Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [136]
I am persuaded that this is a case of the ‘black vomit’, as the disease is called, which often afflicts our soldiers, as I have read, on their tours of foreign duty. It is possible – I think probable – that Simmonds caught the contagion that very evening we separated, I to remain with Owen, he to return to his shipmates at Tucker’s. He would have drunk heavily there and perhaps lain with a native woman somewhere out in the open, and slept thus, amidst the impure effluvia of air proceeding from that marshy ground, acted upon all day by solar heat and at night releasing its poisons.
Paris paused for some moments, pen in hand. He was thinking of his actions from the moment he had noted the violence of Simmonds’s fever. He had gone to his cabin and quite deliberately eaten a certain quantity of bread dipped in vinegar – one should never attend the sick when the stomach is empty, the body being then at its most absorbent. He had looked at his face in the small looking-glass fixed to the locker, the deeply marked forehead, the lines that ran from the nostrils to the corners of the mouth, the pale eyes under thick brows that slanted downward with a slightly dog-like effect, at once mournful and alert. A face not unhandsome, though roughly made and too bony – the face, he knew it then, of a man who did not want to die, who was bolting these sops of bread in fear of death. He clung to the world still, for all his shame and loss and grief.
He had stopped his nostrils, before returning to Simmonds, with lint dipped in the same vinegar; and after the man’s death he had washed out his mouth with camphorated spirits. To be of service on the ship, yes; but he knew that was secondary. What he remembered now was the bread dissolving in his mouth, all hope of life in that sour taste … Thinking of it here in the close, confessional privacy of his cabin he felt a traitor, but to whom or what he did not know.
The number of slaves continues steadily to augment. Tucker, in accordance with his promise, has furnished a batch of twenty-two males and eight females, all captured by his people in the wars he has been fomenting inland. One of his sons was killed in the raid, which had the effect of making Tucker very oppressive and implacable when it came to the bargaining: he asked seventy bars for the adult males and pushed the equivalent in trade goods to levels that brought Thurso close to apoplexy; though one might have thought this exorbitance would compel our captain’s respect, it being after all the mark of a true trader to compensate himself for loss. ‘Fortunate for us he lost only one of his sons,’ Barton remarked to me with that peering, foxy look of his, ‘or he would have cleared us out of printed cottons altogether.’ The mulatto’s prices had to be met in any case, as he controls much of the trade on the river and I believe the supply of slaves can be much curtailed by his disfavour. What can happen to those who get in his way I saw some evidence of in Owen’s shed.
The slaves are still kept on deck, except in squally weather, but there are more than seventy now and they will have to be accommodated below when we are at sea. To this end Barber is installing platforms between the decks. There can be no doubt that a carpenter on a slaveship earns his wages: Barber has had to see to the trimming and raising of the hatches, the construction of the barricade and now these divisions in the hold, which has