The English Monster

by Lloyd Shepherd

  At the mention of a tax, Hawkyns did what any self-respecting English merchant would do—he went to war. Dozens of crewmen were ordered into their armor, including Billy. Hawkyns carried on negotiating even as his men loaded their weapons, graciously saying he’d pay the sales tax but the customs duty was a Papist restraint on the God-given right of Englishmen to trade their goods. Gone was the easy charm. Now all was bulldog and belligerence.

  As Drake passed this information out among the crew, the sailors muttered about “greedy fucking Spaniards” and complained that landlocked bureaucrats were going to take bread from their mouths, what with their disgusting haggling and procrastinating. When news of the demand for a sales tax and customs duty hit the lower decks of the Jesus, there was an explosion of outrage which caused the slaves in the hold to moan and scream in terror as the English stamped and hollered in frustration. Tax! Did those bastards on shore not know how hard they’d all worked for this?

  Hawkyns knew how his men felt, and delivered a rousing speech to manipulate this anger and anxiety. Standing in his finest courtier’s clothes (Hawkyns had remained smartly attired for the entire voyage—Drake told Billy that he’d brought fifty changes of clothes with him) the admiral gazed on the men ranged before him and, in the fine baritone Billy had first heard in a Plymouth tavern, reminded them of what was what.

  “Men! My fine men! The finest men on the sea! We’re off to yonder town to put on a little show for the King of Spain. Those whores in civic clothes are wetting themselves to make some money out of us. They know the treasure we carry and they know they need what we bring. But they’re scared fellows. They’re terrified. They think that the old woman Philip will cut off their heads and the Papist Inquisition will cut off their balls for trading with fine English Protestant seadogs such as us!”

  The men on the deck roared. Billy roared along with them. Drake smirked, watching everything with that careful attention which marked all his observations of Hawkyns, as if he were witnessing a masterclass.

  Hawkyns was warming to his task, and spread his arms out wide with blessed good fellowship, his fine white teeth flashing like the barrels of the guns belowdecks.

  “So listen, my lads! The cowards and thieves have already tried to fool us with their godless sales tax and their Papist customs duties, but no Englishman in the world is going to be stopped from his holy right to trade and commerce by a bunch of spineless Spanish women dressed as men. Now, here’s the thing, lads. They want to trade. They surely do. But they want to make it look like we made them trade with us, so when their king’s sodding bureaucrats crawl over here from Madrid or out of whichever sinkhole they breed in, and when those bureaucrats look at the town’s accounts and say”—and with this Hawkyns adopted a comical, sneering approximation of a Spanish accent—“ ‘What is this? You traded with Hawkyns?’—the cowards who run this place will be able to squeal: ‘They made us do it! They made us trade! We did not want to, but what could we do?’ ”

  The men laughed and cheered, stamping on the deck and waving daggers and swords. Hawkyns had stirred up a vicious potion of fury and comradeship. Billy would have cheerfully shot his weapon into the face of a Spaniard—be it man, woman or child—if there had been one to hand. And he was more than ready to do anything else the admiral might require of him.

  With his men straining to be set loose on the town, Hawkyns wrapped up his performance.

  “Now, this ship we stand on, you know who it belongs to. You know who owns the sails and the shrouds and the yards. Elizabeth, boys. And while we all wondered what kind of queen she would be, I’m here to tell you, lads, that she’s made of the same vicious and unyielding stuff as her father was. And she can feel every stamp, every shot, and every scream from the boards of this ship. Back in London, even now, she knows. She knows. And she has expectations. So armor on and guns up, and if we have to kill a few of the bastards to make it look more real, so be it! For God, for England, for Elizabeth, and for trade!”

  Another roar from the deck, and then they were climbing into the boats and making their way into Burburata. Billy lost sight of Drake, but it didn’t matter. The bloodlust was on him, if only for a while, and he crashed unhesitatingly into the town with his shipmates. A few skirmishes and the odd Spanish death later, and the authorities caved in (with some relief) to this show of Anglo-Saxon mercantile force. The fighting died down almost immediately, and the trading began, with a sense of relief and excitement.

