There is not much to say for a sea voyage: the days are quite the same, except for the weather. I was fascinated by the billow and clatter of the sails, by the creaks and groans of the ship as wood slid against wood, expanding and contracting and turning and wrenching, and by the assured manner of the captain and the skill and daring of the crew. From Liverpool we sailed southward along the west coast of France and Portugal and then of Africa, until we picked up the trade winds before turning westward. I reminded myself that this was the same route that Christopher Columbus had taken, and I could not imagine the uncertainty faced by the men in those three small ships; the admiration I felt for their courage was immense. Of course, I had no idea of the very different sort of maelstrom I myself was sailing into.
Two days after we turned westward, we experienced dead calm—no wind at all, the sea as smooth as a fishpond. And then, later, as we approached the western Atlantic we were caught up, as I had feared, in hurricane weather. I had told my bedmates at Black Hill of the devastation that hurricanes can wreak, but it is quite another thing to actually find oneself in the midst of such a storm. For three days winds tossed us about mightily and the sea poured over the rails, but the ship and its crew bent to their task of getting us safely through, and they succeeded admirably. Beyond that, the trip was mostly uneventful, which is just about the best that can be said for a sailing expedition from the North Atlantic to the Caribbean.
Although I enjoyed the company of Stafford and Osmon, I often preferred being on my own. It was a pleasure to spend time alone, with no pressing responsibilities, and at those times I could not help but imagine what lay in store for me in Jamaica. Once more I took up Rob Roy, imagining Carrot voicing the words in my ear, reading it this time for Touch, who would have loved it, but who had died before it was even written. I was in the depths of such reading when I heard unusual sounds coming from the deck: a quick pounding of footsteps, rumblings of voices, and loud shouts followed by banging and thudding. Curious, I put my book aside and ventured to the deck, but by the time I arrived, a strained silence prevailed. It felt as if the whole world were holding its breath, as, indeed, the whole world of the Badger Guinea was. I moved closer to the crowd that had gathered—mostly sailors, but a few passengers as well, including Osmon—and I could see then Mr. Rowe, the first mate, whip in hand, glowering over one of the sailors. Bent over a stanchion, his back bare, the sailor awaited his punishment, but Mr. Rowe was speaking. I could not hear the words—the rush of the wind blew them away—but as his mouth moved I saw some of the sailors nodding in agreement, while one or two others glared behind Mr. Rowe’s back. I could not restrain myself from creeping closer, my eyes wide, my heart thudding, for I knew what I was about to see.
Mr. Rowe raised his arm, and with it the whip—a cat-o’-nine-tails, I realized—and brought it down smartly on the man’s back. The man made not a whimper that I could hear, and the cat came down again and again. By the second or third stripe I could see blood, and by then the sailor was making a kind of groaning noise. I clenched my teeth as I watched, sensing that it would be unmanly to turn away. It was the first time I ever saw someone whipping a human being as if he were an animal, but of course it would not be the last.
When it was over, Osmon and I stood together at the starboard rail, staring wordlessly into the ocean depths. “I suppose we shall have to get used to sights like that,” he said after a time.
“I can’t imagine it,” I responded.
“I had expected it with slaves,” he mused, “but among whites—”
I thought of Rufus Shap and wondered if a good beating would have made a difference. Mr. Wilson and Mr. Landes had made it clear that the working classes were quite different from us, but I still could not imagine being the one to administer the whip, and I hoped that I would not be called upon to do so.
Later, in our cabin, we three tried to fathom what kind of infraction on board a ship required a whipping. “Theft, I imagine,” Stafford said, “or insubordination. I suppose it happens.”
“Mutiny,” Osmon suggested.
The conversation moved on, but the scene haunted me for some time. I thought of poor Mouse, who was so afraid of being beaten by Mr. Lincoln at Black Hill. He had seemed a pitiful figure to me at the time, but this whipping made me understand that a spirit might be crushed in just such a manner.
