The Reckoning (Slave Shipwreck Saga Book 2)
Page 13
He tried to lift his head to see if it was true, if the whole boat had been cleaned by the pressure wash inside of the wave. The effort of trying brought on a convulsion and the last of the swallowed ocean came boiling out.
“There… it works, see!” the voice cheered triumphantly.
“Nobody seen that executioner pig?” The question was raised again.
“Naaagh, probably swept under. Let the fish have him if they dare. Best we stop looking lest we find the bastard!”
There was a chorus of laughter.
“And finish him with an oar if you do.”
And then Chikunda heard a friendly, familiar voice beyond the throng around him.
“Where is this man?”
It was the doctor, the little man who looked so like a woman hurrying toward him.
“I saw the whole thing, James,” the woman with him, the governor’s wife, was saying. “From up there,” she explained, pointing to the easel still standing on the parapet with its view of the mountain, “I could see down into the boat and that awful man was lying there looking sick as any dog. The whole town heard of his antics last night and it wouldn’t surprise me if he was still drunk now. No doubt drowned, and good riddance, I say to that too.”
Dog….
Of all the words she’d spoken, dog was the one that rang through.
Where is Jack?!
And then he remembered that the dog had refused the ride.
“No doubt drowned, and good riddance I say to that too, James”—the words echoed in his head again. They think the Bosun drowned…? Until he washes up hacked in half!
But that was in the hands of fate, he decided.
It sounded so much like an alibi that Chikunda saw clearly how fate was intervening here, how those Apostles were not mere mountains, that the mountainous wave that washed the slate clean was no accident.
“Let God’s will be done,” he affirmed quietly again to himself.
“Do not fret because of those who are evil,” the psalm played in his mind, “for like the grass they will soon wither, like green plants they will soon die away.”
There was a commotion and suddenly the boat was a bevy of gangly legs and tongue and huge welcome.
Jack had uncannily navigated directly to the shore and was in the boat, furiously licking Chikunda with yelps of triumph. Someone grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and ejected him with a yip from the boat. Chikunda tried to protest but he was ignored.
And then the legs of the crowd parted and the doctor moved through the breach to him, the Governor’s wife close at hand.
Beyond them, he glimpsed an angel.
A very pregnant angel.
Faith was hurrying towards him.
News travelled fast in a small town.
> THE END <
Epilogue
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Spring, 2017
Thank you for sharing this true story, embellished though it is for drama’s sake.
The slave ship and its wreck really did occur in 1794 in a place called Clifton Bay, near Cape Town, South Africa.
Indeed, Captain Antonio Perreira was the Captain of this ship, the São José de Afrika. And the São José really did founder on the reef of Clifton 2nd Beach—where I was the second person ever to dive on her.
When a close friend discovered her lying in 6 metres of water. There was truly not much left, only beams wedged in the boulder field and conglomerate containing cannon-balls, parts of what we now know were shackles, copper sheathing for the hull and handmade nails.
Skoenmaker’s Gat was the original name of Clifton, named after a runaway deserter, a sailor who became a cobbler and lived on Kloof Road under a huge granite boulder, right where the public thoroughfare, Clifton Steps, now exits from the lower Victoria Road.
Of the 400 slaves chained in the slaver’s holds, 200 were salvaged and sold the next day in Cape Town.
Baai of von Kamptz became anglicized to the modern Camps Bay.
The mussel-shell strewn beach where Chikunda and Faith first hid does exist. It is today known as Maiden’s Cover and Bachelor’s Cove.
The story of Chikunda and Faith are fictions, but the other places and names are historical fact, and the situations sketched here are drawn from the historical record of Cape Town.
Gallows Hill is the site of the modern-day headquarters for Cape Town’s traffic police.
The old stone fort still stands in the city, now a mile and more from the ocean, reclaimed and bristling with skyscrapers as it was.
The safe beach for landing was at Waterkant Street between Bree, Long and Loop Streets. That location is now a square, Thibault Square, full of pigeons, restaurants, tall buildings and pavement lifestyle.
