“Yes, Dan,” he said, “a whole lot of trouble, as far as I can make out. But the light’s too poor to see much.”
At this moment Paul came running up the slope and joined us. “Well?” asked Mr. Zachary.
“What’s apparently happened, sir, is that an English slave-ship went up to the depot on Bance Island to load up with slaves. It was on its way back when the slaves broke loose and overpowered the crew. They’ve either killed them or thrown them overboard and now they’re controlling the ship themselves — to go out into the ocean, I suppose. We’re a good twenty miles from Bance Island downstream here but this happened some little time ago. We should see the ship pretty soon now.”
Mr. Zachary merely nodded. “I see. Thanks.”
“Shall I take a boat out and intercept them, sir?” asked Paul.
“No,” said Mr. Zachary. “We haven’t got a big enough boat and we haven’t got enough manpower.”
“But sir
“Do you seriously think we could stop them?” said Mr. Zachary impatiently. “They’ve got the ebb tide for a start.”
After about half an hour we heard the clamour on board the ship before we could see her. As might have been expected, the slaves were vociferous. Soon we were able to make her out in the uncertain light. She was coming downstream with the tide and yawing wildly, mainly, as far as I could see, because a crowd was scuffling round the wheel, with each man trying to steer her as he got control. While the uproar grew louder with the ship’s approach, spectators were gathering along the shore below us, while to our left Freetown was evidently awake and showing interest.
“Excuse me, sir,” said Paul, “but if they’ve thrown the crew overboard, oughtn’t we to take a boat and try to pull out as many of them as we can find?”
Mr. Zachary turned to him with a sardonic smile. “I was afraid you were going to ask me that. Yes, I’m sorry to say we’ll have to, because it would look bad afterwards if we had to admit we hadn’t. I shouldn’t try too hard, though,” he added, and with this resumed watching the ship.
Paul and I went down, took a boat each, recruited four assistants and set out into the estuary. We knew we were miles below Bance Island, near which the crew had presumably been jettisoned, but nevertheless we did our best to go upstream. However, with the tide against us it was hard work. After a time, when both of us felt that for the moment we had done as much rowing as we could, two of our crew took over, but they were no oarsmen and we made little headway.
Looking ahead and steering, I suddenly caught sight of some sort of bundle or pile of stuff floating down towards us. “What’s that, can you see?” I called to Paul, who was nearer than I was. “Are they people?” After a pause he called back, “If they are people they’re not moving. We’d better go and have a closer look.”
I shouted as loud as I could, “Who are you? Can you hear me?” but there was no response. As the strange object drew nearer we both put ourselves directly downstream, so that we were bound to intercept.
“My God!” cried Paul. “They’re black bodies!”
“Dead?”
“They’re either dead or insensible. We’d better grab them as they reach us.”
We waited in silence while the river flowed on. They were indeed black bodies, face down and somehow fastened together. As they drifted between us I grabbed the shirt collar of the nearest and pulled up the drooping head against my arm.
The next moment I cried out in unrestrainable horror. The black face I recognised before the head fell forward again, out of my grasp, was the face of Wilkins.
For — how long? – My mind was swirling in chaos. I had no power of thought. I believed myself the victim of a dreadful phenomenon: a repressed obsession had been projected as a palpable image. For months I had done all I could to suppress, to dismiss Captain Hawkshot and the ultimate cruelty, the slaves thrown alive into the sea. Now, rejecting my feeble suppression, they had formed for themselves a semblance so real that I had touched and seen it. Someone was leaning across, shaking my shoulder. I turned my head. I saw Paul. So I could see. “Are you all right?” His voice. So I could hear. I bit my finger. I could feel.
“We’d better get them in to the shore, Dan. Give me a hand, will you?”
“I won’t touch them.”
“What?”
“’Won’t touch them.”
“Why on earth not?”
