George Fraser - Flash for Freedom!

It didn’t, of course, but I knew better than to protest again. All I could think of was how the h--l I was going to get out of this. He took my silence for assent.

‘Well enough,’ growls he. ‘You’ll begin on this lot, then’ – and he jerked a thumb at the cargo. ‘And for Christ’s sake, liven up, man! I’ll not have you glooming up this ship with a long face, d’ye see? At eight bells you’ll leave off and come to my cabin – Mrs Spring will be serving tea for the officers, and will wish to meet you.’

I didn’t believe my ears. ‘Mrs Spring?’

‘My wife,’ he snapped, and seeing my bewilderment: ‘Who the d---l else would Mrs Spring be? You don’t think I’d ship my mother aboard a slaver, do you?’

And with that he strode off, leaving me in a fine sweat. Thanks to an instant’s folly, and the evil of that rotten little toad, my father-in-law, I was a member of the crew of a pirate ship, and nothing to be done about it. It took some digesting, but there it was; I suppose that after all the shocks I’d had in my young life this should have been nothing out of the way, but I found myself shuddering at the thought. Not that I’d any qualms about slaving, mark you, from the holy-holy point of view; they could have transported every nigger in Africa to the moon in chains for all I cared, but I knew it was a d----d chancy business – aye, and old Morrison had known that, too. So the old swine had his fingers in the blackbird pie – and I’ll lay my life that was a well concealed ledger in his countinghouse – and had taken advantage of the Bryant affair to shanghai me into this. He had wanted me out of the way, and here was a golden chance of making sure that I would be away for good; no doubt Spring was right, and the Balliol College would come through her voyage safe, as most slavers did, but there was always the chance of being caught, and rotting your life away in jail, even if they didn’t top you. And there was the risk of getting killed by niggers on the Slave Coast, or catching yellow jack or some foul native disease, as so many slaving crews did – oh, it was the perfect ocean cruise for an unwanted son-in-law. And Elspeth would be a widow, I would never see her, or England, again, for even if I survived the trip, word of it might get home, and I’d be an outlaw, a felon …

I sat down on the cargo with my head in my hands, and wept, and raged inwardly against that little Scotch scoundrel. G-d, if ever I had the chance to pay him back – but what was the use of thinking that way in my present plight? In the end, as usual, one thought came uppermost in my mind – survive, Flashy, and let the rest wait. But I resolved to keep my spite warm in the meantime.

In the circumstances it was as well that I had work to do; going through that cargo, as I did when a couple of hands and the ship’s clerk came down presently, at least occupied part of my thoughts, and kept me from working myself into a terror about the future. After all, thinks I, men like these didn’t sign on in the expectation of dying; they seemed handy, sober fellows who knew their business – very different from the usual tarry-john. One of them, an oldish man named Kirk, had been a slaver all his days, and had served on the notorious Black Joke ; 12he wouldn’t have shipped on any other kind of vessel.

‘What,’ says he, ‘at £15 a month? I’d be a fool. D’ye know, I’ve four thousand quid put by, in Liverpool and Charleston banks – how many sailormen have the tenth of that? Risk? I’ve been impounded once, on the Joke , shipwrecked once, and seen two cargoes of black ivory slung overside – which meant a dead loss for the owners, but I drew me pay, didn’t I? Oh, aye, I’ve been chased a score o’ times, and been yard-arm to yard-arm in running fights wi’ Limey an’ Yankee patter-rollers, but no harm done. An’ for sickness, ye’ve more chance of that from some poxed-up yellow tart in Havana than on the coast these days. You’ve been east – well, you know to keep yourself clean an’ boil your water, then.’

He made it sound not half bad, apart from the stuff about fighting the patrols, but I understood that this was a rare event – the Balliol College had never been touched in five trips that he knew of, although she had been sighted and chased times without number.

‘She’s built light, see, like all the Baltimore brigs an’ clippers,’ says Kirk. ‘Save a patch o’ calm, she’ll show her heels to anything, even steam-ships. West o’ Saint Tommy, even wi’ a full load o’ black cattle, she could snap her fingers at the whole Navy, and wi’ the fair winds coming south, like we are now, she’s gone before they see her. Only risky time is on the coast itself, afore we load up. If they was to catch us there, wi’ the Government wind pinning us on the coast, they could impound us, empty an’ all, ’cos o’ the law as lays down that if you’re rigged and fitted for slavin’, like we are, they can pinch you even wi’out a black aboard. Used to be that even then they couldn’t touch ye, if ye had the right papers – Greek, say, or Braziliano.’ He laughed. ‘Why, I’ve sailed on a ship that had Yankee, Gyppo, Portugee, an’ even Rooshian papers all ready for inspection, as might serve. But it’s different now – ye don’t talk, ye run.’ 13

He and the clerk and the other man – I think he was a Norwegian – harked back a good deal to the old days, when the slave ships had waited in turn at the great African barracoons to ship their cargoes, and how the Navy had spoiled the trade by bribing the native chiefs not to deal with slavers, so that all the best stretches of coast nowadays were out of court, and no niggers to be had.

‘Mind you,’ says Kirk, winking, ‘show ’em the kind o’ goods we got here, an’ they’ll spring you a likely cargo o’ Yorubas or Mandingos, treaty or not – an’ if sometimes you have to fight for ’em, as we did two trips back, well, it comes cheaper, don’t it? An’ Cap’n Spring, he’s got a grand nose for a tribal war, or a chief that’s got too many young bucks of his own people on his hands. He’s a caution, he is, an’ worth every penny the owners pay him. Like to guess ’ow much?’

I said I had no idea.

‘Twenty thousand pounds a trip,’ says Kirk. ‘There now! An’ you wonder I ship on a slaver!’

I knew slavers made huge profits, of course, but this staggered me. No wonder old Morrison had an interest in the trade – and no doubt paid a subscription to the Anti-Slavery Society and thought it well worthwhile. And he wasn’t laying out overmuch in trade goods, by the look of this cargo – you never saw so much junk, although just the kind of stuff to make a nigger chief happy, no doubt. There were old Brown Bess muskets that probably hadn’t been fired in fifty years, sackfuls of condemned powder and shot, rusty bayonets and cheap cutlasses and knives, mirrors and looking glasses by the dozen, feathered hats and check trousers, iron pots and plates and cauldrons, and most amazing of all, a gross of Army red coats, 34th Foot; one of ’em had a bullet-hole and a rusty stain on the right breast, and I remember thinking, bad luck for someone. There was a packet of letters in the pocket, which I meant to keep, but didn’t.

And there was case after case of liquor, in brown glass bottles; gin, I suppose you’ld call it, but even to sniff the stuff shrivelled the hairs off your arse. The blacks wouldn’t know the difference, of course.

We were searching through all this trash, I counting and calling out to the clerk, who ticked the manifest, and Kirk and his fellow stowing back, when Looney, the idiot steward, came down to gape at us. He squatted down, dribbling out of the corner of his mouth, making stupid observations, till Kirk, who was bundling the red coats, sings out to him to come over. Kirk had taken two of the brass gorgets off the officers’ coats – they must have been d----d old uniforms – and winking at us he laid the gorgets on the deck, and says: