Book 17 - The Commodore

by Patrick O'Brian

  These he chewed with a little lime, carrying the leaves in a leather pouch and the lime in a heart-shaped Peruvian silver box: but of late he had seemed to observe a diminution in their powers, possibly caused by long keeping. He did not appear to feel quite the same markedly anaesthetic effect in his mouth and pharynx: it might be no more than the result of long habituation, but he resolved that as soon as the squadron was within reach of Brazil he would send over for a new supply, and this evening, since he wished to play particularly well, he took an unusually large dose. He did play well: they both played well, and they thoroughly enjoyed their music. But whereas the Commodore, heavy with work, port and toasted cheese, went straight to sleep the moment his head touched the pillow of his swinging cot, Stephen found the wakeful coca-leaves as active as ever—they far outdid coffee in banishing even the thought of sleep—and as he wished to write up his notes in the morning he took a powerful sleeping draught, together with a bolus of Java mandragore, and thrust balls of wax deep into his ears against the ship noises, the changing of the watch, the eventual holystoning, scrubbing and swabbing of the decks, the screech and thump of the pumps. Long practice had made him proficient at this exercise; but he was in some ways a simple creature and he had never perceived that on every succeeding Lady Day he was a year older, and that he was now exhibiting a vigorous young man's dose for a middle-aged body.

  It was often difficult to wake him in these circumstances. Today it was harder still.

  'I beg pardon, sir,' said Wilkins, the senior master's mate, to Harding, now the Bellona's first lieutenant, 'but I can't wake him. I plucked off the clothes—he offered to bite, and then curled up again, though we both hallooed in his ear and shook the cot.'

  It was Killick who brought him on deck at last, partly washed, partly clothed, but unshaven; stupid, sullen, blinking in what light there was.

  'There you are, Doctor,' cried Jack, very loud. 'Good morning to you. I hope you slept?'

  'What's afoot?' asked Stephen, peering heavily about. The squadron was hove to, and in their midst, with her topsails struck, lay a shabby merchantman, wearing Spanish colours, somewhat to the windward of the Bellona. As he looked so the breeze wafted a sickening reek across the deck, and he was not surprised to hear Jack say, 'She is a slaver. Mr Whewell knows the vessel, the Nancy, formerly belonging to Kingston but lately sold. The master is coming aboard. I should like you to make out his nation if you can, and look at his papers, if they are foreign.' ('Lord, how I hope he is a wrong 'un,' he added in a private undertone.)

  Aboard the slaver smoke was already pouring from the galley; large numbers of black, naked women, girls and children stood about the deck; the boat was slowly lowered down, and as the rim of the sun blazed above the horizon the master came across with his papers and an interpreter.

  'Do you speak English, sir?' asked Captain Pullings.

  'Very little, señor,' said the master in a foreign accent. 'Him interpret.'

  'You speak Spanish, however?' said Stephen in that language.

  'Oh si, si, señor,' with an attempt at cheerful ease.

  They exchanged a few sentences. Stephen held out his hand for the passport, and after a glance he tossed it overboard. The man uttered a howl and made as though to dive after it, but checked at the view of the populated sea. 'He is an imposter,' said Stephen. 'An Englishman. He knows no Spanish. His papers are false. You may safely seize the ship.' And to Jack, 'Let us go across.'

  Jack nodded and called to Whewell. 'There is nothing like the dawn for these discoveries,' he said as they pulled over the water in his barge. 'Time and again I have found a prize, and to leeward too, just before the first light.'

  But his voice changed entirely as they neared the slaver: the stench grew worse, the water still more filthy, and he fell abruptly silent at the sight of two small girls, grey and dead, going over the side. For a moment they were disputed by sharks hardly longer than themselves, until a huge fish, gliding from under the keel, tore them apart.

