Chapter XIX

The beginning of the second year on the _Janet_ saw a change in my relations with rum and brandy. The body had its reasons doubtless that only reached the mind as recognition of an alteration in taste. I began a course of drinking not at all or more sparingly even than Bartram, for something like three months precisely. That time out, I then with deliberation drank myself into a kind of lucid drunkenness in which I saw a strange world and did strange things therein. For the better part of a fortnight I moved in this perpetually renewed mirage. Then I slept two nights and days on end, and came out of the cabin of Philip Smith a sober man. Three months of the one state, a fortnight of the other, and over and over again. Out of the cabin of Philip Smith, or out of the small house back of the factor’s house, deep shaded by palm and pepper trees, on the low hill at Daga.

On the _Janet_ I became accepted for what I was. At Daga there was that latitude that no one cared. Rathbone Lace liked me better drunk. Then I was like a sleepwalker, and sleepwalkers did all manner of odd and entertaining and daring things without winking. When he suggested I followed, though now and then I did the suggesting myself.

But on the _Janet_ obtained a different version of latitude. And nothing in the world but Affection caused Captain William Bartram to keep David Scott upon his ship. He did good work and was satisfactory throughout the three months, but those two weeks might come down at sea, in storm or danger, or in good conditions and make a danger. And if the stuff were shut away from him, he grew more of a madman than with it. So Geordie was told off to watch him, and Colley kept an eye over him, and William Bartram suffered him where with another he had hardly waited for port to say, “Begone this ship!”

Bartram looked grim upon me but I answered him out of another world. Then I slept twice around the clock and came to supper like a lamb. He kept me after McNaughton and Colley were gone and said, “So you’re hame again with your better man?”

“Is he a better man?”

“He’s got the power to ask questions anyhow. David, you’re like your grandfather. I’ve heard about him. He was verra responsible and somehow big, except just once in so often when he sold himself to the devil.”

“Just once in so often? I’m not certain that I’m so like there, Bartram.”

He answered dryly, “For all your way of looking at it, I don’t hold that you’ve sold yourself entirely. Your grandfather sold himself like you, for short terms. But in one of them he took a torch and fired his own barns and byres, and it spread to the whole house and it was burned. He tried to get through to a room where was a child, but the rooftree fell and slew him.”

“I’ve heard the story.”

“Then I wish you’d lay it to heart. For you’re like him, David. I’ve seen his picture.”

But I did not wish to talk about torches flung in barns and byres, and even as I thought that, saw the flaming barn of Sandy Scott, smelled the smoke, and marked the cover and the leaves of Helen Scott’s Book begin to move and curl. I said, “What are you reading now, Bartram?” For it was the voyage out, and he had time to read.

“The ‘Odyssey’ again,” he said, and fell to speaking of the Phæacians.

One year, two years, into the third year upon the _Janet_. Counting that first involuntary one from Norfolk, five voyages.

Pomeroy was dead, knifed by a seaman--Eldred--whom he had thrice flogged. Bartram hanged Eldred. Hamilton, the surgeon’s mate, was dead of smallpox in Barbadoes, Davis the boatswain of flux at Daga. Of the forty seamen whom I watched that first day out from Norfolk, more than half were sunk away from view. Dead, disabled by disease or accident, or simply gone, vanishing in port towns, saying that they would reappear but never doing so, spirited away by their own desires or by those of others. Bartram accepted losses, filled his number as best he might and sailed on. More than other merchantmen slave ships must be forever renewing their crews. Even the _Janet_ with William Bartram for captain.

Her second mate now was Edward Black, and he was more than a little like Pomeroy. Wheeler was the boatswain, and a better man than Davis. Out of the seamen a dozen would bear watching.

Five voyages. Twenty-five hundred Africans, men, women and children, taken on at Daga. Twenty-two hundred delivered to Company agents in Kingston, Bridgetown and Charleston. Three hundred dead and given to the sea somewhere in the Middle Passage, or dead in port before they could be landed. It was all down in the great book, how they died and when, the most of that smallpox which we found among us the third voyage. On the whole, for five voyages, the fortune was good.

The _Janet_ had been a long while from Bristol in England, from her berth there and any true overhauling and renewing. Under Bartram what could be done at sea, at Daga, at Kingston, was always being done, but for all that she was growing old and worn and sere and foul. When the next lading had been delivered at Kingston, he would take her home to Bristol and give her full time there in which to be made new again. He himself would go then into the country, or even, it might be, to Scotland. He would rest through those months, repose himself, forget what it was to be captain of a Slave Coast ship. And Colley would go to London--pay his last creditor--and like enough settle there and return no more to the hot, blue sea between Africa and America. McNaughton would surely go to Scotland, to Stirling where he was born. But he would come back to the _Janet_, or to William Bartram, for the two were interlocked in McNaughton’s mind.

