Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [179]
They had promises of change: light rufflings of the sea were perceived at a distance, like gentle strokes of a cat’s paw over the surface, forerunners of a steadier breeze. From aloft Hughes saw these fugitive traces and following an old superstition he scratched with his nails at the backstays and whistled for a wind.
But no wind came. The canvas hung slack. The negroes were listless and sullen under their awning, whose fringes hardly stirred. The fear that had made them quick-eyed and febrile was quite gone from their faces. Their looks were fixed and heavy now, their limbs slow and reluctant, as if fear had been stilled by something worse.
Sea and sky joined seamlessly in a single tone of hot white, burnished and slightly smoky. The ship rested on the sea as if in some substance thicker and more inert than water. Yet this lifeless sea had its moments of energy. The clawing strokes across the surface deepened sometimes to a strange rippling or seething motion. Occasionally a line of foam would break in the vicinity of the ship, bearing an evil-smelling, gelatinous scum. A fierce argument, almost leading to blows, broke out in the forecastle between Blair and Lees as to the nature of this stinking freightage, one contending it was dead spawn, the other decayed fragments of jellyfish. Tempers were short among the men, with only dirty work to do and not enough to eat – their food was rationed now, on Thurso’s orders. Cavana, whose hatred for the captain had not rested since the murder of his monkey, put it about that Thurso had pocketed the money that should have been laid out on provisions. This was consistent with what they knew of him and was believed for the sake of the grievance it afforded. A muttering grew up against Thurso, though not yet in his hearing.
To Paris, seeing the strange seething motions that sometimes disturbed this pale and fiery sea without bringing the faintest of breezes, there came the obscene suspicion that creatures were feasting just below the surface, growing fat on the polluted scum – a filth to which the ship herself added daily, tipping the bodies of the dead and the ordures of the living into the placid waste around, obliged from time to time to have her longboat hoisted out so that she could be towed forward, out of the zone she had fouled.
He was in those days prone to sick fancies, induced in part by the ravages of disease among the negroes, which he found himself powerless to prevent. In the later stages of the dysentery they grew too weak to use the necessary buckets, especially the men, who were still chained together in pairs, and their quarters below and parts of the deck amidships became noisome. Paris used all the means known to him of combating infection, working to keep the slaves washed down and the decks well scraped, and to purify the tainted air below. He had the slaves’ rooms swabbed out with vinegar and he smoked the area between decks with tar and brimstone. Thurso too played his part, united with the surgeon in his urgent wish to keep as many of the negroes alive as possible. He gave orders for wetted gunpowder to be burned in iron pots in different parts of the vessel – a long-tried disinfectant which he swore by. But in spite of all efforts the deaths continued. And now, to add to his troubles, Paris began to find scorbutic symptoms among the crew.
McGann was the first. He had just assisted, with Sullivan, in throwing a dead woman slave over the side, and he came to Paris complaining of a disabling feebleness in his knees experienced while doing so. ‘I could hardly hoist her over,’ he said, ‘an’ she was nae mair than