Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [142]
‘I never seen her,’ Calley said. ‘I was on the other side. I seen her but I didn’ find her. Wilson shouted to me come an’ looka this.’ He wished he could have been the one to find her and have something to tell.
‘Yer couldn’t find yer own cock in the dark,’ Libby said. The dead jelly of his eye emitted a thin, satiric gleam. ‘Yer lost yerself, didn’ yer, and had to be brought back by the quashees?’
A rare moment of felicity came to Calley. ‘Well, I got two eyes,’ he said, ‘so I got more chance o’ findin’ things than what you have.’
This unexpected riposte set Blair chuckling. ‘That’s reet, lad, you ha’ twice the chance o’ some,’ he said; and this support and the fact that Blair had laughed at his joke, secured him Calley’s affection for ever.
‘They dies of melancholy,’ Barber said, round the stem of his pipe. ‘I have seen it over an’ over. They sets their minds on dying. I have been on ships where it spread like a plague. You put ’em below just as usual, two by two, an’ they looks just the same as ever, an’ in the mornin’ you find a dead an’ a livin’ man chained together an’ that is the first you notice any difference between ’em.’
‘When one dies, others will follow,’ Sullivan said, glancing about him as if disturbed in a dream. ‘It was Simmonds set it loose, God rest his soul. Death has sailed with every ship that ever put out of port. Once he gets loose, there is no confinin’ him again.’
‘He is the only free fuckster on this ship then,’ Wilson said. ‘ ’cept for the captain.’
‘It is true that a curse will sometimes fasten on a ship,’ Davies said. ‘There was the Black Prince, Captain Bibby, which I sailed with in forty-four. We were tradin’ on the Gambia an’ the captain was a tartar – this one is a saint to him. He would flog a man every day for one reason or another. I seen him drown a black woman in a swill tub with his own hands for tryin’ to pass a marlin-spike to one of the men slaves. I tell you, he was a devil. He had given out arms and ammunition to the natives ashore so they could make a war-party to take slaves, an’ in exchange he’d taken eight men aboard as pawns.’
‘What is that?’ Blair asked.
‘They are relatives of the chief or people belonging to the chief that offers themselves for it, on the agreement that unless slaves are furnished within a certain time, or goods to the value of what has been loaned, the pawns will be carried off instead. Our agreement was for three days, but Bibby did not wait the due time, he took advantage of a favourable wind to up anchor and make off. The result was that another ship was attacked by the natives in revenge, the Molly, it was, for no other reason than she was a Liverpool ship. She wasn’t a slaver even, she was tradin’ for beeswax an’ pepper. The captain an’ the mate an’ five crew were taken an’ tied to trees an’ had their throats cut. The English sent a sloop from Goree with a platoon of troops an’ a cannon to punish the blacks for this outrage, an’ they burned their village over their heads an’ killed several of them an’ one of the soldiers was killed in the fightin’. Now all this blood was on Captain Bibby’s head, as he had broke the bond. But there was a curse on that ship from the moment of leavin’. Bibby lost two-thirds of his negroes by the bloody flux on the Middle Passage, includin’ all but one of the pawns he had taken, an’ so it was paid back to him.’
‘Paid back to him?’ Blair said. ‘What became o’ Bibby then?’
‘He retired shortly after. He had put savin’s by. He went to live in Kent, with his unmarried daughter. He was a Kentish man, d’you see, Captain Bibby.’
‘I have seen blindness spread on a ship,’ Wilson said. ‘There is a skin grows ower the eyes. Tha wakes up in the mornin’ an’ tha cannot see owt. The negroes come aboard with it already about them, an’ it gets among