James Nelson - The Blackbirder

Damn, damn, damn you to hell, James, for putting me through this! He was angry enough that the idea of James being hanged was not so terrible. When he thought of what they had been through already, what more they had to do, he was ready to hang the man himself.

The sun was fully up and the shore with which they were closing quite visible. Marlowe took the last swig of coffee, spit a few errant grounds over the side. The native canoes were starting to close with them. He could see the boatmen working their paddles, racing out to the new arrival. Some would be grumete, come out to offer their services in getting the white men safe through the surf, some would be bumboats offering for sale those things that sailors long at sea hankered for. That would be rum, chiefly, and he would have to tell Fleming to see that the men did not get their hands on enough of it to cause trouble.

He ran his eyes over the ships and brigs and snows at anchor, more out of habit than any thought that he might find the one he was searching for. His eyes settled on one ship anchored further to the east, away from the central part of Whydah, and he stared at it but his thoughts were elsewhere, with Governor Nicholson, explaining how he had searched the entire coast and had found nothing.

And as he stared, and as his mind traveled back over the Atlantic, back over the water they had just crossed, an odd something began to gnaw at him, like a dream he had told himself in his sleep to remember but on waking could not. It was the dull sensation of knowing there is something one must not forget, but forgetting what that something is.

And so he stared and he mucked around in the silt of his mind, trying to find what it was under there. So much had he come to accept the fact that he would not find James’s ship, it took him a good five minutes before he realized that it was the French merchantman, or something very like it, that he was looking at now.

“Dear God…” He stood up straight, knocked the pewter mug off the caprail. It bounced once on the channel and then plunged into the blue water, but Marlowe spared it never a thought.

“Whatever is it?” Bickerstaff asked, but Marlowe turned and fled aft and picked up the big telescope from the binnacle box and trained it forward. He shook his head as he stared through the glass. The ship was a mile and a half away-he could see none of the little details that would give him absolute confirmation-but nothing that he saw told him he was wrong.

He felt the emotions crashing together like surf coming across either side of a sandbar: the thrill that he might have found them, the relief that it might soon be over, the fear of disappointment, the dread of finding King James and killing him or bringing him back to an even worse death, the confusion of conflicting loyalties and desires.

The more he tried to make his life a simple thing-a wife, a home, a planter’s life-the more it eluded him, the more his problems grew in complexity, like a vine out of control, wrapping itself around him.

Bickerstaff was there, but too polite to inquire, so Marlowe said, “I think perhaps that is the Frenchman, yonder. James’s Frenchman.”

Bickerstaff cocked an eyebrow, which for him was tantamount to a shout of surprise. Marlowe handed him the glass and he trained it forward, though he did not have anything like the seamanship to pick out the tiny details that might distinguish one ship from another.

“Hmmm,” said Bickerstaff, thoughtfully. “They fly no flag, and their sails are not stowed in any manner that would do a captain credit, if he were concerned about such things, and the yards all askew.”

Marlowe smiled. Bickerstaff was right, and it was a good indication that this was the right ship and he, Marlowe, had missed it entirely. He was too busy looking at the steeve of the bowsprit, the sheer, the number of black-painted wales, the somewhat archaic lift at the peak of the mizzen yard, to even notice the more obvious clues. Sometimes knowledge just got in the way.

“You think it is King James?”

“I think it might well be,” Marlowe said. “I am sorry now we put those mad Frenchmen ashore in Sao Miguel, they could have told us for certain.” Then after a moment’s reflection he said, “No, I am still glad to be shed of them. But I think we will clear the ship for action and go to quarters and be ready when we come up with them.”

This order he passed to first mate Fleming who had it relayed in bellowing voices along the deck and below, an order that took the Elizabeth Galleys entirely by surprise. None of them were still abed; it being past dawn, the watch below had been roused and were making a clean sweep fore and aft and seeing to breakfast and attending to those many jobs that needed doing before breakfast and the change of watch. It was a steady routine that had gone unbroken for several weeks now, since their fight with the Frenchman, and there had been no indication that things would be different that morning.

For that reason there was more staggering around, more dumb looks, more questions than Marlowe would have preferred. But still the men fell to with credible speed, casting off guns, arranging tubs of match and buckets of water, fetching out cutlasses and pikes.

They were a good crew, disciplined, happy enough. Griffin’s death had been like pulling a rotten tooth: painful at first, but in the end a vast improvement.

Fifteen minutes later they were ready, as the sea breeze carried the Elizabeth Galley inshore, closing, closing with the Frenchman. Marlowe kept the glass trained on the ship, but he could see nothing out of the ordinary. A few figures moved around the deck, and they looked to be Africans, though it was still too far to tell. A plume of smoke rose from just abaft the foremast, but it looked like nothing more sinister than a galley fire.

“Where there is smoke, there is breakfast,” Marlowe observed to Bickerstaff.

“Where there is breakfast, there is no fear of imminent attack.”

That was true enough, and it added to the confusion of the thing. And then overhead the Galley’s main topsail gave a slap as it collapsed and then snapped full again in a fluke of wind. They were losing the sea breeze. Soon it would be dead calm, and after that the wind would fill in right on their nose.

“Mr. Fleming, let us see to the anchor. We’ll carry on as close as we can.”

The wind held for ten minutes more, then came in puffs that began to box the compass, and then died away altogether, leaving the Elizabeth Galley to drift beam on to the incoming seas. She wallowed side to side in those swells that marched on under her keel and then flung themselves in breaking foam onto the beach a mile away.

The anchor was let go and the bow came around to point into the waves, making the ship pitch rather than roll, an altogether more comfortable motion. And when she finally snubbed to a stop at the end of the anchor hawser, they were no more than one hundred yards from the suspect ship.

Both ships were pointing into the waves and so were nearly in line with each other. Thomas stood at the taffrail, scrutinizing the other.

He could see that the people aboard were indeed Africans, but they appeared to be women. He could see no one that he could positively identify as a man. Perhaps all the men were ashore. That would explain the absence of alarm. But how odd. Why would they do that? Why would James go ashore in Whydah, of all places? It made no sense at all. The disparate parts could not be made to fit.

But that was all right. He did not have to understand everything. The facts were these: He had found a ship that looked very like the one James had taken. Aboard that ship were African women. Not slaves bound in chains and ready to be stowed down but women walking the decks free, cooking, going on with life.