Nobody's Slave (19 page)

That night it rained. It was the first rain for a long time - a sudden, hissing shower that whispered across the waves, pitting them into a million invisible little splashes and ripples between the ships, as though the sea itself were sprouting like a field of winter wheat. Men ran out on deck, stripping off their clothes, laughing in the luxury of the cleansing water that rained down out of the darkness. They rigged sails to funnel it into the water-butts, and cheered as it filled them - enough to last for the rest of the voyage, with luck. Even those who had been asleep on deck were pleased - it was as though God had suddenly remembered them, and sent His blessing in the night.

After the rain came the wind, so that next day the first of the Africans were brought out onto a slanting, slippery deck, as the old
Jesus
rolled and lumbered majestically westwards with the wind on her quarter, her bluff bows shouldering aside the spray of a moderate sea. It was still raining intermittently, so more men than usual were below, and most of the rest, like Tom, were trimming sail. So none watched the shivering, sodden slaves except the half-dozen whose duty it was to guard them.

The attack was an utter surprise. The first Tom knew of it was the gurgling shout and splash of a man tipped overboard, and when he turned his head all he saw was two more sailors slumped on the deck, and the rest involved in a feverish, silent struggle with the slaves around one of the swivel guns. Two black, damp figures bent over the body of the bosun, and then hurried purposefully below with the keys they had cut from his belt.

By the time Tom had let go of his rope and rushed to their aid, the sailors round the gun had killed two of the Africans and overpowered three, while another, rushing madly up the quarter-deck ladder with the whites of his eyes blazing and a knife in one of his great, bony hands, was shot in the face by the Master. He saw the boy Samuel on the quarter-deck, staring as though in a dream, unmoving. There were violent shouts and scuffles from below, and then the two slaves with the keys were also captured. The mutiny was over in two minutes.

Tom was stunned, as were the rest of the crew. He had come to think of these slaves, whom they kept cramped below deck, as amusing cattle rather than humans - and cattle should not rebel. The offenders were whipped and chained below - they were too valuable for the Admiral to consider hanging more than a few - and the dead were thrown unceremoniously over the side. For a while Tom suspected Samuel. But the African boy had done nothing as his countrymen had been cut down; only stared with wide unbelieving eyes and a body rigid as a wooden doll, as though watching a dream that moved too fast for him. And afterwards, he obeyed each order perfectly, like one who has lost all will, or hope, of his own.

T
HERE WAS no more singing, after that, except for the occasional lament that floated up from below decks - a solemn dirge, sung by a hundred helpless, hopeless voices in the hold that made the very timbers of the ship hum, and set the red-face sailors cursing with nervous anger as they went about their tasks.

Only two men - Ezendu and Idigo - were executed. Idigo looked at Madu just before he died, and Madu gazed in fascinated horror as Idigo's staring eyes grew larger and larger when his kicking, jerking body was swung up to the yardarm; but it was not an accusation, only the rope making the eyes bulge as it slowly throttled Idigo's life out of him.

It had not been his fault that it failed, Madu told himself over and over again. He had been standing by the quarter-deck swivel-gun, ready to attack the gunner, damp the powder, as the plan had said; but it had all been over too quickly for that. It had never reached that stage.

He would have been less ashamed if only he had not been, very slightly, glad – not glad perhaps but relieved that he had not been found out, that he could still live above deck in safety. He was invisible. No-one thought of him as a Mani any more - not the Admiral in his rage, not Tom, no-one. Even the wounded bosun saw no danger in him.

‘It was plain foolishness, that. You should have warned 'em against it, Madu,’ said Tom, putting his arm on Madu's shoulder as they looked back, to where the cut-down bodies slowly drifted astern, to disappear in a sudden turmoil of white water and black, triangular fins. ‘Just when we've nearly arrived, too.’

And if Tom’s hand felt the quick trembling of Madu's muscles under the loose cotton shirt, he was not subtle enough to think anything more of it than a natural horror of sharks; and anyway, in a moment it was gone.

