Patrick O'Brian - The Commodore

A general murmur, a looking at one another, and Jack, turning to Captain Thomas, who had long served in the West Indies and who owned property there, asked him whether he had anything particular to say.

'Why me?' cried Thomas. 'Why should I have anything particular to say about slavery?' Then, seeing the astonishment on the faces all round him, he checked himself, coughed, and went on 'I ask pardon, sir, if I have spoken a little abruptly - I was put out by my bargemen's stupidity. No, I have nothing particular to say.' Here he checked again, and Stephen and Mr Adams' eyes met in a fleeting glance; the expression of neither altered in the least degree, but each was certain that the swallowed words were a eulogy of the trade and indeed of slavery itself.

'Well, I am sorry to have drawn a blank covert,' said Jack, looking round his captains' uniform stupidity. 'But my predecessors' reports make it perfectly clear that much of this service is inshore, smallcraft work, and I must desire all officers present to ensure that their boats are in very good order, with their crews thoroughly accustomed to stepping masts and proceeding under sail for considerable distances. Mr Howard, I believe I saw you lower down your launch in a most surprising brisk manner the day before yesterday.'

'Yes, sir,' said Howard, laughingly. 'It was the usual idiot ship's boy. He harpooned a bonito with such zeal that he flung himself out of the bridle-port on to the fish, the harpoon fast to his wrist. Fortunately the launch was in the act of being shifted, so we got her over the side straight away and saved our only decent weapon.'

'Well done,' said Jack, 'well done indeed. And the word weapon reminds me: getting boats over the side quick and handling them well is very important, but it must not, must not, affect our great-gun exercises, which, as you will all admit, still leave something to be desired. Yet tomorrow is a somewhat exceptional day; and tomorrow I hope and trust the exercise will leave you all time enough to dine with me.'

Two bells, and Killick, his mate and three mess attendants walked carefully up the poop ladder, the first two carrying trays with decanters of all things proper to be drunk at such an hour, the others with glasses to drink them from.

As the captains were being piped over the side Stephen's friend Howard came, and standing by him said discreetly 'Of course, Maturin, you know the Commodore infinitely better than I do: is he very exact and naval in his use of the word officer?'

'Fairly so, I believe: certainly punctilious in the use of rank and title. He could no more bear the Swedish knight than could Nelson. But he is the most reasonable of men.'

'To be sure. I was astonished at the cogency, sequence and clarity of his account of nutation at the Royal Society - Scholey took me - and for several days I believe I understood not only nutation but even the precession of the equinoxes.'

'Sure, he is the great astronomer of the world.'

'Yes. But my point is this: in the Aurora I have an elderly master's mate called Whewell. And a master's mate, as you know very well, is not an officer in our ordinary use of the word - a commission officer. He served his time, passed his public or quasi-public examination for lieutenant, but failed to pass for gentleman - in short, the examining officers, conferring in private, did not think him one, and so no commission was ever made out. Yet he is a good seaman and he knows a great deal about slave-ships and their ways.'

'Then I am perfectly certain that the Commodore would like to see him.'

'He could hardly ask better. Whewell was born in Jamaica, the son of a ship-owner: he first went to sea in one of his father's merchantmen, carrying goods and some slaves, and then Dick Harrison took him into the Euterpe, on the quarterdeck. During the peace he served in one of the Thomas's regular slavers as a mate, but he sickened of it and was glad to get back into the service, into John West's Euryalus, and then with me.'

'I did not know that Captain Thomas owned slaves.'

'It is a family concern; but he is extremely sensitive about it since the law abolished the trade - don't choose to have it known.'

Whewell was aboard within ten minutes in spite of having had to shave and change into his best uniform. He was a short, straight, round-headed man of about thirty-five, far from handsome: the smallpox had marked his face terribly, and where it was not pitted by the disease an exploding twelvepounder cartridge-case had covered it with a dense sprinkling of black dots; furthermore his teeth were very bad, gapped and discoloured. Yet this positive ugliness did not account for his present position in the Navy - perhaps the most uncomfortable of them all - since as Jack knew very well midshipmen worse-looking by far had been given a commission on passing for lieutenant at Somerset House. No: the trouble was the yellow tinge in what complexion Whewell could be said to possess - the evident legacy of an African great-grandmother.

'Sit down, Mr Whewell,' said Jack, rising as he came into the great cabin. 'You are no doubt aware that our squadron is intended to put down the slave-trade, or at least to discourage it as much as possible. I am told that you have a considerable knowledge of the subject: pray give me a brief account of your experience. And Dr Maturin here would also like to know something of the matter: not the nautical side or the particular winds in the Bight of Benin, you understand, but the more general aspects.'

'Well, sir,' said Whewell, looking Jack straight in the face while he ordered his thoughts, 'I was born in Kingston, where my father owned some merchantmen, and when I was a boy I used often to go along in one or another of them, trading in the islands, up to the States or across to Africa, to Cape Palmas and right along into the Gulf, for palm-oil, gold if we could get it, Guinea pepper and elephants' teeth; and some negroes if they were offering, but not many, since we were not regular slavers, fitted up to deal with them by wholesale. So I came to know those waters, particularly in the Gulf, tolerably well. Then after some while my father told his old acquaintance Captain Harrison that I was wild to go aboard a man-of-war, and he very kindly took meon to his quarterdeck in Euterpe, lying in Kingston at the time. I served in her for three years and then followed my captain into the Topaz, where he rated me master's mate. That was just before the peace, when the ship was paid off at Chatham. I made my way back to Jamaica and took what I could find - my father had left off business by then - mostly small merchantmen to Guinea and south right down to Cabinda or over to Brazil. A few negroes, as before; but although I was thoroughly used to slavers and their ways, particularly the big Liverpool ships, I never sailed in one until I went aboard the Elkins in Montego Bay; and then, although the owners had made out she carried mixed cargoes, I saw she was a high flyer in that line the moment I set foot on deck.'

'How could you tell that, sir?' asked Stephen.

'Why, sir, her galley overflowed in every direction: ordinarily a ship has coppers enough to cook for the crew - in this' case say thirty hands - but here they were calculated for keeping four or five hundred slaves alive for the four or five thousand miles of the middle passage: say a couple of months. And her water was in proportion. Then again she had a slavedeck, which was perfect proof.'

'I do not think I know the term.'

'Well, it is not a deck at all, in the sense of planking, but rather a set of gratings covering the whole space set aside for the slaves and letting air into it; and about two or two and a half feet under these gratings they sit, or squat, usually in rows running athwartships, the men forward, chained in pairs, and the women aft.'