The Pirate Slaver

by Harry Collingwood

  “Not at all,” I answered. “Your touch is as light as a woman’s. By the way, where are my clothes, Pedro? I shall turn out as soon as you have done with me, if you will kindly send somebody with some water. That ewer seems to be empty.”

  “It can soon be filled, however,” remarked the lad. “As to your clothes, they are forward, drying. They were so stained and stiff with blood that you could not possibly have put them on again, so I had them washed. You see my clothes would not be big enough for you, while my father’s would be too big; so you will be obliged to make shift with what you have until we reach Havana. I am glad that you feel well enough to dress, for I am anxious that you should meet my father as soon as possible. I fervently hope that you will succeed in impressing him favourably.”

  “Why?” I demanded, laughingly. “Is he so very formidable a personage, then?”

  “Formidable enough, for one in your situation, if he should happen to take a dislike to you,” the lad answered gravely. “Not that I have very much fear of that, however,” he continued; “and in any case, my father is all right except when anything has occurred to vex him.”

  “Well, I suppose that holds good of most people,” I remarked. “However, we must hope for the best. And now, since you have coopered me up so nicely, if you will let me have some water and my clothes, I will make my toilet as far as I can.”

  Upon leaving my bunk I found that I was still very shaky, with a tendency to giddiness, added to which my head was aching most distressingly; but I thought it possible that these disagreeable symptoms would perhaps pass off as soon as I found myself in the open air; I therefore dressed as quickly as possible, and made my way on deck.

  The morning was brilliantly fine, with a slashing breeze from about east, a trifle northerly, and the brigantine was bowling along before it, with all studding-sails set on the starboard side, in a manner that fairly made me stare with astonishment, although I had been accustomed to fast vessels. The Francesca was an exceedingly fine and handsome vessel, of enormous beam, and sitting very low upon the water, but the pace at which she was travelling conclusively demonstrated that, beamy as she was, her lines must be the very perfection of draughting; indeed this was proved by the ease with which she appeared to glide along the surface of, rather than through, the water, her progress being marked by singularly little disturbance of the element, considering her very high rate of speed. Her sails were magnificently cut, setting to a nicety, and drawing to perfection, and they were white enough to have graced the spars of a yacht. I noticed, too, that the inside of the bulwarks, her deck-fittings, brass-work, and guns, were all scrupulously clean and bright, while every rope was carefully coiled upon its proper pin, the principal halliards and sheets being Flemish-coiled on the deck. In fact, the whole appearance of the vessel was far more suggestive of the British man-o’-war than of the slaver. The watch on deck consisted of about a dozen men—one or two of whom looked remarkably like Englishmen—and it did not escape me that, one and all, they had the look of resolute, reckless fellows, who would be quite ready to fight to the last gasp, if need be. And I was impressed, at the very first glance, with the fact that they were all quietly and steadily going about their work, talking quietly together, and behaving without a single trace of that lawlessness that I had expected to prevail among a slaver’s crew.

  * * *

  Chapter Eleven.

  Don Fernando De Mendouca.

  The most striking figure in the ship, however, was, beyond all question, a tall, well-built man, with a firmly-knit, powerful frame, every movement of which was eloquent of health and strength and inexhaustible endurance, while it was characterised by that light and easy floating grace that is only to be acquired by the habitual treading of such an unstable platform as a ship’s deck. He was very dark, his hair, moustache, and beard being coal-black and wavy, while his skin—or at least the exposed parts that met my eye—was tanned to so deep a bronze as to give him quite the complexion of a mulatto. But there was not a drop of black blood in him; his nose alone—thin, shapely, and slightly aquiline—was evidence enough of that. He was clad in the inevitable suit of white drill, girt about the waist with a crimson cummerbund; his head-covering was the equally inevitable Panama broad-brimmed hat, and his otherwise naked feet were thrust into a pair of Turkish slippers of red morocco, embroidered with gold thread. And, early as was the hour, he held a half-smoked cigar between his large, even, white teeth. As I emerged from the companion he was standing to windward, near the helmsman, critically eyeing the set of the brigantine’s beautifully cut canvas; and upon seeing me he—without moving from his position or offering me his hand—bowed with all the stately grace of a Spanish hidalgo, and exclaimed in Spanish, in a firm, strong, and decidedly musical voice—

