James Nelson - The Blackbirder

It had been worse than a nightmare, worse than anything he could have imagined. Those poor people, led down into the hold, terrified, beaten, wailing in their despair. And then the stink and the moaning and the rattling of chains. There was no escape from it, like being separated from hell itself by a few inches of oak planking.

And the bodies. Carried up every day and tossed overboard. Stiff, wide-eyed, covered in their own filth, body after body, and every day he had to help carry them up, had to go down into that place, look into the eyes of the living and fetch the dead ones up. Over the leeward side, to the trail of sharks that kept constant company with the ship.

They had arrived in Jamaica with half the number of Africans they had left with, and young Malachias Barrett had jumped ship, fled into the city, not even bothered to collect his pay.

A year later he was a pirate.

And in all his years with that marauding clan he had never sailed with a more depraved and soulless bunch as the crew of that black-birder.

It was odd, he realized, that he had never once felt the same pity for the victims of his piracy that he did for those slaves he had helped transport. The Lord knew he had seen terror aplenty in their eyes, had seen atrocities carried out against them, was guilty of enough himself to see him damned many times over.

Perhaps he did not think of those people as helpless victims as he did the slaves. Certainly those who had not resisted the pirates’ attack had not been harmed-they had that opportunity to save themselves- whereas nothing the Africans could have done would have spared them their awful fate.

He wondered if perhaps that experience with the blackbirder was the real reason he had freed his people at Marlowe House. But that would suggest an emotional rather than a pragmatical reason for his actions, and he rejected that outright. He had always scoffed at Bickerstaff’s notion that slavery should be abolished the world over. The world, Marlowe knew, consisted of the strong and the weak, and the strong preyed on the weak, as it was in nature. Emotion could not be allowed to hold too great a sway.

But sometimes he found himself listening to Bickerstaff’s arguments and finding some sense in them.

He had never told Bickerstaff about his having served aboard a blackbirder, never told Elizabeth or James or anyone that he could think of. The shame of it still clung to him, the way the stink of the ship had clung to his clothes until at last he had stolen a new set and burned the ones he had. He did not know why he felt such humiliation still for something he had done so long ago. Surely he had done worse since?

He shook his head. Seeing the whitewashed city of Whydah growing more distinct amid the thick forest was making his thoughts turn morbid and morose. He was not a man for such introspection, and the more he found his mind turning over such ideas, the more he told himself he was becoming an old woman, or a philosopher like Bicker-staff, and it did not suit him.

“Good morning, Captain,” said Bickerstaff, stepping up from the waist with two pewter mugs full of the fine, pungent black coffee they had picked up in Sao Miguel. Marlowe took the proffered mug gratefully, awkwardly, holding it in his left hand. His right arm hung in a sling around his neck. A clean break, no reason to think it would not heal, but it still hurt like the devil.

The coffee was hot, but no steam would rise in the warm, tropical morning air.

“Good morning.” The sun had all but broken free of the horizon, a blaze of brilliant orange off the starboard bow. The sky was a brittle blue, cloudless, promising heat. The shore that lay under their bows, running from horizon to horizon, was still mostly indistinct, a thick, dark shadow and only the white, white buildings were visible at all. Those, and the smattering of vessels that lay at anchor in the roads, no more than a few miles off.

“Whydah, is it?” Bickerstaff asked.

“Yes.”

“Have you been, before?”

“No.”

The two men were quiet, watching the rising sun reveal what lay before them: more buildings, with smoke curling up into the nearly white sky from a dozen, two dozen points among the trees, more vessels of all sizes. White sand and a line of white surf that ran the whole length of the shore, as far as they could see. Birds wheeling around overhead, seabirds, and occasionally the bright-colored natives of Africa.

“It would be odd to find them here, would it not?” Bickerstaff asked. “Whydah is notorious for its traffic in slaves. One would think it the last place they might come.”

“One would think. I have all but despaired of guessing what is in King James’s mind. If I can only go back and tell the governor that I have truly looked in every port they might have ventured to, then at least I will be satisfied. The world is a damned big place, even Nicholson must realize that, and they could be any damned where in it.”

He had not meant for his reply to be as bitter as it was, but as the words came out, they drew the venom with them. He was tired of this, tired of putting such superhuman effort into a search he did not think was his responsibility. A search that he did not want to be a success. But neither did he want it to fail.

James, damn your black hide…

The French East Indiaman, after blowing away the Elizabeth Galley fore topmast, had simply sailed off. They apparently had more important things to do than capitalize on their victory, or they did not think the cost in blood was worth whatever they might get from the Galley. Whatever their thinking, Marlowe was glad of it, glad to see the big ship disappear beyond the horizon.

It took the crew of the Elizabeth Galley a full twenty-four hours to repair the damage they had suffered in fifteen minutes of fighting. With the threat of being blown from the sea gone, they were able to salvage a great deal of the wreckage, and happily they had on the booms a spare topmast, so in the end there was little apparent damage.

Once things were squared away they set sail, again hunting for King James, the men still eager for the fortune carried by those fabled black pirates.

Two days later they made their African landfall at Cape Verde, the northernmost point to which Marlowe thought James might be heading. They had looked there and into the mouth of the Gambia, gone around to Cacheu and Bissau, poked into those few anchorages in the Bissagos Islands, and then southeast along the Guinea Coast.

The only thing in their favor was the sparsity of anchorages along Africa’s west coast, the few places where they had to negotiate their way into a well-defined harbor. Most of the coast was open roads, great long stretches of beach where the treacherous surf pounded and pounded and vessels took their wary moorings far from the land, relying on the skills of native boatmen to get them to shore and back.

In that case they had only to sail by, to make their way inshore close enough to survey the vessels there and see if any were the French merchantman taken by James and his pirate band.

And none of them were.

Past Cape St. Anna and Cabo Monte, southeast along the Pepper Coast, then northeast at Cape Palmas and along the Ivory Coast to Axim. They doubled Cape Three Points and stood on to the Gold Coast, Ashanti country, past the open roads of Shama and Komende and Elmina and Cape Coast with its great, looming castle, the best anchorage for a thousand miles and the least likely place to find fugitive slaves. And indeed they did not.

They checked the vessels anchored at the mouth of the Volta River and made their easting into the Bight of Benin, the Slave Coast, not a place that Marlowe had any hope of finding them.

Up until that point the search had been a simple matter. Once they passed Lagos, however, and entered the area of the Niger River Delta, then there would be hundreds of creeks and rivers and backwaters where they might have hidden, indeed where they probably had. He would have to check them all, all the fetid breeding grounds of yellow jack and black fever, and he dreaded even the thought of it.