The Blackbirder botc-2

by James L. Nelson

Madshaka translated and heads nodded, faces looking not joyful but satisfied.

  “We have done what we needed. We have food now, and water, enough to get us home.” There was no need to mention the pointless slaughter. It was done, there was no changing that, and they would not be attacking any other ships.

  “We have work to do now-” James continued, but one of the men cut him off, shouting out a question that met with murmured concurrence from several others.

  James turned to Madshaka. “He say, ‘Why don’t we take this ship now? Why we go back in the death ship?’ ”

  Why indeed? Before James could formulate a response that might make sense to that man, Madshaka translated the question to the others, and James could see more nodding heads, more agreement.

  Why not? It was piracy, robbery on the high seas. But what would that mean to these people, who had been stolen from their homes and sold into bondage? They were victims of the most depraved kind of robbery. They were Africans, what did they know or care of the Europeans’ customs and uses of the sea? Why should they ever think it was wrong to take a ship from white men, most of whom were dead?

  Now Madshaka was talking again, addressing the assembled men. “Madshaka!” James cut him off. “What you telling them?”

  “I telling them what you said.”

  “No you ain’t. What you telling them?” His fury was met by Madshaka’s defiant eyes.

  “I telling them they can vote. They can, can’t they, or you calling yourself king now? King James?”

  James held his eyes, did not let his expression waver, did not let his face reflect the raging inside. They could vote, he had agreed to it. In a moment of weakness he had said they would run things in the way of a pirate ship, and for his sins that was what they were doing.

  Madshaka turned back to the men, delivered a few quick, clipped sentences; heads nodded all around, and then every man on the deck raised his hand.

  Madshaka turned to James, gave him a hint of a smile. There was no need to translate the results.

  “Very well. Tell them to go collect the women and children and whatever they want from the old ship. But first we throw these dead ones over.”

  Madshaka gave the orders, pointed here and there, and men lifted corpses out of the sticky puddles of blood and carried them to the leeward rail and heaved them over the side. A dozen white men, slaughtered.

  James closed his eyes. His head sunk to his chest. The nightmare went on and on and on.

  It was with a great sense of relief that Thomas Marlowe stared through the glass at the ship, the battered wreck of a ship, drifting a cable length away. Relief, tempered with anger, regret, self-loathing, self-pity. A mixed brew, a rumfustian of emotion.

  She was a mess, her spritsail yard broken, just the courses and fore topsail set. The smell told him she was a slaver. Reasonable deduction told him it was King James’s.

  She was flying her ensign upside down, was firing guns to leeward as a signal of distress, but Marlowe was not buying it. It was just what he would expect James to do, to lure them in. But he would not be fooled.

  Now there would be an end to it, one way or another.

  He could hear the muttering. The men at the great guns and the men at sail trimming stations and the men with pistols and cutlasses at their sides, ready to board, all murmuring, all expressing that discontent for which sailors were deservedly famous.

  “What’s the good of taking yon wreck, then? Bloody risk our necks for flotsam, not worth a sou.”

  “It’s them niggers, and Marlowe using us for his own good.”

  “Ain’t what I signed on for.”

  “Nor me. Signed aboard a privateer, and Marlowe leaving off whatever he thinks looks like a man-of-war, and attacking some hulk.”

  “It was Billy Hood was aloft then, said it didn’t look like no man-ofwar to him.”

  They had too much time to think. Sailors would always get into trouble if they were given time to think. But in ten minutes’ time they would be into it, some bloody work, and then it would be over.

  The Elizabeth Galley had come up with the ship that morning, closed with her. Now she was hove to a cable length to windward. Marlowe would beat King James into submission and be done with it.

  “We will not board?” Bickerstaff asked.

  “We will not. Those freed slaves could be the death of us, fighting hand to hand. They understand there is no quarter for them. Fight to the last man. But I reckon they know little of fighting with great guns. We’ll stand off, give them a cannonading, hope they see fit to surrender.”