I didn’t answer and after a moment he let go my shoulder, took the oars of his boat, turned it, followed the sodden mass and made his men grip it while he struggled shoreward across the current.
Meanwhile, as I still did nothing, my boat was drifting downstream. “Sah, sah, we go too?” I nodded. He took the oars and his companion steered. I don’t know how long we took to reach the bank. They got out, moored and ran upstream to Paul. As I remained in the boat, he came down to me.
“Dan’l, for God’s sake, what’s the matter?”
I had a sudden visitation of commonsense. Of course it wasn’t Wilkins at all. It only looked like him and I, with my ineradicable memories, had allowed myself to be scared silly. “Nothing; I’m all right.”
“What d’you think we should do?” said Paul. “D’you think we ought to lay them out decently and then find some stretchers and take them down to Zachary?”
I nodded, and stood aside while his men cut the bindings. I saw that at least one of the bodies was horribly wounded and supposed that for some reason they must have been fastened together after being murdered.
Paul and the men dragged them apart and laid them side by side, face upwards. I forced myself to look. It was Wilkins. I could be in no doubt.
But now I was further away from the face and had Paul beside me. “Look, just give me a minute or two, Paul, there’s a good chap. I must explain; it’ll put me right.”
He heard me out, showing no impatience. “Poor old Dan’l. No wonder you took on. And it really is Wilkins, is it? You’re sure? Well, that’s better than if you’d had a hallucination, isn’t it? Perfectly natural reaction. But whatever was he doing here, for God’s sake?”
“Wilkins? Bashing slaves? Why, man, he did make love to this employment. For him, the more cruelty the better. Nothing more likely than he’d be on a slave-ship. It’s simply a nasty coincidence — him and me, I mean.”
By a paradox, our four black companions understood the occurrence with no scepticism at all. There was no need to convince them, one way or the other. They were familiar with the supernatural, and in the account they spread I was not in the least to blame for having been afflicted by a devil.
We never heard what happened to the ship that the slaves had taken over.
* * *
Freetown expanded steadily and the new dwellings were built to unprecedentedly high standards of comfort. Cultivation also progressed. That year, for the first time, we achieved a self-sufficiency of rice, as well as producing gratifyingly good crops of tapioca, ginger, cinnamon, pepper and bananas. Several new fishing-boats were built. Weather permitting, the fleet went out three or four days a week, and usually came home with a good catch.
There was a certain amount of attempted sedition, but Mr. Zachary was upsides with that all right. On one occasion, having got wind of a plot to murder him, he gave out that he would hang anyone who could be proved to be implicated. Nobody was; the threat was sufficient to scupper the conspiracy.
Not infrequently Paul and I, just the two of us, were employed on further goodwill visits to local chiefs. I won’t say that initially we didn’t feel nervous, but Mr. Zachary’s confidence in us proved sounder than our confidence in ourselves. Among the Foulahs at Timbo I was always sure of a welcome, for they were kind enough to credit me with having contributed a lot to their trade agreement with the Colony. Visiting King Bill was a more ticklish business; but we managed to bring off what Mr. Zachary wanted and to come home in one piece. Of the second King Tom — a nasty bit of work — I was frankly afraid and almost went the length of begging Mr. Zachary not t
o send us. However, we survived, although I had the impression that King Tom spared us only because we were fish too small for his net. On our return I warned Mr. Zachary to expect an armed attack by King Tom; and this in fact took place in less than a year after he and we had finally left for home.
The diplomatic mission that remains most strongly in my memory is the one which Mr. Zachary told the two of us to make to a certain King Afreera, whose realm lay in the further interior, well beyond the neighbouring tribes with whom we had more-or-less friendly relations. This King Afreera was notorious as an avid slave-trader, not only making war on his neighbours for no better reason than to take prisoners for slaves, but even selling his own people when he thought he could get away with it. Mr. Zachary wanted to know more about King Afreera’s subjects and his régime, about the economy, the approximate size of the population, how his men went about his dirty work, his contacts with the still deeper interior and so on. He was wondering how much minatory pressure the king might be able to bring to bear on our friendly tribes.