What should I do--what should David Scott do?

It was eight years since Culloden, and if I changed my name and grew a sailor’s beard, should I not move in safety, even if--even if--I went to Scotland?

“Aye, you may, man,” said Bartram, “if only you’ll time your veesit. It’ll never do, David, to choose the time when the devil has you. That’s the day you should seek the _Janet_ or at the worst a Bristol lodging house I’ll give you the name of. There, with Geordie at the door, you can bide till Auld Nick and you are weary, the tane of the tither. But if you meet him in Scotland, he’ll betray you to the Whigs, or you’ll betray yourself and it’s the same thing!”

He looked at me with an anxious fold in his broad brow, sunburned into the hue of one of his old brown books. “I’d feel safer about you, David, if you’d bide in Jamaica that while. Leave you at Kingston, find you at Kingston--and the old berth on the _Janet_ and the books and the sea and all----”

“I want to lie on the green grass by Arthur’s Seat once more.”

“Well, I’m saying what I think is best, but you’re your ain man.”

The full moon that night made of the _Janet’s_ sails mountains of pearl and caverns of ebony. We were going toward Africa. The ship was clean, was silent save for the ever music, where we gave it harp strings, of the wind that put us forward, and the sound now and again of seamen’s voices; was spacious. A full sea was running and under the moon there were crests of light and caverns of night. I watched them, and Bartram’s words kept running through my head.

“My own man. I am my own man.--David Scott, you are your own man.--Then why the devil am I so unhappy?”

It was not necessary to show that I was unhappy. Before Bridgetown in Barbadoes I overheard--a great water cask on deck hiding me from them--the steward Benjamin describe me to Black, the new second mate, just signed with the _Janet_ and a former acquaintance of Benjamin’s. The latter had doubtless been picturing Captain and first mate and surgeon and all. I came in only for myself. “And there’s Mr. Scott----”

“Who’s he?”

“He’s kin of the Captain. God knows, I think he’d been in some horrid strait in Virginia where he picked him up! Killed a man maybe, or maybe ’twas a woman.--He’s a stark, tall Scot with a glint of the Captain about him.”

“What does he do?”

“He clerks for the Captain--and the Captain’s been always a perfect sea lawyer about putting things down. But he can handle a ship too. He wa’n’t no novice there when he came aboard, though he might be what you call rusty. If he’d ‘a’ wanted it he could have been second mate after Mr. Pomeroy was killed.”

“Well, seeing that you are aboard, Benjamin, I’m glad that he didn’t want it!”

“We were nearer Cape Verd than we were to the Indies when Eldred killed Mr. Pomeroy and was hanged for it. Then up comes all of a sudden a terrible blow, regular small hurricane! Mr. McNaughton gets struck by a boom--knocked senseless and didn’t rightly come to himself for two days. Enduring that storm Mr. Scott was mate and there’s no denying he did well. The _Janet_ never had any one do better. He’s rash and he’s not rash--that kind.”

Mr. Black demurred. “Give me the kind that’s steadily not rash.”

Benjamin, who had a turn for analysis, would not relinquish me. “Yes, poop and forecastle have got a liking for him, but he’s got curious ideas about slaves.--Yet he has a slave girl at Daga and he stays quite calm upon this ship.”

“Curious ideas?” said Black and spat. “My only idea is they’re cattle!”

“About every two months,” continued Benjamin, “he gets drunk in the entirest way. The strange thing is that you don’t know if he is drunk or is an extraordinary person doing extraordinary things. You tell it at last because there doesn’t anything useful come of what he does. They’re just fantastic.”

“Well, if he drinks that way, he oughtn’t never to be mate.”

“He’s the kind that’s more like to be captain, and God knows there are drinking captains enough in the trade!”

“Captain of the _Janet_, you mean?”

“Why, no captain’s immortal! If Captain Bartram was to go, he might say to the Company, ‘I recommend my kinsman for my place,’ and they might listen to him. Mr. McNaughton don’t want it. He’s been first mate so long that he’d rather die as he’s lived. I talk that way,” said Benjamin, “but Captain William Bartram ain’t like to die yet, and his kinsman will have to stop his particular kind of drinking before _he_’ll put him over the _Janet_. That’s _his_ care for seamen and slaves.”

McNaughton called, “Mr. Black!”

“Aye, sir!” and the second mate and steward departed that quarter.

It was true that there was at Daga Fanny. I bought her to make her safe while I was from Africa. She was Fullah, that is, mixed Negro and Moor, from the country where the caravans over the great desert change sand for forest and where the Negro villages grow Mohammedan. She said “Allah” as often as she said “God”, but when she was really moved she used the Negro word for the same Being.

Fanny!