The Guineaman

  The Negresses have greatly Assisted in tending the Sick, among them a Young Woman whom we call Puella and in whom I have an Interest and Regard with Great Affection…

  What did it matter what he wrote now? Who would read his journal after his death? He crossed out the dissembling we call and substituted I call.

  On the following afternoon Gerard was taken ill, along with two other men who included the gunner, and while Kite almost hourly expected to begin a shuddering fit, he remained strangely unaffected. Upon hearing the news of the first lieutenant’s incapacity Makepeace retired to his own cabin and proceeded to render himself helplessly drunk. It was Ritchie who brought both the news that Gerard had been carried twitching from the quarterdeck to his cabin and that Makepeace had taken to the bottle. Kite was then in the berth deck, binding up the jaw of their most recent fatality, Francis Molloy.

  Kite frowned, intent on his task, asking over his shoulder, ‘who has the deck? With Molloy dead, Captain Makepeace has no right getting drunk…’

  ‘The steward says he’s consigned the ship to the devil, Mr Kite…’

  Kite straightened up and looked at Ritchie. ‘I suppose he fears that he’ll be next.’

  Ritchie shrugged. ‘that’s a risk we all run,’ he observed with chilling logic, glancing at the pale form of Molloy. Then he confronted Kite with an even colder piece of logic. ‘If the Cap’n goes, you’d be the last officer left. I reckon you’ve a touch of luck, about you, Mr Kite. I’ve seen it before; Makepeace had it for years and maybe it ain’t deserted him yet – we’ll see – but you’ve a winning way, sir and with Mr Kerr gone… Well, sir, looks like you and Jacob Ritchie’ve got a leg up in life, if you know what I mean…’

  Kite frowned, then the penny dropped. ‘You mean you’re the next senior man?’

  Ritchie nodded. ‘At the moment Mr Kite, it’s Cap’n Makepeace, you and me…’ Ritchie waved his hand at Puella and another negress who were present, tending the sick seamen. ‘Along with all this black ivory.’

  Kite saw the end of Ritchie’s train of thought. The system of shares upon which the rewards of the voyage rested, accrued to those holding the various stations at the conclusion of the voyage. ‘Yes,’ he agreed hurriedly, ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m glad you do, Mr Kite. You and me haven’t always seen eye to eye, but then we can let bye-gones be bye-gones, can’t we? I can work the old Enterprize, sir, but I’ll need you to navigate, like.’

  Kite nodded. The additional burden appalled him. ‘I’d better go and see the Captain, just the same. We’d be desperately short-handed without him.’

  Ritchie stood aside. ‘Oh yes, sir, quite so, but just tell him that Jake Ritchie’s now his first luff, sir.’

  Kite left Ritchie laughing and made for the ladder. Ritchie watched him go, then still smiling, squeezed the buttocks of the nearer negress.

  ‘I Mister Thomas’ woman…’ she protested as she had been schooled to.

  ‘Sure you are, sister, just as long as Mr Thomas can stand up and piss.’

  Kite went aft and knocked on Makepeace’s door. ‘Go to the devil, whoever you are!’

  ‘It’s Kite, sir. Pray let me in…’

  ‘To hell with you Kite.’

  Kite hesitated only an instant before forcing the flimsy door. Makepeace rose to his feet. ‘Damn you…!’ Makepeace began, but Kite, seeing the quantity of bottle necks visible in the opened locker under the settee beneath the stern windows, over-rode him.

  ‘Captain Makepeace, for God’s sake recollect yourself. You are not sick and the ship requires you. If you submit to this meaningless debauch, do you think me capable of bringing the Enterprize into port?’

  ‘I am in quarantine, Mr Kite,’ Makepeace began portentously, ‘to better preserve myself for precisely the purpose of bringing this brig into port…’

  ‘And whom do you expect to run the ship in the interval, sir? Are you aware that presently, with Mr Gerard like to die, your first lieutenant is Jacob Ritchie?’

  Makepeace stared at Kite, frowned, then waved Kite’s remark aside. ‘Well, you are an officer… haven’t we taught you to take a meridian altitude…’

  ‘I cannot tend the sick and…’

  ‘Then give up tending the sick! The sick will die! The fever is fatal! Embrace you new opportunity with enthusiasm, Kite. It may not last long.’

  Kite was appalled, he was neither surgeon nor a sea-officer, but Makepeace’s remark gave him a slight opening, for the commander was not yet completely inebriated.

