Flash For Freedom! fp-3

by George MacDonald Fraser

  Those who were selected were herded out of the barracoons into a long railed place like a sheep pen, all jammed together with three black guards either side, armed with whips and pistols. There was a narrow gate at the other end, just wide enough to let one slave through at a time, and the two biggest guards were stationed there. As each nigger emerged they seized him and flung him face down beside an iron brazier full of glowing coals, and two of Sanchez's Dago pals clapped a branding iron on his shoulder. He would squeal like blazes, and the niggers in the pen would try to crowd back out the other end, but the guards lashed them on, and another would be hauled out and branded the same way. The screaming and weeping in the pen was something to hear; everyone who could was on hand to watch, and there was much merriment at the antics of the niggers, blubbering before they were burned, and hopping and squealing afterwards.

  Spring was there for the branding of the wenches, to see that it was done lightly, just below the ankle on the inside, in the case of the better-looking ones. "Who the d—-l wants a young wench with scars on her backside?" he growled. "Even if we ain't selling fancies, the less marking the better; the Legrees tell me the Southern ladies don't want even their field women burned these days.22 So have a care with those irons, you two, and you, doctor, slap on that grease with a will."

  This was to Murphy, who sat beyond the brazier with a huge tub of lard between his feet. As each branded nigger was pulled forward one of the black guards would thrust the burned shoulder or ankle under Murphy's nose; he would take a good look at it and then slap a handful of the lard on the wound, crying either, "There's for you, Sambo", or "That'll pretty you up, acushla"; he was half full of booze, as usual, and from time to time would apply himself to his bottle and then cry encouragement to the niggers as they came through, or break into a snatch of raucous song. I can see him now, swaying on his stool, red face glistening, shirt hanging open over the red furze on his chest, plastering on the grease with his great freckled hand and chanting:

  "Al-though with lav-ish kind-ness

  The gifts of Go-od are strewn,

  The heath-en in his blind-ness

  Bows down to wood and sto-one."

  When he was done with them the heathen were pushed through a series of wooden frames set up close by the Balliol College's gangplanks. One was six feet by two, another slightly smaller, and a third smaller still. By means of these the slaves were sized, and sent up one of three gangplanks accordingly; the biggest ones were for the bottom of the slave deck, the middle-sized for the first tier of shelves, and the smallest for the top tier, but care was taken to separate men and women — a tall wench or a little chap could have got in among the wrong sex, and Spring wouldn't have that. He insisted that the women should be berthed forward of the first bulkhead and the men all aft of it, and since they would be chained up they wouldn't be able to get up to high jinks — I didn't see why they shouldn't, myself, but Spring had his own reasons, no doubt.

  Once up the planks, though, the really hard work began. I didn't know much about it, but I had to work with the hands who stowed the slaves, and I soon picked up the hang of it. As each slave was pushed down the hatch, he was seized by a waiting seaman and forced to lie down on the deck in his allotted place, head towards the side of the ship, feet towards the centre, until both sides of the deck were lined with them. Each man had to go in a space six feet by fifteen inches, and now I saw why there had been so much argument over that extra inch; if they were jammed up tight, or made to lie on their right sides, you could get ever so many more in.

  This was the hard part, for the slaves were terrified, stupid, and in pain from their branding they wriggled and squirmed, on the deck and wouldn't be still, and the hands had to knock them about or lay into the most imruly ones with a rope's end. One huge buck, bawling and with tears streaming down his face, made a dash for the hatch, but Sullivan knocked him flat with a hand-spike, threw him into place, and terrified the others by shaking a cat-o'-nine-tails at them, to let them see what they might hope to get if they misbehaved.

  When they were placed, a shackle was clapped round each right ankle, and a long chain threaded through it, until they were all stowed, when the chain was made fast to the bulkheads at either end. Soon there were four lines of niggers flat on the deck, with a space up the middle between them, so that the seamen could stand there to pack the later arrivals into the shelves.

