The Guineaman

  ‘If the little demons bite me and bite you, they will be biting every poxed rascal in St John’s,’ Mulgrave gasped in a lucid moment as Kite visited him one morning. ‘God knows what contagions they spread between us.’ He gestured at the net that was tented above his bed and that he had ordered Kite to sleep under while in St John’s. Kite had assumed the kindness to simply enable him to sleep undisturbed by the irritation of insects, whether mosquitoes or ants, or to avoid the more serious attentions of snakes and lizards. ‘You must always cover yourself with such a bed-tent, Kite, while in these warm and humid latitudes,’ Mulgrave had insisted.

  Kite stared astern through the windows at the brilliant sunlight dancing upon the blue sea. The schooner lifted easily to the waves and the coast of Cuba fell astern, misty in the heat haze. He watched a bird dip into the wake, which drew out as a thin attenuated roil of disturbed water marking the passage of Spitfire’s hull, gradually fading as the greater power of the wind-blown waves over-rode the schooner’s temporary influence. Surely it was a kind of allegory of their own tiny existences, Kite thought, as Mulgrave closed his eyes; this small disturbance of the world, to be smoothed over after their passing.

  Dorothea tended Mulgrave assiduously, making him concoctions which, though they could not prevent the fever, brought it swiftly to its climax and eased its passing. ‘She is clever,’ Puella whispered, as though in awe of Dorothea whom she loved and revered, ‘she know many things and Mr Mulgrave know she know.’

  ‘Knows, Puella, she knows many things and Mr Mulgrave knows she knows…’

  Puella dutifully repeated Kite’s correction. She never resented these and accepted them from Kite, Dorothea or Mulgrave, and all three, almost as a matter of concerted policy, corrected not merely her grammar, but her accent and diction so that she enunicated Mulgrave’s title of ‘mister’ as if English were her native tongue, never falling into the cruder distortions of the lingua franca of the Antilles. The only occasion she complained of her tutoring was when she overheard some barbarous English used by Da Silva. Puella failed to recognise the coarse and rapid speech of the polyglot seamen as English, which in truth it scarcely resembled, but she comprehended that Kite addressed Da Silva in English, and that Da Silva responded incorrectly, mirroring her own mistakes without correction. This irritated her.

  ‘Why do you not speak with him about his corrections, Kite?’

  ‘About his errors, you mean Puella… Well, it does not greatly matter that Mr Da Silva does not speak good English. I understand him, as do Mr Mulgrave and Dorothea and all the men in the crew. Besides, he will not need to learn any more now, for he is too old.’

  Puella frowned. ‘You confuse me, Kite.’

  ‘No more than you do me, my Puella,’ Kite laughed caressing her swelling belly.

  Puella was delivered of a son in Charleston, so the infant boy was called Charles, then Joseph William after both his benefactor and his father. The boy was the colour of creamed coffee, with his mother’s dark, lustrous eyes and his father’s straight nose.

  ‘He could pass for an Italian,’ Mulgrave murmured as he regarded the baby in his arms. He had asked Puella to let him hold the tiny bundle in a request that seemed so uncharacteristic that Puella looked first at Kite, before acceding. ‘You must acknowledge him as your own, my boy,’ Mulgrave added, looking up at Kite who stood proudly by. Mulgrave’s eyes glittered with half-suppressed tears.

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  ‘Good. That is as it should be. Do not be distracted by these tedious social niceties that speak against our siring sons on the country…’

