Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [145]
Thurso paused for a moment, looking closely at the surgeon, feeling the customary irritation of moral constraint the other put upon him, by his silences as much as his words. ‘We are living in the real world, Mr Paris,’ he said. ‘We have to shape our course to the weather.’
‘The measure I am suggesting is practical enough, sir,’ Paris said mildly.
Thurso raised a blunt forefinger and tapped slowly at the side of his head. ‘It is in the mind,’ he said. ‘You have got to bring ’em to the right frame of mind. And when you have animals to deal with, it is done by fear, sir, not persuasion.’
There had been a jibe contained in this and Thurso saw it register – the surgeon’s face had lost the look of youth but there was no concealment in it; what he felt changed the expression of his eyes and moved the corners of his mouth.
‘Persuasion gets you a gobful o’ rice in the face,’ Barton said with his lackey’s instinct for pressing home the attacks of his master.
Paris smiled slightly but he had felt his heart quicken. ‘So you think the rice in the face was a victory for the method of fear, Barton, do you? I must say I find that a strange interpretation of the event.’
‘Take the negroes,’ Thurso said, with unmoved face. He often behaved as if no one had spoken since his own last remark. ‘This mortality by which we suffer such losses is entirely owing to their brooding so much on their situation. If you want to get ’em to market in good condition, you must change their way of thinking. I remember once, many years ago now, it was one of my first ships, we were trading in the Bight of Benin and had taken aboard a cargo of Ibo. I do not buy Ibo nowadays; they have a reputation for being unreliable and do not fetch prices anything comparable to the Windward Coast negroes, though I know of skippers that deal in nothing else as the trade is well ordered in the delta and slaves in good supply, so you can reduce waiting time on the coast, and the feeding of your negroes while you are waiting. On this occasion we had not been a week at sea when these Ibo began to fall into a fixed melancholy. They could not be brought to eat by flogging and began to die in numbers. I discovered from my linguister that they believed that by dying they would get back to their own country. So what do you think I did, sir?’
Thurso paused to drink some of his brandy. ‘Do you think I tried persuasion on ’em?’ he said. At this moment there was a light tapping on the cabin door, but at this climactic moment of his story, he paid no attention to it. ‘I’ll tell you what I did, sir. I had the slaves brought up on deck and in full view of all I cut off the heads of those who had died with a cleaver from the galley. Who the devil is that knocking? Give him a shout to come in, Barton. Yes, sir, that is what I did, and do you know why?’
In answer to Barton’s summons, the door had been pushed open and Sullivan stood wild-eyed and dishevelled on the threshold. He was in time to hear his captain’s concluding remarks.
‘I did it so they might clearly understand that if they were determined to return home they would have to do so without their heads. I had no more trouble with ’em from that day forward. What are you doing here?’
‘Beggin’ your pardon, sir.’ After the first glances, Sullivan kept his eyes down. He had prepared his speech and delivered it without faltering though rather too fast: ‘The captives bein’ in chains, sir, they cannot move their limbs freely to the sound o’ me fiddle an’ the noise they make with the clankin’ is swampin’ me notes. There is more than thirty pairs, sir, fastened at wrist and ankle an’ all of thim jumpin’. The sound of the chains is drownin’ out me fiddlin’ intirely.’ He paused, looked up briefly, then down again – he had remembered another point. ‘An’ the numbers is increasin’ all the time,’ he said. ‘I’ll niver be able to hear me own notes an’ I’ll forget what it is I am supposed to be playin’.’
Thurso turned frowning to his first mate. ‘What