  “Good-morning, señor! I congratulate you upon being sufficiently recovered to leave your cabin. I suppose I ought, by every rule of good manners, to bid you welcome to my ship; but I have discarded conventional forms of speech—among other things—and now make a practice of speaking only the strict truth; and—as Pedro has probably told you—I had little to do with your being here beyond the mere issue of the order for your transfer from the deck of the French schooner. But, if I cannot at this moment truthfully bid you welcome, I can at least say that I sincerely hope we shall be good friends; and should that come about, you shall be welcome not only to my ship, but, as we Spaniards say, to my house and all that is in it.”

  “Thank you, Don Fernando,” I answered. “I can easily understand that you find it exceedingly difficult to regard me as a welcome guest, and believe me, I am not going to be so foolish as to feel hurt at your frankly telling me so. And I heartily unite with you in the hope that as long as we may be compelled into intimate association with each other, we shall be able to forget that our professions are antagonistic, and that personally it may be quite possible for us to be good friends. And now, señor, permit me to seize this, the first opportunity that has presented itself, to express to you my most grateful thanks for having saved my life yesterday—”

  “Stop, señor, if you please,” he interrupted, holding up his hand. “I have already explained to you that I had absolutely nothing to do with that beyond the mere issuing of an order. To be perfectly frank with you, I was in no mood to show mercy to any one just then, for you and your pestilent, meddlesome crew fought like fiends, and cost me several good men that I could ill spare. Your gratitude, therefore,” and I thought I detected an echo of something very like scorn in his voice, “is due solely to my boy Pedro, whose whim of saving you I did not even then care to thwart. But enough of this; you are my guest, and may, if you will, become my friend. I hope your accommodation is to your liking?”

  “Excellent, indeed,” answered I, glad enough to get away from a topic that seemed to be somewhat distasteful to my host. “Excellent, indeed, and far more luxurious than anything to which I have been accustomed on board my own ship.”

  “Yes,” he smiled; “the English are clearly anxious that their officers shall not become enervated through overmuch luxury. I have been on board several of your ships, and saw but little to admire in the accommodation provided for and the arrangements made for the comfort of their officers. How long have you been on the West African station, señor?”

  I told him, and the conversation gradually took a more agreeable turn, my host proving himself, not only a thorough man of the world, but also surprisingly well educated and well read for a Spaniard. He was well acquainted with several of our best English writers, and professed an admiration for our literature as great and thorough as was his evident hatred of ourselves and our institutions as a nation. He had very considerably thawed out of his original coldness of manner, and was discussing with much animation and in well-chosen language the British drama, and especially Shakspeare, when we were summoned to breakfast and found Pedro waiting for us in the cabin. The lad was very demonstrative in his delight at finding me so much better, and I could see that he was also grea
tly pleased—and I thought relieved—at the prospect of amicable if not cordial relations becoming established between his father and myself.