  They had already encountered social ostracism in Savannah, where Mulgrave was asked to leave an assembly on account of Dorothea’s presence on his arm. The pretensions of English colonial society in the Carolinas, he afterwards remarked, were in odd contrast to those of the eponymous king after whom the colony was named. That the very men who asked Mulgrave to leave, all had black mistresses several of which openly paraded in grand coaches, only blackened Mulgrave’s mood. The hypocrisy of Antigua was muted by contrast, an attitude fostered by a few and thus far less widespread than in Savannah. Unlike St John’s where, although many of the blacks seen about the town were slaves, and though the disembarkation of slaves from the arriving Guineamen reminded everyone of the enthrallment of the vast majority of the black population of enforced immigrants, the atmosphere in Savannah seemed unduly repressive. ‘Here’, Mulgrave thought, voicing his observation to Kite in one of their moments of increasing friendship as the voyage advanced, ‘even the slaves themselves resent Dorothea’s good fortune. Is a black never to rise from the shackles of serfdom as we have done? Why, Kite you and I know these people are capable of all that we are. That their villainous chieftans and kings sell them into our custody should enable us to liberate them by degrees. Of course there can be no swift, revolutionary change, it would invite only the most savage repression, and the white must change with the black even more profoundly, for he must give up and share his advantages…’ Mulgrave trailed off and Kite suddenly saw him as an ageing man, left weakened by his last bout of fever.

  ‘Did you always think thus?’ Kite asked.

  Mulgrave gave his pallid smile and shook his head. ‘No, of course not, and had Dorothea not treated my first bout of fever, I doubt that I should have ever done so. But a man in exile, reduced to a sweating shadow, has to rediscover much and in doing so often finds matters are not quite as he had formerly thought them.’

  ‘You were… exiled?’ Kite tried to draw Mulgrave, but the older man divined his intention. ‘You know Kite, curiosity about many things is a great virtue, without it mankind would never have advanced, but curiosity about each other is often a great bar to advancement of any kind.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ Kite apologised hurriedly, ‘I meant no offence…’

  ‘None was taken, I assure you.’

  In the succeeding months, as Charlie was weaned and began his first tentative crawls across the cabin floor encouraged by Dorothea and Puella, Kite himself learned much. Although the grander elements of society in Savannah shunned them, Mulgrave’s wealth and mercantile power, assured him of welcome elsewhere. Kite frequently accompanied him on his quasi-social visits as he called upon those he had traded with over the years. In this way the two men heard of the military and naval disasters befalling British arms. In the north of America, all along the border with French Canada, French troops and their Indian allies, brilliantly directed by the Marquis de Montcalm, raided and harried, shooting and burning the settlers in the backwoods, raping the women and tomahawking the men, scalping indiscriminately and carrying off children to feed their barbarous and perverse appetites in the fastnesses of their forest lodges. This frisson of fear and loathing rippled down from the dense woods of the north to the marshes and pine barrens of the south, increasing the natural apprehension of the outnumbered whites at the overwhelming numerical superiority of the natives whom their own commercial rapacity brought into their colonial economies. Between red skin and black their lay only the distinction of colour, it was argued; what a red warrior did to the whites at Oswego or Fort William Henry, a black might do to the white of the Carolinas.

  The British armies in North America proved powerless to stem this flood and seemed destined to emulate the fate of General Braddock. New York, Boston and the towns of New England were said to be overwhelmed with settlers seeking refuge from the horrors of the frontier. This situation was exacerbated by the perverse folly of the colonial assemblies, who refused to join forces in raising troops, or to co-operate in any way. Mulgrave, commenting upon this, said that if the French gained a foothold in any of the British colonies, the assembly of that colony would probably seek an accommodation with the enemy, in defiance of the legitimate right of the British parliament in London to decide such matters. The signal failure of British arms to prevent the encroaching raids of the French and Indians, Mulgrave claimed it would be argued in the assemblies, e
ffectively removed the right of the Houses of Parliament in London to consider themselves the superior government of the American colonies, since they could not defend their own extensive and extended borders.

  In Europe the story was much the same, with Admiral Byng failing to relieve the British garrison of Minorca. This surrendered ignominiously to the French, whereupon Byng fell victim to the malice of the Duke of Newcastle’s ministry who had him shot. The charge of alleged cowardice was proved to the government’s satisfaction by their own suppression of half of Byng’s dispatch which laid out his reasons for withdrawal. The execution had shaken British society and led to a political crisis. The outdated newspapers Kite and Mulgrave read reported defiant and scathing attacks by William Pitt, and eventually contained the news that Pitt had consented to join a ministry if the direction of the war was placed in his hands. That the King hated Pitt, only seemed to the two distant observers to play into the hands of the enemy, chief among which was France, though Russia and Austria were in the field against Britain’s continental ally, Prussia.