  The negroes did not understand what was happening; they had no notion of rescue, but only of some change of captivity, probably for the worse; they were frightened; at the same time they were desperate for their food and water. Whewell tried to reassure them in a variety of languages and the lingua franca of the Coast: apart from some of the small children, they did not believe him.

  The men had not been let out yet, but now the hatches were lifting and the first group came staggering up the ladder, still writhed and bent from their all-night crouch with headroom of two feet six inches at the best. Jack, Stephen, Whewell and Bonden went down into the unbreathable fetor, watched nervously by the slaver's hands, who held their whips in an uncertain, awkward fashion. The slaves farthest aft came out, scarcely looking at them, rubbing knees and elbows and galled heads: they were chained in pairs: their expressions upon the whole were inhuman—apathy with underlying dread—but no evident single emotion.

  The files seemed endless, scores and scores of bowed, thin, wretched men, naked and a lightless black; but in time it thinned and almost stopped. Whewell said, 'Now we have reached the sick, no doubt. They are always stowed forward, where there is a little air through the hawse-holes. Perhaps you would like to come and see, Doctor?'

  Stephen, who had known some shocking prison infirmaries, lunatic asylums and poor-house wards, had a professional armour; so, from his voyages in a slaver, had Whewell; Jack had none—the gun-deck amidships in a hard-fought fleet action, the slaughter-house as it was called, had in no way prepared him for this, and his head swam. He walked forward doggedly after them, bowed under the low beams: he heard Stephen give orders for the removal of the irons, saw him examine several men too weak to move, in the dim light and stifling air, understood him to say that there was dysentery here, that hands were needed, water and swabs.

  He reached the deck; the slaver's men looked at him in dismay, and in a strangled, savage, barking voice he ordered six below with buckets and swabs, six to the pumps, and four to look alive there in the galley—all whips overboard. Some of the slaves looked at him, but without much curiosity; some were already washing; most sat there on the deck, still bowed.

  'Bellona,' he hailed.

  'Sir?'

  'Send that fellow over, with his men. A file of Marines and an officer; the armourer and his mate. The surgeon's assistants.'

  He called for the ship's steward, told him to spread all the cabin bedding out on deck, and as the sick came up, supported or carried, he had them laid upon it. The Nancy's master came aboard. 'Take this swab,' said Jack, bending over his appalled face as he climbed the side. 'Take this swab and clean up below, clean up below, clean up below.'

  There was never at any time the least question of disobedience in the slaver: on the contrary, all hands showed an obscurely disgusting zeal. And now, as the Marines took up their station, a double rank right aft, with their muskets at their sides, food was coming from the galley in mess-kits for ten, and the slaves formed their habitual groups, almost filling the deck: five hundred at the least.

  'Mr Whewell,' said Jack, 'Can you tell them that they are not to be harmed, nor to be sold, but to be set free when we reach Sierra Leone in a couple of days?'

  'I shall try, sir, with what smattering I possess.' This he did, loud and clear, in several versions. Half a dozen black men showed some interest, some comprehension: the rest ate wolfishly, their eyes fixed on vacancy or on a world that had no meaning.

  'Mr Whewell,' said Jack again, 'are you of opinion that it would be safe to knock off their irons?'

  'Yes, sir, so long as the Marines are here. But I believe the hands should be taken off before nightfall: and a strong prize-crew, well-armed, would prevent any trouble in the darkness.'

  Jack nodded. 'If there is anything the Doctor needs—boats, hammocks, stretchers or the like'—for Stephen had set up a sick-berth in the ravaged cabin—'let Captain Pullings know at once. You will be relieved before the end of the watch. Davies,' he said to one o
f his bargemen, a big, ugly, violent seaman who had followed him from ship to ship, 'you see that those fellows at the pumps and down below are kept busy. You may start them if they are slack in stays.'

  He returned to the Bellona, took off all his clothes, stood long under a jet of clear water, retired to his cabin and there sat considering, revolving the possibilities open to him, thinking closely, taking notes, and writing two letters to Captain Wood at Sierra Leone, the one official, the other private.