  I have said that the morning was brilliantly fine, and so it was; but I had noticed even when I first went on deck, that there was a certain pallor and haziness in the blue of the sky, the appearance of which I did not altogether like; and when after breakfast we went on deck—Mendouca with his sextant in his hand, for the purpose of finding the ship’s longitude—our first glance aloft showed us that a large halo had gathered round the sun, and certain clouds that had risen above the horizon were carrying windgalls in their skirts. I drew Mendouca’s attention to these portents, and he agreed with me that we were probably about to have bad weather. And sure enough we had, for that afternoon it came on to blow heavily from the eastward, and after running before it as long as we dared—indeed a good deal longer than in my opinion was at all prudent—we were compelled to heave-to; and we thus remained for sixty-two consecutive hours, during which Mendouca fumed and raved like a madman; for the sea was making clean breaches over the brigantine during the whole of that time, so that a considerable portion of our bulwarks and everything that was not securely lashed was washed away, and, worst of all, it was imperatively necessary to keep the hatches battened down during the entire continuance of the gale, thus depriving the unhappy slaves pent up below of all air save such as could penetrate through a small opening in the fore-bulkhead, communicating with the forecastle, and used for the purpose of gaining access to the hold in bad weather, in order to supply the slaves with food and water. As, however, the sea was breaking more heavily over the fore-deck than anywhere else, the utmost care had to be exercised in opening the fore-scuttle, a favourable opportunity having to be watched for, and the hatch whipped off and on again in a moment. Very little air, therefore, was obtainable from that source, and none whatever from elsewhere; the blacks, therefore, were dying below like rotten sheep, of suffocation, as was reported by those who came up from time to time after attending to the most pressing wants of the miserable creatures. And to make what was already bad enough still worse, it was impossible to remove the dead from among the living so long as the bad weather continued.

  When at length the gale moderated and the sea went down sufficiently to permit of sail being once more made, the hatches were lifted; and never to my dying day shall I forget the awful, poisonous stench that arose from the brigantine’s hold. The fumes could be actually seen rising through the hatchway in the form of a dense steam that continued to pour up for several minutes, and when the men were ordered below to pass up the dead bodies, even the toughest and most hardened of them recoiled from the task, and staggered away forward literally as sick as dogs. At length, however, after the lapse of about a quarter of an hour, a gang ventured down into the now comparatively pure atmosphere, and the work of passing up the dead bodies began. I stood to windward, as near the hatchway as I could get without being sickened by the still pestilential effluvium that even now arose from the hold, and watched the operation, not from any feeling of morbid curiosity, but in order that I might become aware, by the evidence of my own eyesight, of some of the blacker horrors of this most foul and accursed trade, and the sights that I then witnessed literally beggar description. The unhappy wretches had been packed so tightly together that they had been unable to move more than an inch or so, while the slave-deck was so low that a sitting posture with the head bowed to the knees and the hands clasped in front of them had been absolutely necessary; and the miserable creatures had died and stiffened in this cramped and painful posture; it was gruesome enough, therefore, to see the bodies passed up and thrown overboard in so woeful an attitude; but the worst sight of all was in those cases where, in the dying agony, some unfortunate wretch had writhed his head back until it looked as though the neck had become dislocated, thus revealing the distorted features, with the eye balls rolled back until only the whites were visible, and the mouth wide open as though gasping for air. The brigantine had left the Congo with four hundred and fifty-five slaves on board, about three-fifths of whom were men, the remainder being young women and children; and of these every woman and child, and one hundred and twenty-seven men had succumbed, leaving, out of the grand total, the miserable moiety of only one hundred and forty-six survivors! It was horrible beyond the power of words to express, and to crown all, as the work went on, the water in the ship’s wake became alive with sharks, who fought and struggled with each other for their prey, literally tearing the bodies limb from limb in their frantic struggles to secure a morsel. It was a sight that, one might have thought, would have excited pity in the breast of the arch-fiend himself, but with Mendouca it only had the effect of goading him into a state of mad, ungovernable fury. “See,” he exclaimed at last, stalking up to me and grasping me savagely by the arm—“see the result of the thrice accursed meddlesome policy of your wretched, contemptible little England and the countries who have united with her in the hopeless task of suppressing the slave-trade! But for that, these negroes might have been comfortably stowed in three or four ships, instead of being packed like herrings in a barrel in the hold of one only, and then all this loss of life and money might have been avoided. By this infernal mishap I am a loser to the extent of over thirty thousand dollars, and all for what? Why, simply because you British, with your sickly sentimentality, choose to regard the blacks as human beings like yourselves. You are all virtuous indignation because forsooth we slave-traders have bethought ourselves of the plan of removing them from their own country, where their lives would have been passed in a condition of the lowest and most degrading barbarism, and transporting them to another where they can be rendered useful and valuable; where, in return for their labour, they are fed, clothed, tended in sickness, and provided with comfortable homes; where their lives may be passed in peace and comfort and perfect freedom from all care; and where, if indeed they are human, like ourselves, which I very much doubt, they may be converted to Christianity. You violently object to this amelioration of the lot of the negro savage; but you shut your eyes to the fact that thousands of your own countrymen and women are actually slaves of the most abject type, made so by your own insatiable and contemptible craving for cheap clothing, cheap food, cheap every thing, to satisfy which, and to, at the same time, gratify his own perfectly legitimate desire to make a living, the employer of labour has to grind his employés down in the matter of wage until their lives are a living lingering death to them, in comparison with which the future of those blacks down below will be a paradise. Bah! such hypocrisy sickens me. And yet, in support of this disgusting Pharisaism, you, and hundreds more like you, claiming to be intelligent beings, willingly endure hardships and face the perils of sickness, shipwreck, shot and steel with a persistent heroism that almost compels one’s admiration, despite the mistaken enthusiasm which is its animating cause. Nay, do not speak, señor; I know exactly what you would say; I have heard, until I have become sick of it, the canting jargon of those meddlesome busy-bodies who, knowing nothing of the actual facts of slavery, or for their own purposes, hunt out exceptional cases of tyranny which they hold up to public execration as typical of the system—I have heard it all so often that I have long passed the point where it was possible to listen to it with even the faintest semblance of patience; so do not attempt the utterly useless and impossible task of trying to convert me, I pray you, lest in my anger I should say words that would offend you.”