They had nearly reached land. Later the same day, the two of them clung precariously to the shrouds near the very cap of the foretopmast, and caught the first sight of a low line of trees and hills on the horizon, which later proved to be the island of Dominica.

They sailed to the town of Cubaqua, the first red-face port Madu had seen. And here, as the ships let down their anchors and the first small boats rowed out to enquire nervously who they were, Madu began a process of learning about the voyage, which took him many weeks and questions to fully understand.

The slaves were to be sold; that he had guessed before - but when he went ashore with the Admiral, and saw the trembling, naked, chained bodies being examined, squeezed and pinched in every part by the red-face who lived there, as a farmer might look at a goat, he was still sure they were to be eaten, and could hardly move his own limbs for horror. But when Tom understood his fear, he laughed.

‘Eat ’em? Lord, no - you don't think we've brought ’em all this way for the Spaniards to eat, do ’ee?’ Tom roared with hearty laughter, and told the other sailors, who advanced on Madu smacking their lips and pretending to gnaw at his arms and legs, until Tom rescued him. Later, seeing how really shaken and trembling he was, Tom had climbed up into the foretop with him and tried to explain.

‘You really did think that, didn't you? Lord, Madu, Spaniards may be Papists but they bain’t animals, you know. They want slaves to do their work for 'em - farming and mining and so on; everything that might get their hands dirty, that's all.’

So Madu learnt that the red-face tribe of these lands, the ‘Spaniards’, were as different from the English as the Sumba were from the Mani. These Spaniards needed slaves because they were too lazy to farm or do any of the simple things of life for themselves. As the English ships moved from port to port, Madu saw how the English sailors mocked the Spaniards. They said they were so lazy that they would get slaves to eat and drink and sleep with their wives for them, if they could. Yet these Spaniards were very rich, because all the food that was grown on the farms and all the gold and silver that was mined from the earth by the slaves belonged to them. The English sailors were jealous of the Spaniards, because of their wealth, but Madu did not really understand this, for gold and silver and fine clothes seemed useless to him, and he did not really understand what they could find to do all day.

The two red-face tribes had a very peculiar way of trading, which took Madu some time to understand. The Spaniards, he learnt, had been sent across the sea to dig gold and silver out of the ground and send it back to King Philip in ships. However, because they were so proud and lazy, they needed slaves to do the actual digging for them. And since these slaves kept dying or escaping, they needed more and more each year. So men like Hawkins caught slaves in Africa, and brought them over the sea to sell.

The problem with this was, that King Philip did not like the English and had forbidden the Spanish colonists to buy anything from them at all. So the Spaniards wanted to buy slaves from Admiral Hawkins but dared not. And this led to Hawkins' tricks.

The first trick, in which both sides worked together, was for the English to pretend to attack the Spaniards, and for the Spaniards to pretend to run away. The Spaniards would show the English an old house near the sea which was no use to them, and the English would blow it to pieces with their guns. The Spaniards would fire a few muskets into the air, run away, and then come on board the
Jesus,
smiling, to buy slaves. Then they would write a letter to King Philip explaining that they hadn't wanted to buy the slaves, but that Hawkins had forced them to do it.

At a town called Rio de La Hacha, however, this trick was not enough. A year ago, the Spaniards here had been too clever for the English, and tricked them into leaving a few hundred Africans ashore without paying. So this year Hawkins began by sending in Francis Drake in the
Judith
, to shoot cannonballs through the governor's house to remind him of his debt. When this did not work Hawkins went ashore with a large number of sailors, and chased the Spaniards out of the town.

But this did not help because the Spanish governor had hidden all the gold and silver. The governor was prepared to steal slaves but not buy them; the ordinary Spaniards of the town
were
prepared to buy slaves, but couldn't because the governor had forced them to hide their money. They knew where the money was but would not tell, because they were afraid of the governor. (And because they also hoped to steal slaves, if they could)

By this time, several months after they had arrived in New Spain, Madu had come, despite himself, almost to admire John Hawkins, and to understand why to him this way of trading was a glorious game, almost a joke, at times. Evil though it was, even Madu could see that the slaves would have a better life ashore than on shipboard; and there was nothing he could do to rescue them, alone. After the mutiny, he had thought, briefly, that he should try to kill the Admiral himself, or steal the bosun's keys and run below to set the prisoners free; but the risk, the certainty of failure, deterred him. At least as Hawkins' page he could eat well, breathe the free air, sleep with his limbs unchained. Luck had set him apart from the rest; and as he learned more about the ship, and the language and ideas of the red-face, he had come, slowly, to feel himself almost as much one of them as one of the prisoners below.

