Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [144]
‘Aye-aye, sir.’
‘We will be going on round the coast very soon, down to the company fort. We will do our private business for the gold dust there, upriver, as we did before. This voyage will be our last together. What course you set afterwards is no concern of mine, but while you are mate on my ship you will keep to my mood. I was remarking on the fickleness of these dogs and their readiness to follow any bad example.’
Then the yawl returned from six days’ trading upriver, with eight slaves, a tusk weighing nearly forty pounds and two quintals of camwood – and with Johnson in the waist half conscious and shivering with fever and True hardly able to stand to his oars.
It was this that decided Thurso. Two of the crew were dead already and one had run; any more, and he could not keep the yawl manned and the negroes guarded at the same time and so would not manage to bring off slaves anywhere on this side of the cape. Next morning he sent ashore for water and more rice; they had more than a thousand pounds of it aboard now. Later he sent Haines and four men with twenty fathoms of remnants to exchange for yams, plantains and palm oil, but these supplies could not be brought aboard till next day, as there was so great a sea across the bar that Haines did not dare to venture over. When they came they brought with them also a single slave, a well-grown boy of fourteen or so, bringing the total number to ninety-seven, of which thirty were women.
In the course of the day the ship’s sails were loosed and aired and the spare sails brought up and overhauled. It was found that the rats had done some damage to these; the ship was by now overrun with them, as the three cats they had brought out from England were all dead, and they had been quite unable to find one ashore. Under Barton’s supervision – Johnson being too ill – the small arms were discharged and reloaded. With nightfall, the slaves were herded to their quarters below and the hatches fastened down on them, Thurso knowing from old that to leave slaves on deck, men or women, when the ship was leaving their home shores, was to invite trouble of the most serious kind.
‘I have seen it happen,’ he said that evening to Barton and Paris, whom he had invited to sup with him on this eve of departure. ‘They become desperate when they see the ship putting out to sea. They will sometimes throw themselves over the side, chained as they are. And in their shackles, d’ye see, they cannot long stay alive once they are in the water. They are gone under before you can lower a boat for ’em. I have known ’em shout and laugh with the joy of cheating us. It is a dead loss to the owners, since we are not underwritten for suicide.’
They were sitting over brandy after the meal. Thurso was in a more than usually expansive mood this evening, with his trading done here and half his cargo already purchased. Since hearing Paris’s report he was less troubled at the thought of being left undermanned. Johnson was still weak and complained of racking pains in head and limbs; but True’s fever had left him. Both men had been drinking heavily and sleeping in native huts on shore. It was the surgeon’s opinion that they had exposed themselves to malignant ground vapours and thus contracted marsh fever, though it seemed of an ephemeral kind.
‘If the men have to sleep away from the ship,’ the surgeon said, ‘they should be sure to have a fire lit in their close vicinity, just sufficient to raise a gentle smoke. This would render the night airs less noxious.’
‘Aye, it is the same practice we use aboard ship,’ Barton said, ‘to clear the air between decks.’
Thurso looked from the mate to the surgeon. He could not suffer men to show any accord in his company without prior reference to himself. ‘You may be right, Mr Paris,’ he said. ‘But you will never get any discipline or good governance from these men. They will take no notice of advice that might tend to their good. Hard labour