by Wilbur Smith
‘Funny business, that tattooing.’ Nathaniel stopped to chat with Robyn as she stood watching the dismal show. ‘They started tattooing their children to make them repulsive to us slavers, some of them file or knock out their teeth like that one there.’ He pointed at a muscular black man in the circle of dancing slaves whose teeth had been filed to sharp points like those of a shark. ‘Some of them put bones through the noses of their daughters, and others stretch their tits – begging your pardon at the plain speaking, ma’am – or they put rings of copper around their necks until they look like giraffes, all so the slavers will leave them alone. They do say now that these have become marks of beauty amongst the heathen. No accounting for taste, is there, ma’am?’
Robyn saw how the extra space and regular exercise would affect the well-being of the slaves, and while they were up on the maindeck, in the open air, their empty slave decks were flushed out with sea water from the ship’s pumps and then scrubbed down with a strong lye mixture. Though even this was not enough to prevent the slave stink slowly impregnating the ship.
Each slave spent two hours on deck each second day, and while they were there, Robyn held clinic and examined each of them for any signs of disease or injury. Before going below once more, they were each forced to drink a decoction of molasses and lime juice to supplement the plain diet of boiled farina and water, and to ward off the dreaded scourge of the scurvy.
The slaves responded well to this treatment, and, incredibly, began to put on the weight that they had burned off during the fevers that were the result of the inoculation against the smallpox. The mood of the slaves was resigned and compliant, although there were isolated incidents. One morning, while a batch of slaves were being brought up, one of them, a fine-looking naked woman, managed to work free the shackle of her chain and the moment she reached the deck she rushed to Huron’s side and leapt over it, into the creaming blue wake of the racing clipper.
Despite the fact that she still wore the iron cuffs on her wrists, she managed to keep afloat for many long minutes; her struggles were pitiful to watch as she was slowly drawn down lower and lower in the water.
Robyn had run to the rail to watch the woman’s efforts, expecting Mungo to heave-to and lower a boat to rescue her, but he remained detached and silent on his quarterdeck, barely glancing over the stern before occupying himself once more with the management of his ship, while Huron tore away and the woman’s head dwindled to a speck on the blue water, then was drawn inevitably below the surface by the weight of her iron cuffs.
Although Robyn realized that it would have been impossible to stop the clipper and reach the woman before she drowned, yet she glared at Mungo across the length of the deck, wishing that there were words to express her fury and indignation.
That night she lay awake in her tiny cabin, hour after hour, racking her imagination for some ruse that could be used to delay the tall clipper’s full flight towards the Southern Cape.
She thought of stealing one of the ship’s boats and casting herself adrift during the night, forcing Mungo to turn back and to search for her. It took only a few minutes’ reflection to realize that it would take a dozen strong men to free the whaler from its lashings and lower it on its davits over the ship’s side – and even if she managed to accomplish that, it was far from certain that Mungo would delay even a minute. He was more likely to sail away and leave her, as he had left the slave woman.
She thought of setting fire to the ship, overturning a lantern in the mainsail locker, and creating so much damage that Huron would be obliged to call at the nearest port, Lourenc¸o Marques or Port Natal, to effect repairs, and to give Black Joke an opportunity to come up with her. Then she imagined eight hundred chained slaves burning to death in the hold when the fire got out of control, and she shuddered, thrust that idea from her and hopelessly composed herself to a sleep which would not come.
In the end her opportunity came from a most unexpected source, Tippoo. The huge mate had a weakness, a single weakness that Robyn could observe. He was a trencherman and, in his own taste, a gourmet. Half the lazaretto was filled with delicacies that Tippoo had hoarded and which he shared with no others. There were dried and smoked meats and sausages, cheeses the smell of which brought tears to the eyes, and wooden crates of cans and bottles of preserved foods, though as a strict Muslim, he took no alcohol. He made up what he lacked in the glass with his spoon.
His appetite was one of the ship’s jokes, and Robyn had heard Mungo chaffing him across the wardroom table.
‘Were it not for the tucker you brought aboard, Mr Mate, we’d have room for another hundred blackbirds in our hold.’