Perhaps it had been the same for his mother, he thought, as a captive among the Mani; and no-one among the Mani had been quite such an attractive man as John Hawkins. He was a natural leader; most of the red-face sailors admired him, even loved him, and obeyed him more with pleasure than fear. Madu had seen Spaniards come on board surly, scowling, mistrustful, and go away laughing, charmed by Hawkins' open manner and friendly, persuasive tongue.

So when Hawkins took occasional notice of Madu's improving English and interest in the sailing of the ship, Madu felt an inordinate surge of gratitude. To most boys it might have seemed nothing, perhaps, but Madu was used to the indifference and rare, grudging approval of Nwoye; and he still needed to belong, here on the ship as he had done at home. He had failed his tribe and the men below, but that was past, and not wholly his fault. Now he began to hope that he might have a place in this strange new world of the red-face, as the honoured slave of their leader. As he learnt more of the sailing skills Master Barrett taught Tom, he even came to believe, secretly, that he might himself become a ship’s pilot some day.

So when, in the town of Rio de la Hacha, a tall, thin African came on board and asked Madu if Hawkins could be trusted, Madu nodded without hesitation. The man's lower lip trembled a little with excitement; it was a great step he was taking. Then he told Hawkins, in strange, halting Spanish, what he had hinted to Madu already: that he was a slave who had escaped from the Spanish governor, and would take the English to where the Spanish treasure was hidden; but only if Hawkins promised to set him free. He wanted to sail away with the English to be set down at another port, safe from the Spaniards of la Hacha. He would go back to Africa with them if that was where they were going. But they must agree to set him free, or he would show them nothing.

‘Agreed,’ said Hawkins, casually, a faint smile crinkling behind his neatly trimmed beard; and then, when he saw the man did not understand, repeated himself in Spanish: ‘Tu seras libre.’

‘Oh gracias, gracias, senor. Usted es mi salvador, sabia que podia confiar en usted, siempre le honrare por esto!’

A torrent of words poured from the man’s lips. His eyes shone; he reached out for Hawkins’ hand and kissed it, and Robert Barrett’s too. Then he spun round, whooping and singing in a wild dance of joy that hurt and delighted Madu’s heart, as he remembered similar dances at home after the Festival of New Warriors, when all the formal ceremonies were over and the boys were accepted into the tribe. So he himself should have danced once, if only ...

He glanced at the English gentlemen, and saw them scratching their beards, and looking at each other strangely with raised eyebrows, as though they did not understand clearly what the man was feeling. But Madu was glad, and thought how at last he might have an African friend on board, when they sailed away.

T
HAT EVENING a column of 100 men, led by this man, Alberto, set out to find the Spaniards' treasure. For Madu it was a glorious, aching pleasure to be on land again, in a forest, away from the ships and the sea. The forest was hot, fat-leaved, luxuriant, in many ways like the jungle he knew. There was the same steady hum of insects and whistle and screech of birds; twice he saw troops of monkeys; and once he heard the deep coughing roar of a wild cat, something like a leopard.

They found the treasure in a small house in a clearing, guarded by no more than a dozen startled, indignant Spanish soldiers, who fired their arquebuses wildly, and then ran away into the woods. Alberto was jubilant, strutting about proudly in an embroidered Spanish coat he had found; and as the sailors carried the treasure back through the forest to the ships, he chattered excitedly to Madu in a mixture of Mandinka and Mani about how he too would become a traveller, a rich man, a merchant now that he was free. He tried to tell the sailors too, but they could not understand his Spanish, and seemed to resent his new coat and noisy excitement.