But there was a great deal of beauty in the trip as well. On the forty-first morning, the rising sun shed a golden light upon the islands of Montserrat and Nevis, and between them the monstrous rock named Redonda, covered with seabirds. And the flying fish! Whole formations of them, slim and silvery, flinging themselves from the turquoise sea and just as quickly disappearing again under the waves. And dolphins, bounding in and out of the water, followed alongside the ship like a joyful honor guard.
I realized then that I was truly at last in the Caribbean, the place I had so often dreamed of at Black Hill, and I could not wait to see how my life would unfold. In the next few days we encountered other islands, to which we sailed close for safety, in case we should find pirate ships bearing down upon us. At Black Hill, pirates had seemed impossibly exciting, but now I understood what terrors they might hold. That part of the Caribbean was still infested with such ships, often schooners—favored for their speed and maneuverability—armed with a single twenty-four pounder that moved upon a swivel. Under Mr. Lincoln’s eye we had once built a wooden model of such a weapon, which is perhaps how I was able to notice that one of our Badger Guinea’s guns was itself an imitation. When I questioned the captain, he confessed that the ship had indeed lost one of its guns in a fierce storm on its last sailing, and this replacement was what they called a “Quaker,” for, even if ordered into battle, it would not fight.
Finally, more than six weeks after our departure, we sailed into Kingston Harbor. My heartbeat slowed and my eyes watered and I felt my hands gripping the rail as I stared at the pale, colonnaded buildings along the harbor, and saw palm trees up close for the first time. Stafford and Osmon were still below, packing, but I had done that the evening before, as I was determined to be on deck when we sailed into a place about which I had read and dreamed so much.
“Will someone be meeting you?” came a voice from behind.
I turned and saw it was Whitledge. I had had so little conversation with him that I had not even recognized his voice.
“I am not sure,” I said, a bit embarrassed to admit that I had no idea.
“Where will you be staying?” he persisted, and it dawned on me that he was actually being kind—was truly interested in me—despite all my rebuffs of him during the voyage.
“There is a house in Spanish Town I have access to,” I replied, not quite able to bring myself to say that it was, indeed, my own house now. I had the key to the house in my possession, and the address of it, as well as that of my father’s attorney—now mine—on papers in my purse.
“You ride, I assume,” he said.
“Of course.”
“I go beyond Spanish Town, to Clarendon. We can ride together as far as Spanish Town, if you wish.”
Suddenly I was grateful for an opportunity for companionship, and I turned more fully toward him. “I’d like that very much,” I said.
“Your friends are not traveling with you beyond Kingston?”
“No, they have other destinations.”
He raised his eyebrows at this but said only, “Meet me at Harty’s Tavern at noon. You will see it soon enough when you get ashore; it’s close to the customhouse. We shall have some dinner and then make our travel arrangements from there.”
“Very good,” I said with genuine gratitude.
He turned away and I watched him go. He did not seem like such a bad sort after all, and in this unfamiliar place I would need all the companionship and advice I could get. Stafford and Osmon, fine enough friends as they were, were even less able to make their ways in Jamaica than I was. In that respect, Whitledge was a godsend that I should have taken adva
ntage of earlier.
Chapter 2
The first thing one notices when one arrives in the West Indies from England is the light, and what it does to everything one sees. It is as if one has entered into a different world, where a veil has been removed, and the sky is suddenly more intensely blue, the sea the deepest turquoise, the buildings starker white, the flora more vibrantly colored. One is assaulted with so much at once: the dialects of the citizens, the screech of strange and brilliant-hued birds—even in the city—and the vast array of exotic fruits and vegetables laid out for purchase: pomegranates, pineapples, avocados, mangoes, coconuts; the sheer variety of it all bewilders the mind while entrancing the senses. And the smells! They were not the odors of an English summer: roses and strawberries and new-cut hay. Although I could not yet identify the ones that greeted me now, they were richer, more intense—well matched for the kaleidoscope of colors on the island. Only the smell of horse manure in the streets was the same, and even there, with the hotter sun, the odors were stronger and sharper. A passing shower struck—a downpour, really—but nearly as soon as it had started it was over and the sun shone strong and clear again. It was not at all like a gentle summer rain in England, and I could not have been more disoriented.