We were provided with an interpreter — a freed slave, formerly a subject of King Afreera who, he told us, wouldn’t want to try to sell him twice – and an armed party of twelve men from the militia. We took along twenty bottles of indifferent whisky as a present for the king.
Well, we got there in three days, just about; smartened ourselves up as best we could, and next morning had an audience of King Afreera, a burly, rough-looking man aged about forty, who wore a crown of silver set with rubies and emeralds; and was attended by some twenty or thirty warriors, plus about a dozen quite attractive women, some of whom looked like Arabs and others like people from India. We didn’t take to him. He was not even trying to be friendly, but was chiefly concerned to impress us with his wealth and power. He said he had no use for coinage, either from the Arab merchants or from anyone else. What he would like to acquire from us was whisky, fine cloth, e.g., silk, velvet, satin, etc; artefacts made from brass, copper, iron and silver; guns, shot and gunpowder; women, and white slaves.
We replied that since our country lay beside the sea, we had ready access to wealth brought by ships from Europe. Whatever the King wanted could be brought by our ships, provided that he paid us generously and fairly. I asked him whether he had ever seen the sea. When he replied that he was so rich and powerful that he did not need to, we unrolled for him a painting on cloth, depicting Freetown, the estuary, the sea and the ships. This certainly caught his attention, and he asked a number of questions that showed that he was not lacking in shrewd intelligence. I told him that our King Zachary would be glad to receive him as a royal guest, and that if he thus honoured us, we would take him for a sail on the sea in one of our great ships; a hundred miles if he liked.
To this he replied that first, he would send a party from among his most exalted subjects to visit us and report back to him. We told him that they would be welcome, but that the actual details of a trade agreement would be best worked out between our principal merchants and his own. Merchants, I said, were the best people to discuss assets, artefacts and the relative values of trade goods. Why not let some of them come back with us, to get acquainted with our people and our products? We had only one reservation: we would not deal in slaves. (I wanted to make this clear, because if he sent us slaves Mr. Zachary would, of course, free them immediately, whereupon they would become a dead loss as merchandise and not representative of any value to us in weighing up a trade bargain.)
King Afreera thereupon said that in his experience the white men’s demand for slaves was inexhaustible. He could not imagine what they did with them all. I repeated that for the time being, at any rate, slaves must be left out of any trade agreement between us. The king, with the air of someone playing the ace of trumps, said what about white slaves? White slaves? I asked. Had he any white slaves? Yes, he replied: about nine or ten. They were scarce and thus very valuable and worth a great deal simply as possessions. Would we like to see them? I replied Yes, very much; whereupon the king came down from his throne, took Paul and myself by the arms and led us out of the presence chamber.
We came to a mud-brick building, the front of which consisted mostly of a row of doors. The king explained that behind the doors were rooms, each of which accommodated one of his white slaves. They were not like ordinary slaves, he said. They didn’t have to work. Simply by being his possessions, they were of unique value, and accordingly were well treated and looked after. They were, of course, guarded night and day.
At this moment one of his warriors came running up to us and told the king that an important tribal deputation had just arrived to speak to him. Would he wish to see them immediately? The king thereupon excused himself, ordered the head guard to look after us and went back to meet the newcomers.
We still had our interpreter, who conversed with the guard at some length and then told us that we could be admitted to individual rooms and were free to talk to the occupants. We nodded our assent, whereupon the guard opened one of the doors and gestured to us to go in.
The small room we entered was certainly well appointed by African standards. It contained a plank bed and a wooden chair and table, together with a free-standing cupboard, a row of hooks along one wall, a wash basin, a towel and a pail of water. This certainly bore out the king’s assertion that his “white slaves” were comfortably accommodated. On the opposite side of the room a half-door gave onto what looked like a fairly extensive garden.
