Georges

by Alexandre Dumas

  Privateers usually spent the better part of their time engaged in battle; of the thirty or thirty-one days that make up each month, twenty or twenty-five were spent in combat. On the days they did not fight, the ships were generally blasted by storms. In such an environment as this, I say again, young sailors learned quickly. The high casualty rate and lack of conscription meant that ships were almost never fully crewed, but because every sailor aboard was there by his own will, quality, fortunately, usually replaced quantity. Whether waging a battle or weathering a storm, no man had a set duty. Everyone could perform any task with skill.

  Obedience to the captain or, in his absence, his second-in-command was the ironclad rule. In the six years Jacques served aboard the Calypso, two men—one from Normandy and one from Gascony—had attempted mutiny. The captain had split the first man’s head open with an ax; his lieutenant had shot the second through the heart. Both bodies had then been summarily dumped over the side of the ship—it would have been bad for morale to keep them on board. Since that time the control exercised by both Captain Bertrand and the first mate, Lieutenant Rébard, had been absolute.

  Jacques had always had a taste for the sea. As a child he had spent countless hours climbing the riggings and exploring the decks of the ships that docked in Port Louis to do business with his father and other men of île de France. The good-natured captains had been happy to indulge him, explaining how things worked and allowing him to roam freely on their decks and climb high into their crow’s nests. By the age of ten Jacques, for whom any ship was a fighting ship, was constantly at the docks waiting for the incoming vessels to arrive, and carving masts from the trees and ropes from the reeds. By the age of twelve he could be counted a true authority. He could name every part of a ship and describe endless maneuvers in exact detail. If his father had allowed it, any commander would have been glad to take him on board as a midshipman first-class.

  But as we have seen, Pierre Munier, anxious for his son to have a good education, had enrolled him at the Collège Napoleon in Paris instead of the Collège d’Angoulême, where he would have been able to study what he loved most. The result only confirmed the old saying, “Man asks, and God grants.” Jacques, after spending two years drawing frigates in his composition books and launching toy frigates in the Luxembourg lake, took advantage of the first opportunity that came his way to turn theory into practice. On holiday in Brest, visiting the frigate Calypso, he told his brother, who had accompanied him, that he could return to shore alone. As for himself, Jacques said, he had decided to become a sailor.

  Both brothers did as Jacques had suggested, and Georges returned alone, as I have said, to the Collège Napoleon.

  Jacques’s manly bearing, sturdy physique, and good-natured countenance won the approval of Captain Bertrand, who quickly promoted him to the rank of able seaman—a mark of favor that caused much grumbling among his shipmates. Jacques was unperturbed; he held strict notions of fairness and unfairness, and those who doubted his worth were simply ignorant of it. It was only natural that they resent him, an untried novice. He had a golden opportunity to prove himself soon enough, when a storm hit the ship and he braved the topmost rigging to cut loose a poorly knotted sail. Later, during his first battle aboard the Calypso, he sprang aboard the enemy vessel before his captain had done so; the breach of sailor’s etiquette earned him a thumping that laid him low for three entire days. Still, Bertrand could not help but admire his bravery, and forgave him in short order. From then on it was Jacques’s privilege to board third, behind only the captain and first mate. After that the rest of the crew never said another word against Jacques. In fact, the old sailors came to him and were the first to shake his hand.

  This satisfying state of affairs lasted until 1815. I mention 1815 because Captain Bertrand, who was a true skeptic, had never taken the fall of Napoleon seriously. Perhaps this was why, having nothing else to do, he made two voyages to the island of Elba and, on one occasion, had the honor of being received by the ex-ruler of the world himself. The emperor and the pirate had a conversation that seemed to afford Bertrand great inward pleasure, though he never revealed what had been said. When he stepped back aboard the Calypso, though, he was heard humming the following verse:

  Ran tan plan tirelire,

  Comme nous allons rire!