I had expected to see Africans on the island, of course, but I had not anticipated Chinese and East Indians as well, for there was at that time in the West Indies an unquenchable thirst for workers who could be paid near-slave wages, and shiploads of them had been brought in from East and South Asia.
I said hurried farewells to Stafford and Osmon, with vague promises among us to remain in contact. I gave them the address of my town house, and I watched them leave, making their ways in opposite directions. I did notice that they were nearly the only whites walking down the street, but it was only later that I learned how shameful it is to be a “walking buckra”—a white pedestrian—in Jamaica.
Harty’s Tavern was, as Whitledge had said, quite easy to find, but it was not yet noon, so I found myself a bit of shade and spent much of an hour just watching the bustle around me. Despite the August heat and humidity, which I found quite oppressive, negroes were hard at work on the docks nearby. They were as black as night, most of them, bare chested and dressed in only rough-cloth trousers, torn and faded. They wore no shoes, and yet they seemed to walk carelessly about without complaint. There was a gang leader, brown skinned instead of black, and wearing a sleeveless jacket and a hat, but still barefoot, holding a whip in his hand, but he seemed not to use it except to crack it above their heads to keep them moving, as one might do to a cart horse.
Few people were on the street at early midday, and those women who were in sight—nearly all of them negroes—carried parasols against the sun as any English lady would. Carriages that might have been seen in Maysbeck or Liverpool passed, carrying white passengers and driven by black men, and, strangely, there was generally a black man trotting along behind. I felt entirely disconcerted by these familiar trappings of English life exported to a world so different: the intense sun, the heat, the aromas, the constant reminders of slavery; and I wondered if I would ever get used to it all.
Shortly after noon Whitledge appeared with a dray, and he immediately set the driver to loading up my possessions beside Whitledge’s own pile of boxes and wooden trunks. He watched the operation for a few minutes, until he seemed satisfied that all was being done properly, and finally the two of us made our way into Harty’s. The dray set off toward Spanish Town ahead of us, its negro driver hunched over in his seat.
By way of conversation, I noted cheerfully that that was a good amount of baggage Whitledge had brought.
“Ah yes,” he said as we entered the indoor gloom. “My father is a magistrate in May Pen—that’s the central town of Clarendon. He requested me to bring a number of official papers and books of record.” We found a table in the crowded tavern. “And,” he added, “I have two sisters who of course desire the newest fashions from London. It will seem Christmas in August when I arrive home.”
“How long have you been gone?”
“Four years.”
“You never returned in four years?”
He smiled at that. “You have learned how lengthy a trip it is, I should think, and sometimes it can be quite dangerous. Of course,” he added with a sly smile, “there are charms in England that one does not want to miss.”
I ignored the implications, for I had more immediate interests. “You were at Oxford, were you not? What will you be doing now that you have returned?”
“I studied law there,” he said. “I shall begin as an attorney and see what that brings for me. It is how my father started and it has served him well.”
“An attorney who manages plantations for absent landowners?”
“Ah then, you understand,” he said with another smile. “There is money to be made in that capacity, as I am sure you know. And you? What are your prospects?”
“My father has a small plantation near Spanish Town, and some other business interests there, and here in Kingston. He owns the Badger Guinea, for example,” I could not resist adding. I had not revealed that to my other shipmates.
Whitledge’s eyebrows rose and another expression came upon his face. “Oh? In the slave trade—before it was outlawed?”
“What makes you say such a thing?” I asked.
“Badger Guinea. The name means it was a Guineaman—a slave ship. You did not know that?”