  It's not that I'm an abolitionist by any means, but by the end of that day I'd had my bellyful of slaving. The reek of those musky bodies in that deck was abominable; the heat and stench grew by the hour, until you'd have wondered that anything could survive down there. They howled and blubbered, and we were fagged out with grabbing brown limbs and tugging and shoving and mudging them up with our feet to get the brutes to lie close. They fouled themselves where they lay, and before the job was half done the filth was indescribable. We had to escape to the deck every half hour to souse ourselves with salt water and drink great draughts of orange juice, before descending into that fearful pit again, and wrestle again with wriggling black bodies that stunk and sweated and went everywhere but where you wanted them. When it was finally done, and Sullivan ordered all hands on deck, we climbed out dead beat, ready to flop down anywhere and go to sleep.

  But not with John Charity Spring about. He must go down to inspect, and count the rows, and kick a black body into place here and tug another one there, before he was satisfied. He d––d our eyes for letting 'em soil the deck, and ordered the whole place hosed down, niggers and all; they dried where they lay in no time, of course, and the steam came out of the hatches like smoke.

  I looked down at it just before the hatch gratings went on, and it was an indiscribable sight. Row upon row of black bodies, packed like cigars in a box, naked and gleaming, the dark mass striped with glittering dots of light where the eyes rolled in the sooty faces. The crying and moaning and whimpering blended into a miserable anthem that I'll never forget, with the clanking of the chains and the rustle of hundreds of incessantly stirring bodies, and the horrible smell of musk and foulness and burned flesh.

  My stomach doesn't turn easy, but I was sickened. If it had been left to me, then and there, I'd have let 'em go, the whole boiling of them, back to their lousy jungle. No doubt it's a deplorable weakness in my character, but this kind of raw work was a thought too much for me. Mind you, sit me down in my club, or at home, and say, "Here, Flash, there's twenty thou for you if you'll say 'aye' to a cargo of black ivory going over the Middle Passage", and I ain't saying I'ld turn you down. Nor do I flinch when someone whips a black behind or claps on a brand — but enough's enough, and when you've looked into the hold of a newladen slaver for the first time, you know what hell is like.23

  I mentioned this to Sullivan, and he spat. "You think that's bell, do you? First blackbird voyage I made, as a young hand, we took three hundred coons from the Gallinas, and we were setting out for Rio when a Limey sloop tacks on to us. It was a Portuguese flag we carried, with a yaller-black Dago skipper in command; he saw sure enough they were going to take us." He looked at me with his head on one side. "Can you guess what that Christian Angolese son-of-a-b—-h did? G'wan, have a guess."

  I said I had heard of slave cargoes being thrown overboard, so that when the Navy came up all the evidence had gone. Sullivan laughed.

  "There wasn't time for that, our skipper figures. But we were carryin' palm oil as well as slaves, and had a good deal of trade powder left over. So he set the ship on fire, an' we took to the boats. Navy couldn't get near her, so she just burned out an' sank — with three hundred niggers aboard. I wouldn't care to guess how many of 'em were lucky enough to drown." He laughed again, without any mirth at all. "And you think that's hell, down there? I guess you also think that Mr J. C. Spring is a real tough skipper!"

  Well, I did, and if there were bigger swine afloat in the earlies I'm only glad I never met them. But Sullivan's story gave me the shudders all right, for it reminded me that the next stage
of our voyage was the notorious Middle Passage, with all the dangers of pursuit and capture, to say nothing of hurricane and shipwreck.

  "D'you think there's any chance of … of that happening with us?" says I, and Sullivan snorted.

  "I'll say this for Spring — he don't lose ships, or cargoes. He believes in keeping the sharks hungry. Any Navy coaster that comes up with us is in for a h—l of a chase — less'n she's a steamer an' catches us in a flat calm."

  Here was a fearful thought. "What then?" says I.

  "Then — why, we fight her," says he, and left me prey to a nausea that had nothing to do with the heat or the slave-stench or my weariness. Having lately been at grips with fighting nigger women, I could see myself shortly assisting in a running-sea-battle against the Royal Navy — just what was needed to liven up the cruise. And by jove, it nearly came to that, too, and on our very first hour out from that abominable coast.

