Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [217]
FORTY
As soon as Erasmus Kemp had rejoined the ship she weighed and set a course northwards for St Augustine. In the southwesterly land breeze she made good time. Erasmus stood at the rail scanning the coast through a telescope, but he saw no sign of human habitation, only the pale stretches of the shore and the low line of scrub beyond it, broken occasionally by dark, dome-shaped belts of forest like sudden islands. When they were still south of Cape Canaveral the wind veered eastward, obliging them to stand further out for fear of the shoals, and he lost all sight of the coast.
Late in the afternoon, after some hesitation, he settled down to look at the journal. Some reluctance he did not fully understand, some fear of being mastered, held him back, though he was conscious of no curiosity in regard to his cousin’s thoughts and feelings, only of the desire to find evidence of his crimes.
He began at the later pages – evidence would be here, if anywhere. The ink had faded badly in places and mould had attacked the edges of the leaves here and there, but a good deal was legible still. He turned the leaves, his eyes moving impatiently over the obliterated passages. The journal gave off the faint, sweetish perfume of neglect.
… perhaps seeing some advantage to be gained from me as the owner’s nephew, a matter he refers to frequently and with significant inflections. He is sniffing for a source of power, or preparing to shift allegiance. Certainly Thurso may not now be such a star to follow. Feeling among the people against him is strong, it can be sensed in the men’s looks and mutterings among themselves. Cavana has scarce said a word since the casting overboard of his monkey … a favourable wind, but the terrible deity who may have sustained Thurso all these years of his trading for slaves shows himself whimsical at last, as we see in these calms that have descended on us and keep us still among the shoals with seldom enough wind to give the ship steerage way, for she is now so foul she will not feel a small breeze.
April 20
Woke this morning to strains of ‘Nancy Dawson’, played by Sullivan for the negroes to dance to. It is in his face that he does not much relish this use to which his music is put, but Thurso … considerations of humanity, but for the sake of his ‘prime’, that is the four per cent promised him by my uncle on every slave reaching Jamaica and sold there. I care not if we never reach Jamaica nor any … Dancing will not keep them alive while the bloody flux moves among them; this demon was with us when we set sail from the coast and grows apace in spite of all my efforts to air and fumigate their rooms below deck. Almost every morning now we bring up dead shackled to the living. Yesterday one of the women was delivered of a dead baby, which Libby threw over the side.
April 26
I continue, in spite of these terrible conditions, to hold long conversations with Delblanc, and they are a solace to me, though I think him not enough of a realist. He maintains there could be a world, a society, without victims and without injustice, where the weakness of one was not an invitation to the strength of another, except to succour or protect. I go so far with him as to believe it true that the moral character of man is formed by what happens to him in the world and that our nature originates in external circumstances. Why then do we languish under wars and tyrannies? Delblanc would say it is due to the harmful effect of government upon us, government being powerful for evil only and powerless for … conditions on this ship one would be bound to agree. We are a sick and disaffected body of men, with a human cargo constantly dwindling, presided over by a man who grows every day more mad in appearance, hoarse and staring, with congested-looking features, and accompanied always … flogged a man today only for going to complain about the condition of the salt beef,