  During this time, or part of it, Stephen sat with Whewell on the slaver's capstan, the wind being abaft her quarter and the air clean as the squadron stood south-east. He was reasonably satisfied with his patients; he had put salve and clean linen on many and many an iron-chafed wrist, and there was a somewhat more human feeling on the well-fed deck.

  'From your experience, would you say that this vessel was in a very bad condition?' he asked.

  'Oh no, not at all,' said Whewell. 'For a ship fourteen days out of Whydah, I should say she was doing rather well. No. It is ugly, of course, and I believe the Commodore was sadly shocked; but there was little dysentery, and that in an early stage and it can be far, far worse. Perhaps the ugliest I ever saw was a brig called the Gongora that we chased for three days, off the coast. All that time the slaves were of course kept below—no food, precious little air with her running before the wind—and when at last we took her and opened the hatches there were two hundred dead below: dysentery, starvation, suffocation, misery, and above all fighting before they grew too weak to beat one another to death with their irons. The wretched brig carried almost equal numbers of Fantis and Ashantis, mortal enemies who had been at war, each side selling its prisoners in the same market, and they crammed in together.'

  'I beg pardon, sir,' said a tall master's mate, rising up the side, 'but I am come to relieve Mr Whewell. The Commodore wishes to see him when he has washed and changed.'

  'Mr Whewell,' said Jack, 'correct me if I am wrong, but I believe it is the rule at Sierra Leone to saw captured and condemned slavers in half, with an estimated auction-price being distributed as prize-money.'

  'Yes, sir. Formerly the really fast craft were simply bought by the merchants and used again in the trade.'

  'Very well. You have also told the Doctor and me about the Kroomen, described as capital seamen, pilots for various stretches of the Coast, intelligent and reliable.'

  'Yes, sir. They have always had that reputation, and I have found them to deserve it through and through. I have had a great deal to do with them, ever since I was a boy. And what is more, most of them speak Coast English well and understand it even better.'

  'I am glad to hear it. Now here are two letters for Captain Wood, the governor. I ask him to have this ship, this Nancy, condemned at once, out of hand, and for her to be moored in the roads once she is empty. And I ask him to have a powder-boy, a loaded powder-hoy, ready for me when the squadron arrives. If he will do these things, and I have little or no doubt of it, I desire you to use your very best endeavours to recruit at least one good Krooman for each of the squadron's boats from the six-oared cutter up, in order to guide them by night to raid Sherbro Island and perhaps the Gallinas river. Do you think this feasible, Mr Whewell?'

  'With this steady leading breeze, perfectly feasible, sir. And I have no fear for the Kroomen. There is a Kroo town in Sierra Leone with some hundreds of them, men I have known these five and twenty years; and they hate slavery—will have nothing to do with it.'

  'I am very happy to hear you say so. Mr Adams will give you your order and whatever money you judge necessary for the Kroomen. You will go aboard the Ringle as soon as possible and proceed to Sierra Leone without the loss of a minute. Take Mr Reade with you: he handles her beautifully. And you may carry a press of sail, Mr Whewell. Good day to you.'

  Chapter Eight

  Late in the afternoon dark clouds, remarkably dark clouds, began gathering over the hills behind Freetown; they progressed against the wind for an hour until half the sky was black and the heat still more oppressive. Then much the same happened in the west, out at sea, but now the clouds were darker still, a fine solid black; and as the sea-breeze set in they swallowed the low sun entirely and hurried across to cover the whole sky with a hot, lowering pall.