  We dropped down river early the next morning, to catch the ebb tide, I believe, and it seemed a piece of lunacy to me to try those shoals and islands in the half light. However, Spring knew his business; he took the wheel himself, and with only the foretopsail spread we drifted slowly between the green banks, the leadsmen chanting quietly, and the first hint of dawn beginning to lighten the sky over the black jungle mass astern. It was a queer, eery business, gliding so silently along, with only the mumble of the slaves, the creak of rope and timber, and the gurgle of water to break the stillness, and then we were clear of the last banks and the sun shot a great beam of light ahead of us across the placid surface of the sea.

  It was all very beautiful, in its way, but just as Sullivan was roaring the watch up to set more sail the idyll was marred by the appearance round the southern headland of a small, waspishlooking vessel, standing slowly out on a course parallel to our own. It happened that I saw her first, and drew my commander's attention to her with a sailor-like hail of: "Jesus! Look at that!"

  Spring just stared for a moment, and then says: "Foresail and main-tops'l, Mr Sullivan," before getting his glass out for a look.

  "White ens'n," says he presently, without any emotion. "Take a look, mister. Twenty-gun sloop, I'd say."

  Sullivan agreed, and while my bowels did the polka the two of them just stood and watched her as though she'd been a pleasure steamer. I didn't know much about sailing, as you're aware, but even I could see that she was moving more briskly than we were, that there was nothing but light airs stirring the surface, and that she wasn't more than two miles away. It looked to me as though the Balliol College's voyage was over before it had rightly begun, which merely shows how ignorant I was.

  For an hour, while my gorge rose steadily, we watched her; we were doing no more than creep out from the coast, and the sioop did the same, only a little faster, and converging gradually all the time on our course. I could see that eventually we would be bound to meet, if we held our courses, and I had an idea that in light wind the sailing advantage would be all with the smaller vessel. But Spring seemed unconcerned; from time to time he would turn and survey the coast behind us, and the sky, converse shortly with Sullivan, and then go back to watching the sloop, with his hands stuck deep in his pockets.

  He was waiting confidently, I now know, for a wind, and he got it just when I had finally given up all hope. The sails flapped, Spring barked an order, and at a shout from Sullivan the hands were racing aloft; in the same moment the boom of a shot sounded over the water, and a pillar of spray rose out of the sea a few hundred yards from our port bow.

  "Burn your powder, you useless son of a Geordie coaster skipper, you!" bawls Spring from the wheel. "Look alive, Mr Sullivan!" And he sent out a perfect volley of orders as the Balliol College heeled gently and lifted to the first puffs of wind, and then I found myself tailing on a rope with the others, hauling for dear life and wondering what the d—-l would happen next.

  If I were a nautical man, no doubt I could tell you, but I'm not, thank God; the mysteries of ship handling are as obscure to me today as they were fifty years ago. If I were Bosun McHearty I daresay I could describe how we jibed with our futtock gans'ls clewed up to the orlop bitts, and weathered her, d'ye see, with a lee helm and all plain sail in the bilges, burn me buttocks. As it was, I just stuck like a shadow to a big Portugal nigger of the deck watch, called Lord Peabody, and tailed on behind him with the pulley-hauley, while Spring and Sullivan bawled their jargon, the men aloft threw themselves about like acrobats, and the Balliol College began to surge forward at greater speed. There was another shot from the sloop, and an ironic cheer from our fellows — why I couldn't imagine, for our pursuer was soon cracking along famously, and I could make out her ensign plainly, and the figures on her deck, all far too close for comfort. I saw, in the intervals of scampering about after Peabody, and hauling on the ropes, that she would be able to fire in earnest soon, and I was just commending my soul to God and wondering if I could turn Queen's Evidence, when Spring let loose another volley of orders, there was a tremendous cracking and bellying of sails overhead, and the Balliol College seemed to spin round on her heel, plunge over with a lurch that brought my breakfast up, and then go bowling away across the track of the sloop.

  I don't understand it, of course, but in the next hour Spring executed a similar manoeuvre half a dozen times, while the wind freshened, and although the sloop copied our movements, so far as I could see, she always somehow finished up farther away — no doubt any yachtsman could explain it. The hands cheered and laughed, although you could hardly hear them for the fearful howling that was coming from below decks, where the slaves were spewing and yelling in terror at the bucketing of the ship. And then we were standing out to sea again, and the sloop was away off our quarter, still flying along, but making no headway at all.

