by M. M. Kaye
Daniel Larrimore knew the coastal waters between Lourenço Marques and Mogadishu well, for he had spent the best part of the last five years assisting in the thankless task of suppressing the East African slave trade: that traffic having greatly increased of late as the trade shrank on the West Coast, where stricter surveillance and the strengthening of the West African and Cape Squadrons had combined to make slaving an increasingly dangerous and unprofitable venture. Although he had on occasion heard rumours of a hidden bay, he had never been able to confirm them, and as recently as a week ago would have been inclined to dismiss them as fables. On the previous Thursday, however, while his ship was engaged in taking on water and supplies of fresh food at Zanzibar, one of the negro slaves whom the Arab contractor employed to carry baskets of fruit and vegetables on board had plucked furtively at his sleeve and whispered a highly interesting piece of information…
The hidden harbour, it appeared, was no myth, but a secure and secret haven known to certain of the Arab slave traders, where they could embark slaves in safety, take refuge from storms and doldrums, and lie concealed when naval vessels were known to be on the prowl. Moreover, a notorious English-owned schooner, loaded with illegal cargo, would be leaving it at nightfall the following Tuesday, bound for an unknown destination.
The information had been both detailed and circumstantial, but the negro could not be persuaded to tell how he had come by it, and when pressed had become frightened and stupid, and backing away, muttered that he did not understand the white man’s talk.
Lieutenant Larrimore had been of two minds whether to believe him or not. Yet the story not only confirmed those earlier rumours, but explained how certain ships, sighted and pursued towards sundown, had managed to escape in the darkness when their sailing speeds were certainly not superior to his own. At least there could be no harm in acting upon the information; and the Daffodil had raised steam and left Zanzibar on the following day, heading northwards; her commanding officer having announced his intention of visiting Mombasa.
Once out of sight of the island, however, he had altered course, and turning south crept down the coast as close to the shore as reefs would permit. And now, late on the Tuesday evening, his ship lay in wait; lights darkened and full steam up, keeping watch on the barely visible break in the long, uneven line of coral cliffs and dark jungle, and rocking idly to the slow-breathing swell that broke lazily and monotonously against the darkened shore.
There had been little wind that day, or for many days; but an hour ago a breeze had arisen with the rising moon, and now it blew strongly off the land, dispersing at last the stinging, singing cloud of mosquitoes that had been plaguing the watchers, and bringing with it the taint of an odour; rancid, sickly, and entirely horrible.
“Strewth!” muttered the coxswain, grimacing with disgust: “Stinks like a floating sewer, don’t she? Must ‘av a full load on board this trip; and ‘arf of ‘em dead already, I’d say. You’d think them dhows would ‘av more sense than to kill off their own goods, wouldn’t yer?”
“This one isn’t a dhow,” said Lieutenant Larrimore grimly. “If my information is correct, it’s a bird of a very different feather. Look—”
The slave ship had edged forward into the unseen passage, and now the moonlight caught her full on and she was no longer a shadowy and unidentifiable shape, but a thing of silver, picking her way cautiously through the narrow channel under jib and foresail, and sounding as she went.
“Schooner!” exclaimed the coxswain. “I believe it’s—no, it couldn’t be…By goles, sir, I believe it is! Look at the cut of ‘er jib—if that ‘aint the Virago, I’m a Dutchman!”
“So that negro was right,” said the Lieutenant between his teeth. “It is Frost—we’ve got him at last, and red-handed.”
He whirled round and yelled: “Up anchor! Headsails out! Full speed ahead!”
The anchor came up with a rattle that drowned the slow crash and mumble of the surf, furled sails blossomed white in the moonlight, and smoke and sparks lit the blue of the night as the paddles threshed and turned.
The schooner had seen them, but too late. She was too nearly free of the channel to check or turn, and there was nothing for it but to crowd on sail and go forward; and winning clear of the shoals she came about and fled before the strengthening wind, heeling to larboard with the long wake of foam streaming out behind her like a shimmering path across the dancing sea.