  ‘D’you want to bring the ship in, sir, because if so then I will willingly stand watch-and-watch with you? We cannot have many more days to run before sighting land…’

  Makepeace stared at him, then he refilled his glass. ‘I shall consider your proposal,’ he said and Kite knew he had lost his argument. With a look of absolute contempt for Makepeace, he left the cabin, followed out by a bottle which flew through the air and smashed against the door Kite slammed behind him.

  On deck Kite passed word for Ritchie, telling him to take the watch until midnight when he himself would take over. Ritchie grinned and winked at him. ‘I told you, Mr Kite.’

  Kite turned away; he was desperate for some sleep. The prospect of even two or three hours away from the stench of vomit, blood and the last venting farts of the dead, seemed to hold the promise of paradise.

  Nothing mattered any more; the fell shadow of damnation that had fallen over his life in the Hebblewhite’s barn and against which he had struggled for so long, could no longer be opposed. He reconciled himself to death; it would come sooner or later and sooner now seemed preferable, for he lacked the will to fight the inevitable any more. Makepeace was neither a fool nor a coward, but Kite realised he had already capitulated. Makepeace had always known the enormity of the risks in his adopted trade. Perhaps these risks mitigated the cruelty of it and the mortality among the crews of the Guineamen paid in some part for those of the enslaved negroes. Perhaps the constant presence of death prompted men of high temper and passion, such as Captain Makepeace, to take their pleasure of the black women while they still breathed…

  With these dark certainties crowding his mind, Kite entered his cabin, intent only on falling fast asleep. Puella was crouching in the corner, whither she had run to escape Ritchie who, unwilling to antagonise Kite, had not followed her and had then been summoned to the quarterdeck.

  ‘Puella…’ he said thickly, swaying with fatigue. She stood hurriedly and caught him by the upper arms.

  ‘Kite…’

  Hesitantly, his hands went round her slender waist and ran down over her pert buttocks, slipping the cotton wrap from her. He felt the responsive pressure of her thighs against his and they looked at each other, she half smiling, half fearful as he bent and kissed her, losing himself in the sudden access of tremulous passion. Her nipples rasped against him as he tore at his breeches and then she was laying down before him, on the bare scrubbed planking of the deck, her knees drawn up, shielding the smooth and lovely brown expanse of her flat belly. As he exposed his throbbing and eager member she parted her legs and he tenderly knelt between them, pressing his loins down towards her black triangle of coiling pubic hair.

  Woken from a deep sleep, Kite disentangled himself from Puella’s deliciously wanton limbs and clambered wearily up the companionway to the quarterdeck. His mind was a turmoil of contradicting thoughts. Love and desire mixed with self-contempt and despair; hope flowed through him, to be quenched by reality, while rambling and insane thoughts of defying fate and surviving against all the odds, were brought down to sea-level by a dousing of cold spray sweeping across the brig’s rail as he reached the deck.

  The fog of sleep cleared and he stared about him, checking the course. The man at the wheel said nothing; the death-rate aboard the Enterprize had so altered everything aboard the brig that it seemed no longer odd that the surgeon was also the officer of the watch. Kite stared to leeward where, just abaft the larboard beam he could see the Mar
quis of Lothian quite clearly in the starlight, a pale ghost of a ship, her waterline delineated by the faint trace of phosphorescence.

  The beauty of the sight struck him, along with the incongruity of the sentimental effect the perception had on him here, on this stinking vessel with its cargo of death and misery. The strange, contradictory thoughts made his whole being tingle, like some late extension of the shuddering orgasm he had enjoyed with Puella. He sensed something of that triumphalism touched upon by Makepeace with his theory of providential defiance; he sensed too a brief connection between the wonder of creation that united the quickening of the life forces of Puella and himself, with the dreadful, bloody death of his friend Molloy.

  He was recalled from this introspection by a monosyllabic protest by the man at the wheel. Turning, he saw Puella beside him. ‘What are you doing here?’ he began, stopping when he simultaneously realised she could neither understand him nor comprehend his hypocritical affront at the impropriety of her presence on the quarterdeck. Puella held out a twist of cloth containing something small and hard. Taking the tiny bundle, Kite thought it felt like irregular musket balls.

  ‘Kola,’ she said, pointing at her mouth. ‘Good.’ She hesitated, then, pointing at his own mouth, added ‘Kite… Good… Eat.’