  Only then did Spring hand over the wheel and come to the stern rail, where he delivered a catechism to the distant Navy vessel, calling them lubberly sons of dogs and shaking his fist at them.

  "There's where the tax-payer's money goes!" he roared. "That's what's supposed to defend us against the French! Look at them! I could sail rings round 'em in a Blackwall coal lighter! Quo, quo, scelesti ruitis,*[* Where are you hastening, fools?] eh? I tell you, Mr Sullivan, a crew of All Souls dons could do better on a raft! What the blazes are they letting into the Navy these days? He'll be some rum-soaked short-haul pensioner, no doubt — either that or a beardless brat with a father in the Lords and some ladylike Mama whoring round the Admiralty. My stars, wouldn't I like to put them all to sea under Bully Waterman,24 or let 'em learn their trade in an opium clipper with a Down East Yankee skipper and a Scotch owner — you hear that, you Port Mahon bumboatman, you? You ought to bean the beach!"

  It was fine stuff, but wasted since the sloop was miles away; by afternoon she was just a speck on the horizon, and the coast of Africa had vanished behind us. The ease of our escape, I was told, all came of Spring knowing his weather, for standing away from the Slave coast was evidently a most unchancy business, and many slavers had been caught in the calms that so often beset them there. But some of the deltas and river mouths could be relied on to give you wind, and Spring knew all about this; it was also true that he was a first-rate seaman with a prime crew, and together they were probably a match for anything. We did sight another patrol vessel on the following day, but we were tearing along at such a rate that she never came near us, and Spring didn't even interrupt his dinner.

  It was blowing fairly stiffish now, and the slaves had an abominable time. For the first few days they just lay howling and weeping in their sea-sickness, but Spring insisted that the huge coppers and tubs in which their pulse porridge was made should be kept at work, and by flogging one of the bucks down on the slave deck in the sight of his fellows he terrified them into eating, ill as they were. Murphy was constantly at work, especially among the women, to make sure that none died, and twice a day the hoses were turned on to scour out the filth which would otherwise have bred an epidemic in no time.

  Abo
ut the fourth day, the wind dropped, the slaves stopped spewing, and the cooks who tended the mess tubs became the hardest-worked men on the ship. One thing the Balliol College didn't stint to its human cargo, and that was food — which was good business, of course. Spring also insisted that lime juice be issued, and the slaves forced to drink it — they hated it, but when they saw it was that or the cat they swilled it down fast enough. They were still in a fearful funk, of course, since they had no idea of what the ocean was like, and couldn't seem to get used to the rolling of the ship; when they weren't eating or sleeping they just lay there in their long black rows, wailing and rolling their eyes like frightened sheep. There was no spirit in them at all, and I began to see why the slavers thought of them not as humans, but as animals.

  Every day they went through a curious exercise which was called dancing. They were brought up on deck in batches, and forced to caper about for half an hour, leaping up and down and trotting round the deck. This of course was just to keep them in trim; they didn't like that, either, at first, and we had to smarten them with rope's ends to get them moving. But after the first few times they began to enjoy it, and it was the most ludicrous sight to see them skipping and shuffling round the deck, clapping their hand's and even crooning to themselves, the bolder spirits grinning and rolling their eyes — they were just like children, forgetting the misery of their condition, and sky-larking about, quite delighted if the hands cried encouragement to them. One of the fellows had a fiddle, on which he would play jigs and reels, and the niggers would try to out-do each other in capering to the music.

  The men got over their fears faster than the women, who danced with much less jollity, although everyone on the ship was always on hand to watch them. You couldn't have called any of 'em pretty, with their pug faces and great woolly mops of hair, but they had fine shapely bodies, and none of us had seen a proper woman for near on six weeks. The sight of those naked black bodies shuffling and swaying got me into a fever the first time I saw it, and the others were the same, licking their lips and muttering when was Murphy the surgeon going to set about his business?