James Nelson - The Blackbirder

James held his eyes, did not let his expression waver, did not let his face reflect the raging inside. They could vote, he had agreed to it. In a moment of weakness he had said they would run things in the way of a pirate ship, and for his sins that was what they were doing.

Madshaka turned back to the men, delivered a few quick, clipped sentences; heads nodded all around, and then every man on the deck raised his hand.

Madshaka turned to James, gave him a hint of a smile. There was no need to translate the results.

“Very well. Tell them to go collect the women and children and whatever they want from the old ship. But first we throw these dead ones over.”

Madshaka gave the orders, pointed here and there, and men lifted corpses out of the sticky puddles of blood and carried them to the leeward rail and heaved them over the side. A dozen white men, slaughtered.

James closed his eyes. His head sunk to his chest. The nightmare went on and on and on.

It was with a great sense of relief that Thomas Marlowe stared through the glass at the ship, the battered wreck of a ship, drifting a cable length away. Relief, tempered with anger, regret, self-loathing, self-pity. A mixed brew, a rumfustian of emotion.

She was a mess, her spritsail yard broken, just the courses and fore topsail set. The smell told him she was a slaver. Reasonable deduction told him it was King James’s.

She was flying her ensign upside down, was firing guns to leeward as a signal of distress, but Marlowe was not buying it. It was just what he would expect James to do, to lure them in. But he would not be fooled.

Now there would be an end to it, one way or another.

He could hear the muttering. The men at the great guns and the men at sail trimming stations and the men with pistols and cutlasses at their sides, ready to board, all murmuring, all expressing that discontent for which sailors were deservedly famous.

“What’s the good of taking yon wreck, then? Bloody risk our necks for flotsam, not worth a sou.”

“It’s them niggers, and Marlowe using us for his own good.”

“Ain’t what I signed on for.”

“Nor me. Signed aboard a privateer, and Marlowe leaving off whatever he thinks looks like a man-of-war, and attacking some hulk.”

“It was Billy Hood was aloft then, said it didn’t look like no man-ofwar to him.”

They had too much time to think. Sailors would always get into trouble if they were given time to think. But in ten minutes’ time they would be into it, some bloody work, and then it would be over.

The Elizabeth Galley had come up with the ship that morning, closed with her. Now she was hove to a cable length to windward. Marlowe would beat King James into submission and be done with it.

“We will not board?” Bickerstaff asked.

“We will not. Those freed slaves could be the death of us, fighting hand to hand. They understand there is no quarter for them. Fight to the last man. But I reckon they know little of fighting with great guns. We’ll stand off, give them a cannonading, hope they see fit to surrender.”

“You just said they would not call for quarter in fighting hand to hand. Do you think they will surrender under cannon fire?”

“No.”

“I do not see any but two men aboard, and they look to be white men.”

They did look to be white men, and the view through the glass only strengthened that impression. They waved, beckoned, but Marlowe stood firm, did not make a move one way or another. He could picture the hordes of armed black men crouching behind the bulwark, waiting for them to board.

He would let King James take the first shot, and then he would decimate them.

Ten minutes passed, and no one other than the two white men appeared on the deck. At last they seemed to realize that Marlowe would not be sending any aid, or laying his ship alongside. They disappeared down the leeward side of the blackbirder, and a moment later came pulling under her counter in a yawl boat, making for the Elizabeth Galley.

“Some of you men with small arms, come with me.” Marlowe stomped forward to the gangway, armed members of the boarding party behind him. He could not imagine how the two men in the yawl boat were part of some trick, but he would never, never be caught unawares.

The yawl boat pulled up below the boarding steps and the two men scrambled up the side, not asking permission to board, not even bothering to tie the boat to the chains. It drifted well clear of the Elizabeth Galley’s side even in the few seconds that it took them to come aboard, but they seemed entirely oblivious, as if gaining the Galley’s deck was the singular goal in their lives and nothing beyond that mattered.

They stopped short at the gangway and looked around at the armed men, the row of guns, Marlowe and Bickerstaff. Their eyes were wide, bloodshot. Their hands were trembling. Marlowe had seen that look on men’s faces before. It was how they looked when the pirates were done with them.

“Who are you? What ship is that?” Marlowe asked, but the men just looked at him, dumb.

“What ship is that?” he asked again.

One of the men uttered a sound. It was not a word that anyone could tell, but it seemed to break the impasse in his throat and suddenly sentences were spilling out. But they were not English. Marlowe shook his head to indicate that he did not understand; the man kept on talking.

And then Bickerstaff interrupted, talking the same language, and Marlowe realized it was French. The man turned to Bickerstaff and continued his explanation. At last Bickerstaff turned to Marlowe.

“You were right. This is indeed James’s slaver. Or was, in any event. These men are from a French merchantman. They were attacked by black pirates, he says, from this ship.” He nodded toward the slaver, drifting away downwind. “The whole crew was butchered, save for them, because they were in the yawl boat when the attack took place. I must say, James is a man of some passion, but I am hard pressed to see him killing unarmed sailors in cold blood, white though they may be.”

“As am I. But I was surprised to hear of his sticking a knife in the blackbirder’s captain, so it is hard to know what he is capable of.”

Bickerstaff turned and asked the French sailor a question, nodded as the man made a lengthy reply, and then turned back to Marlowe.

“They abandoned the slaver, which is in a wretched state, and took the merchantman. They carried away the merchantman’s chief mate, who was also in the yawl at the time of the attack.”

“Oh, God!” Marlowe threw his head back, let out a long sigh of aggravation that built into a frightening shout as he tried to vent his pent-up anger. Then he turned to the first officer.

“Mr. Fleming, pray see that the Frenchmen have some rum and some food. These poor bastards need some drink, some strong drink, I should imagine. Mr. Griffin, clear the longboat away and tell off a boarding party.”

The slaver, her sails all aback, had drifted a good distance downwind from the Elizabeth Galley. An hour later she was safely to leeward when the fire that Marlowe and the boarding party had built in her hold worked its way through the main deck and up the rigging, turning the entire stinking affair into a great pyre.

James and the others had tried to clean it. Marlowe could see the signs: the recently scrubbed decks, the faint trace of sulfur in the hold where they had apparently lit brimstone to drive out the even more horrid smells of people locked down for weeks.

But he could imagine that all the cleaning in the world would not wash away the horror that that ship carried aboard. They must have been glad to be rid of her. In her state she would not have carried them back across the ocean.

Now he and Bickerstaff stood together on the Elizabeth Galley’s quarterdeck, all the way aft, out of earshot of the helmsmen or any of the crew. In the gathering dark they watched the bright column of flame that rose above the hated vessel and danced across the ocean swells.