  From somewhere within the innards of the apparently endlessly bulwarked hold of the Jesus a strange contraption made an appearance. The strange lengths of wood and colored sailcloth Billy had first seen with Drake just after they’d left Plymouth were explained. Canvas and struts were unfolded on the quayside and made up into a glaring and extraordinary anachronism: a merrily striped tent with a detachable awning, as might be seen in an English country fair. Within barely two hours of the supposed invasion of the town, Hawkyns could be heard gleefully laughing from the Jesus at the sight of an English summer market springing up on the dusty quayside of a New Spanish colony. Dejected and chained groups of slaves were lined up outside the tent and made to stand, one by one, on a small dais within as locals assessed them, grabbing their legs to feel the muscle and pulling back the lips from their teeth. The very few Negro families still together after the raids and the disease and the drownings were soon separated. Those older children who’d been brought with the men and the few women were acquired as individuals, and as good investments.

  Over the next few days a great deal of trading was done. Locals from Burburata wandered up and down, the women in what served as finery in this Spanish outpost, the men complaining of the poor condition of the slaves but buying them anyway.

  But trade was still not as good as it should have been. Billy’s oft-repeated question—what are they worth?—had been answered, and the answer was: not enough. Most of the slaves were being sold for 90 pesos of gold. For perhaps the first time in the voyage, Drake looked tense. Hawkyns had reckoned on making 125 pesos or more per slave. The knowledge that he could be making a third more on each sale ate away at him like one of the Guinea worms that accompanied the slaves on board the ships.

  Hawkyns decided to play another game. He ordered that the gaily colored tent be packed up, raised the anchors, and took the fleet out of the harbor of Burburata. The canny traders of the town were left bemoaning their cleverness. They’d been deliberately keeping the prices low because they suspected Hawkyns of selling his sickest, weakest slaves first—which indeed he had been. They wailed with anguish as the fleet made to leave. They still needed more slaves.

  But the fleet’s departure was the naval equivalent of a knowing wink during a market-stall haggle. After a few days, Hawkyns brought the fleet back and set up the stall again, and now slaves flew out of the hold and onto the plantations and into the mines of the Spanish locals. The prices were higher, and as demand began to ebb and prices began to fall again, Hawkyns packed up, for good this time, and headed for Rio de la Hacha. There were still many living Negroes in the holds of his fleet and he needed the best price for them.

  Rio de la Hacha was not a wealthy place; it was certainly less promising than Burburata. The land was hard to cultivate, and only the pearl fishing brought in a regular income. But even this was enough to make it worth trading with, although the locals went through similar charades as their fellows in Burburata had: abandoning the town on his approach; sending officials to negotiate, said officials being easily persuaded to participate in another charade; Hawkyns claiming to have been blown off course and needing to trade to get supplies to get home; the locals replying that they would love to trade, really, but the King wouldn’t let them.

  If anything, the pretense in Rio de la Hacha was even more theatrical than in Burburata. The town authorities penned pretend letters of protest and Hawkyns pretended to be annoyed with them. He sent a pretend force to attack the town, and the townspeople pretended to surrender. Billy found t
he whole thing perplexing and frustrating, and the crew watched as Hawkyns’s contempt for the Spanish grew and grew with every new play-act they put on. Drake found the whole thing delightfully amusing. But then Drake found a great many things delightfully amusing.

  Finally, another all-clear was given, and the bucolic English stall was reconstructed in this new location. The whole town came out to the shop, in a pent-up frenzy of spending. For three days and three nights, the Hawkyns collapsible boutique was the fashionable place to be seen for the inhabitants of Rio de la Hacha. The final two hundred slaves were all sold, along with French wine and English flour, cakes, cloth, and clothing, and even lingerie. The town’s royal treasurer, the mayor, the tax collector—all of them made it to the shop. Drake and Billy watched them from the deck of the Jesus, and Drake spat sardonically into the sea before declaiming: “So much for the Inquisition—these sorry Papists are more concerned about missing out on a quick profit than sending their souls to damnation for all eternity.”