‘I’ll wager that belly of yours costs you more to sustain than a harem of extravagant wives.’
‘Sweet merciful heavens, Mr Tippoo, but whatever you are eating should have been given a Christian burial a month ago.’
One of Tippoo’s favourite appetizers was a particularly virulent bloater paste, packed in half-pound tins. The instruction printed on the tin read ‘Spread thinly on biscuit or toast’, and Tippoo would spoon it directly from the tin, consuming the entire half pound without once breaking the rhythmic dip and lift of his soup spoon, his eyes half closed and a cherubic smile buckling the wide line of his toad’s mouth.
The fourth night out of the Rio Save he began his dinner with a can of bloater paste, but as he pierced the lid with his clasp knife, there was a sharp hiss of escaping gas, and Mungo St John glanced up from his own plate of pea soup.
‘It is blown, Mr Tippoo. I would not eat it if I were you.’
‘No,’ Tippoo agreed. ‘But you not me.’
They called Robyn a little before midnight. Tippoo was in convulsions, doubled up with agony, his belly swollen and hard as a yellow agate boulder. He had vomited until now he was retching only a little blood-flecked bile.
‘It’s ptomaine poisoning,’ Robyn told Mungo St John. It was the first time she had spoken directly to him since that morning in the Rio Save, and her voice was cool and formal. ‘I do not have the medicines to treat it. You will have to put into a port where he can receive treatment. There is a military hospital at Port Natal.’
‘Doctor Ballantyne,’ Mungo answered her as formally, but his infuriating smile lurked behind the gold-flecked eyes. ‘Mr Tippoo’s mother was an ostrich, he can digest stones, nails and lumps of broken glass. Your concern, touching as it may be, is entirely misplaced. He will be ready to fight, flog, or devour an ox by noon tomorrow.’
‘And I tell you that without proper treatment he will be dead in a week.’
However, Mungo’s prognosis proved to be correct, for by morning the vomiting and retching had abated and Tippoo seemed to have purged his bowels of the poisoned fish. Robyn was forced to a decision which she made on her knees in her cabin.
‘Forgive me, oh Lord, but there are eight hundred of your children chained below decks in this foul prison, and I will not kill him – at least, with your help, I will not kill him.’
Then, off her knees she went briskly to work. She used a solution of peppermint tincture to disguise the taste, and let fall fifteen drops of essence of ipecacuanha into the medicine glass, which was three times the recommended dosage for the most powerful emetic known to medical science.
‘Drink it down,’ she told Tippoo. ‘It will soothe your stomach, and cure the diarrhoea.’
Late that afternoon she repeated the dose, but the wardroom steward had to help her lift Tippoo’s head from the bolster and pour the draught down his throat. The effect was enough to alarm even Robyn.
An hour later she sent for Mungo, and the steward came back with the message, ‘Captain says as how the ship’s safety demands all his attention at the moment, begging your pardon, Doctor.’
When Robyn herself went on deck, Mungo was at the weather rail, sextant in hand, waiting for the sun to appear in a gap in the clouds.
‘Tippoo is dying,’ she told him.
‘And this will be my first sight of the
day,’ Mungo replied without taking his eye from the eyepiece of the instrument.
‘I at last believe that you are a monster with no human feelings,’ she whispered fiercely, and at that moment blazing sunlight struck the deck, as the sun showed briefly through the ragged hole in the cloud.
‘Stand by the chronometer,’ Mungo called to the signals yeoman, and then ‘Mark!’ as he brought the sun’s image down to bounce lightly as a green rubber ball on the dark line of the horizon.
‘Excellent,’ he murmured with satisfaction, as he lowered the sextant and read off the height of the sun, and called it to the yeoman to mark on his slate. Only then did he turn back to Robyn.
‘I am sure you have misjudged the severity of Tippoo’s ailment.’
‘See for yourself,’ she invited.
‘That is my intention, Doctor.’
Mungo stooped into Tippoo’s cabin, and paused. His expression changed, suddenly the light mocking smile was gone. It was evident that Tippoo was indeed dangerously ill.
