“Which profits many have invested in New England’s own triangle trade—molasses to rum to slaves, I believe.”
Sam tried, with some pain, to swing his other leg over the rear of the horse. “I am no slaver.”
“You trade with China, and on your voyages, you often put in at Turkey. Turkish opium for Chinese tea. Enslavement for a nation.”
“I’m a shipper.” Sam settled onto the horse. “I deliver cargoes. It’s for others to use them.”
“On the one hand you beg principle. On the other you decree that there is no morality in what goes in the hold. Which do you believe, Sam?”
“You’re a clever man, John Bellamy.”
“I am a desperate man, Sam, as yourself.”
“I am
not
desperate.”
Bellamy grabbed the bridle of Sam’s horse. “I am desperate because my father drank most of
his
father’s fortune. I have sustained my family’s holdings through the slave trade. Now the British lion grows scruples beneath its tail and outlaws the trade, as you Americans have. That makes the sailing more dangerous… and immeasurably more profitable.”
Sam tried to pull the horse away, but the animal heeded its master.
“
You
are desperate, Sam, because if you go home, you can’t ship until Jefferson lifts his embargo. London merchants know this, and they’ll cut your share on any tea run you make.”
“Where have you heard that?”
“You’re a man without a flag, Sam. Such men are used.” He put his hand on Sam’s thigh and gripped it hard. “But flesh and blood pass over national boundaries. They cast aside worn principles. I offer you something of immense value in exchange for—”
“A piece of my soul?”
Bellamy relaxed his grip. “You said you were not a God-fearing man.”
“I’m not.”
“Then why speak of your soul?”
Sam reined the horse around and rode down the hill. But he did not go far, because Bellamy was right. He could not claim principle. He could not worry for a soul besmirched already by countless sins. He stopped and turned. “Why not sell the log instead of the slaves?”
“Because you want the log more than any London bookseller will. It is why you came here. The log will profit me only once. A good slave will breed for generations.”
Sam had once dreamed of owning all of Jack’s Island. With the log, he might yet. Comeuppance was good for the soul, likewise the profit that this book might bring. But he lived now for challenge, for the danger of the Barbary Coast or the Horn, for the intrigue of bargaining in Canton or Constantinople. Hard Sam Hilyard, they called him, Determined Fury, afraid of nothing. He had no wife or children that he knew of. His voyages would be his legacy, and what braver voyage could there be than to run the blockades of the African and American coasts?
Besides, men had been slaving since the beginning of time. Slavery was a pillar of the American economy, north
and
south. If there was a God, how could he have let slavery go on for so long, unless he approved?
Sam looked out on all that slavery had preserved. It was beautiful beyond words, and he made his choice. “I’ll not sail without the book.”
“You shall have it. But fail, and I shall send agents to retrieve it.”
xiii.
What struck most was the stench. A week out of Africa, and his beautiful
Dragon
stunk the stink of death, of living death, of puke and shit and piss, of bodies that died during the night and released their contents and began to rot before dawn, a stink that could not be washed away by buckets of salt water or blown away if all hatches were thrown open or prayed away by all the souls in Christendom.
The
Dragon
carried four hundred naked Africans, chained three apiece, hands and feet, without regard to sex or age. Fifty of them were on deck now, exercising their limbs so that they would not shrivel, then partaking of horsebeans cooked to mush. Some ate; some refused any food or water whatever.
“It’s all right, Cap,” said Mr. Milt, an Africa hand who had been slaving on Bellamy ships for thirty years. “Them what don’t eat, ’less they’re prime, we lets ’em die. The prime ones we chains down and opens their mouths, and if they don’t eat, they gets a burnin’ coal to suck on.”
Sam kept his eyes straight ahead. He did not look at Milt, because Milt had only one expression, the smile of a man who had just worked his way through a brothel. Sam could not reconcile this to the work Milt did, nor could he reconcile the beauty of the
Dragon
to the three slave decks that Milt had built into her. Yet, in the overhaul of the ship and the handling of the slaves, Sam had deferred to Morley Milt, because Milt, in his way, separated Sam from the horror, as if Milt were the supercargo and Sam merely the hired shipper.