  It was on the third day of this trading extravaganza that Billy and Drake had decided on their little pearl-diving expedition. Now their commandeered boat was ready, and they pulled out of the small harbor and into the wide mouth of the river. The boat-owner threw out a rudimentary anchor, and then started shoving the slaves out of the boat, each of them with a net tied to their waist and a couple of rocks tied to their legs to weigh them down. Drake and Billy helped him, grabbing the arms of the more reluctant ones and pulling them over the side and into the sea. The one with the sharpened teeth and the worm was particularly reluctant, gibbering something in his own language as Billy grabbed his arm before they threw him in, and waited for him to return.

  After a minute or two, all the more experienced divers popped back onto the surface, spluttering and spitting but carrying sacks of oysters which their owner heaved into the boat. Some time later the newer slaves made it to the surface, with far fewer oysters and with their eyes rolling with fear. The owner heaved them into the boat, slapping their heads in irritation at the small catch they brought with them. The last slave, the one with the worm, was nowhere to be seen, and they watched as three or four shark fins began to circle.

  This troubled Billy, but it troubled the boat-owner more. He shouted angrily at the other divers, slapping them around the head again and muttering angrily at Drake, who simply smirked.

  “He’s saying he wants his money back. He’s saying we sold him a slave who doesn’t swim. What an idiot.”

  14 DECEMBER 1811

  While John Harriott is dining with Aaron Graham, Waterman-Constable Charles Horton is indulging in a spot of what Graham would call, with smooth asperity, police work.

  He is standing in the scrappy patch of land behind Timothy Marr’s house. The backs of the tidy little houses look out onto this nondescript little space. If the square were in one of the new fashionable districts around Chelsea or Belgravia there would no doubt be some nicely planned planting, with a small wrought-iron fence to emphasize exclusivity. Here in the East End, it’s just a patch of land, an accident of design, a scandalously underused piece of scrub which will inevitably be built on in years, if not months, from now.

  Horton has just come out of the rear of number 29, carrying some pages torn from Marr’s order book which he is now folding and placing in a pocket of his peacoat as he ponders the scene. He found the order book in a metal box in the main bedroom of the house, shoved into a cupboard. It is a small miracle it was still there, so many people having traipsed through the house since the day of the murders. Horton supposes the Shadwell officers who’d been keeping an eye on the place had done a rather better job than he would have ever imagined.

  Immediately after the murders, a local resident claimed to have found tracks across this little parcel of land, as if several men had run across the enclosed square to one of the houses opposite. John Murray, the first witness Horton had encountered, reported hearing the sound of men crashing through a house near his and Marr’s property. Horton has today found himself wondering if there is evidence for any of this.

  The houses are arranged in a rectangle, their fronts facing north onto the Ratcliffe Highway, south onto Pennington Street and the wall of the dock, and east and west onto the smaller connecting roads between Pennington Street and the Highway. There is no chance of finding any of the footprints again, if indeed they had ever been there. The ground has been churned up by an army of amateur investigators. In fact, there is one obvious route which tracks the muddiest parts of the soil, a proxy for the dozens of feet which have rehearsed the probable escape route of the murderers (perhaps they followed the original claimed footprints, perhaps they didn’t). This muddy track heads southward down the hill, directly toward the dock. But Horton is, for the moment, ignoring this muddy track. He is more interested in a house which faces out on Artichoke Hill, one of the roads running down from the Ratcliffe Highway to the wall of the dock. There is a house here that is close enough to John Murray’s to have caused him to notice noises from it. Murray’s house is on the corner of the square, and he would have been able to clearly hear men running through one of the Artichoke Hill properties. Also, this particular house is dark and unoccupied, and would be an obvious option for desperate men seeking a rapid exit from the square.