  The sea-breeze also brought in five ships, dimly seen but undoubtedly men-of-war bound for the Cape and India: the powder-boy that had sailed from the naval yard would certainly have been for them. And since a number of Kroomen had also put off in a schooner it was likely that among them was a merchantman, taking advantage of their protection until she turned off eastwards, trading along the Grain Coast, the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast for pepper, palm-oil, elephants' teeth and gold-dust. There were some foolish rumours that the preventive squadron was back, rumours based on the bringing-in and instant condemnation of the Nancy, now lying in the road; but they were dismissed on the grounds that the Nancy had been brought in by the Governor's own sloop, no doubt acting as a privateer—Captain Wood, like his predecessors, could grant a commission: and who was more likely to do so than such a knowing officer? Besides, who had ever heard of the preventive squadron possessing a two-decker? For even in this light—a light that might well presage the end of the world—not one, but two of these important ships could be seen.

  'Thou art the father of lies,' said a Syrian merchant. 'Nothing whatsoever can be seen in this light, or rather this darkness visible. Though I admit it is very like the death of time.'

  'Thou art the offspring of an impotent mole and a dissolute bat,' replied his friend. 'I can distinctly make out two decks on the second from the front: and on the third. They all appear to be bearing down on the Nancy.'

  'Balls,' said the first merchant. But hardly were these words out before the first of the line turned to starboard until her side was parallel with that of the Nancy and at a distance of two hundred yards she let fly with a rolling broadside whose brilliant flashes lit the whole mass of cloud and whose voice, having deafened the town, roared to and fro among the hills. In the space of three astonished exclamations, no more, the whole of this was repeated, but with even greater force, with stronger, longer stabs of fire and the deeper, louder voice of thirty-two-pounder guns: and so it went, right along the line of ships until the last. The silence, with powder-smoke still billowing across the bay, was strangely shocking, and birds flew in every direction. But after the briefest pause there rose a universal sound of shrill amazement from the whole wide-scattered town, followed by conjecture: it was the French; it was the Patriarch Abraham come again; it was the captain of an English man-of-war enforcing the law against slavery. He had caught the wretched Knittel of the Nancy sailing under Spanish colours, had chained him and all his men to the mast and was now shooting and burning them to death. This explanation gained general support as the squadron wore and came back again, now thundering and bellowing two ships at a time, so that the spectators, the entire population of Freetown, could scarcely hear their own voices, though raised to a most uncommon pitch. And during the pause between this run and the next, when once again the starboard broadsides uttered their prolonged and deliberate roar, the Bellona alone flinging several hundred and twenty-six pounds of iron at each discharge, the news spread from deafened ear to deafened ear that Kande Ngobe, who had a telescope, had clearly seen the mutilated victims in their chains: so had Amadu N'Diaje, the clear-sighted man; so had Suleiman bin Hamad, who stated that some were still alive.

  So was the wretched vessel: her side pierced through and through, she lay there yet, very low on the smooth sea, but, since she had never showed a strake below her waterline, still afloat. Yet now, after another prodigious crescendo that lit the sky and the town, filling the streets with shadows, the line moved in for the short-range carronades to come into play, and another voice of war was heard, the high-pitched barking crack of the genuine smasher, firing much faster than the great guns and with heavier shot than most, so fast and so heavy that the slaver could stand no more than
a single passage before sliding down and down into sea now strangely thick with sand, as thick as a moderate gruel, the result of conflict between the changing tide and a local current.

  'House your guns, house your guns, there,' the cry came down the line, and the grinning crews housed the hot cannon trim and taut. Supper was at last served out, shockingly late: and when all hands had anchored ship in twenty-five-fathom water the watch below turned in, still smiling; for firing live, and at such a target, was one of the most gratifying occupations in a seaman's life.

  'No Ministry could have asked for a greater éclat, a greater din,' said Stephen, still rather loud, as they sat in the reconstituted, but still powder-smelling, cabin. 'Nor a more convincing proof of the squadron's presence.'

  'It really was a right Guy Fawkes' night,' said Jack. 'I am infinitely obliged to James Wood for arranging things so cleverly and with such discretion—there were a score of details that I had not thought of at all, any one of which would have blown the gaff—that brilliant stroke of sending his own people out to bring the Nancy in, for example.'