Corsair (49 page)

‘Come on,’ Dan was standing at the foot of the mast beckoning. He had a rope in his hand. ‘Here haul on this! Jacques, you help him.’ Hector limped over and took the rope. Dan and the two blacks had begun to unfasten the bands which held the sail along the boom. Then he and Bourdon heaved on their rope and the upper spar rose, the sail opening beneath it. The blacks and Dan joined them and added their weight. There was no one at the helm so the boat was spinning slowly in the current. The riverbank was sliding past and above their heads the sail flapped three or four times. The gap between the vessel and the pursuing dugout was widening. ‘Almost there now,’ called Dan. ‘Make fast!’

The vessel began to gather pace. Looking aft, Hector saw the paddlers in the dugout had given up the chase. They were turning back to shore.

‘T
HERE WAS MUCH
sickness on the ship,’ said a deep, husky voice. Hector swung round in surprise. The speaker was one of the blacks who had rescued them. The man noted his astonishment. ‘My name is Benjamin. I speak French and Portuguese also as I work with the foreign ships on the coast. When you ran down the hill, I thought you are runaway slaves so I wanted to help. I too was a slave once. Now I have been given my freedom. The foreign sailors call me a Laptot.’

‘We were slaves too, at one time.’

Now it was Benjamin’s turn to be taken aback. ‘Your dark-skinned friend here was a slave, that I understand. But I have never met white slaves before.’

‘We have reason to be grateful to you. Thank you for picking us up.’

Benjamin regarded him hopefully. ‘You are a ship’s captain?’

‘No. The most I’ve ever been is a captain’s secretary, or a galley slave. I’ve never been in charge of any ship.’

‘This ship needs a captain. The old one is dead, and so are the first and second mates. All died from the sickness. That is why we were anchored. We did not know what to do. Maybe it is your turn to help us.’

Benjamin went on to explain that he and his companion, another Laptot, had been hired when the sloop called at the Residence of St Louis, the French trading station at the river mouth. The two of them had helped bring the vessel upriver until, two weeks into their journey, a fever had broken out aboard. The hard-driving captain had refused to turn back. He insisted on proceeding until finally the crew were so short-handed that they had been forced to anchor and wait for the sickness to abate. But the fever had raged all the more fiercely. One by one the foreign crew had died until only the two Laptots were left alive. Unable to handle the vessel by themselves, they had been marooned.

‘What about the cargo?’ Hector asked.

‘We have touched nothing,’ Benjamin answered. ‘I will show you.’

Hector hobbled behind him as the Laptot led the way to a hatch, opened it, and disappeared below. As Hector’s eyes got accustomed to the gloom in the hold, he had a vivid recollection of the interior of the ship in which he had been carried away by Hakim Reis. But what he saw now was different. Along each side of the hull were built rows of shelves as if in a trading post. On them were stacked what looked like trade goods. There were bundles of chintz cloth, axe heads, knives, and iron agricultural tools, trays of brass medals. But many of the shelves were bare. They also seemed unnecessarily wide and the gap between them was barely eighteen inches.

‘Our captain had planned to go far upriver where there had been a native war. He was sure he would fill the shelves. He had already laid in stocks of food and water for the captives.’

Hector realised that he was looking at the interior of a slave ship. The wooden shelves were where the slaves would lie during the long passage to the Americas.

‘Where did the captain keep his papers?’

Benjamin showed him into a small cabin in the stern of the vessel. A quick search of the dead captain’s documents revealed that the vessel was the
L
’
Arc-de-Ciel
from La Rochelle. There were maps and charts of the west coast of Africa, of the mid-Atlantic, and the Caribees. There was no doubt that
L
’
Arc-de-Ciel
was a slaver.

Benjamin and Hector returned on deck. It was growing dark. Soon there would be the short tropical dusk, then nightfall. ‘Should we anchor for the night?’ Hector asked Dan. The Miskito seemed confident in his ship handling.

Dan shook his head. ‘Our remaining anchor is not heavy enough to hold us in this current. With a little moonlight we should be able to avoid the mudbanks. We had best keep going.’

Hector turned to the Laptot. ‘How far to the mouth of the river? When we get to St Louis, we can put you and your companion ashore. But we cannot visit the place there ourselves. One of us,’ he nodded towards Bourdon, ‘is a rowing slave who has run away. His former masters were French and would seize him.’

Benjamin looked doubtful. ‘What will happen to the ship?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Hector. ‘My friends and I are hoping to go to the Americas.’

Bourdon spoke up. ‘Then why don’t we try to sail this boat all the way?’

Hector looked at Dan. ‘Is that possible?’

Dan thought for a long time before replying. ‘It could be,’ he said cautiously. ‘We’ll need good weather. And our greatest difficulty is that we are so few aboard. Jacques, Hector and myself – that’s not enough to manage the ship.’

‘Then take us with you,’ said Benjamin suddenly. Hector blinked in surprise. Benjamin spoke urgently to his companion in their own language, then turned back to face the others.

‘If we return to St Louis, the governor will want to know what has happened to the ship. We will be accused of failing in our duty to the captain, or even of killing him and the foreign crew. We may be hung and certainly we will lose our freedom and be sold again as slaves.’

‘Can’t you go ashore somewhere else, not at the Residence?’