  Good heavens! did the man suppose that he had not offended me already? I saw, however, that I might as well attempt to quell the hurricane as argue with him in his present mood; moreover I am but a poor hand at argument; I therefore bowed in silence, turned away and went below, fully determined to have the matter out with the fiery Spaniard the first time that I caught him in a more amenable temper. Pedro would have followed me, and indeed attempted to do so, but as I entered the companion, I heard his father call him back and bid him remain on deck.

  With the moderatin
g of the gale the wind had come out dead ahead, and the brigantine was consequently on a taut bowline on the starboard tack when the hatches were opened and the bodies of the suffocated negroes were passed up on deck and thrown overboard. She remained so for the rest of that day; but when I awoke next morning, I at once became aware, from the steady, long, pendulum-like roll of the ship, that she was once more before the wind, and I naturally concluded that the wind had again become fair. To my great surprise, however, when I emerged from my state-room and caught a glimpse of the tell-tale compass hanging in gimbals in the skylight opening of the main cabin, I saw that the ship was heading to the eastward! Wondering what might be the meaning of this, I went on deck, but neither Mendouca nor Pedro was visible, and I did not choose to question the mate—a surly, hang-dog, cut-throat-looking scoundrel, who had chosen to manifest an implacable hostility to myself from the moment that our eyes had first met. However, I had not been on deck long when Mendouca made his appearance, and in response to his salutation I said—

  “Good-morning, captain; I see you have shifted your helm during the night.”

  I saw, when it was too late, that my remark was an unfortunate one, for Mendouca scowled as he replied—

  “Yes; it was not worth while to make the trip across the Atlantic and back for the mere purpose of landing one hundred and forty odd negroes—even could we have got them over without further loss, which I greatly doubt—so I am going back to the coast for more—unless I can pick them up without going so far,” he added, after a momentary pause, and with a peculiar look which I could not at the moment fathom. “And all this loss of life, and money, and time, and all this extra risk are forced upon me by the meddlesome policy of Great Britain. Great! Faugh! Could she but see herself as others see her she would, for very shame, strike out that vaunting prefix, and take that obscure place among the nations which properly befits her. Señor Dugdale, do you value your life?”