Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [167]
Next day Thurso took advantage of a Liverpool brig recently arrived in the offing, fully loaded with camwood and ivory and on the way home, to leave letters for Kemp announcing his intention to quit the coast immediately with a total of one hundred and ninety-six slaves.
Most of the following week was spent in preparations for departure. More yams and rice were taken on board and the water casks replenished. The crew were employed mending the sails, which had been much damaged by rats during this long stay on the coast. These were very numerous now and ravenous, so emboldened by hunger that they would bite at people they found sleeping and had even taken to gnawing the cables.
Things were not made easier during all this time by the strong winds from land and the continual high swells which caused the vessel to labour a good deal, especially at the change of the tide. In the worst of this the ship was made to ride so hard that on successive days she broke one of her main shrouds on the larboard side and a main topmast stay. The purchase of two women slaves was frustrated when the canoe bringing them off was smashed in the surf and they were lost by drowning, having their arms bound behind them. Then a woman slave who had wandered from the others was dragged below and raped by two men who hooded her with a square of sail-cloth. She could not say who the men were and if others of the crew knew it they did not come forward to say so.
These various irritations darkened Thurso’s mood considerably and he scowled through the days. It was a time of grievance generally, compounded by impatience to be gone from the coast and its humid, sapping airs. The boatswain was out of temper at being saddled with the repairs to the rigging, and he drove the men hard. The crew grumbled at the work and at the constant labouring of the ship, which made the footing precarious. Even Vasco, the monkey, seemed affected by the prevailing mood. Cavana had killed a rat with a lucky throw of a mallet and, wishing to show off his pet’s adaptability, gave it to him to eat; but Vasco threw the limp and scaly creature from him in unconcealed bad temper. ‘He would have ate it if it had been cooked,’ Cavana said. But he had found that what Vasco liked best was a mixed diet of flies and beetles and boiled plantains mashed with coconut, and he was continually badgering Morgan to make this last dish for him.
For Paris too it was a bad time. The fever had reduced him and depressed his spirits. He did not recover quickly from his abandonment of the diseased boy and kept to himself below as much as he could. He was surprised to find his face in the looking-glass unchanged, when he had so betrayed his profession. What worse was there that he could assent to now? In the cramped and heaving confines of his cabin he was haunted by the knowledge that he had not paid his score yet, there was worse to come.
Only Delblanc seemed unaffected by the prevailing mood. He was often to be seen on deck, dressed with careless elegance, conversing in his frank, unstudied fashion with anyone free to listen, not seeming at all inconvenienced by the heaving of the ship. Paris, emerging from his penitential cell, would find himself accosted with some theory of sentiment as the source of knowledge or the arbiter of action. On the very eve of departure Delblanc detained the captain some minutes with an ingenious metaphor derived from the workings of the ship. Feeling was the pilot, the passions alone could fill the sails and drive the ship forward, even if their excess might overwhelm it … Thurso meanwhile, constrained to politeness by the other’s status as passenger, looking as if excess passion might overwhelm him at any moment.
In the early hours of the day following, they weighed anchor and stood off from the south as the wind allowed, with all sails set. Stealthily, in the dark, the Liverpool Merchant began to make slow way against the head swell on the first leagues of its journey to the West Indies. But departure