters, the Swede was the senior petty officer in the long boat. He had served on British ships – first Hull whalers, then Royal Navy vessels – for so long that scarcely a trace of any Swedish accent remained in his voice. ‘Toss and boat oars.’

  The rowers shipped their oars and allowed the long boat to cover the last few yards under her own momentum until the bow bumped gently against the clipper’s side where a rope ladder hung down from the gunwale.

  Killigrew went up first. At the top he hooked both hands over the gunwale, heaved himself up and swung his feet on to the deck. There were a dozen sailors gathered there, some looking fearful, others glaring at Killigrew with venom in their eyes. The moment he stood on the deck he unhooked his ‘pepperbox’ – a multi-shot pistol with six revolving barrels – from his belt and levelled it at the sailors. It was not unknown for the crew of a captured slaver t
o murder the prize crews put aboard her, although they usually waited until the vessel which had caught them had sailed away. But Killigrew was damned if he would take any chances with this villainous-looking bunch.

  ‘Which one of you is in charge?’ he demanded.

  The sailors exchanged glances. None of them spoke.

  Killigrew repeated his question in Portuguese and gestured with his pepperbox. ‘Come on, speak up. I haven’t got all day.’

  ‘I am,’ said one, a heavily built man with greasy black hair and a cast in one eye.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Ramón Barroso.’

  ‘Are you the first mate?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The rest of the prize crew gathered on board the Maria Magdalena’s deck, armed with pistols and cutlasses, and some of them at once covered the slavers. ‘Keep those men under guard until we can get irons on them,’ ordered Killigrew. ‘I’m sure there’ll be no shortage of those on board. Boulton, Evans, Ivey and McFee: you four search the ship for other crewmen and weapons. Mr Parsons, be so good as to hoist our colours. Mr Fentiman, make an inventory of what spars we’ll need to jury-rig her until we make it to Freetown. You help him, Sails. See what you can find in the ship’s stores; what’s missing we’ll have to bring across from the Tisiphone.'

  Fentiman and ‘Sails’ – the chief carpenter’s mate and the sailmaker respectively – nodded and went about their work.

  ‘I’ll check the slave deck,’ said Strachan, heading below.

  Killigrew gestured at Barroso with the pepperbox. ‘Show me the ship’s papers.’

  ‘The senhor capitão has the papers. He took them across to your vessel to show to your capitão—’

  ‘I mean the other ship’s papers,’ said Killigrew. ‘I never stopped a slaver yet which didn’t have more than one set of papers.’ He followed Barroso into the captain’s day room where the Portuguese indicated a padlocked strongbox.

  ‘I don’t have the key.’

  ‘I do.’ Killigrew shot the padlock off with his pepperbox.

  Barroso moved to open the strongbox, blocking it from Killigrew’s sight with his body. ‘’Vast there!’ Killigrew snapped before he could raise the lid. ‘Move over there. Turn your face to the wall, spread your legs and put your hands against the bulkhead. Good boy. Now don’t you bat an eyelid.’

  He lifted the lid of the strongbox. A pistol lay on top of the papers inside, an old-fashioned single-shot flintlock. Killigrew picked it up and showed it to Barroso. ‘Is this what you were looking for?’

  Barroso did not reply. Killigrew tucked the pistol behind his belt and turned his attention to the rest of the strongbox’s contents. There were no ship’s papers, no log, no cargo manifest, no owner’s instructions, just a slight haze and a smell of burning in the day room.

  There was a knock on the door. ‘Who’s there?’ Killigrew demanded without taking his eyes off Barroso.

  ‘Me, sir. Parsons.’

  ‘Come in, Mr Parsons. What can I do for you?’

  ‘It’s the quack, sir. He wants you to join him on the slave deck.’

  ‘All right.’ Killigrew seized Barroso by the scruff of his neck, rammed the muzzles of his pepperbox into the small of his back, and marched him out on deck. ‘You can go back with your shipmates for now.’ He pushed Barroso roughly across to where the barque’s other crewmen waited, and then descended through a hatch and down a companion ladder to the slave deck.

  Below decks the stench of sweat, urine, excrement and vomit was even worse and Killigrew found himself gagging. Strachan waited outside the door. The sounds of moaning and weeping came from the other side.

  ‘I thought you’d want to see this for yourself, sir,’ said Strachan, grim-faced.

  Killigrew glanced at him. Strachan had already been aboard several other slavers in his short time with the West Africa Squadron; if he thought this one was worthy of particular attention, then it had to be especially bad. The forewarning braced Killigrew, as much as anything could have braced him for the stench and sight which greeted him when Strachan opened the door.

  A wall of hot, stinking air hit him at once, and he had to choke back the bile which rose to his gorge. The one mercy was that the dim lighting prevented him from seeing too much.

  If Killigrew lived to be a hundred years of age – which with his career and personal habits was unlikely, he reflected – he would never understand the mentality of slavers. Even if the very concept of slavery had not been entirely contrary to all laws of natural justice, surely it would have made sound economic sense to look after the slaves. True, they would have transported fewer slaves per voyage, but then they would have lost a smaller number on the way and sold a higher proportion of those they had paid for on the African coast.