Again Benjamin shook his head. ‘We are Laptots. We were brought to St Louis as slaves, and our own homelands are far away. The local people would not accept us. Besides, without us you will never cross the bar.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There are many sandbanks and mud shoals where the river runs into the sea. Ships can come in and out when the river is in flood, but now it is almost too late. This is the season when the sea breaks heavily on the bar, and it is very dangerous. It needs local knowledge to find a way through the obstacles and a travado to help us.’

‘A travado?’

‘A great gale of wind from the north-east, from the desert. The wind blows opposite to the sea, and drives back the waves. Also the ship is pressed forward and crosses the bar quickly.’

‘Then we must all hope for a travado.’

Benjamin appeared to hesitate, then asked, ‘Once we are out to sea, who will show us the way, who will navigate the ship? You said you were not a ship’s captain, but now you are sounding like one.’

Hector found himself saying nervously, ‘I’ve never navigated a ship before. But I think I can learn.’

W
ITH THE RIVER CURRENT
sweeping her along,
L’Arc-de-Ciel
took less than a week to reach the bar at St Louis. Hector spent much of the time studying the dead captain’s sea charts and trying to understand his navigation instruments. The main item was a mystifying device as long as his arm and carefully stored in a cherrywood box. Its open frame supported two wooden arcs engraved with degrees of angle. Three small vanes were attached to each of the arcs, and he found he could slide the vanes back and forth. One of them was fitted with a lens. Puzzled, he took the instrument on deck and tried to use it. But it defied logic. He held the instrument up to his eye and tried looking through the lens. Then he slid the vanes to different positions. The angles they recorded made no sense. He turned the device around, and tried looking through it the other way. Still nothing worked. Bourdon strolled over to see what he was doing, and commented that he had seen an architect using something similar when he had visited the building work at Versailles. ‘It’s for measuring angles,’ he commented. ‘I know that already,’ snapped Hector, increasingly frustrated. ‘If I could use it to find the angle of the sun or of the north star, then it would be better than the astrolabe I learned to use among the Turks. There’s a book of tables among the captain’s possessions which gives the height of the sun or the star at different locations at different times of the year. With that knowledge I might even be able to take us to the Caribees.’

The Frenchman tactfully withdrew, leaving Hector to wrestle with his problem. Unexpectedly Benjamin provided the solution. He had seen the captain of a visiting ship use a similar gadget. Benjamin had thought the captain was touched in the head, for he had held the instrument to his eye in broad daylight and when facing out to the open sea. There was nothing on the horizon to look at. ‘You must be wrong, I’m sure he was measuring the angle of the sun,’ Hector growled. He was really irritated now.

‘No,’ the Laptot insisted. ‘He was looking out to sea. The sun was behind him.’

To save his dignity, Hector waited until Benjamin had walked away before, still doubtful, he turned his back to the sun, peered through the lens, and fiddled with the vanes. By chance he saw the shadow of a vane pass into vision and across a graded arc. He lifted the instrument until it was level with the horizon and adjusted the vanes again. He placed the vane’s shadow steadily on the arc, then brought the instrument down and took the reading. It was in the range of numbers in the captain’s book of tables. He had discovered how to bring the ship to her destination.

They stopped only once on the river voyage, a brief halt at a friendly village to take fresh supplies and top up their water barrels. Then they dropped downriver until they began to feel the rise and fall of the tide, and Benjamin warned that the Residence of St Louis lay just ahead. ‘We must stay close to the left-hand shore. The guns of the Residence do not reach that far. A few ships will be anchored in the roadstead, maybe a man of war also, but we can slip past them if the wind favours us.’ He pointed to the north. A small dark cloud could be seen, far in the distance. ‘I think we are lucky with the weather.’

As the day wore on, banks of thick, dark cloud formed on the horizon and began to coalesce into a solid black mass. From the underbelly of the clouds flickered distant flashes of lightning. Along the river there was an atmosphere of foreboding. The breeze dropped away and was replaced by an oppressive calm. The air seemed to thicken and become slightly opaque. It was difficult to breathe. The sloop glided on, her sails slack, carried only by the current. Hector listened carefully. There was a faint roaring sound far away. ‘What’s that noise?’ he asked Benjamin. ‘That’s the sound of the waves breaking on the bar. Let us hope that the travado reaches us before we are in the overfalls, and that the ship survives the wind.’

Half an hour later the storm broke. There was a tremendous thunderclap and a great gust of wind swept across the river, driving spray from the surface. The squall struck the sloop like a fist. With a loud clap of canvas, the mainsail bellied out, and the sloop heeled over. Hector heard the groan of the stays under the sudden strain.
L
’
Arc-de-Ciel
surged forward as Dan and Benjamin struggled to control her helm.

A peal of thunder close at hand, and suddenly the horizon was blotted out by torrential rain which reduced visibility to a few paces. Hector’s clothes were saturated in an instant. He remembered the long parched days in the desert and tilted back his head in sheer delight. He opened his mouth and let the rain pour in. When he swallowed, he could taste the faint grains of dust which the travado had brought from the interior. Benjamin appeared at his side, gripping him by the elbow. ‘Go help Dan at the helm,’ he shouted. ‘I will show which way to steer.’