“No, we’re bloody not,” said Morgan Tillert, but he was grinning. They were all grinning. It felt like they were doing what they’d set out to do. Destiny was standing there on the shore, ready to be roped into a line and dragged onto the ships.
The armor they were wearing was a precaution, but it was a precaution hatched in the cool air of Northern Europe, and the men were quickly drenched in sweat. The armor presented another bigger and more pressing problem. The clanking and splashing of the metal-clad tin sailors terrified the Africans. They had been transfixed by the arrival of the ships and then by the little boats which separated themselves from the larger vessels, but now when the tin men began to crash out of the boats and into the surf, their metal shapes creaking and screaming under the strain, the Africans turned and fled, running and half-swimming back across the river waters, their shiny, strange faces and huge white eyes looking back over their shoulders as they disappeared into the scrubby jungle of the interior beyond the river.
The tin men could not follow. The metal suits were too heavy and ungainly to allow for crossing the river safely, and there was no time to get back into the boats and give chase. Billy and his shipmates hauled themselves up onto the island only to see the last of the Africans disappear into the undergrowth. The treasure was gone.
Watson screamed an oath toward the far riverbank, and several of the sailors could be heard muttering dark near-mutinous curses while others tore at their armor in frustration. But then Watson shouted again, as two black men reappeared from the undergrowth on the far shore and made their way gingerly toward the water.
Both groups watched each other for a moment—the tin men of Europe, the near naked black men of Africa. And then the two black men, to the astonishment of the sailors, began to laugh and whoop and dance, waving what looked like longbows around their heads. Jet-black and near naked they were, and they were leaping around like merry demons.
The Europeans were being mocked. The two Africans had realized that the visitors could never reach them, and had returned to make fun of the ridiculous would-be kidnappers. Watson let rip an elaborate stream of Midlands obscenities, and ordered the men to line up and take aim.
The sailors were carrying harquebuses, long ungainly things which got water in them but which could still rip through flesh willingly enough on the one-in-three occasions they actually fired. On Watson’s command, the tin men fired the guns at the capering Africans, and even with the inevitable misfires the sound of the successful shots was sudden and enormous. For a moment the great estuary was silent, as if the waves themselves had hushed to hear what this alien sound could be.
The blacks had been scared by the explosions from the guns and had stopped jumping about when they’d first heard the sound. But as far as they could see the mountainous noise of gunfire had only led to puffs of smoke unfolding around the guns of the sailors—the Africans hadn’t noticed the sand jumping at their feet as the balls of lead buried themselves within it, or the leaves crackling behind them, or the little splashes of water in the river in front of them. These strange sticks made a vast echoing noise, but apparently did little else.
Watson lined the sailors up again, and ordered them to prepare to shoot a second time. As the tin men fiddled with the infernal unreliable guns, the Africans continued their enjoyment at the expense of the slow, plodding, metal strangers who’d come up onto their shore, apparently threatening but really about as scary as a pride of old, fat, toothless lions. As the guns were raised again, Billy heard someone say something.
“Run, you silly bastards. Run. Get away from here.”
Billy couldn’t see who was speaking. The helmet he was wearing had a smaller angle of vision than the crack in the barn door through which he’d once watched a farmhand and a girl. It was hot inside the armor, hot enough to turn his skin into something wet and flowing. There was sweat dripping down every bend in his body. His excitement had given way to an intense irritation—with the armor, with Watson, with his harquebus, with the Africans, and with the stranger who now seemed to be urging their quarry into flight. Weren’t they here to seize the Africans they could, and shoot the ones they couldn’t? Wasn’t this his destiny?