  On his return to Brest he began to prepare the Calypso for active service, loading her with powder and bullets and recruiting the remaining men he needed to complete his crew. Those who knew the captain knew that he would never have acted in such a way if he was not absolutely certain that something momentous was about to happen. Sure enough, six weeks after the Calypso’s last voyage to Porto-Ferrajo, Napoleon landed at the Gulf of Juan, and three weeks after that he made his entry into Paris. Captain Bertrand set out from Brest Harbor a mere three days later, sails hoisted and the tricolor fluttering proudly from the mast. Barely eight days had passed before he returned in triumph, towing a magnificent three-masted English vessel he had taken, laden with choice Indian spices. The money gained from the sale of the ship and her cargo was distributed evenly among the Calypso’s crew, and Bertrand and his men set out immediately in search of another prize.

  As we know, however, one does not always find precisely what he is looking for. After nearly a year of stifling boredom, the Calypso and her crew found themselves face-to-face with another English vessel. As Fate would have it, this was the Leicester, the very ship that would later carry Lord William Murray and Georges Munier to île de France.

  The Leicester had ten cannons and sixty men more than the Calypso, and instead of cinnamon, sugar, or coffee, she was loaded with shot and shells. At her first sight of the privateer she dispensed with formalities by letting fly a thirty-six-pound ball that buried itself neatly in the Calypso’s hull.

  The Calypso, unlike her sister Galatea, who clamored to be seen, would have gladly become invisible and fled at that moment. Captain Bertrand was no fool; he knew immediately that here was nothing to be gained, and everything to be lost. The Leicester’s commander was none other than William Murray himself, who at that time had not yet retired from active service and was known far and wide as one of the most fearful sea wolves to be found between the Straits of Magellan and Baffin Bay. Accordingly, Bertrand shifted the Calypso’s two largest guns to stern and fled as fast as he could.

  The privateer was a long and narrow brigantine, built for speed, but it soon became evident that, like a sea swallow facing an eagle, she could not outrun the Leicester. The frigate pursued her relentlessly, firing at intervals in a clear demand for surrender to which the Calypso’s only reply was a hail of gunfire.

  Jacques had been carefully studying the Leicester’s spars, which seemed to him a weak point on the English frigate. Changes might be made in the rigging, he thought, that would be to the advantage of ships like the Calypso. He made a remark to this effect to Lieutenant Rébard, who was next to him on deck, but received no answer. Turning, he saw the reason—Rébard had just been cut in two by a cannonball.

  The situation was becoming dire. The two ships would be side by side in less than half an hour, and the Leicester’s crew outnumbered the Calypso’s by a third. Jacques stooped to confer with one of the gunners, but at that moment the man’s knees buckled and he slumped forward against the breech of his gun. Jacques took hold of the man’s collar and hauled him impatiently to his feet—only to find that the poor fellow had swallowed a bullet—death by heartburn, as it were.

  Almost without thinking, Jacques shoved the man’s body to one side and bent over the gun. He sighted—aimed—cried “Fire!”—and let fly with a burst of shot! Then he leapt onto the bulwark to see what he had done. The effect on the Leicester was immediate and catastrophic. The enemy ship’s mizzenmast snapped like a willow branch and crashed to the deck below, carrying sails, sheets, spars, and a portion of the starboard bulwark with it.

  Shouts of joy echoed from the decks of the Calypso. She had won the battle with barely a
scratch and was free to pursue her course, untroubled by the crippled English frigate. The captain’s first action was to appoint Jacques lieutenant in Rébard’s place—an action that was greeted with universal acclaim by the crew. That evening a mass was held for the dead. Most of the bodies had been thrown overboard during the skirmish, but Rébard’s had been kept so that he might be given the honors due a man of his rank. The corpse was sewn up in a hammock with a thirty-six-pound cannonball at each end—to prevent unseemly floating—and solemnly consigned to the depths.

  When night fell Captain Bertrand took advantage of the darkness to return to Brest, sending the Leicester, which had quickly repaired the damage to her mast, on a wild-goose chase to Cape Verde. This misadventure did much to ruffle the temper of the normally easygoing Captain Murray, and he swore that the Calypso would not escape so easily if he ever encountered her again.