Buitengracht Street echoes the name of the “outer channel” of the old town.
The Heerengracht is today’s Adderley Street.
“One (drink) for the road,” that we cheerily recite these days, is indeed derived from “one for the rope,” as described herein.
Dreadful tortures were visited upon slaves at Salt River and Woodstock. These suburbs used to be a thriving beach community with a fine beach that ran out of the city. Today, you will know that beach location as a ten-lane highway on reclaimed land, with a concrete and steel jungle to the seaward of you where Duncan Dock, The Royal Cape Yacht Club and the military naval base (described in Praying Nun), SAS Unitie, now stands and vast ships moor in safety behind vast concrete wharves.
Down in the foundations of the city skyscrapers, lie the shipwrecks of almost four centuries of ships beached on this Cape of Storms during onshore winter northwester gales.
Were you to seek the spot where Chikunda’s troubles finally ended in the surf and on the beach, you’d be standing on the rail tracks of the Cape Town rail station.
To affirm these claims, I offer you news of the shipwreck that caused this book and its prequel to be written.
Genesis of The Story
> Overview coverage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhJUEOQzYDg
1794: The São José, a slave ship owned by Antonio Perreira and captained by his brother, Manuel Joao Perreira, ran aground at Clifton, Cape Town carrying more than 400 slaves, en route Mozambique to Brazil.
1980s: Treasure hunters—(indeed, a friend an myself… the author)—discovered the wreck of the São José, but mistakenly identified it as the wreck of an earlier Dutch vessel.
2015: The Smithsonian Institute of Washington in collaboration with the Iziko Museum of Cape Town correctly identified the wreck.
2016: I published “The Praying Nun”—my dramatized account of our discovery and a part-2, fictional account taking the reader aboard the fated ship.
2017: The Reckoning is the story of one of the survivors.
2018: The sequel to The Reckoning will follow that slave as he tries to survive the brutal 1790s into the 1800s.
Video Links About Slavery
Story of Slaves Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak1SlHjFBbU
Slaves Part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n26NRPtD-xw
Slaves Part 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbyDcrGdtq8
Slaves Part 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kpy7DqGTFt8
Thank you
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About the Author
Michael Smorenburg
Born in 1964, I grew up in a fabulously stable family with the best siblings one could ask for and an embra
cing community. I also landed with my derrière firmly in the proverbial butter in another way; home was a piece of paradise; the beach community of Clifton, Cape Town, South Africa.
Today, Clifton is world-renowned as a playground of the super-rich, but back then it was all a boy could want; a wild and bounteous Southern Ocean on the doorstep flanked by towering mountains on all sides, and precious few rules in between.
It was there that I fell in love with adventure and nature, which in turn prompted my endless questions about what made everything tick. Religion, back then, provided the stock standard answer, but as time went by, science increasingly won my inquisitive vote.
In my mid 20s, the travel bug bit, and when my head cleared, it was the millennium and I found myself living in San Diego, California, founding an online marketing company. Yet, Africa’s gravity is strong, and I was drawn back home, where I have happily remained.
Humans are, of course, the universe finding out about itself. We are of nature; we are matter… the stuff of stars, all too briefly made conscious and self-aware. Each of us is privileged to add our small voice to the symphony of life.
This book and my other novels are my small contribution into that great chorus.
Wherever you may be in time and place, it’s been a very great privilege to entertain and now chat with you.
Please do stay in touch:
I use: #SlaveShipNOVELs
facebook.com/MichaelSmorenburg
www.MichaelSmorenburg.com/Reckoning
MichaelStheWriter@gmail.com
Other Titles by Michael Smorenburg
A Trojan Affair explores actual unfolding events.
The silent heavens stretched above a pious town locked in the grip of drought have become valuable beyond measure—the fracking bounty below its feet... irresistible.
When Dara, 17, half Indian and raised in Oxford, England, arrives in the heartland of a Calvinist bible belt—a place his astrophysicist mother has come to build the biggest infrastructure in the history of science, the $2.5-Billion SKA radio telescope—he becomes the lightening rod for the town’s anger and suspicion of outsiders.
