Chapter XI

I liked Colley, McNaughton and William Bartram. I did not like Pomeroy. I liked Geordie and the mulatto cook, Tom and his quadroon helper Don, which was short for Adonis. These two were free men, manumitted on his death bed by the planter their owner. They made a deal of it, carried it written as it were about them. Yet were they bound to the _Janet_, year after year, for one told me that they rarely went ashore in any port. I did not like Davis the boatswain. I liked Llewellyn the carpenter. Of the seamen whose names were quickly learned, I liked certain ones and certain ones I did not like and to others I was indifferent. There were no saints among them, but on the other hand few forthright scoundrels.

I knew now that that numerousness of her seamen which had struck me at the first belonged to her as slaver. She must have enough to allow for sickness and death, and enough to handle and cow those five hundred that would be brought aboard. I learned that many seamen signed for Slave Coast ships when they were muddled with drink or otherwise deceived. Llewellyn the carpenter told me this. “Wherever there’s a sail and a mast and a hull, there’s danger. Seamen know all that. Britain’s got her ships of war, and the Newfoundland trade and the North American trade and the regular West Indian and Bermudas trade, and the East Indian trade and the Grain Coast and Ivory Coast and Gold Coast trade and the Slave Coast trade. Seamen don’t wait to get old to die--not on any ship! But seamen die quicker and in more ways in the slave trade than in any going. And if they don’t die outright, they move ashore at last with some bad disease. And so they die anyhow. I _have_ seen old ones sitting watching the sea that were on a slave ship in their youth and manhood, but they aren’t many. No, they’re few!”

But Llewellyn, too, said that the _Janet_ was a good ship. No man--no captain nor anybody else--could have helped that sickness voyage before last. “Yes, fifteen seamen--God rest them!”

It was the first time I had heard that word aboard. “Do you believe in God?”

“Oh, aye!” he answered. “Most carpenters do.”

“You lost eighty Africans.”

“Aye,” he said. “God rest them too!”

Days and days went by like beads on a string, easily slipping beads.

As I had read Gervase Morrison’s books on the _King William_, so now I read my cousin Bartram’s. He had as many as fifty, the most of them the Greeks and Romans done into English. But there were also modern books, poets and philosophies and histories, and full in the middle of his shelf a Bible. It had his name written in it and the fact that it had been given him by his mother, on his tenth birthday.

In boyhood I had read every book that came my way and would go far out of my way to get one of which I had heard. Then another life rushed upon me and spoiled the old life. And then I came to Virginia. One didn’t read at Old Mill quarter nor at Daniel Askew’s. But now the hunger returned and I read and read.--And do not think I do not know that reading is an opiate!

I read Herodotus, Tacitus and Livy, and I read Homer in George Chapman’s version. It was so good a place to read--the _Janet_ going, not coming from Africa! Very clean she was, with the salt air, warm not cold, searching all her empty spaces. Cabin and poop deck were free to me, and I had also the diminutive room that had been Philip Smith’s. I wondered sometimes about this man, and why he left the _Janet_ at Philadelphia where apparently, once or oftener, she had touched. I had space and sea quiet, with all the sounds of good weather. I read and I read, and my hand went out for the dram that Geordie brought. Or Colley, his fever now only a memory, came and talked, his intense blue eyes aiding. Or in the cabin after the sudden dusk, when the yellow lanterns were lighted, William Bartram talked. We talked in the cabin there about many things, but not about the slave trade. Early in the passage he had set his great foot upon that topic. “It’s my business to sail this ship and see her laden and deliver her cargo as undiminished as may be. I’m no thinking of resigning. I loved the _Margaret_ that I had so long, but she’s dead and now I have married the _Janet_. And you’ll please leave your reasoning and objecting alone! If I’m no for listening, I’m no for listening. And you’ll kindly, David, do no preaching nor you-know-what-kind-of questioning among the officers and crew. It’s not healthy for them nor any. I’ll be obliged if you will take it that those are Captain’s orders. I’ll have no mutinies, David, even from one man.”

He was captain of the _Janet_. I recognized that. “I’ll make no trouble,” I said, and saw not, indeed, how I could make it. And I spoke to my conscience that was not in robust health. “_It’s but this voyage; we’ll make a change when we come to Christian lands. We’ll go ashore and stay ashore._”

“And I’m noticing, David,” he said, “that there’s a lure for you in the wine and the dram. You’re too Scots not to know that a hard-drinking Scot throws his soul away. I’d advise you to put the ship about while there’s time.”

“Have you seen it affect me, sir?”

“Why,” he said, “not precisely ‘affect.’ But you’ve a way of setting it to solve problems and I never heard of a one that it solved!”

I answered with moodiness. “It may not resolve but it makes one forget.”

“It’s better not to wish to forget. Face your life! At any rate don’t make a dram your angel!”

He spoke with vigor, and Colley told me afterwards that he had a strong feeling upon the subject.