No, of course I did not. “And they could not change the name after the slave trade ceased, because it’s bad luck,” I mused.
He nodded. “You can count on it. If you had gone belowdecks you might have seen the remains of the fittings that had once held the shackles.”
I could not think what to say. My shock must have shown, for Whitledge leaned closer across the table. “We all have things we prefer not to think about, Rochester. Here, slavery is a necessary evil. It was slavery, after all, that built this beautiful island, and that makes life here so very pleasant for us. It no doubt helped pay for your education at Cambridge. It produces the sugar you have been putting into your tea all your life, and the rum that will be a staple of your life from here on. And speaking of rum, it’s high time to have a bit, is it not?”
“Indeed,” I murmured. I should not have been shocked, but I had not realized the degree to which slavery had infiltrated even my life in England. Sitting there in that busy tavern, I tried to steel myself to the reality that Whitledge took so casually: I could not avoid becoming dependent upon the work of slaves. It was an uncomfortable proposition.
The grog was brought soon enough, but I did not drink it right away. I had never been fond of rum, and that first taste of grog in Jamaica nearly gagged me, but in time I did get used to it. And to the way of life that produces it, I am not proud to say.
After a bounteous meal and more drink than I really wanted, Whitledge and I finally left Kingston on hired horses. It was only a short trip to Spanish Town, even at our slow pace and with occasional pauses as Whitledge pointed out views and characteristics of the island. One of the first things I had learned all those years ago at Black Hill was that escaped slaves, called “Maroons,” often fled to the mountainous center, which was a wilderness into which no white man ever ventured. Now, as we rode along, I saw that region for myself—it is background to everything on the island, in more ways than one—and it does indeed look forbidding: mountains thick with trees and vines, a bluish haze lying over them. But the rest of the island, from the foothills to the sea, is almost entirely domesticated into plantations and cattle pens.
At that time of year the cane stalks had grown higher than a man’s head, rustling and clattering against one another in the wind, and the air was filled with the sounds of hoes chopping weeds in the cane rows and the occasional work chants of the negroes. The fields needed to be weeded constantly, for the weeds benefit from the same conditions that enable the cane to grow so prodigiously. I paused occasionally to watch the backbrea
king work, realizing that I would not last half a day working in such humidity and intense sun.
Whitledge was not well acquainted with any of the owners of the plantations we rode past, but he was able to point out each plantation’s great house—which the negroes called the buckra house. There was another new and unsettling experience on that ride: we were rarely out of earshot of the crack of whips. A negro driver strode behind each gang, snapping the whip over their heads every few minutes, and when his whip found a target, there was often a cry of pain, a sound that made my skin flinch in my first few days on the island. I never fully got used to that sound.
By the time Spanish Town came into view, I had become so attached to my friendship with Whitledge that I urged him to stay the night with me and continue on the following morning. But he was adamant, for he was anxious to return to his family and his own home. So we said our good-byes at the edge of Spanish Town, and I watched him go on his way, wondering if in the years ahead I would ever become as attached to Jamaica as he. I had not forgotten my father’s enticing description of Mr. Mason’s daughter, and I hoped that a happy future with a wife and children would transform this strange and exotic place into a home—despite that the word conjured, still, warm memories of Thornfield and its fields and woods and moors.
Chapter 3
Spanish Town is a pleasant enough city, bustling as a capital usually is, but not in the same frenetic way as a port city like Kingston, which itself is a mere shadow of Liverpool or London. Spanish Town’s government buildings overlook a wide and placid square, and nearby was my father’s small and utilitarian town house. As in Liverpool, he had clearly seen little need in Spanish Town to entertain lavishly. Yet, once I had dropped my portmanteau in the entrance hall and surveyed the place, I was struck by how comfortable it seemed. I felt pleased with what had been provided for me, and I could not wait to go over once again the papers that he had sent with me, for they contained all that my life was to be, and I was in a great hurry to get on with it.
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