And while the living ate, the dead rose. Each morning the crew passed a rope basket to the tween-decks, and the strongest of the blacks would load in those who had died in the night. Sons piled fathers, while mothers, with what tenderness they had left, piled their babies. Then the bodies would rise from below, but to no resurrection. Without so much as the doffing of a seaman’s cap, the filth-covered black flesh was sent over the side.
Then came a sound that Sam could never ignore, the splashing and snapping frenzy of the sharks. They followed the ship day and night, as if they knew how well they would feed, and the
Dragon
left a wake of shark fins and blood all the way across the Atlantic.
“You’ll get used to it, Cap,” said Milt. “We be in the middle passage now, when most of the dyin’ gets done. The first week out, they stays pretty strong. The last week out, only the strongest is left. It’s these five weeks in between when we does the best service by weedin’ out the weak ones.”
Sam looked down into the boil of legs and arms and flashing jaws at the stern. Inexplicably, a face turned toward him. It was a little girl. Her eyes were open, and she seemed to look right at him, right through him. Then she was pulled into the blood.
A voice whispered in Sam’s ear, “You’ll get used to it, Cap.”
It was Kwennit, and he was wearing a headband. In the twenty years he had been Sam Hilyard’s mate, never once had he worn a piece of Indian clothing, beyond the whales’-tooth necklace Ned Hilyard had given him when he went off to join the Continental Army.
“Where did you find that?”
“I made it from the loincloth of a dead nigger.”
Sam clamped his hands behind his back. “Stand your men ready for the starboard tack.”
“All of this for a book, Sam? About the first white men in America? I seen the book in your cabin, Sam. I read what I could of it. They robbed Indian graves, but they called the Indians savages.”
Sam glanced around the deck at Milt and his crew of slaving veterans. They were all watching him. And so was the cargo. Sam could not let this go on or he would lose all respect, and a captain who lost respect might just as well go over the side with the dead niggers.
“Stand down, Charlie,” he said softly.
Kwennit did not move. His eyes were as piercing as the little black girl’s.
“Stand down before we face mutiny.”
“We’re all dead men, Sam. All dead.”
“Stand down, damn you.”
Kwennit turned abruptly. “Mr. Burt, prepare for starboard tack.”
“Starboard tack to Boston and back. When they go to face God, even white men are black.”
“Tell him to quit ’is pomes,” cried Milt. “They upset me men.”
Burt’s voice echoed down the deck. “I upset his men. I make ’em sad. But they steal frightened niggers, so it’s too damn bad.”
And the August sun beat down, and the
Dragon
beat to windward, and the weak ones died.
A fortnight into the voyage, Kwennit went to Sam’s cabin again. This time, he read the journal of Solemnity Hilyard, which Squire Bellamy had not bothered to remove. It told of killing slaves simply to strike fear. The next day, Kwennit went shirtless on deck, his chest and arms covered with grease to deflect the sun.
“Kwennit takes off his shirt and puts on his paint, and maybe it’s him who’ll end up a saint,” said Barmy Burt.
And August beat into September, and the sun beat down, and black flesh fed the sharks. Burt grew barmier each day and made up a new poem for every order. Mr. Milt continued to smile and finger his whip. Kwennit put on breechclout and feathers.
Sam Hilyard studied the trim of the sails and the run of the swell and tried not to think about his cargo. Each night, he wrote in his own log, which then he placed in the box with the foundry stamp. If something happened, he would save the box before anything.
He had gambled that once he evaded the British patrols on the African coast, he would face little difficulty in running into the West Indies. Most British ships were blockading Napoleon, while the tiny American Navy was overtaxed simply keeping American vessels bottled up in American ports.
He was right about the navies. But he had also gambled on the weather, and here his hand was not so steady. It was autumn, the time of the hurricanes that swirled off the Brazilian coast, beat northward until they slammed into the Indies, then spun on to havoc Florida and the Carolinas. He could not outrun the hurricanes.
The
Dragon
was no more than two days from the West Indies when the pressure began to fall in the glass.
“Kautantowit’s mad.” Charlie Kwennit had now painted his face black, as his ancestors did when they went into battle.
“Kautantowit?”