  He opened the cloth, marvelling at her slow but sure acquisition of English words. She had learnt ‘eat’ from the curt commands of Ritchie and his men as they compelled the sea-sick slaves to consume their daily rations of manioc and rice. Kite recognised the nuts which he had seen a few of the slaves eating. Makepeace had drawn his attention to them, explaining that they eased hunger and could drive away fatigue, even, it was claimed, dispel the symptoms of drunkenness and purify water. These, Kite deduced looking down at the handful he held, must have been preserved in the clothing of the blacks during their captivity in the baracoons. There could have been few of these left on board by now, and he assumed Puella had gone to some trouble to obtain them for his easement now. He was touched by her solicitude and gratefully touched her cheek.

  The man at the wheel sucked his teeth with whistling disapproval.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said tenderly to Puella and she, sensing the solitary duty to which he must attend, left him alone. As she went below, the man at the wheel muttered something. When Puella had disappeared, Kite rounded on him. ‘Hold your tongue!’ he snapped.

  The man sniffed, but Kite let the insolence pass and, putting one of Puella’s kola nuts into his mouth, he began chewing.

  At dawn Kite went below and, crushing another kola nut with a pestle in his mortar, tipped the powder into a tankard and added water from the scuttlebutt. Then he went into Makepeace’s cabin. The captain was in such a drunken stupor that Kite was unable to wake him. No longer tired, thanks to the masticated kola nut, Kite resumed the watch on deck, sending for the captain’s steward and instructing him to give Makepeace the infusion as soon as he could.

  But Makepeace made no appearance on deck during the forenoon. Kite, possessing an odd vitality and mental energy, left to his own devices, ordered all hands mustered aft at noon, when the next watch-change was due. Then, nervously giving the helm orders himself, he edged the Enterprize down towards the Marquis of Lothian and hailed Captain Ross. It was Ross’s mate who made his appearance on the rail.

  ‘Bad news Enterprize! Capt’n Ross is struck with this damned plague!. Where is Captain Makepeace?’

  ‘Likewise unwell, sir,’ Kite replied, unwilling to explain further with a precise definition of Makepeace’s condition.

  ‘Our fortunes are on the ebb, sir. Our only hope is that we sight land. Until tomorrow!’

  ‘Until tomorrow,’ Kite responded.

  At noon, the men assembled at the break of the quarterdeck. There were sixteen of them.

  ‘Mr Ritchie, pray take your station beside me.’ Ritchie swaggered up and stood beside Kite who turned his attention to the crew.

  ‘Are there any among you who feel unwell?’

  The men shuffled awkwardly and looked from one to another, but a negative mumble rose from them and Kite, standing behind the athwartships quarterdeck rail, nodded and cleared his throat. ‘Very well. We are in a desperate plight with Mister Gerard ill and Mr Molloy dead. But we are not yet entirely destitute. Captain Makepeace is unwell but not from the fever…’

  The aside provoked a laugh from the men and one shouted, ‘no sign of the yaws yet then, Mr Kite?’

  Kite had no idea what the yaws were and merely smiled before resuming his address. ‘As the surgeon and the only officer fit for duty, Mr Ritchie here will assist me…’ Ritchie grinned at his shipmates. ‘From eight bells we will take up new watches of eight men each,’ Kite went on. ‘For the next four hours, I want the slaves exercised and their decks mucked out.’ He saw a grin pass among the men at his use of a farming expression. ‘Now let’s get on with it!’

  By sunset Makepeace was sober and, still free of any signs of fever, somewhat contrite. Seeing Ritchie on deck he summoned Kite who reported the events of the day.

  ‘There’s one other thing, sir.’ Kite said when he had finished, regarding his commander’s dissipated pallor with disgust.

  ‘Oh?’ Makepeace looked up from the compass in the binnacle as if intent on finding an error in the brig’s navigation greater than that of his own dereliction of duty. ‘Pray what is that?’

  ‘We have had no new cases of yellow-jack today.’

  ‘And is that significant?’

  ‘That is for you to decide,’ said Kite, his voice coldly formal.

  Makepeace stiffened and straightened up. ‘Have a care, Mr Kite, that promotion don’t go to your head.’

  ‘Your solicitude is most thoughtful, Captain Makepeace.’

  Makepeace regarded Kite with a jaundiced eye. ‘You may go below, Mr Kite.’

  Kite footed a bow and wisely held his tongue.