  Captain Bertrand spent just enough time at Brest to repair the minor damage done to the Calypso; then set out again in pursuit of glory, with Jacques proving to be a very capable first mate. Unfortunately, the disaster of Waterloo brought about a second abdication and, after that, peace. Bertrand watched the prisoner of Europe, the unlucky emperor himself, pass by aboard the Bellérophon en route to St. Helena, a prison from which there would be no escape as there had been from Elba. After that, prospects for privateers were increasingly bleak. The captain knew he would have to look elsewhere for his fortune. As the master of a swift, tightly run brigantine manned by a loyal and efficient crew, it was only natural that his thoughts should turn in the direction of the slave trade.

  Slavery had been a booming business, indeed, before an avalanche of altruistic proclamations had all but buried the trade. Still, there was a great fortune to be made if a man was enterprising and resourceful. War, which comes and goes in Europe, rages eternally on the African continent. The natives’ thirst for blood is matched only by their thirst for brandy, and in those days one had only to venture into Senegambia, Congo, Mozambique, or Zanzibar with a bottle or two of cognac to return with a black under each arm. If a tribe did not have prisoners to dispose of, mothers would sell their children for a glass of liquor. True, youngsters did not fetch much of a price, but there were large numbers of them, and they added up neatly in the end.

  Captain Bertrand plied this trade honorably and profitably until 1820, and would have done so for much longer had an unforeseen event not put a premature end to his life. During a stop on Africa’s western coast, after traveling up the rivière des Poissons to meet with a Hottentot chief who had promised to sell him a group of Grands Namaquois, for which he already had orders in Guadeloupe and Martinique, in return for two kegs of rum, Bertrand happened to step on the tail of a coiled rattlesnake, which reared up and bit him on the hand. The Hottentot shook his head at the captain’s cry of pain. “Man bitten, man dead,” he said gravely.

  “I know that!” cried the captain. “That’s why I screamed!” Bertrand seized the snake and strangled it to death, both for his personal satisfaction and to make sure it bit no one else, but no sooner had he done this than he collapsed on the ground. Everything had happened so quickly that by the time Jacques—who had been barely twenty-five paces behind his captain—reached his side, it was all but over. Bertrand gasped out a few words, his skin green as a lizard’s, and expired. Within ten minutes his body was completely covered in black and yellow blotches, like a poisoned mushroom.

  The swiftly decomposing corpse was so riddled with poison that it could not be returned to the Calypso. Jacques and twelve of his fellow sailors dug a grave on the spot, laid the body of their captain in it, and piled up a rough cairn of stones to mark Bertrand’s final resting place and, hopefully, to ensure that it would be safe from hyenas and jackals. One of the men kept the rattlesnake for his pharmacist uncle in Brest, who had never seen a rattlesnake and yearned to display one in his shop window, between a bottle of red water and a bottle of blue.

  There is an old adage that states, “Business comes first.” Accordingly, despite his shock and horror, Jacques roused himself to complete the transaction with the Hottentot chief. Fifty Grands Namaquois slaves were duly exchanged for two kegs of rum; the two men who had completed the transaction, enchanted with each other, promised to continue their business relationship in the future; and the Calypso set off once more.

  That evening Jacques assembled the entire crew on deck and extolled the virtues of the late Captain Bertrand before offering the men a choice of two scenarios. The first was that they would deliver their cargo to Martinique and Guadeloupe as promised and then sell the Calypso, dividing the profits equally and scattering to seek their individual fortunes as they chose. The second scenario was that they would elect a new captain and continue to deal in slaves under the name Calypso et Compagnie. The verdict was unanimous: The crew chose the second option without hesitation and named Jacques as their commander.

  Jacques’s first action as captain was to name as his first mate a brave Breton from Lorient popularly known as Master Tête-de-Fer—Ironhead—due to the remarkable hardness of his skull.