  But instead they packed the slaves on deck as closely as it was physically possible, and on average roughly a third of them died during the middle passage to the New World. ‘O brave new world, that has such people in it!’ he thought ironically. And it was not even a reflection of the complete indifference to the lives of their slaves, which his various encounters with slavers had taught him was a given. To the slavers, their cargo was not even human, merely a superior form of ape. But the diseases which spread like wildfire through the slave decks of these death hulks – dysentery, smallpox, ophthalmia – could transfer just as easily to their crews, and it was not unusual for a sixth of the crewmen to die as well.

  The deck had been split into two levels, with less than three feet of headroom between the two. Like most people Killigrew had seen the graphic plans of slave decks published by the abolitionists, and had read the statistics about how little space each slave had. But those were only pictures and statistics, and could never capture the full horror. There were over four and a half hundred slaves crammed into that cramped, fetid hold, all of them naked and in irons, their ankles raw and blistered where the fetters chafed their flesh. A shallow wave of piss and puke swept across the deck each time the barque rolled. As soon as the door opened, the moans and cries intensified as they jabbered at him in their incomprehensible tongue.

  And the worst of it was that the vast majority of them were children.

  When the slave trade had been legal, slaves of all ages had been transported to the Americas. But now that fewer ships dared to make the crossing and the supply was strangled, it made more economic sense to import younger slaves from whom the owners would get more years of work. And since children were smaller, the slavers could pack more of them on board.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ breathed Killigrew. ‘All right, does anyone here speak English? Speakee Krio? Est-ce qu’il y a quelqu’un qui parle français? ¿Habla español? Fala português…?’ A firm believer in self-improvement, Killigrew had found that there were usually one or two foreign ratings on board most British ships, and one way to pass the time on long voyages was to employ them in teaching him their tongue; in this manner he had picked up the languages of the most common seafaring nations, including Spanish and Portuguese in addition to the French most naval officers learned as a matter of course.

  ‘I speak Portuguese,’ said one of the older ones, a woman of about twenty.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Koumba, senhor.’

  ‘My name’s Kit. Now listen, Koumba, I want you to translate what I’m going to say for everyone else here. Can you do that?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Good girl. Tell them everything’s going to be all right, do you understand? I’m an officer of the Royal Navy, we’ve come to save you from the slavers. We’re going to get you out of here and take you all up topsides as soon as possible, and the doctor here will care for your sick. Then we’ll take you back to Africa, all right? But you have to be patient.’

  She nodded again.

  ‘Good girl. Be strong. The ordeal’s nearly over.’

  He went back on deck and gestured for Barroso to approach. ‘The keys for the irons. Where are they?’

&nbs
p; Barroso grinned. ‘The capitão has them. He keeps all the chaves on him all the time…’

  Killigrew shook his head. ‘What about the spare set?’

  ‘Spare set, senhor? What spare set?’

  Killigrew punched him in the stomach. As Barroso doubled up, Killigrew drove his knee into his face. Barroso’s head was snapped back and he sprawled on the deck.

  The British seamen on deck stared at this display of gratuitous violence, half shocked, half admiring. None of them cared for slavers, of course, but Mr Killigrew hated them with a passion. He knew what they would be thinking: A rum cove, that Mr Killigrew, most of the time as staid and sober as any English gentleman, yet every now and then prey to the most violent passions. But then he did have a foreigner for a mother, it was said, so what could you expect?

  Ignoring their stares, Killigrew kicked Barroso viciously in the side, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and hauled him to his feet. Then he smashed his face against the mainmast.

  Barroso sank to his knees with blood streaming from his nostrils and a livid bruise weeping blood on his temple. He spat a mouthful of blood on the deck and several teeth with it. Killigrew felt nothing. He had no doubt this was not the first time blood had been spilled on that deck.

  ‘The spare set.’

  ‘Hanging on a… o que é… o prego?’

  ‘A nail?’

  ‘Sîm, a nail. Hanging on a nail behind the door to the capitâo’s day room.’

  ‘It’s amazing how co-operative these people can be when you ask them nicely,’ remarked Killigrew. ‘Go and fetch them, Mr Parsons.’

  As the midshipman scurried off to fetch the keys, Boulton, Evans, Ivey and McFee returned from below decks. ‘There’s no one else hiding on board, sir,’ reported Boulton.

  ‘You’re sure? I don’t want anyone you overlooked sneaking out once we’ve parted from the Tisiphone freeing their shipmates here so they can slit our throats. Remember the Felicidade.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The Felicidade had been another slave ship captured by the Royal Navy off the coast of Africa two years earlier: the slavers had overpowered the prize crew and thrown the survivors overboard. Worst of all the slavers had later been captured and despite their guilt having been established, a judicial appeal had ruled that a British court had no jurisdiction over a vessel owned by a Brazilian who had murdered a British prize crew. The slavers had been sent back to Brazil at British expense.