“He’ll take wine after supper, but if it wasn’t that there _would_ be mutinies, I don’t believe that he’d have a drop of rum or brandy in the spirit room! Drunkenness anywhere, land or sea, is to him the king viper. He’s capable, if he didn’t have the _Janet_, of going on a crusade to deprive the beast of his head. Sometimes he’s funny----”

David Scott thought, “Because the presence of some viper is on his soul. He’s striking at it over yonder, when it’s by his ankle, under the log.”

But I ceased, in cabin, to question the backgrounds of trade, and when I spoke with Jack Dannet and his like I did not again ask, “How do you like it?” or “What do you think of it yourself?” Colley and I sometimes disputed, off to ourselves, with the wind singing and the blue sea sheering away. But one day he said, “You’re here and I am here--on the _Janet_. Unless we are prepared to jump into the sea let’s stop the argument! You’re just easing your soul with it, anyhow.”

And I saw that I was, and that it was taking the place of action. Then I said to myself “Hypocrisy!” and ceased to assert that there should be no slave ships nor slavery. When I left this ship then I might begin once more.

Moreover, after that talk with William Bartram, I had collared Geordie. “Geordie, a dram in the morning and a dram at night, but no dram in between!” and thought that I had done well and killed the snake. I looked at Geordie severely, and he was a queer imp. He said now, “Forgive me my sins, sir, and I’ll try to do better!” and so elfish was he with light-gray eyes and flaxen locks and slim as a reed in a bog, that it passed, as did all his comments, for elfishness and not impudence. So I drank less, though I lusted for the foregone cups.

When I had been a week upon the _Janet_ my kinsman tried me out with a blank book and a pen and a paper of figures and other matters. Now it chanced that I had done some clerkly work for that uncle with whom for a time I had lived, and that he was particular and taught me thoroughly. I could have clerked in Virginia as well as Gervase Morrison, but I was bought for a tobacco hand and woodcutter. But now Bartram was pleased. “You’re a better man than was Philip Smith! I see that you may be very helpful to me, David, if you’ll leave strong drink alone. There’s nothing like kindred if everything else is provided.”

After that I had an hour or two of work each day. He was upon--in the great blank book--a transcript for his owners of all the voyages of the _Janet_. In a month I became deeply learned in her fortunes and her trade. I had a kind of gift for this kind of thing. I could do it well and with the mind. I saw the pictures of all I was putting down, but I began to see them coolly. Even then, even so soon, feeling was dulling, Self-Interest, the promising devil, sitting fast upon my shoulder!

The _Janet_ ran on, piled with canvas, through fair weather. A week, two, three, four, five. Sometimes at night, before I fell asleep, there filed before my eyes James River and Amory Hall and Old Mill quarter and Daniel Askew’s and tempest-tossed forest wet as the sea and Christian Todd’s boat under a sycamore. Going off, I heard now his flute and now a Scots pipe screaming a pibroch in a glen. I slid into dreams, some good and some bad. Once I dreamed that I lay in Sandy Scott’s barn, and it was afire, and Helen Scott brought me a great book, and I said, “Now this will show me the way out for it is the book of Holiness.” And I clasped it, but it turned into Eboe Sam, and we wrestled and tried each to throttle the other, and a great voice like thunder cried “The soldiers are coming!” And the fire that was laying hold of the straw and the rafters began most awfully to laugh. I woke and lay trembling, bathed with sweat. There dawned a morning. I went on deck. Pomeroy, leaning against the rail, turned his bull head and spoke. “Africa, Mr. Scott----” I followed his nod and saw the mountains of Sierra Leone.

We coasted south by east, turned the great hump at Cape Palmas and coasted east. There were days and days of this, so huge is Africa. We passed the grain, the ivory, the gold lands. They all dealt in man-gold likewise; slaves might be acquired in any bight or river mouth. But the Slave Coast proper was our end, where rose by the ocean the most factories or forts or castles, French, Portuguese, Dutch and English. Daga was one of ours, built seventy years before. I knew much about it now from the great book and Colley and McNaughton.

There came a day. The sea was strongly blue and flowed in long waves. We had been standing in to land, were close now, could see the fringing cocoanut palms and the low land behind and then hills, blue and emerald. Turning a white prong of shore, we sailed into a deep and narrow bay where emptied a sizable river.

“Daga Bay,” quoth McNaughton at my shoulder. “Yon is Daga.”

The sea ran into surf against a shore of dazzling sand. Drawn up on this lay a row of sharp-prowed, narrow boats. The burning sand stretched on and was met by palm trees. I, who had never seen a palm tree, knew them well enough. Stretched on and met palm trees and some low, green growth, hard and staring in the sun, and a big square of whitened masonry, big and low, with gateway and embrasures and guns in these, and under its shadow a huddle of huts. Only there was no material shadow just now. The sun stood at noon and all was blindingly light. Behind the walls rose a kind of keep, and from this floated the British flag.

_And David Scott, an escaping prisoner, was back in Edinburgh on a wild night, a witches’ night._ There, there, I had seen Daga that lay now in my path!