  “You just said they would not call for quarter in fighting hand to hand. Do you think they will surrender under cannon fire?”

  “No.”

  “I do not see any but two men aboard, and they look to be white men.”

  They did look to be white men, and the view through the glass only strengthened that impression. They waved, beckoned, but Marlowe stood firm, did not make a move one way or another. He could picture the hordes of armed black men crouching behind the bulwark, waiting for them to board.

  He would let King James take the first shot, and then he would decimate them.

  Ten minutes passed, and no one other than the two white men appeared on the deck. At last they seemed to realize that Marlowe would not be sending any aid, or laying his ship alongside. They disappeared down the leeward side of the blackbirder, and a moment later came pulling under her counter in a yawl boat, making for the Elizabeth Galley.

  “Some of you men with small arms, come with me.” Marlowe stomped forward to the gangway, armed members of the boarding party behind him. He could not imagine how the two men in the yawl boat were part of some trick, but he would never, never be caught unawares.

  The yawl boat pulled up below the boarding steps and the two men scrambled up the side, not asking permission to board, not even bothering to tie the boat to the chains. It drifted well clear of the Elizabeth Galley’s side even in the few seconds that it took them to come aboard, but they seemed entirely oblivious, as if gaining the Galley’s deck was the singular goal in their lives and nothing beyond that mattered.

  They stopped short at the gangway and looked around at the armed men, the row of guns, Marlowe and Bickerstaff. Their eyes were wide, bloodshot. Their hands were trembling. Marlowe had seen that look on men’s faces before. It was how they looked when the pirates were done with them.

  “Who are you? What ship is that?” Marlowe asked, but the men just looked at him, dumb.

  “What ship is that?” he asked again.

  One of the men uttered a sound. It was not a word that anyone could tell, but it seemed to break the impasse in his throat and suddenly sentences were spilling out. But they were not English. Marlowe shook his head to indicate that he did not understand; the man kept on talking.

  And then Bickerstaff interrupted, talking the same language, and Marlowe realized it was French. The man turned to Bickerstaff and continued his explanation. At last Bickerstaff turned to Marlowe.

  “You were right. This is indeed James’s slaver. Or was, in any event. These men are from a French merchantman. They were attacked by black pirates, he says, from this ship.” He nodded toward the slaver, drifting away downwind. “The whole crew was butchered, save for them, because they were in the yawl boat when the attack took place. I must say, James is a man of some passion, but I am hard pressed to see him killing unarmed sailors in cold blood, white though they may be.”

  “As am I. But I was surprised to hear of his sticking a knife in the blackbirder’s captain, so it is hard to know what he is capable of.”

  Bickerstaff turned and asked the French sailor a question, nodded as the man made a lengthy reply, and then turned back to Marlowe.

  “They abandoned the slaver, which is in a wretched state, and took the merchantman. They carried away the merchantman’s chief mate, who was also in the yawl at the time of the attack.”

  “Oh, God!” Marlowe threw his head back,
let out a long sigh of aggravation that built into a frightening shout as he tried to vent his pent-up anger. Then he turned to the first officer.

  “Mr. Fleming, pray see that the Frenchmen have some rum and some food. These poor bastards need some drink, some strong drink, I should imagine. Mr. Griffin, clear the longboat away and tell off a boarding party.”

  The slaver, her sails all aback, had drifted a good distance downwind from the Elizabeth Galley. An hour later she was safely to leeward when the fire that Marlowe and the boarding party had built in her hold worked its way through the main deck and up the rigging, turning the entire stinking affair into a great pyre.

  James and the others had tried to clean it. Marlowe could see the signs: the recently scrubbed decks, the faint trace of sulfur in the hold where they had apparently lit brimstone to drive out the even more horrid smells of people locked down for weeks.

  But he could imagine that all the cleaning in the world would not wash away the horror that that ship carried aboard. They must have been glad to be rid of her. In her state she would not have carried them back across the ocean.