Based on actual unfolding events, A Trojan Affair is a contemporary geopolitical thriller where science, religion, politics, greed and racism collide, tearing a community apart and setting generations against one another.
LifeGames Corporation is a psychological thriller with elements of horror & high-technology.
Catherine's Ad-agency has won the most lucrative prize in the world—a LifeGames Corporation contract.
Everyone knows what LifeGames does: Immersive Virtual Reality training
And everyone knows that LifeGames certification is the ticket to the top of world politics, military and business.
But the intricacies of LifeGames are a jealously guarded secret; a secret Catherine is at the threshold of learning… The first tantalizing fact; Artificial Intelligence runs the entire operation and hypnotizes candidates to believe that their simulation is reality.
To learn more she must cross a forbidden line. Indeed, to retain the contract, Ken, the narcissistic boss-man, has made it clear that crossing the line is a deal breaker.
Ragnarok is a thriller with a plot like none you’ve ever imagined.
Tegan Mulholland is a Hollywood Exec flying Paris to Los Angeles. A mid-air event off the coast of Newfoundland will change her life…
South of Australia, on the other side of the globe, a secret NASA Warp Drive test backfires—a column of spacetime warps in an unexpected way and two passenger planes ahead of Tegan’s wink off the radar.
As the world deals with the seismic events and recriminations that follow, an instinct for connecting dots convinces Tegan that the sudden spate of brutal massacres along the Newfoundland coast is far more sinister than the Hells Angel turf war the authorities are claiming.
The key to the truth lies in the hands of Pete, the charming arms-dealer she sat next to on the fateful flight… the man Tegan has secretly fallen in love with.
The Praying Nun is the prequel to this, THE RECKONING, novel
A story in 2 parts, 'now' and 'then’ — come along on a gripping saga of adventure, intrigue and discovery of a shipwreck that has no identity; until 30 years pass and the Smithsonian fills in the missing pieces — then leap back two centuries to witness a tale of disturbing brutality and exhilerating human courage… The Praying Nun will leave you shocked to the core and pondering human nature in all its forms.
Part I - A True Story of Discovery and Excavation, 1985
In 1985 an uncharted shipwreck was discovered off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. Two divers, the author and his friend, salvage artefacts from the ocean floor and try to identify the ship’s identity and cargo. In 2015 the mystery was finally solved by the Smithsonian Museum of Washington. The ship was the São José de Africa, a slaver that ran aground in 1794 with 400 slaves aboard, half lost on that day, the other half salvaged and sold the next day to defray costs. At this time, the recovered artefacts reside in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the US, in 2027 they will be returned to the Iziko museum in Cape Town.
Part II – A Love Story of Terror and Tragedy, 1794
Naked and shackled, Chikunda, and his new wife Mkiwa are heaved aboard the slaver São José off the coast of Mozambique, bound for the slave markets of Brazil. Once below decks, down in the stinking holds with 400 other captives, Chikunda instinctively knows that it will all be over. When the Captain discovers that Chikunda and his wife are Christians, the couple are spared a horrific fate below decks, but this reprieve does not protect them from what fate has in store.
The story of Chikunda and Mkiwa, though fictional, is based on the best-known facts about the ship and the slave trade in general as contained in records, news reports, and journals available at the maritime archives, through accounts reported by the Captain, crew and from others who witnessed the disaster and its aftermath.
LifeGames/Ragnarok sequel—Coming Soon…
The Manhattan Event—Worlds Collide LifeGames Technology spreads its wings.
With Ken gone from the helm and the company’s key technology mothballed, what becomes of LifeGames?
Of course—exciting things!
More than that, those who read my other novel, “Ragnarok—Worlds Collide”, will be equally inquisitive as to the fate of “the missing planes”.
Well… both of these matters are resolved in my new book to be published in early 2018.
Strangely, it is a novel that brings together the two plots (LifeGames & Ragnarok) into a single tale of deception, intrigue and mind control at the highest levels.
You’re gonna love it!
Email me to get an early copy: MichaelStheWriter@gmail.com