The Praying Nun

by Michael Smorenburg

“You follow my orders to the letter. It is against the law to hold a Christian as a slave.”

  “What law is that? English law. This is a Portuguese ship, we do not recognize those laws. I recognize the laws of God only, and they are clear. ‘You may acquire slaves from the pagan nations that are around you. They may become your possession’.”

  “I know Leviticus well enough, Bosun.” The Captain stared hard at the ugly bull before him. “You are not a stupid man, Alfonso, but you are a stranger to common sense. English men-of-war patrol the lanes we will sail. If they send a party aboard and discover this matter…”

  The Captain left the obvious conclusion unsaid.

  He hated the Bosun’s extreme obsession with the Old Testament and his warping of the New Testament to suit his own sadistic delights.

  Alfonso equally hated the Captain’s obsession with Jesus, meek and mild, and he voiced his disdain at every turn.

  “Do you wish for me to return the merchandise?” the Bosun said lightly, still goading the Captain, the smell of rum heavy on his breath and his nose red like a lighthouse on his face. “I can find the Arab trader and bring him to you. I suspect, though, that it will delay us many days.”

  There was mocking, again, in his challenge.

  “What is done is done. This Christian—this man, Christian—is aboard this ship now and technically the property of my brother. But I will not violate either the laws of the predominant power on the high seas or decency. Go find the woman, the man’s wife. Fetch the man. Attend to his wounds, dress them well, and bring them to me. Now get out.”

  “Bring me coarse salt,” the Bosun ordered. “The chef will have some.”

  When he was brought to the Bosun, Christian saw the bowl of salt crystals and guessed what was coming, but he was wrong.

  “Yes… we pickle you pigs before we cook you,” the Bosun laughed, seeing Christian’s eyes on the salt, repeating the lie that he always spread among new slaves coming aboard.

  It was always whispered quickly through the terrified holds. The Bosun would stoke the lie throughout the trip.

  “So much black meat,” he would suggest to them. “What else is there to do with you? It’s into the pots of America…” or the Caribbean, or, in this case, Brazil, “…with you.”

  “Kneel down, Christian-man. Let me clean your wound,” the Bosun ordered with disdain in his voice, and Christian followed the order.

  The Bosun stood over him and fished in his breaches, producing in his hand a revolting and weathered appendage. From it, he urinated directly onto the site of Christian’s burn and the onlooking crew began to laugh when he directed the flow slowly up toward the man’s face.

  Faith watched in horror. The trail of urine ran along the deck and into the joints between the planking above the slaves crammed below.

  “Do not be distressed, my Lady,” the Bosun assured her, still naked as she was and standing terrified among the leering crew. “It is the finest bulwark against corruption of the air. My hot stream and this salt,” he indicated the bowl of coarse crystals waiting to be rubbed roughly into the burn, “will keep the festering out of this man’s wounds.”

  When he was done and the salt ground into the burns, he ordered the couple’s nakedness covered: the man with cotton trousers, the woman with a long shirt that made do as a smock.

  “Follow,” the Bosun growled.

  Two crewmen carrying stubby little clubs fell in behind the black pair. They walked within striking range, patting the business end of the weapons against the palm of the other hand.

  At the threshold to the private quarters they were turned aside by the Commander.

  “No need for your witness,” the Captain ordered the Bosun who was about to step through the doorway, “your time is better spent overseeing the loading.”

  The bump of the next cargo load against the ship’s hull gave Alfonso the opportunity to save face at the insult of his command. He would vent his frustration on the newcomers, he consoled himself, as he turned away.

  Most of the slaves brought aboard carried some evidence or other of recent abuse not worth commentary. The Captain would not have bothered stepping in were this woman not reputed to be a servant of God.

  “Why is your eye closed?” the Captain demanded of her.

  “I was struck, sire.” Her voice was thin and halting. Uncertain and terrified, her Portuguese was passable.

  “And lashed severely, as well,” he observed.

  “Sire… yes.”

  “For…? For what reason?”

  “My… our...” She looked to Chikunda with dread, his face grew puzzled. “…our gift, sire.”

  Chikunda looked down at his own feet. He couldn’t bear to see his dove suffer.

  He had warned her to abandon the token, but she was a stubborn woman. Stubborn and faithful to him, their bond and her Lord.

  “Make yourself clear, girl.” The Captain lifted her chin with a crooked index finger.

  Her eye had been punched closed, the welts of a lash displayed across her face and neck, hinting at worse scars elsewhere on her clothed frame.

  “I gave her a gift, Sir.” Christian explained. “At our wedding during the last moon. I ordered her to leave it after we were captured, but she would not. The slavers delighted in using it as an excuse to punish her and us from there to here.”

  “How?”

  “They found that she would not leave it, so they beat her each time they discovered her with it, ordering her to leave it again, yet not checking.”

  “And where is this thing now?”

  “They took it from me on the beach,” she added.

  “The Arabs took it?”

  “No, sire,” she corrected. “Your men...”

  “Hmmm….” He walked to the port window to look out over the stern. “You are newly wed?”

  “Sire…” they answered as one, mouthing their admission of in solemn unison.