  Now he and Bickerstaff stood together on the Elizabeth Galley’s quarterdeck, all the way aft, out of earshot of the helmsmen or any of the crew. In the gathering dark they watched the bright column of flame that rose above the hated vessel and danced across the ocean swells.

  Damn that ship, Marlowe thought. He hated her as much as James must have. Damn her, she was the cause of all this.

  Burn, you whoreson villain.

  “Ah, Francis,” he sighed. “It was all so much simpler once. Being a barbarous pirate has its advantages, you know. When one operates beyond all morality, then one never suffers such a thing as a moral dilemma.”

  Bickerstaff sniffed. “Neither does a frog or a maggot concern itself with moral considerations, but I couldn’t recommend the life. But let me ask you, Thomas, why were you so distraught to find they had carried off the chief mate? It did not seem to be from concern for his safety.”

  “No, faith, it was not. The damned annoying thing is now they have someone who can navigate. If it had just been James I reckon he would have tried to beat to the eastward against the trades-he would not guess at any other way to fetch Africa. We could have run him down easy, put an end to this. As it is we are but a day or two behind them.

  “But now they have someone who knows the sailing route. Now they can sail to Africa and we have to follow and I have to convince these dogs forward that we’re doing it all for their greater glory and riches, or who knows what they will do.”

  He stared at the flames. They were all he could see now, with night having come full on them while they talked.

  Chapter 12

  Frederick Dunmore wheeled his horse around, took in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of Marlowe House, the big white plantation house, deserted, the barn that waited for that season’s harvest, the row of slave quarters, abandoned.

  But not slave quarters at all, of course. Houses for free Negroes. All trim and neat with paint and shingles bought with the wages that Marlowe paid and laid out in the circular pattern of an African village. Some were white, some were crazy colors, reds and blues. Some had African symbols painted on their walls. It was the most egregious kind of effrontery. He spun his horse again, could not bear to look on it.

  Twenty or so men-well-to-do planters, their overseers, indentured servants, even some common mechanics and laborers-had now joined him in hunting down the escaped Negroes. They were gathered on the big lawn that stretched away from the back of the house, relaxing, waiting. The dogs raced all around the grass, barking, howling, tearing up this and that.

  Between his legs Dunmore could see the wide black smudges from his saddle that stained his white breeches. Mud was splattered over his white socks. A constellation of little black holes spread across his dustcovered coat where sparks from the pan on his firelock had floated down and burned through the fabric.

  But the clothing did not matter. He was happy to see the hard use it was getting. It was evidence of the great effort he was exerting in routing out this plague on the colony.

  The people were starting to listen to him. They were starting to listen to reason.

  Dunmore wanted slavery gone, abolished, made illegal. He did not wish to ever see another black man in America. Could not understand how the others failed to see that they were importing a plague, paying good money to bring into the land the means of their own destruction. Soon there would be more blacks than whites. And then, agitation, more and more liberties for the Negroes.

  And then, with the lower sort of whites, inbreeding. Inbreeding. It was intolerable.

  He turned again and looked at the Negroes’ houses. Neat, even comfortable and homey. Unbelievable.

  Sailing to London, years before, his ship had been caught in a storm, midocean, a wild, disorganized blow with the wind boxing the compass and big seas rising up from all directions, knocking the ship first here and then there. Lightning from every quarter. It was a black, freezing madness.

  Dunmore had never forgotten that storm, coming as it had mere weeks after his own steady life had been blown to ribbons. It seemed then such a perfect physical manifestation for the rage that ran wild in his head, coming from all quarters, overwhelming him from directions in which he was not even looking.

  “You men!” he shouted. “Those niggers’ houses! Burn them!”

  Glances back and forth, questioning looks. The storm in Dunmore ’s head raged harder. “They built these houses with money that was not theirs, by law! I say burn them!”

  A few of the men, the overseers and mechanics, got to their feet. They would do it, willing or not.

  Oh, I am so very brave while Marlowe is off to sea, Dunmore thought. Man enough to burn his property, threaten his wife.