‘How are you, old friend?’ Mungo asked quietly. It was the first time Robyn had ever heard him use that form of address. He lifted his hand and laid it on the mate’s sweat-beaded forehead.
Tippoo rolled the bald yellow cannon ball of his head towards Mungo, and he tried to smile. It was a brave effort. Robyn felt a terrible guilty pang, at the suffering she was inflicting and at being the witness to this private, and strangely intimate, moment between these two hard and dangerous men.
Tippoo tried to lift himself, but the effort brought a long dragging groan rattling up his throat, and he clutched at his stomach with both hands, drawing his knees up with agony, and then desperately twisting his head as a fresh bout of heaving and retching racked his body.
Mungo snatched the bucket off the deck and with one arm around Tippoo’s shoulders held it for him – but all that Tippoo could bring up was a little splash of blood and brown bile, and when he fell back on the bunk he was gasping unevenly, bathed in fresh sweat and his eyes rolled back in his skull until only a little half moon of the iris still showed.
Mungo stood beside his bunk for a full five minutes, bowed and attentive, swaying slightly to the ship’s movement, but otherwise still and silent. His brow was creased with thought and his gaze remote, and watching him, Robyn knew he was making the dire decision – the throw of the dice of life, friendship against the loss of his ship and perhaps even his own liberty, for to go into a British port with slaves in his holds was an awful risk.
Strange, now that he was showing this gentler side of his nature, that her affection came flooding back at full strength, she felt mean and cheap for playing on his deepest emotions, and for torturing the huge yellow Muslim on the narrow bunk.
Mungo swore quietly but decisively and, still stooped under the low deck, strode from the cabin.
Robyn’s affection turned to disgust and disappointment. Disgust that even the life of an old and loyal friend meant nothing to this cruel and merciless man whom she was doomed to love, and intense disappointment that her ruse had failed, that she had inflicted this dangerous suffering on Tippoo to no avail.
She sank down wearily and bitterly beside his bunk, took a cloth soaked in sea water and bathed the sweat-basted yellow head.
During their long voyage down the Atlantic, Robyn had grown sensitive to all Huron’s moods, to the feel of the deck underfoot at every point of sailing, and to the sounds that her hull made in different sea and wind conditions, and now abruptly she felt the deck cant sharply beneath her. She heard the stamp of bare feet on the deck above as her yards were trained around and Huron’s action became easier, the sounds of her hull and rigging muted as she took the wind in over her stern quarter and rode more easily.
‘He’s altered course towards the west,’ she breathed as she lifted her head to listen. ‘It worked. He is going in to Port Natal. Oh thank you Lord, it worked.’
Huron anchored well offshore, out on the thirty-fathom line of the shelving coast, so that she could not benefit from the shelter of the huge whale-backed bluff that protected Port Natal’s natural harbour. Even with a powerful telescope, a watcher on the shore would be unable to make out any significant details of Huron’s cargo, nor of her true occupation. However, the ship paid for her offshore berth by taking the unfettered scend of the sea and the wind. She pitched and she rolled and she jerked at her anchor chain.
At her peak she flew the stars and stripes of her country – and below that the yellow ‘Quebec’, the plague flag which warned, ‘Stay away from me! I have plague on board!’
Mungo St John placed an armed watch on both sides of the ship and others at her bow and stern, and, despite Robyn’s strident protest, she was confined to her cabin for the duration of the ship’s call, with another armed guard outside her door.
‘You are very well aware of the reason, Doctor Ballantyne.’ Mungo answered her protests calmly. ‘I do not wish you to have any communication whatsoever with your countrymen ashore.’
The whaler, when it took Tippoo ashore, was rowed by men that Mungo selected personally, and they were instructed to inform the Harbour Master that there was smallpox aboard, and to request that no other vessel be allowed near Huron.
‘I can only wait three days for you.’ Mungo stooped over the litter on which Tippoo was carried on deck. ‘That is all I can risk. If you are not sufficiently recovered by then, you will have to stay here until my return. That cannot be more than five months.’ He tucked a leather draw-string purse under Tippoo’s blanket. ‘And that will pay your expenses in the meanwhile. Get well, Mr Tippoo, I need you.’