Colours broke from her masthead and fluttered in the breeze, but by the light of the half moon it was difficult to make out what they were, until a midshipman staring through a telescope announced: “American, sir. She’s hoisted the stars-and-stripes.”
“Has she, by God,” snarled the Lieutenant. “That trick may work with the West Coast Squadron, but it won’t with me. There’s nothing American about that bastard except his blasted impertinence. Put a shot across him. Bates.”
“Ay, ay, sir.”
There was a flash and a boom, and the shot passed over the schooner’s masthead and plunged into the sea beyond.
“They’re lightening ship, sir.”
The fleeing shape ahead of them was flinging everything movable overboard. Spars, casks and timber flashed briefly in the moonlight and bobbed away in the creaming wake, and as the breeze freshened the tiny dark figures of her crew could be seen throwing water on her straining canvas and scrambling from one side to the other to trim the ship.
Even in those light airs she was faster than Lieutenant Larrimore had thought possible, and it was obvious that she was being handled in a masterly manner. He began to realize that even with the advantage of steam in his favour she might draw away from him if the breeze continued to strengthen, for he could not keep up the chase for long—the Admiralty being notoriously parsimonious in the matter of fuel, his supply of coal was far from adequate.
“Come on! come on, blast you!” muttered the Lieutenant, apparently urging the threshing paddles to greater speed: “We can’t let that chousing scug get away from us this time. God damn this wind! If only…’ He turned abruptly to snap out an order to the coxswain demanding another knot from the engine room. Two, if possible.
But half an hour later the schooner was not only still ahead of him, but appeared to be increasing her lead. And though the Daffodil’s guns had scored several hits, a cross swell combined with the uncertain light had not been conducive to good shooting, and none of them had served to slow the slaver’s pace.
Lieutenant Larrimore, fuming, was recklessly ordering the fires to be stoked to danger point, when a lucky shot cut away the schooner’s steering sails. She yawed and lost way, and five minutes later another shot ripped through her mainsail and the taut canvas split and fell idle. The crippled ship hauled down her colours and hove to—though only backing her fore topsail, and leaving her fore and aft sails still set The Lieutenant, observing this last, remarked grimly that Rory Frost must think he was born yesterday.
“If he imagines that he can trick me into lowering a boat, and then pile on sail and run for it while we’re getting back on board again, he’s much mistaken.”
He picked up a speaking trumpet and yelled through it:
“Lower your sails at once, and come aboard!”
The breeze distorted the reply so that the words were unintelligible, but the coxswain, who was peering through a telescope, ripped out a sudden oath, and said: “It ‘aint the Virago, sir. Same build, but she’s a shade sharper forrard, an’ she ‘aint got the port’oles.”
“Nonsense! There isn’t another ship in these waters that Here, give me that.”
He snatched the telescope and peered through it at the drifting moonlit ship with the torn mainsail, and then put it down again and said heavily: “Damn and blast!”
“Probably a genuine Yankee after all,” said the Assistant-Surgeon apprehensively.” If she is, we’re for it.”
“Hell to that! she’s a slaver—you can smell her,” snapped Lieutenant Larrimore.’ I’m going aboard.”
>
He picked up the trumpet again, and shouted through it, and this time the reply was audible:
“No understand Inglese!”
“That’s a relief. Try him with French,” suggested the surgeon.
The Lieutenant’s French, however, produced no result, and losing patience he issued a curt order to the gun’s crew to fire at the slaver’s jib halyard block and to continue doing so until it was cut away.
“Good shooting,” commended Lieutenant Larrimore, watching the halyard block come rattling down. “Lower a boat. I’m going over.”
“You cannot board me!” yelled a bearded man in a peaked cap, whose suit may have once been white, but which even by moonlight showed blotched and stained with dirt and sweat of many seasons. “It is illegal! I am Americano! I report you to your Consul! I make much trouble for you!”
He appeared to have learned to speak English with remarkable rapidity.