  The Calypso, more forgetful than the nymph from whom she had taken her name, set sail for the West Indies that very evening. Her crew was saddened by the loss of Captain Bertrand, their Ulysses, but they had certainly found just as able a leader in Jacques. Bertrand had been one of those tough sea wolves who do everything by the book, never allowing himself simply to be inspired by the moment. Jacques, by contrast, was a child of impulse. He had a real genius for the sea, and could command his ship in storm or in battle as capably as the most experienced admiral—but neither had he forgotten how to tie a knot as well as the lowest deckhand. His energy seemed limitless; every day he came up with some new shipboard improvement to be made. He loved the Calypso as a man loves his mistress; she responded brilliantly to his ministrations, and it soon became impossible to imagine one of them surviving without the other.

  Jacques’s happiness was nearly complete—only the occasional thought of his father and brother caused a shadow to cross his brow. He was neither greedy nor cruel; he was an honest merchant, dealing conscientiously and treating his human cargo with care. Not for Jacques the conduct of some slave traders, who lose half of their profit by treating their blacks miserably, and for whom violence soon turns from a habit into a pleasure. These natives of the Plains of Cafres, these Hottentots, Senegambians, and Mozambicans, were treated almost as well as if they had been sacks of sugar, barrels of rice, or bales of cotton. They ate well, slept on clean straw, and walked the Calypso’s decks twice a day to benefit from the fresh sea air. Chains were used only when necessary. He tried as often as he could to sell husbands with their wives and children with their mothers—an unheard-of bit of delicacy and tact. Jacques’s Negroes almost always reached their destination in good spirits and excellent physical condition, which increased their market value considerably.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jacques never stopped in any port of call long enough to form a serious romantic attachment. His wealth made him quite attractive to many young maidens in Jamaica, Guadeloupe, and Cuba; and their fathers—unaware that he was a mulatto—offered him their hands in marriage more than once. Jacques, though, had his own ideas about love. He was well acquainted with mythology and history; with the stories of Hercules and Omphale, and Samson and Delilah. He declared that he would have no other bride than the Calypso. This is not to say that he wasn’t a man of Creole sensuality; on the contrary, he had mistresses aplenty, and in every color: black, red, yellow, and brown, depending on whether he was in the Congo or in Florida, Bengal, or Madagascar. To these physical joys he added a host of other pleasures. Nature was extremely pleasant for him, but instead of affecting his soul, it touched his senses. He loved wide-open spaces—not because they made him think of God, but because they gave him more room to move and breathe. He loved the stars—not because he believed they might be other worlds spinning in the heavens, but because he enjoyed the idea of having an azu
re canopy studded with diamonds over his head. He loved towering forests—not because their depths were full of mysterious and lyrical voices, but because their dense greenery threw shadows that not even the sun could pierce.

  As for his view of the trade he practiced, he saw it as a perfectly legal business. He had witnessed blacks being bought and sold all his life; it was, he believed, the natural state of things—what they were made for. He never worried about whether it was arrogant to traffic in human beings; once he had paid for a Negro, he viewed him as his property, and saw himself as completely within his rights to sell him to someone else. He was a businessman; he bought and sold, and it was his business alone.

  Unlike some of his fellow slave traders, Jacques never hunted for blacks on his own account. He found the thought of forcibly taking possession of a free man, and then making him a slave, repugnant. But, he reasoned, if a man was a slave already—well, he had no control over that, and there was no reason to refrain from doing business with the owner.

  All in all Jacques’s life was a decidedly pleasant one. There were minor skirmishes here and there; the slave trade had been officially abolished by a congress of governments in the days of Captain Bertrand, and once in a while some ship’s commander would decide to investigate just what the Calypso was doing off the Senegalese or Indian coasts. Jacques often amused himself by sporting with these curious devils, hoisting one flag after another, and finally displaying his own standard, which consisted of three black heads. He would then dart away, and the chase was on.