  Later that day, when the watch changed again and Kite came on deck, Makepeace was still pacing the quarterdeck. The captain said with his charming smile, ‘I have more than a reputation to maintain, Mr Kite, I have a name to keep.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, I don’t understand,’ said Kite frowning, still fogged by sleep.

  ‘My name; I have to live up to it. We are at odds, Mr Kite, and I have to make peace between us. I owe you an apology; you have done an uncommonly fine job and the knowledge that you are not properly a surgeon is set aside. We are quits, Mr Kite.’

  Was it that easy? That they were quits, and all dispute between them was set aside? Kite recalled the similarity of Ritchie’s remark about by-gones being by-gones. Kite wanted to feel the weight of responsibility lifted from his shoulders, but this did not happen, though he was not one to maintain an ill-humour, even towards a man whose aberrations had for a while, threatened them all.

  ‘It is a pity about Gerard, though,’ Makepeace said.

  ‘Yes, and Molloy.’

  ‘Indeed yes; Molloy too, but Gerard and I had known each other a long time, and my wife is a relative of his.’

  ‘I see, sir. I am sorry.’

  ‘Well, we cannot weep long over the dead. Or the dying… We may yet join them in hell.’

  ‘That is true, sir.’

  ‘But if our luck has improved, then we may yet turn this voyage to good account.’

  Kite grinned ruefully. ‘I think Mr Ritchie is somewhat sanguine on that score.’

  Makepeace frowned. ‘Ritchie…? Oh, yes, I see, rapid promotion and an increased share. Well much of that will be due to you.’ Kite demurred. ‘No, I am sincere,’ Makepeace insisted. ‘Mr Gerard and I had already concerted a plan if mortality had debarred the further passage of this vessel.’

  ‘I recall hearing you speak of it,’ said Kite, ‘though I took no meaning from your conversation.’

  ‘We are not yet out of trouble and it is as well if you know of it, Mr Kite. It is not unknown, in extremis, for the master of a slaver to jettison his cargo. The risk of an uprising increases with
every death among the crew and it may yet be necessary.’

  ‘I do not understand, sir. Surely, to jettison means to throw overboard. Do you mean the scrivelloes and the camwood? Surely you cannot mean…’

  ‘Of course I mean the slaves, Mr Kite.’ Makepeace looked at the young man beside him as Kite’s astonishment changed to horror and outrage. ‘All of them,’ he added, ‘your paramour included.’ Then, with a sudden intensity Makepeace went on, ‘like all intelligent young men, you judge your elders. You disapproved of my whoring and drinking, but when you have survived the yellow-jack, and when you have to make a decision which may account for the deaths of nearly three hundred blackamoors, then you may not view me so harshly, Mr Kite. Life walks in constant companionship with death.’

  Kite considered Makepeace’s strange half-apology, half-justification and, just for a second, recovered a fragment of the weird sensation he had felt that morning he had viewed the phosphor running along the waterline of the Marquis of Lothian.

  ‘…It is the Fates who direct us, Mr Kite,’ Makepeace concluded.

  For Kite, the moment of magic vanished. He was again a murderer on the run, a man drawn to the contemplation of drowning almost three hundred blackamoors . ‘Of that I am only too well acquainted, Captain Makepeace.’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ Makepeace responded, his voice low. ‘You are in too deep now, Mr Kite.’

  Five days passed as they ran west and no further infections occurred; cautiously Kite came to believe the yellow-jack had gone as mysteriously as it had arrived.

  I can only Conclude, he wrote in his journal as Puella squatted in her corner and watched him, that the Mysterious Agent of Disease Possesses a Finite Life-time and that this is now at an End. I now Believe that the Contagion was brought aboard by the Blacks. The first Infections were Probably caught from our Initial Contact with the Negroes in the Sherbro. The later Outbreak is Likely to have come from the Slaves held on board, which Spread after we had Sailed.

  He re-read his words, wondering if he had divined the actual means by which the fever infected white men. One or two of the seamen, he had heard, had voiced the opinion that the fever was caught from the bites of mosquitoes. They argued the mosquitoes lived in the salt-marshes in the Thames Estuary where the Marsh Ague and Dengie Fever were widespread. But although one man claimed the ague killed many women on the coast of Essex, the man’s description of the diseases progress indicated it to be a different sickness, more like the Quotidian Fever of Mr Lorimoor, that the yellow-jack. Moreover, for the life of him, Kite could not see how a mere fly could propagate a malady vicious enough to strike a fit man down so swiftly.