“You can report me to the Archangel Gabriel if you wish,” retorted the Lieutenant, and scrambled aboard.
Five years in the East African Squadron should have inured Daniel Larrimore to horrors, but he had never got used to the sight and stench of human suffering, and each time he witnessed it, it seemed to him like the first time—and the worst. Mr Wilson, the coxswain, a hearty, grizzled mariner newly out from home, took one look at the schooner’s crowded and filthy deck and was instantly and violently sick, while the Assistant-Surgeon turned an unhealthy green and found himself feeling oddly faint as the intolerable stench took him by the throat.
The ship was crammed with naked slaves: their emaciated black bodies patched with festering sores, their ankles and wrists chafed and bleeding from heavy iron fetters or gangrenous from ropes that had been tied so tightly that they had eaten into the dark flesh. The schooner’s hatchways had been secured by iron crossbars, and pressed against them from below were the heads of men, women and children who had been packed into the hot, dark, airless space as though they had been bales of cloth; crouching ankle deep in their own filth, unable to move and barely able to breathe, and chained together so that the starving, dying, tortured living were still manacled to the decomposing bodies of the fortunate dead.
Apart from the crew there were three hundred captive negroes on the schooner, and of these eighteen were found to be dead, while a dozen more lay on the deck, huddled together at the foot of the foremast and dying of disease and starvation.
“Bring ‘em up,” ordered Dan Larrimore, his voice as hard and expressionless as his rigid face. He stood back while they were drawn up through the small hatches to collapse on to the deck where some lay still and moaned, while others crawled feebly to the scuppers and licked the salt water with tongues that were blackened and swollen from thirst.
More than half of the captives were children. Boys and girls whose ages ranged from eight to fourteen years, who had been captured by men of their own race to be sold into slavery for a handful of china beads or a cheap knife. Young and defenceless creatures who had committed no crime against humanity, but who represented a fat profit in counted coin, and whose hands were needed for planting, tending and picking the sugar-cane and cotton on rich plantations on the other side of the world. In Cuba and Brazil, the West Indies and the Southern States of America. “And we dare to call ourselves Christians!” thought Dan Larrimore bitterly. “We have the infernal impudence to send out missions to the heathen and preach sanctimonious sermons from our pulpits. And half Spain and Portugal and South America light candles to the saints and bum incense and go to Confession, and can hardly move for priests and churches and statues of the Virgin. It’s enough to make one vomit…”
A dazed, emaciated negress stumbled towards the rail, holding in her arms the body of a child whose skull had been crushed, and seeing that the ugly wound was fresh and bleeding, Dan said sharply: “How did that happen?”
The woman shook her head dumbly, and he repeated the question in her own tongue.
“My son cried when your ship came near,” said the woman in a parched whisper, “and the overseer feared that you might hear and struck him with an iron bar.”
She turned away from him, and leaning over the rail dropped the little body into the sea. And before he could stop her, or even realize what she was about, she climbed onto the rail and leapt in after it.
Her head surfaced only once, and as it did so a black, triangular fin sliced through the water. There was a swirl and a splash and the sea was stained with something that would have been red by daylight but that by moonlight showed only as a spreading patch of oily darkness. Then the shark sank out of sight, and die woman with it. Presently other bodies were sent to join them as the dead were separated from the living and flung overboard, and the scavengers of the deep tore them in pieces and dragged them under, and the waves washed the sea clean again.
The slaver’s boats were lowered and her hapless cargo—dazed, apathetic and convinced that they were merely falling from the clutches of one set of brutal captors into the hands of another and possibly worse one—were transferred to the Daffodil to the accompaniment of hysterical threats from their late owner.
The schooner’s Captain stormed and raged, calling down curses upon the collective heads of the entire British Navy, and shouting that his name was Peter Fenner, and that he was an American citizen and Perfidious Albion would be made to pay dearly for having fired upon him. But his log had been written in Spanish, his flag lockers proved to contain the flags of a dozen different nations, and his papers gave his name as Pedro Fernandez and his “Country of residence’ as Cuba.