  “And your capture? If you are Christians, why were you taken as slaves?”

  “Our enemies… the enemies of our tribe captured and sold us. The Arabs who bought us said it mattered not, we are still kafirs, unbelievers to Islam.”

  “Why did the Mission not intercede?”

  “The Mission, sir? It is a long distance yonder.” Christian pointed generally toward the north. “We were married before God, but it is our custom to return to my home closer to here, to celebrate with my family. Before we could arrive, we were ambushed and kidnapped.”

  “Ah-huh…” The Captain’s hand came to his mouth, his index finger forming a question mark that patted his lips. He paced and then went back to the stern porthole, looking back at the African shore and the empty tender rowing back to collect another load.

  He stood like that for long moments, contemplating.

  “What is this thing?” he asked. “Why is it worth so many beatings?”

  “It…”

  Christian hesitated, weighing the possibilities of added hardship it might bring to them if he spoke the heresy of it. From the day he’d whittled it out of ivory for his beloved, it seemed to have brought nothing but misfortune.

  “…It is a statue of us kneeling before one another, sir, accepting the Lord into our life.” And against his better judgment, he felt compelled to speak of the presumptuous pose he had captured them in.

  “I… I am depicted as a Jesuit in Holy Orders, Faith as a Nun.”

  Chapter 10

  They had been outbound from the anchorage ten days when the Bosun allowed more than a morsel of food to be doled out below decks and doubled the ration of water from a cup of muck at sunset to an extra cup at sunrise.

  The ship’s groans and creaks of her timbers seemed amplified in the deathly hush below. The slaves had quickly learned that any sound emitting from the holds drew unrelentingly punishment.

  The effect of a week’s starvation and more meant that the seasickness of the first day—when every miserable soul below purged the contents of their gut onto th
eir fellow from both ends and then lay in it—came to an end.

  Nothing left to evacuate, only dry retching was possible.

  The stench from below—reeking with diarrhoea, urine and vomit—remained over them, clinging to the boat as if it were a solid thing fastened down with tethers. It was now joined by the stench of the dead beginning to rot.

  It was time to purge the ship.

  Deck by deck, the four hundred and more slaves were brought on deck, gulping in the relative sweetness of the rank air that hung over the ship.

  For them the air seemed sweet, while between decks the atmosphere was noxious.

  The dead were dragged by the barely living, manacled together as they still were, the lash encouraging them to hasten.

  Boys were sent back in to drag those too spent to find their way out. Evidence of murder came up with them. Conditions were so claustrophobic and crowded that the unfortunates had turned one against another, the chains linking men together used as garrottes.

  Desperation to make room to breathe drove men to raving madness.

  Corpses were cut loose from their fetters and thrown overboard; new partners formed when vacated irons were slapped around the throats or limbs of those just relieved of a carcass.

  Those still strong enough were put to the buckets, disgorging load after load of tropical water into the holds to wash the human waste toward the bilges where a chain gang worked to scoop and deposit the slick, poisonous brew overboard.

  All the while, the savage hound lent its voice to the misery, glassy-eyed with anticipation and straining high on its hind legs to be at them. The handler played it again like he would a fish, keeping the thing tormented and its quarry obedient.

  “These ones will not fetch much on the block,” he told Christian jovially. “There is little meat left for the eating. Perhaps the next deck?”

  And then he laughed at the fear his words evoked in Chikunda’s eyes.

  “But you will still make a good meal for my people. The roasting of your flesh with the brand made my mouth water, you know? I’ll piss in it again for you to keep it from spoiling.”

  He laughed heartily again.

  The burn on Chikunda’s chest was still putrid and ragged. The raw meat below the skin battling to knit closed in these tropics. Each new scab ripped away with the toil laid upon him daily.

  The Captain had saved him and Faith from the holds, allowing them to sleep, chained together, close to the wheel where the watch could monitor them by night.

  Seeing his wretched companions hounded out from between the decks now, the Captain’s intercession was clearly no small mercy, it was a life-saving one.

  “This one won’t make tomorrow.” The Bosun lifted the delirious man’s face with his lash then slapped him across the face with it. The light abuse extracted only a gurgle and rolling of eyes.

  The stricken man was chained to a woman who was already dead.

  “Put them over the side, but save the chain.”

  Chikunda turned aside, he could not watch.

  “Where do you think you are going, Christian?” The Bosun had taken to using Chikunda’s anointed name, as had all the crew. But he pronounced it with derision in his voice.

  “I cannot…” Christian wanted to protest the inhumanity.

  “You cannot? Cannot… watch? Well, then… Let me increase your stomach for these necessary matters. You will do the task yourself. You will throw them both overboard.”

  Christian impulsively half turned away again.

  “Insolence?” The word fluted in a high octave of excitement from the Bosun. “Well… you know, and I know, that the Captain has put you and your whore—Christian as the pair of you claim to be—beyond the reach of my lash. But he has not forbade me from persuading you by visiting its attentions upon one of the others in your stead. You speak a civilized language well, but can you also count?”

  Christian could, but he shook his head, hoping that whatever sinister reason the Bosun had for asking, he could circumvent it through denial.