  He walks to the back of the dark house. The back door is hanging open, and has clearly been forced more than once. It is a sad, ill-used thing, this door. Horton goes into the dark house, looks around him, and comes out again.

  He walks through this little reenactment five times, trying to use the mechanisms of walking to activate some connection in his mind. He loses all track of time in the process (his wife Abigail is at the little apartment in Lower Gun Alley even now, fretting over his ruined evening meal, angry at his absentmindedness, resigned to his coming in at any hour with his eyes closed to anything but the melancholy considerations running through his head). He peers into every corner of the dark little house. He runs his fingers along shelves, between banisters, even underneath loose floorboards. There is not even any evidence of a previous tenant, let alone anything indicating a gaggle of men escaping the scene of a slaughter.

  He comes out, he goes in again. This time he does not kneel or feel. He walks into the hall of the little house, which is in complete darkness. Through the wall he hears the sounds of a man and woman talking in the neighboring house. Is that Murray’s house? He thinks so, but can’t remember for certain. He leans back on the banisters and feels them give slightly, with a creak. He looks back behind him up the hall, to the rear of the house, then brings his head round toward the front, and as he does so something catches the light from the moon which is shining through the large front window.

  There is something on the dusty staircase, a couple of inches back from the edge and almost at his eye level. He stands up on tiptoe and gazes at it. It seems to be the edge of a thick silver coin. He ponders for a moment, then walks around to the foot of the stairs. He tests how safe the bottom step is, but the house, whatever its state of cleanliness, is relatively new and fairly well built, and the staircase is firm. He walks up half a dozen steps, but cannot see the coin and for a moment considers whether or not he might have imagined it. But then he remembers the light from the moon, the light which he is now standing in, and steps to the side and the coin reveals itself again.

  He stoops to pick it up. It is thick and heavy, but it is too dark to see it clearly. Horton walks back down the stairs and out of the front door, and stands where the moonlight allows him to take a closer look.

  On one side of the coin is a picture of two pillars topped by crowns. Between the pillars the words PLU-SUL-TRA, and a number, 79. Around its edge the words POTOSI and CAROLUS II. On the other side is a cross quartered by dragons and lions.

  It is a piece of eight, from Peru. Horton recognizes the currency immediately, from his days as a sailor, and is perfectly capable of decoding the writing on it. Spanish colonial currency is still widely accepted in t
he far-flung corners of Spain’s empire, even in the pockets of English power which have inserted themselves inside that ancient, creaking imperium. He has himself received Spanish doubloons and pieces of eight while traveling, even in places where Spanish power never reached. The coin is surprising, not least for its age (Horton guesses its date at 1679, given the number and the name of the King, Charles II), but not unprecedented.

  Horton ponders the metal disc. What is it worth? A not inconsiderable amount, he thinks, even though the degraded Spanish currency has been very much frowned upon these last two or three decades. The purity of the silver guarantees a certain amount of value. How much, exactly? Perhaps enough for a new set of clothes for an ordinary lady, not so distinguished that she demands the finest things, but certainly aware of quality. A woman much like his wife, he thinks to himself, running his thumb around the uneven edge before placing the old coin in his pocket, and the thought of his wife makes him impatient to be home again. He taps the coin through the material of his trousers a couple of times with his fingers as he closes the front door of the house, looking up Artichoke Hill toward the Highway. The tower of St. George in the East rises above the houses behind him, a very similar rectangle of houses to the one he has just been inside.

  He has had his fill of the Highway for a day. He turns down the hill, toward the wall of the dock, and then stops again. He looks to his right and sees the wall meandering westward, parallel to the Highway, toward the old city a mile or so beyond.

  He turns away from the city and to his left and walks down toward Wapping, that great dock wall now on his right, and as he walks he runs his hand along its massive extent (his fingers passing the spot where Margaret Jewell pressed her own face to the wall several nights before). He wonders if he should put his head into some of the alehouses and make inquiries about who has been paying for their liquor with Spanish colonial coins.