  Pitt’s position was unstable and, as the French overran King George’s native electorate of Hanover, Frederick II suffered a humiliating defeat in Bohemia at Kolin. The heavy subsidies Britain paid to the Prussian monarch now seemed an inordinate waste and the National Debt rose accordingly.

  But in this same period, Kite learned that war, though it interferes with trade, prospers traders. Prices rose and Wentworth’s letters spoke of great opportunities less, and of profitable deals more often. Nor were Mulgrave and Kite detached from this profiteering. Although the Spitfire’s voyage north was leisurely, consolidating the position of Mulgrave, Wentworth and Company as it progressed, she carried cargoes between her ports of call. These were often valuables, specie or bullion, payments placed on deposit and destined for other trading houses along the coast, or destined for the banks of Phildelphia, underwritten and guaranteed by Mulgrave’s signature. Armed, fast and well-manned as she was, Spitfire attracted this monetary traffic as merchant houses sought to salt away their gains before the impact of hostilities limited their freedom. Mulgrave’s name for probity, added to the fearsome appearance of the Spitfire’s crew added to her growing reputation, which was discreetly spread among the commercial fraternity, so that she was almost as laden as a Spanish treasure ship. Not one shipment was accepted without an agreed percentage, deductible on safe delivery, and payable to ‘the Said Master and Owner, and the Said Assigns of the Schooner Spitfire of St John’s in the Island of Antigua’.

  And as Mulgrave paid his respectful farewells to men he had often previously known only by the bond inherent in their signatures, he introduced them to ‘the Said Master and Owner’ of the Spitfire. Kite’s reputation was enhanced by specious rumours that he had saved an entire slaver from the yellow-jack while his vessel was known to have been a fearsome privateer. This combination seemed to promise the smile of fortune upon the handsome young man’s enterprises, a perception given greater weight by the endorsement of so shrewd and respected a man as Mulgrave.

  For Kite, the progress northward had a great charm. The intensity of his love affair with Puella, the birth of his son, the fruitful association with the relaxing Mulgrave and his friendship with Dorothea, indeed the entire domestic atmosphere that prevailed aboard Spitfire in her guise as a private yacht, conferred upon him a period of almost blissful happiness. At the time he was unaware that, in their prolonged visits, he was establishing relationships with trading houses and merchants that he would afterwards prize; but he was aware of his growing mastery of all aspects of his adopted profession of ship-master, developing what Da Silva acknowledged was a hidden ability far out-weighing his former clumsy attempts at surgery. Where this aptitude had come from, he could not guess, for he had never been told that his mother had been a Manx woman and her family had for generations fished the Irish Sea about the Isle of Man.

  His basic understanding of navigation was brought to a practical competence by frequent practice and, unlike many masters formally but imperfectly instructed in the art, he never lost his sense of caution in conducting his ship. In mastering these skills he was helped not only by Da Silva, but by the curious loyalty of his oddly assorted crew. To man Spitfire, the Portuguese sailing master had brought together some forty men whose paths had never previously crossed, other than from them being part of the casual, unemployed fraternity of the waterfront. They had never previously sailed together, nor shared a common place of origin, and this prevented them forming cliques, allowing their present common experiences to swiftly weld them together into an efficient crew. Da Silva had ensured they were well paid, and that they enjoyed a sufficiency of leisure in port so that the sight of Puella and Dorothea failed to stir them to resentment. Otherwise, Da Silva kept them hard at work. In port they toiled at cargo-handling or the general maintenance that Spitfire demanded and Mulgrave could underwrite; or at sea in the gruelling grind of watch-keeping. Nor was opportunity neglected to remind them frequently that it was wartime, and that their present employment kept them from the clutches of the press gangs of the Royal Navy.

