Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [140]
Paris took out a handkerchief and wiped his face slowly. ‘There was not much gained by flogging him, even when he was alive,’ he said, loudly enough for the captain and mate on the quarterdeck to hear. He glanced across the deck at the shackled men under the awning. They avoided his eye as usual, except for one tall and strongly built man, whom he recognized now as the first slave he had examined. This man was looking at him steadily though without discernible expression; and he did not look away when their eyes met – an unusual thing.
THIRTY
The dead slave was thrown overboard at once. He was followed two days later by a woman who, though eating her portions without protest, had been in a state of deepening lethargy for some time and was found dead on deck in the early morning with no sign about her as to the cause. Then the ship’s boy, Charlie, began to sicken with the same symptoms that Simmonds had shown. As his fever mounted, the hammering and clatter on the ship mounted with it: under the supervision of Johnson, the gunner, the men were sheathing the fore parts of the mainmast and a space of the deck forward of it with lead plate, so that the furnace could be placed amidship with more security, there being more mouths aboard now than the ship’s iron pot could boil for. Charlie, whose surname nobody knew, who had experienced little but blows and hunger in his fourteen years, died shivering and vomiting, not knowing whether these heavy detonations of sound were within him or without.
Paris could fathom neither the one death nor the other. Charlie had not berthed in any proximity to the second mate; he had not gone on the expedition to Tucker’s and so had not been exposed to any poisonous airs from the river. Paris knew there were sexual relations among some of the men. Simmonds, after contracting the disease, might have sodomized the boy and so communicated the contagion. From questions such as these – and from his own ignorance – he sought refuge where he could find it, in memories of the past, in attention to the daily trafficking for slaves that still continued.
That steady look of the negro exercised his mind in the days that followed, though it was not repeated. It was the first time he had actually been regarded by any of these people. He could not decide if it had been a look of enmity or a recognition of something. It was as if, he wrote in his journal, the life of the eyes was transferred from the man who spat at me, who died, transferred from him to the other …
Fanciful, no doubt, he thought, sitting late in his cramped cabin, unable to sleep, for all the cradling motion of the ship. He felt that he was changed. He had become prey to superstitious fancies, as he had to impulses of violence.
Close weather lately, with lightnings and variable winds. The slaves have had to be kept under hatches a good part of the time – Barber has fitted the platforms and bulkheads now. Tapley is in irons up against the windlass, and has been so since yesterday. It seems that he seduced one of the women to go with him below, and there lay with her brutelike in view of those of his companions not on deck. It was not a rape, all are agreed, so he may escape flogging. He is a sly, rat-like man, Tapley.
At daybreak there came several canoes alongside us with traders to offer their services. They were sent back ashore by Captain Thurso to purchase slaves and rice, he having provided them on trust with trade goods. One came back within two hours with a man and two girls, bringing our number to eighty-three. There is in the offing now, as well as the Frenchman and a Danish slaver newly arrived, a London ship, the Astrid, Captain Cockburn. In mid-morning Thurso went