Watson barked at them in his miserable Midlands drone to fire at will, and again that cracking sound, bigger this time as, miracle of miracles, more than half of the guns actually fired. There was another one of those silences, and both of the Africans looked down as puffs of sand and explosions of water sprouted around them. A fraction of a second later, Billy heard a man’s scream as one of the black men felt the effect of harquebus shot piercing his skin and bone. First he’d been dancing, and now a wound had exploded in him and pain had ripped through his leg. Billy had never seen a gun before this trip, either. But even so he’d known what guns could do, known it as he’d known that the water in the Cherwell was cold in winter. Just the shape of them was all he’d needed to understand what their purpose was. These two fools had no idea what they were up against. Or at least, they hadn’t until now. The lesson was hard and sudden and excruciating.
The wounded man carried on screaming as his companion dragged him into the trees in the same direction as the others had fled. The tin men did not bother following them. The cries of the man they’d shot could be heard for several minutes before the two men were swallowed by the forest, and then the noise of the estuary reasserted itself, cleansed of the shrieks of gunshot and agony. Watson ordered the sailors to drop their weapons and return to the ships. Not a single African had been captured.
Half a day later the two ships that had sailed into the estuary—the Tiger and the Swallow—met up with the Jesus and the Solomon, both of which had stayed out on the ocean (as indeed had Francis Drake, who had winked at Billy and given the strong impression that he was in some way being left in charge), and Hawkyns issued the next order: sail south. And off they went, frustrated but also excited by the prospect that had opened up for them that day: a continent which teemed with African life, all of it capable of transmutation into gold and silver. If only they could catch it.
Billy watched the beautiful blue-green estuary fall away behind them, and felt something very like joy. Since the voyage began, he’d been troubled by the nagging doubt that perhaps this John Hawkyns was just a particularly well-funded chancer, without a plan or a clue, hoping for something to show up somewhere which would justify his voyage and the patronage of his Queen. That feeling had only grown as calamity had followed calamity, like the strange visit of the inquisitors and the scramble away from Tenerife.
A few days after that ignominious getaway, Billy had seen Africa for the first time. It had been the Barbary Coast, and it had looked dustily exotic and alien, but at the same time drained of any color, shimmering in oranges and browns like a line of sand spread across the horizon. For five days they sailed south along that coast, looking for Portuguese to “trade with,” a euphemism that Billy only fully comprehended when Hawkyns sent his crew down to hide belowdecks on the Jesus as he prepared to enter the new, hastily built, and ill-constructed harbor of Angla de Santa Ana. The smaller ships in the fleet waited outside on the open sea while the colossal Jesus burst into the harbor and opened fire on the cluster of Castilian and Portuguese boats, the crew’s training in broadsides now explained, and Billy riding his own Bloody Mary into battle with a thrill and only one or two new burns.
Some Portuguese ships were sunk, most of the shot went into the water, but when the smoke cleared there was silence, allowing Hawkyns to shout from the forecastle: “Halloo! The English are here! Do you dogs want to make some money, or do you want to be blown up?”
Such was the John Hawkyns method of negotiating trade. While Billy could admire the directness of the approach, he failed to comprehend how it would lead to riches for him or his shipmates. Very little real trading was done in Angla de Santa Ana—a few yards of cloth exchanged for some precious stones, little else—but the men seemed happy enough with the measure of humiliation they were abl
e to deal out, particularly to the Portuguese, whom they viewed as shortarsed buffoons not fit to run an empire awarded to them by a rancid Catholic pontiff (or so said the master, Barrett, that evening at prayer, his Lutheranism now an engine of war).
The night after the one-sided gun battle with the two Africans, Hawkyns himself took evening prayer, and delivered a comely sermon on the need to bring Christianity, Luther’s Christianity, to these benighted pagans, racked by disease and starvation, limited in understanding and capacity, needing only to be transported to the bosom of a good Christian home to be rewarded with at least a measure of eternal salvation (for how could savages, really, be headed for the very same celestial palaces as were good Englishmen?).