On the bed a bearded white man was lying on his side, naked except for a loincloth. I could see that he was not asleep but his eyes were closed and he took no notice of us as we came in. The guard called to him “Barz, barz,” at which he opened his eyes, looked at us but did not sit up. He seemed entirely apathetic, so that I wondered whether he was ill. I sat down on the edge of the bed, took one of his hands in mine and said in English, “What’s your country? Can you understand what I’m saying?”
At this he sprang up into a sitting position, so quickly that I myself reacted by jerking backwards. He said slowly, “Angleesh? Are you – Angleesh?” I replied, “Yes. But are you?”
He said “Yes, but no speak, long time.”
Now, looking into his face – the face of a man more-or-less my own age – I was visited by a vague, here-and-gone feeling that I had seen him before. I could make nothing of this, however.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Basla Towneelo,” he replied.
“But you’re English, aren’t you? You have an English name?”
Then, in a flash, I recognised him. I put my hands on his shoulders and cried out “Basil! You’re Basil Townley!”
He frowned, shook his head and buried his face in his hands.
But now I was in no doubt. I pulled his hands down and raised his face with a hand under his bearded chin. “You’re Basil, Basil Townley, aren’t you? I’m Daniel! Don’t you remember Captain Hawkshot’s slave-ship?”
He replied slowly, “Yes. I’m — Basil – Townley — ’course. You’re — you’re Daniel?”
I turned to the interpreter and said, “Will both of you please leave us?”
He spoke with the guard and then answered, “Absolutely not. He must not leave you.”
“Then please remain silent while we talk,”
They plainly did not like this, but I took no notice of them and continued talking to Basil. He was groping for English, and as we went on, it returned to him more and more easily.
He said he had lost count of time and almost forgotten that he was English. He recalled being taken away by Ushumbo. He recounted – here a stumbling phrase and there another – how Ushumbo had degraded and brutalised him until he had become as crushed as any subjugated slave could be. He had been bullied out of any trace of self-respect and had virtually lost all sense of himself as a man. Ushumbo used to show him off to people as a fine example of a white man, and would often starve him; after which, to entertain his associates, he would withhold his food until he had fir
st performed tricks, like a dog, many of which were disgusting and obscene.
He knew vaguely that Ushumbo had become rich through slave-dealing and had travelled to many coastal countries, always making money. He could not remember when they had arrived at the court of King Afreera. King Afreera had told Ushumbo that he collected white slaves and after a lot of haggling had bought him. He had lived here ever since and had accepted it with a kind of contentment, since at least he was not ill-treated. He looked for nothing more.
I began speaking about getting him back with us to Sierra Leone and then to England, but found that I had said too much too soon. He replied that he had no wish to be released. Release would mean a return to a life he had long forgotten, a kind of previous incarnation that he had finished and done with. If he were to return to England he would not be able to cope with life – with strange people, with the situations and demands made on him, with the necessity of getting a living. Here, there was none of these things and he was glad to have lost them.
I thought, he’s like someone with frozen hands and feet who dreads the pain he will have to suffer as they thaw out. And then Yes, but once he has suffered it, the pain will stop and he will be back to normality. I said “You must agree that you’re living here in a kind of prolonged trance; a stupor; a dream. And you don’t want to wake up and come back to reality.” He answered that he was, indeed, happy to remain in the dream until he died.
Suddenly another idea came into my head, and for this, I thought, I had Mr. Zachary to thank, even though he didn’t know it.
“Can you remember the slaves on the shore of the lagoon at Lekki?” I asked, “and how you and I refused to obey when we were ordered to whip them?”
He said, “I think I remember.”
“And do you remember how the two of us were browbeaten by Captain Hawkshot? He asked us whether we would obey in future, when Jack Wain told us to whip the slaves.”
Basil said nothing and there came a pause. At length he said, “Yes, he asked us whether we’d obey orders.”
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