  Coward!

  But what other approach? What good could he do if Marlowe put a bullet through his head? Who would carry on with his mission? Had to

  be done that way, most effective, doing it for his race, a greater good.

  The storm raged, lashed at him.

  “Hey! Here comes Powhatan!” someone yelled, and everyone stopped and turned. Those men that were lighting torches for burning the Negroes’ homes dropped the materials, stared out toward the woods.

  A single Indian was approaching them, dressed in buckskin, musket in hand, moving at an easy trot. His name was not Powhatan, of course, but no one knew what his real name was, and rather than ask, everyone just called him after that long-dead chief. He never seemed to object.

  He was a sometimes scout, sometimes guide. Dunmore had finally broken down and engaged him for this business.

  They had been hunting the Negroes for a week, forging out into the woods with dogs and horses, charging over trails and slashing through bracken, but they had found nothing. The dogs had picked up trails, sure enough, had set up great choruses of baying, had raced off like they had a fox treed, but it had always come to naught.

  The damned Negroes had been leading them astray. Dunmore finally smoked it. They were sending a few of their men out to lay false trails, doubling back, splashing through streams, creating long meandering trails that dead-ended far from wherever it was the rest of them were hiding.

  It was pointless. Hire a savage to catch a savage, Dunmore had concluded at last. Those Africans and their jungle ways. Perhaps a Red Indian could find them. He had all but given up hope that white men and dogs could.

  He spurred his horse and rode toward the Indian, as did some of those others on horseback, wealthy planters who by tacit understanding were part of the decision-making cabal. They reined up around Powhatan and the red man looked up at Dunmore, and Dunmore alone, because Dunmore was the one who had put the gold in his hands.

  “They about three mile from here. In a meadow. Tents, fire. They have scouts out in the woods, maybe what you call pickets. I can show you. But no dogs. That is why you don’t catch them. They hear the dogs, lead them aw
ay from the camp.”

  “Damn it!” Dunmore said, and almost added “I knew it!” but since the dogs had been his idea he did not. “Very well. We will leave two of the more useless ones back with the dogs. McKeown, that lazy Irishman, and that big fellow. Let’s get the others ready to go.”

  “And no horses,” Powhatan said, “we not surprise them with horses.”

  The other men on horseback, wealthy planters all, looked at one another, uneasy, and Dunmore knew that they did not wish to go on foot. Three miles in and back was a long way for men used to riding. And being on foot put them at the same level as the laborers and mechanics. It actually gave the Indian, practiced woodsman that he was, a certain superiority.

  “No, we need the horses. Can’t hunt them down without the horses. The speed they give us, and the fear they bring to these Negroes, will more than make up for a want of surprise.”

  Powhatan shrugged and leaned on his musket. It occurred to Dun-more that the red man probably did not care one way or another about this fight. That did not matter, as long as he played his part.

  Ten minutes and they were ready to go, Powhatan in the lead, the lower sort on foot following him, and then the men on horseback, feeling like the crusaders of old.

  A crusade indeed, thought Frederick Dunmore. A God-given mission to rid this New World of a terrible and growing plague. A chance to murder my own demons.

  It was amazing. Elizabeth could hardly believe how the people settled into their new life out in the woods, living like Indians, hunting, gathering edible plants, tending fires. Less than a week after fleeing Marlowe House and it seemed as if they had been living in that clearing for a year or more.

  She tried to help. She wanted to be a part of it, in a useful way, but the other women seemed to feel it was their job to take care of her, to not let her expend any effort.

  And she quickly discovered that there was precious little that she could do in any event that would have been of help.

  She was not without skills; she could write a neat, round hand, could organize a formal dinner with the skill of a field officer, could lay out, plant, and tend a gorgeous garden. She kept all the books at Marlowe House with great accuracy. She could satisfy a man in any way he might wish-intellectually, socially, carnally-but none of those skills found a practical application there in the Virginia woods.