Two days after this, with Hawkyns’s pretty justifications still being shared belowdecks with admiration and agreement, they anchored off an island which Hawkyns said was called Sambula, though it wasn’t clear if this was a name he’d discovered or one he’d simply made up. The island was situated at the edge of another massive estuary, this time a huge expanse of water into which several gigantic rivers emptied. The island was fifteen miles long and five miles deep, and was a scrubby, rocky place on the seaward side. However, the landward side was green and fertile, with freshwater and a network of small rivers. And, as the ships’ crews soon discovered, it was teeming with human life.
Half a dozen boats set off from the fleet, each carrying twenty men this time, without armor to weigh them down. Billy found himself in one of these, though again not with Drake, who once more seemed to have found something pressing with which to make himself busy on board ship. There seemed to have been other changes in strategy, too. Now only the more experienced men carried harquebuses; the younger, greener crew members, like Billy, were there to carry supplies and ropes.
As they rowed toward the shore, Billy saw a small gathering of black humans on the beach ahead, the rocky outcrop of the island looming behind them. The group was still, and every minute or so a new figure walked casually into it, swelling its numbers. By the time the three boats from the Jesus reached the shore, there were perhaps twenty people in the group, all of them standing still while they watched the sailors come ashore.
The lead officer in Billy’s boat this time was Clinker Jerome, so named because his skin had been resewn so many times it looked like the hull of an old clinker-built boat. He had one eye and most of his nose was gone, as were most of his teeth. He was perhaps thirty-five, looked twice that age, and he had the most terrifying voice of any man Billy had ever heard, more terrifying than the master, the first mate or Hawkyns himself.
Clinker was the first to jump into the shallow water as Billy’s boat beached, and was followed by the other sailors as he approached the group of black men, women, and children standing on the shore. Two of the black men grinned, a man and a woman, and Billy noticed that their teeth were filed into points and that their skin, like Clinker’s, was sewn together in some places like an old leather jerkin, but in their case this looked deliberate and decorative and almost beautiful. They were tall and muscular, their loins covered in simple cloth, the woman’s breasts exposed, their dark skin shining like the surface of a still, deep pond. They chattered something at the approaching Englishmen, and the sound of the chatter was joyous and musical and profoundly welcoming.
Something hung heavy in the air as Clinker approached the group, something old and timeless, and Billy felt a roaring in his ears as of wind rushing down a tunnel, somewhere dark and close into which he’d crawled.
Here it comes. Here comes the thing we’ve been searching for.
Clinker reached the first African, the woman, and with one smooth movement which belied his creaking body he pulled back her head and cut through her throat, and then Billy heard something else—an inhuman roar, as if from a gigantic beast, and it was coming from Clinker, and then the other men from the ship were roaring too, and deep within the roar Billy heard his own voice, deep and screaming and tremendous. The black humans were falling away, jabbering and aghast, and Billy reached out and grabbed the arm of one of the men, his fingers closing around the Negro’s thick upper arm, squeezing the bone and muscle within as something crackled between them, noticing the sharpened teeth which were bared partly in welcome and partly in the sudden onrush of terror . . .
. . . and Billy pulled the shrieking African down into the boat.
Later that day, as evening fell and the ships lay at anchor just off the island, it became time to take the inventory, so Billy went down to the hold and there found Drake, already counting and listing, walking between the dozens of black figures which lay chained together, naked (the simple cotton clothes and leather shoes which had been brought from England had not been needed, Hawkyns had decided—they could sell it on, these savages did not dress themselves, so why should Hawkyns pay to do so?). There had been children on the beach too, Billy remembered, but there were no children down in the hold, and very few females—only the youngest and strongest-looking of them had made it this far. Billy considered asking Drake where the other captured Africans might be—on another ship, perhaps? But then he realized that he knew, in effect, what had happened to the children and older women. Just mouths to feed on a long voyage.
Drake was standing, or rather crouching beneath the low ceiling, simply staring at the Negroes, watching them as they tried to move around and whispered quietly to each other. They did not cry or moan any longer (many had been screaming as they’d been shoved down into the hold).
