James Nelson: The Blackbirder

Marlowe called the divers “his people,” called all the blacks “his people.” But they were not King James’s people. They were Congolese, a tribe more accustomed to the water than were the Malinke. The distinctions were blurring, but they were still real.

The river was huge, over three miles wide, and the Northumberland ran easily downstream. Cato ambled aft, took the tiller from James.

“Favor the north shore,” James instructed the young black man. They would need the room to leeward when they passed Newport News and swung round into Hampton Roads.

James stepped up on the low bulwark, steadied himself with a hand on the backstay. Past the tall reeds, the fields ran up easy slopes to the big plantation houses along the shore. The seabirds wheeled around the topmast head and the ducks made their little flotillas along the banks.

The sun beat down on the deck, warm, even hot, but not oppressive. James could feel the soft caulking that stuck to the bottoms of his feet.

He felt the sloop heel to leeward in response to a gust from the shore, heard the note of the water rise a bit in pitch.

He ran his eyes along the deck, looking for something that needed attention. There was nothing that he could see. His sloop was perfect. He felt his anger with Lucy subside, his disquiet brought on by her fear fade away.

He was happy, and that emotion still seemed like a stranger to him, like something from another place. There was his boyhood in Africa, a life of princely indulgence, and then the long, long black nightmare of slavery. And now, so many years after going to sleep, he was awake again.

Three uneventful hours later they turned northeasterly and ran across the wide mouth of Hampton Roads. There were a few ships anchored there, and the sun, now inclining toward the west, burnished the roofs of the buildings that made up the town of Hampton.

James had lived in Virginia for twenty years now, five more than he had lived in Africa. He had watched the extraordinary speed with which the settlements had sprung up, taken firm root, spilled over and taken root in half a dozen places further out, spreading over the countryside.

He had never been to England, but he pictured the shoreline there crowded with people, mobs, hundreds deep, waiting, jostling onto the ships that brought more and more immigrants to be absorbed by this new land.

The wind was from the northeast and freshening. They left Point Comfort in their wake and stood out into the wide Chesapeake Bay. They would have to make a few miles of easting at least before they could tack up-bay and fetch the landing at Marlowe’s new property.

Off the starboard side, the mouth of the Chesapeake opened up, and beyond it, the Atlantic Ocean. Acclimated as he was to having land all around, the wide, endless space between the capes gave James an odd feeling, like hanging over a precipice, like being in a house with only three walls.

“Do you see that?” Cato asked, breaking into James’s reverie. “The ship?”

“Yes.”

He had seen it three minutes before. It was his job as captain to be more alert than anyone else on board.

“Something ain’t right…,” Cato offered.

James grunted in reply, unwilling to offer an opinion. But he had been thinking the same thing as he watched the ship struggling along, nine miles or so to the south. She was too far off to make out any detail, but there was something in the way her sails were trimmed, something in her plodding motion, as if she were dragging something, that raised an alarm in James’s head.

He picked up the sloop’s telescope and trained it on the distant vessel. The image in the lens yielded no more definite information, but neither did it lessen James’s conviction that something was wrong with her. He could see foresail and mainsail lashed to the yards-they could not have been called furled, with the great ungainly folds and lumps of canvas-merely tied up out of the way. The mizzen yard and its lateen sail seemed to lie across the quarterdeck. Heaps of gray cloth were just visible. James thought he could see some bits of rigging swinging loose.

And then, a puff of smoke, a flash from a muzzle. A cannon fired, not at the river sloop, but from the other side, to leeward. A few seconds later, the muffled report, like the sound of someone beating a rug. A gun to leeward. A universally accepted sign of surrender or distress.

“Let’s run down on this fellow,” James said to Cato, then, as the helmsman eased the tiller to weather and the Northumberland’s head turned more southerly, he called out, “Joshua, Sam, see to them sheets. We’re going run down on yon ship, see if she needs help.”

The Northumberland moved fast with the wind over the quarter and soon she had halved the distance. Through the glass James could make out the ensign, the British merchantman’s ensign, flying from the masthead, upside down, another distress signal.

The ship was sagging off to leeward, the wind setting her down on the beach, and while she was in no immediate danger of taking the ground, it was clear that she would have to come about, and soon.

The Northumberland was no more than two miles away when the merchantman tried to tack, swinging up into the wind, slowly, her sails beating in disorderly array. Her bow came up, up, and hung there, unable to turn further, like a dying man making one last feeble and useless attempt to save himself.

And then she fell back again, having missed stays, her sails in a shambles.

James watched through the glass. One by one the yards came sailing down as halyards were let go. No topmen racing aloft to stow them, the clews and bunts were not even hauled up. The sails just hung there, as if letting the halyards run was all the effort those on board could manage.

A flash of white under the bow and James knew they had dropped the anchor. They would go no further. Now that they could see help was on the way, they would anchor and wait rather than struggle on.

“You keep to windward of them,” James growled at Cato, and Cato replied, “Windward, aye.” James wanted a look at these people first before he laid his sloop alongside of them. He had seen enough of pirates’ deceptions to be wary. They would stay safely to windward until they were certain.

One mile, then half a mile, and they could see more and more of the frightening condition that this ship was in. Shrouds and backstays hung loose, great gouges were shot out of the bulwarks. Strips of torn sail fluttered aft in the breeze. Those, and the inverted ensign, were the only bunting showing.

“What the devil happened to you?” James muttered to himself.

“What do you think?” asked Joshua, standing by the main sheet.

“I do not know… Attacked, maybe, or caught in a gale, shorthanded. Plenty out there can do that kind of damage.”

James studied the ship as they approached, and there was nothing about her that said “pirate.” She was armed, of course, but no more than any merchantman would be in those dangerous times. There were none of the rough-cut gunports of hastily rearmed ships, no forecastle or quarterdeck cut away to make a flush-deck vessel, as one often saw among the Brethren of the Coast. No, this one looked to be just what she appeared: a merchant ship in dire trouble.

They were only a few hundred yards away when the smell reached them.

Had they been downwind of her they would have noticed it miles before, but with the fresh breeze, it required they get much closer than that.

James felt the foulness wafting into his nose, his mouth, his lungs. It made his hands clench, his stomach convulse like ingesting some airborne poison. It set the anger and hatred racing through him like fire

on a powder train before he even understood why.

“Dear God,” he heard Sam behind him muttering. “A blackbirder.”