Robyn had administered another dose of the peppermint and ipecacuanha a few minutes previously, and Tippoo could reply only in an agonized whisper.
‘I will wait for you, Captain Mungo, as long as she takes.’
Mungo’s voice was husky as he straightened and spoke to the seamen carrying the litter.
‘Handle him easy, you hear me.’
For three days Robyn sweated and fretted in the stuffy little cabin, trying to occupy her time with writing up her journals but distracted by any loud noise from the deck above, her heart pounding as she both hoped for and dreaded the hail from a British gun-boat, or the rush of a boarding-party coming in over Huron’s side.
On the third morning Tippoo was rowed back to the ship, and he climbed up the side and in through the entry port unaided. Without further doses of ipecacuanha, his recovery had amazed the military surgeons ashore, but he was so thin that the skin hung in folds from his jowls like a bulldog, his belly had shrunk so that he had tied his breeches with a length of rope to keep them from sinking down past his flattened belly, but still they flapped around his shrunken buttocks.
His skin was the pale yellow of ancient ivory, and he was so weak he had to pause to rest when he reached the deck.
‘Welcome aboard, Mr Tippoo,’ Mungo called from the quarterdeck. ‘And if you have finished your holiday ashore, I’ll thank you to get this ship under way immediately.’
Twelve days later, having struggled with flukey and variable winds, Mungo St John played the field of his glass down the open gaping maw of False Bay. On his right hand rose the distinctive curved black peak of Hangklip, shaped from this angle like a shark’s dorsal fin, and directly opposite it across the mouth of the bay the southernmost tip of the African continent, Cape Point, with its lighthouse perched high above the steep wet cliffs.
It was a magnificent Cape summer’s day, a light and fickle breeze scratching dark patches on the surface of the rolling dark blue sea, leaving the rest of it with a satiny gloss. There were seabirds working, their wings twinkling like flurrying snow flakes in the sunlight, huge flocks of them that stretched low across the horizon.
Creeping along on the breeze, lying for minutes at a time completely becalmed, Huron took half a day to round the point and came on to west-north-west and a point north, the course that would carry her up the Atlantic, across the equator and finally into Charl
eston Roads.
Once they were on their new course, Mungo St John had leisure to inspect the other sails that were in sight. There were nine, no, ten other vessels in view now, for there was another far out to sea, just her topsails showing. They were small fishing craft out from Hout Bay and Table Bay, and the seabirds clouded the air about them, most of them were between Huron and the land, and all of them were bare-masted or under working sail as they plied their lines or their nets. Only the vessel furthest out was carrying topsails, and though she was hull down she gave to Mungo’s seaman’s eye the impression of being a bigger ship than the rest of the fishing fleet.
‘There’s a ship for you!’ Tippoo exclaimed, touching Mungo’s arm to draw his attention and when he swung his glass back towards the land Mungo murmured with pleasure as a square-rigged East Indiaman came into view around the headland that guarded the entrance to Table Bay itself.
She was ass plendid a sight as Huron was herself, canvas piled to the sky and her paintwork gleaming in snowy white and Burgundy red, the two lovely ships on reciprocal courses passed each other by two cables’ length, the officers eyeing each other through their telescopes with professional interest and appraisal as they paid passing honours.
Robyn was also at Huron’s rail, pining towards the land. The proximity of the beautiful ship interested her hardly at all, it was that flat-topped mountain from which she could barely tear her gaze. It was so very close, marking as it did her one hope of succour, her friends there, the British Governor and the Cape Squadron, if they only knew that she was a prisoner aboard this slave ship.
The thought was interrupted by an abrupt movement that she caught from the corner of her eye – strange how receptive she was to Mungo St John’s smallest movement, to his slightest change of expression – and now she saw that he had turned his back on the East Indiaman as she dwindled away astern, and instead he was peering intently over Huron’s port side, his expression rapt, his whole body seemed charged with latent energy, and the hands that gripped the barrel of the telescope were ivory knuckled with tension.