“I have them where I want them,” said Drake, noticing Billy’s arrival. “They were a-wailing and a-moaning when they came down here, but I asked them forthrightly: wherefore do you moan? We have come to rescue you: to feed you and to take you to the bosom of a Christian family, to save your immortal soul in return for the labor of your body and the loyalty of your spirit. They jabbered away for a while. Not a single one of them can communicate with me. But I made my point, sometimes with the help of an open hand. They are quiet now. Look. Dozens of them, cleaned and made ready for our voyage across the Atlantic. We will feed them beans and peas and keep an eye on them. But look at this.”
Drake leaned down to one of the men, whose sharpened teeth flashed brightly in the gloom of the boat and who let forth a stream of African language which sounded, to Billy’s ears, like the screeching of a monkey, all clicks and whoops and shrieks. The man’s face was familiar—the Negro he’d grabbed first out on the island beach.
“Look at this, young William,” said Drake, grasping the man’s foot. “Look at what we’re saving these savages from.” In the gloom, Billy could see an open sore at the man’s ankle, and emerging from the wound, perhaps half an inch out of the skin, the white, eyeless head of a thin worm, squirming horribly as it pulled itself into the light. “The worms of Guinea are passing strange, young William. These blacks should be grateful.”
They stared a little longer at the ugly thing, while the man moaned with something like pain.
“What do you think he’s worth with that inside him?” asked Billy.
Drake grinned.
14 DECEMBER 1811
Four days after the inquest in the Jolly Sailor, John Harriott leaves his pristine and still somewhat unfinished home at Wapping’s Pier Head to head across town for dinner with his old friend and fellow-magistrate Aaron Graham. Harriott’s wife is still accustoming herself to their soon-to-be excellent accommodation in the new building, which looks over the entrance to the dock from the river and houses many of the administrators and officers of the London Dock Company but which is still very much a work in progress. Elizabeth is Harriott’s third wife, and unlike the two poor women who preceded her and who are now dead in the Essex earth, destroyed by the horrors of childbirth, she is a survivor, tolerant of the schemes which have seen her husband overcome by Essex rivers, London creditors, and American farmhands only to bounce back again and again. The third Mrs. Harriott has persevered this long by virtue of bottomless (if by now a little dry) wells
of perseverance and patience, both with her husband and with fortune.
In truth the small apartments are the most luxurious surroundings they have ever found themselves in; they feel like home, perhaps the final home for Elizabeth and her husband after their incessant journeying. She is looking forward to a quiet evening of reading, embroidery, and correspondence, without the hectoring bluster of her husband and the recent “insidious events” (as she insists upon calling them) to disturb her.
Aaron Graham is the magistrate of Bow Street in the fashionable West End of town, and as such has some right to consider himself the lead magistrate in London and Westminster, though no such seniority exists in official point of fact and in any case Graham would never be graceless enough to dwell upon it. But Bow Street still has a special status within the magistracy, thanks to the fifty-year-old tradition of Henry Fielding and his Runners.
Graham’s lodgings are near his office, so Harriott must travel from the eastern edge of the metropolis to the western. He escapes Wapping via Old Gravel Lane, climbing up onto the old gravel bluff along which the Ratcliffe Highway makes its way into the city. Inevitably, he must pass Timothy Marr’s shop, which is shut up and dark on this cold night. Harriott watches the little shop pass to his left, and then sinks back into his seat as the carriage heads west.
It is a cold night but there are crowds on the streets in the West End, better dressed and more purposeful than the oblivion-seekers of Wapping and Shadwell. Harriott always feels restless and vaguely disgusted in this part of town, this close to the politicians and the dukes and the influencers. Somewhere in these streets is Ryder, the Home Secretary, for whom Harriott’s distaste has grown beyond all reckoning in the past week. And Ryder is just the latest in a long line of smooth intelligent men upon whom Harriott has run aground.
The English Monster Page 9