  “No matter, I can do the counting on your behalf,” he suggested calmly and with a smirk. “You there,” he pointed the tangle of leather with shards of black iron plaited into its length toward the healthiest of the specimens just come on deck. “I need you to act in the favour of our good Christian here,” and he indicated Chikunda. “Kindly stand to the mast. Mate…” he called to the Captain’s second in charge, “…do be a good fellow and bind that man.”

  It was done and the Bosun handed Christian the lash by its business end.

  “I propose…. oh… how many days a’sail are we? A dozen? It’s a good number for the occasion, don’t you think, Christian.”

  Christian hesitated.

  “Well, boy. Have at it, Christian, and make each stroke count or we’ll elect that good lady over there,” he pointed to an arbitrary young woman, “...to be matched with the same. Kindly employ the lash.”

  And so it went.

  The Bosun’s persecution of the couple wherever he could exact a penalty preceded unrelenting and brutal creativity.

  And then, by some quirk and probably violence, when the Captain carried out his investigations of the ivory carving, the trail led from the man who had taken it from Faith, to the Bosun. Christian had worked his charm with the Master of the ship, and against all protestations—for Christian knew what it would bring—the Captain insisted that the Bosun give it up to the wedded couple.

  This made the situation worse.

  And so the voyage progressed down the coast for the distance again that it had already come.

  The body count grew steadily to over two dozen dropped into the wake. A life for every forty sea miles.

  Chatter among the crew and human cargo was that the Cape of Storms would soon be sighted, the majestic cliffs marking the narrow point of Africa’s most southerly peninsula.

  There, the ship would come about onto a new, northerly tack and, within half a day’s sailing in favourable weather, they would sight the majesty of Table Mountain standing guard over the victualing station at Table Bay. The monumental mountain was reputed to be the finest sight any sailor could see rising from the horizon.

  The southern-most point of rock came and went, and with it a rising wind.

  The vessel began to tack, making some headway as best she could into the tempest.

  The sea changed her state when that peninsula was rounded. The long, lazy and low swells of the Indian Ocean gave way to the muscular brutality of the South Atlantic.

  Now it came over them in sheets, bitter and cold, numbing the crew and human cargo to the bone.

  The ship seemed to fear this ocean as much as its human cargo. The hull and rigging’s low and slow groans became a banshee of howls as the storm escalated.

  As she tacked on a northerly passage, making what progress she could into the northwesterly gale, the wind began to shift, coming ever more steadily out of the west, pushing her ever more toward the coast off to the east on her starboard beam.

  The gigantic swell running out of the south was coming in under her stern as well, driving her with ever more vigour before it.

  Sail sheets were taken in and lashed to the spars to reduce the load on the mast, but still the bucking of the ship and smashing of her bow into the rollers increased.

  Cloaked in a squall, she picked her way gingerly forward, and then the squall abated.

  “REEF AHOY!” came the panicked call from on high where a seaman had been sent to scope the way ahead.

  Full ahead and to port from whence the wind was driving, behind the screen of the torrential rains, came a sound heavier than thunder and more daunting than cannon fire.

  Presently, the falling deluge of rain parted its curtain and there stood a staggering sight. Water rising vertically as a set of monstrous waves came marching in from the horizon at her stern.

  Taller and taller each wave grew as it, in turn, ran under them out of the deep and onto a hidden shoal hemming the ship
’s path ahead.

  This was a blind reef; a deadly necklace of submerged rock pinnacles dotted a nautical mile and more out to sea, jutting up close to the surface from fifty or more fathoms of depth.

  The might and energy of the storm surf running into the submerged obstacle caused its base to slow, but like an avalanche, the water driving in from behind piled higher and higher until it pitched over on itself, exploding into a cavernous maw of cascading brutality and blown spray.

  “GO TO STARBOARD!” came the Captain’s terrified shouts. “TO STARBOARD—TO STARBOARD!!!”

  And the ship began to heel over, pivoting dangerously about when the wind caught the remaining sails and drove them violently before it, fast ashore. Boiling white water, deflected away from the reef, came crashing into the ship’s side almost as high as the rail.

  Surfing on the wind now, howling on a broad reach, the ship threatened to pitch and broach.

  She was running from the horizon toward the shore, now less than ten leagues away.

  Ahead of her stood the ramparts of the vast mountain, the ship’s gathering speed driving her quickly into the funnel of the bay’s open arms.

  “COME ABOUT!” the Captain boomed. “PAY OUT LINES!”

  It was a trick he’d learned to slow a ship running ahead of the weather. Attached ropes thrown overboard would help with steerage and with preventing the bow from digging into the back of a swell, causing a fatal and unpredictable lurch to port or starboard that could roll her.

  But it proved to be no good.

  The closed-in weather had obscured the hazards for too long. The troughs in the mountainous swell had stood too high. The wind-whipped white water all about had conspired to deliver the ship into the hands of fate.

  The Bosun was ashen with fear. He had lost his lash and club in his urgency to grab something and hold on for life as the deck ran ankle deep in white water and tested his rum-addled balance. The tools of his trade had gone out of the scuppers as the surge cleared the deck of anything not fixed down.

  From below decks came the wails of terror.