“What do you propose to do with him?” demanded the Assistant-Surgeon, gulping brandy from a bottle that he had found in the Captain’s cabin—for he, like the coxswain, was new to the realities of slave trading. “If we take him back to Zanzibar they’ll only keep him there for a month or so, and then ship him off to some place like Lourenço Marques where he’ll be treated like a prodigal son and allowed to get off scot free. And we haven’t enough coal to take him to the Cape.”
“I know. That’s why we’re going to leave him here.”
The slaver’s Captain, smiling broadly, spoke insolently over his shoulder, and in Spanish, to his first mate:
“You see, Sanchez? They can do nothing. They dare not hold us, and when they have gone we shall go back and pick up more slaves, and these pigs will not even know. Por Dios! What fools are these English!”
Lieutenant Larrimore returned the smile, though less pleasantly, and remarked in the same language: “But not too foolish to speak Spanish—which is unfortunate for you Señor Perro (dog) is it not?”
He turned back to the Assistant-Surgeon and continued as though there had been no interruption:
“We’re well clear of the land and the wind seems to be dying down again, so I shall sink his boats and confiscate his canvas. We’ll let him keep some food and water—about the same amount, and in the same proportion, that he seems to have considered sufficient for those poor devils. Agreed?”
“Agreed!” said the Assistant-Surgeon briskly. “I shall enjoy seeing to it.”
They finished the brandy and returned to the deck, where the boarding party unbent all the sails and removed every shred of canvas (‘Nothing to stop them using their bedding to rig up a jib,” suggested the Lieutenant unkindly), unreeved all the rigging, threw guns, bunting, and every movable object overboard, let go both anchors to the limit of their chains, and dealt drastically with both food and water.
“And you can thank us,” said Lieutenant Larrimore in conclusion, “for leaving you a compass.”
He climbed over the side and was rowed back to the Daffodil in the first pale light of dawn: unaware that behind him a dhow that had also been lurking in the hidden bay, and that had left it as soon as the chase had moved far enough out to sea, had slipped away unseen and set her course due south for a rendezvous that was no more than a pin-point on a well-thumbed chart.
3
Captain Thaddaeus Full
bright of the Norah Crayne, ninety-eight days out from Boston, glanced at the barometer for the fourth time in ten minutes, and frowned. The sea was as flat and as motionless as it had been for the past three weeks, but the glass continued to fall, and although it was midday the sun was still veiled by a hot, tarnished haze that was neither fog nor cloud.
It was an ugly and unseasonable haze, and it disturbed Captain Fullbright, for this was normally the season of swift passages; of roaring blue seas and scudding cloud shadows. But ever since they had rounded the Cape they had met with nothing but this unnatural calm and these rusty, hazy days. The Norah Crayne had idled up the coast of Africa, often making less than a knot, and now it began to look as though they would be lucky if they made land in another ten days.
“If at all!” muttered Captain Fullbright. And was startled to discover that he had spoken the words aloud.
It was a measure of his anxiety that he could even entertain such a thought, let alone put it into words, and it occurred to him that at this rate he would soon be emulating Tod MacKechnie, that maundering old Scotsman back in Durban who had discoursed so depressingly on death and the Judgements of Jehovah.
“Bah!” said Captain Fullbright, addressing himself impartially to the barometer and the shade of the absent MacKechnie. He turned his back abruptly upon both, and staring out at the flat leagues of tarnished silver, wondered pessimistically what further mischances might lie in wait before he saw Boston harbour again.
It had been a bad voyage so far, and he regretted this as much for his wife’s sake as his own, for it was not often that Amelia was permitted to accompany him. The owners had never previously encouraged it, and she would not have been here now if a cousin of the Craynes’ had not happened to be the only lady among a long list of male passengers, and Josiah Crayne, being strongly opposed to Miss Hollis travelling unchaperoned, had not personally requested Amelia’s presence.