  On their arrival at New York, Mulgrave disembarked. It had been his intention to cross the Atlantic in Spitfire, but at New York a number of considerations persuaded him to change his mind. The first grew out of his friendship for Kite who proved to be a young man of great promise. Not only had Kite shown his ability as a ship-master in practical terms, but he had also demonstrated a firm grasp of the principles of commerce and, in their dealing with several American houses, had demonstared an originality and independence of mind that suggested he would prosper on his own account. In particular, Kite had used his own money, mostly derived from his unspent pay-off from the Enterprize, to undertake a private speculation on a quantity of crocodile skins which he sold in Philadelphia at a profit. Mulgrave was therefore reluctant to deprive him of the opportunities thus offered by ordering the Spitfire to England, a reluctance that also took into consideration another factor.

  One evening, on their passage from Annapolis to Philadelphia, when the Spitfire lay becalmed and rolling in a sluggish swell that promised a blow later, the two men had been enjoying a cigar after dinner. The women had withdrawn, as was their custom, to play with Charlie before he was settled to sleep, leaving the two men to discuss the completion of the voyage and their future plans.

  ‘On completion of your affairs in New York,’ Kite said, uneasy about his return to his native land. ‘I know it to be your intention to sail for England, sir, so may I ask what port you would consider it best to make for?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Mulgrave asked absently.

  Kite shrugged, affecting a disinterest he was far from feeling. ‘Only insofar as I apprehend that a passage to London is better made with a landfall to the southward, whereas a passage to Liverpool is otherwise, and with the probability of French ships on the lookout, I take it they will congregate in greater numbers between the Caskets and the Wight, than off Malin Head.’

  ‘You have been studying your charts, Kite. Where did you get them?’

  ‘From a merchant in Charleston.’

  ‘Rawllings?’

  ‘No sir, Bigsby, he was but newly out from Bristol where the slave trade is much fallen off.’

  ‘The war, I suppose…’

  ‘Yes, and the fierce competition of Liverpool Guineamen who run for lower wages than the Bristol ships.’

  ‘I see.’ Mulgrave paused. ‘Well then, you recommend Liverpool as entailing less risk, I assume.’

  ‘The matter is yours to decide sir,’ Kite replied, aware that much might depend upon Mulgrave’s decision. Now he had Puella and Charlie to consider and in England he was still regarded as a murderer. ‘Though I should point out that despite the armament of our guns we have not fired them in anger and that one hopes it will never be necessary…’

  ‘Amen to that,’ broke in Mulgrave, ‘but we cannot build assumptions on that score… The reminds me, we must obtain a l
etter-of-marque in either Philadelphia or New York. I was intending to wait until we arrived in England, but we need its protection to avoid our crew being poached by some damned Johnny in an under-manned frigate off the Lizard…’

  ‘So you’re for London?’ Kite asked quickly, visualising a passage up the Channel.

  ‘Or Liverpool,’ countered Mulgrave swiftly. Leaning forward he ground out his cigar. As the last curl of smoke rose up from the plate, Mulgrave looked up at Kite. ‘I have never asked you, Kite, for I am not curious – you know my views on personal curiosity – but you have never spoken with any enthusiasm for England. Even now, I do not detect any great eagerness in your desire to return home. Do you have any preference whether I should land by way of Liverpool, London, Bristol or Falmouth?’ Mulgrave paused a moment and then asked, ‘tell me, would you rather perhaps remain here, on the American coast, or in the Antilles?’

  Mulgrave sat back and Kite, his heart beating, responded. ‘Sir, I cannot at this moment tell you what I should perhaps have told you long ago…’

  Mulgrave held up his hand. ‘I do not want to know anything about your personal affairs, Kite, life is too short and perilous and whatever mischief lies in the past, I have known you long enough to trust you. Only do me the honour of answering my question with an honest answer.’