“He’s mad about the niggers, and he been mad a long time. About Witawawmut and King Philip and Mashpee Indians who came home from the rebellion and found white overseers running their town. He’s madder now than ever. If you don’t throw over that book and cut loose the niggers, we’re all dead men.”
“Put on your pants,” said Sam.
The following day, the wind faded entirely. The sea grew silent. The air became still. The sky went a strange yellow-gray. Even the creatures in the hold seemed to sense something terrible in the air, and their wailing, once as constant as the wind, ceased as completely.
“Mr. Kwennit, lower ’maphrodites and tops’ls.”
“Lower?” cried Milt. “You should be wettin’ ’em down and kedgin’ out ahead. Anything to catch a wind.”
“Tend to your cargo, Mr. Milt. I’ll tend to the ship.”
“Sails are in, Captain,” cried Kwennit, who played the perfect mate, though he now looked like one of the slaves.
“We’ll scud with spanker and jib.”
“Shall I loose the niggers?”
“Loose the niggers?” screamed Milt.
“No!” answered Sam Hilyard.
And the rain began to fall. And the sea rolled into swells that grew into great black mountains. And the wind began to roar, loud and louder, until neither the renewed screaming of the slaves nor the praying of the crew could be heard above it.
Sam stood at the stern, the dragons on his waistcoat soaked to his skin, Barmy Burt lashed to the wheel beside him.
“The pumps!” Kwennit came sliding aft. “They can’t keep up, Sam.”
“Keep pumping!” screamed the captain.
“Loose the niggers!” cried Kwennit through cupped hands. “Throw over the book! Or we’re all dead men!”
“Loose the niggers! Throw over the book! Or it’s sure that in hell we all three will cook!” Burt began to laugh.
Sam had not heard the madman’s cackle since the
Somerset
. It chilled him colder than the scream of the storm.
“I been chained in the cable tier, and so has you, and your old dad, Ned… but he knew what to do.”
“What?” Sam turned on Burt with sudden fury. “What did he do?”
“He held to his principles, but you, you ain’t got any.”
“Loose the niggers!” screamed Kwennit again.
“Loose the niggers?” Milt was running down the deck, unfurling his whip as he came. “Loose the niggers?” He raised his whip, and the tip blew back like a piece of loose line. As he turned to see where it went, Kwennit drove his knife into Milt’s belly and opened him all the way to the throat, spilling blood and intestines like stew onto the deck.
Then Kwennit cut Burt free from the wheel, which spun wildly with the running ship and swung the stern away from the wind. “Loose the niggers, Burt!”
“No! Not the niggers!” Sam grabbed for the wheel, and the spinning spokes nearly threw him over.
“Loose the niggers.” Kwennit gave Burt the keys from Milt’s belt. “I’ll get the book.”
“No!” screamed Sam. “Not the book.”
Kwennit kicked open the companionway and went below while Barmy Burt went laughing toward the forward hatch. And Sam could follow neither of them, for if he let go of the wheel, his ship would swing broadside and be gone.
One of Milt’s men came out of the forecastle and skulled Barmy Burt with a belaying pin. Burt fell to the deck, grabbed a halyard, and pulled himself up, only to be smashed again.
Sam found line to lash the wheel and lurched toward Burt. Then he thought of the book. Kwennit would throw it over the side, a sacrifice to the Indian God, but the wind would not stop, nor the waters part, and the book would be lost forever.
Through the sheeting black rain, Burt and the sailor suddenly seemed to Sam like mockingbirds fighting for a branch. But the book… the book was alive, for what it was worth, for what it meant, for what it had cost. So Sam left Burt fighting for his life and stumbled to his cabin.
The sailor hit Burt again and again with the pin. But Burt clutched his halyard and laughed like a madman. With each blow, the laugh grew louder, the eyes opened wider, and the sailor struck harder, as though shocked that this crazy old man could stand the beating. But Burt stood it until a black sea boiled up and carried the sailor over the side.
Then he let go of his line and unlocked the hatch. His last act was to drop the keys into the hold, freeing black men chained as he once had been. Then he disappeared in another wave of blackness.
From blackness into blackness men went. From the blackness of his cabin, Sam emerged to the living blackness of the storm. In his arm, he clutched the box. Its corner was covered with blood and hair, and his hands were covered with lampblack from Charlie Kwennit’s face.