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By Root 1530 0

He too has been on slaveships before, or so I think. It seems to me there is a difference, in the aura they carry about them, between these men who have sailed on Guinea ships before and those who are new to it, however experienced they may be as seamen. I would be hard put to describe this difference; they are rough and reckless men almost all, yet I feel that it exists, and is indeed one of the elements determining the constitution of this floating commonwealth. Some are always alone, like Hughes and a man called Evans, who never speaks; but most have made alliances of one sort or another. The strong have their satellites who also have theirs, in a chain of being like the order of creation which we are told governs the universe. Haines has Libby for attendant and Libby a man named Tapley, a most unpleasant vicious fellow to all appearance, who in his turn lords it over poor Charlie, the cabin boy. At the apex there is Captain Thurso with Barton as his messenger and voice; and Thurso carries a passenger nobody sees but himself, a kind of divine supercargo who relays messages from some more abstract deity, some wielder of wind and current. I am growing convinced that our captain interprets the universe as a system of signals addressed to himself, which is what many do who end in Bedlam; but he has this world of the ship to govern, he has people to judge and punish, he can force the shape of things to suit his sickness. How many of our governors and judges would end poor frothing Bedlamites without this resource, I wonder? And perhaps it is natural so to force the world, if one has the power to do so. We know so little of it in any case – we are so little skilled at reading the evidence. We see appearance only. Then, if we are in a dream, why not be our own interpreters, like Thurso, and turn madness to good account?

Paris paused, and laid down his pen. Perhaps it was wrong to think of systems, to seek coherent principle in this random human community of the ship. The words of his revered Maupertuis came back to him: One constructs for oneself a satisfactory system only when one is ignorant of the characteristics of the phenomena to be explained … What was one left with then but isolated phenomena, fast losing distinctness – the look in a man’s eyes, the start of blood on the pale skin, the patter of drops on the deck. So to what end do I pass distractedly from observation to speculation to some wild call to take on sufferings not my own? I have enough with my own. As if in the duress of a dream it came to him again: my blood, my pain. And now, clamouring for inclusion, there was Thomas True, who soiled his bedding and was flogged for it, and Cavana, with his confiding air and the putrid discharge of his eyes …

It was with a sense of fleeing that he rose, passed out of his cramped cabin and mounted until he could see the rail of the quarterdeck and the dark figure of the helmsman beyond and a scattering of stars. He became aware again of the ploughing ship, the endless complaint of the timbers. With this the familiar sense of unreality descended on him; he was adrift among strangers, set on no purpose that he could call his own. And yet they were not strangers, like him they were captives here; fellow-captives can never be strangers though one knows nothing of them but this – it was one of the lessons of his prison days.

As he stood there he heard eight bells sounding, signalling the end of the watch. Mounting to the deck, he saw a figure he thought was Barton come down the ladder and disappear below. Two or three men stood talking in low tones at the forecastle, having just come off the watch. It was time for him to present himself in the small stateroom adjoining the captain’s cabin where, in company with Barton and Thurso when the business of the ship allowed it, he was accustomed to take his evening meal.

He found the two men at table already, presenting the attitudes that in the course of these weeks at sea had come to seem heraldic to Paris, the one heavy-set and fearsomely immobile, with a face the colour of dark