Chapter Six.
We find new quarters.
It was about half an hour after Nugent’s death that young Parkinson, who had been engaged somewhere outside the tent, came in and said to Hutchinson—
“The launch, under sail, and with only about half a dozen hands in her, has just hove in sight from somewhere up the river. None of the other boats seem to be in company, but as she is flying her ensign at the peak,”—the launch, it may be mentioned, was rigged as a fore-and-aft schooner—“I suppose it’s all right.”
“It is to be hoped so,” fervently responded the medico; “goodness knows we don’t want anything further in the nature of a disaster; we’ve had quite enough of that sort of thing already. Could you distinguish the features of any of the people in the boat?”
“No, sir,” answered the lad. “I hadn’t a glass with me. Is there such a thing knocking about anywhere here in the tent, I wonder?”
“Yes,” answered Hutchinson. “You will find Mr Nugent’s somewhere about. It was picked up and brought in by the fatigue-party this morning. You might take it, if you can find it, and see if you can distinguish an officer in the boat. The glass ought to be somewhere over there.”
Parkinson went to the spot indicated, and proceeded to rummage among the heterogeneous articles that had been recovered from the scene of the previous night’s fight, and soon routed out the instrument of which he was in search, with which he went to the opening of the tent, from which the launch was by this time visible. Applying the telescope to his eye, he focussed it upon the fast-approaching boat and stared intently through the tube.
“Yes,” he said at length, “I can make out Mr Purchase in the stern-sheets, with Rawlings, the coxswain, alongside of him; and there is Cupid’s ugly mug acting as figure-head to the boat. The beggar is grinning like a Cheshire cat—I can see his double row of ivories distinctly—so I expect there is nothing much the matter.”
Presently, from where I was lying, the launch slid into view, coming down-stream at a great pace under whole canvas, and driven along by a breeze that laid her over gunwale-to. She was edging in toward our side of the river; and as I watched her movements, her crew suddenly sprang to their feet, apparently in obedience to an order; her foresail and mainsail were simultaneously brailed up at the same moment that her staysail was hauled down, then her helm was put up and she swerved inward toward the beach, upon which she grounded a minute later. Then Mr Purchase rose to his feet, sprang up on the thwarts, and, striding from one to the other, finally sprang out upon the beach, up which, followed by Cupid, he made his way toward our tent. A couple of minutes later he stood in the entrance, waiting for his eyes to accustom themselves to the comparative darkness of the interior.
“Well, doc.,” he exclaimed cheerily, “how have things been going with you to-day?”
“Quite as well as I could reasonably have expected, taking all things into consideration,” answered Hutchinson. “Poor Nugent has passed away—went about half an hour ago—but the rest of the wounded are doing excellently. How have things gone with you, and where are the others?”
“Left them behind busily preparing quarters for you and your contingent,” answered Purchase. “We have had a pretty lively time of it, I can tell you, since we left here this morning. Searched both banks of the river for a dozen miles or more, exploring creeks in search of the gentry who attacked us from the river last night, and who undoubtedly put the savages up to the shore attack upon the camp, and eventually found them snugly tucked away in a big lagoon about twelve miles from here, the entrance of which is so artfully concealed that we might have passed it within a hundred fathoms and never suspected its existence. Splendid place it is for carrying on the slave traffic; large open lagoon, with an average of about fifteen feet of water everywhere; fine spacious wharf, with water enough for ships to lie alongside; two spanking big barracoons; and a regular village of well-built houses; in fact, the finest and most complete slave factory that I’ve ever seen. Well-arranged defences, too; battery of four nine-pounders; houses loop-holed for musketry; and a garrison of about a hundred of the most villainous-looking Portuguese, Spaniards, and half-breeds that one need wish to meet. They were evidently on the look-out for us—had been watching us all day, I expect—and opened a brisk fire upon us the moment that we hove in sight. Luckily for us their shooting was simply disgraceful, and we managed to effect a landing, with only two or three hurt. But then came the tug-of-war. The beggars barricaded themselves inside their houses, and blazed away at us at short range, and then, of course, our people began to drop. But Perry wouldn’t take any refusal; landed the boat guns, dragged them forward, and blew in the doors, one after the other, stormed the houses, and carried them in succession at the sword’s point. After that it was all plain sailing, but very grim work, doc, I can tell you; our people had got their blood up, and went for the Dagoes like so many tigers. It lasted about a quarter of an hour after we had blown the doors down, and I don’t believe that more than a dozen of the other side escaped. Of course we, too, suffered heavily, and there are a lot of fresh cases waiting for you, but Murdoch is working like a Trojan. And now I have come to fetch you and your contingent away out of this; there is a fine, big, airy house that Murdoch has turned into a hospital, where the wounded will be in clover, comparatively speaking; so, if you don’t mind, we’ll get to work at once and shift quarters before nightfall.”
No sooner said than done. As I had surmised, a party of twenty unwounded men, under the boatswain, had been left behind by the skipper to look after the camp when he had gone away early in the morning, and these men were now called in to convey the most seriously wounded down to the launch, while the less seriously hurt helped each other; and in this way the whole of the occupants of the camp were got down to the launch and placed on board her in about twenty minutes. Then Hutchinson caused his medicine-chest to be taken down to the boat, together with such other matters as he thought might be useful; and, lastly, poor Nugent’s body was taken down and reverently covered over with the ship’s ensign, which had been saved, laid on a rough, impromptu platform on the thwarts amidships—the other poor fellows who had fallen in the fight had been buried before the setting-out of the boat expedition, I now learned. A final look round the camp was then taken by Purchase and Hutchinson; a few more articles that were thought worth preserving from possible midnight raiders were brought down; and then we got under way and stood up the river, keeping in the slack water as much as possible, in order to cheat the current.
It was within an hour of sunset when Purchase, who had been standing up in the stern-sheets of the boat, intently studying the shore of the right bank of the river for some ten minutes, gave the order to douse the canvas and stand by to ship the oars; and as he did so he waved his hand to the coxswain, who put down his helm and sheered the boat in toward what looked like an unbroken belt of mangroves stretching for miles along the bank. But as the launch, with plenty of way on her, surged forward, an opening gradually revealed itself; and presently we slid into a creek, or channel, some two hundred feet wide, the margins of which were heavily fringed with mangroves, and at once found ourselves winding along this narrow passage of oil-smooth, turbid water, in a stagnant atmosphere of roasting heat that was redolent of all the odours of foetid mud and decaying vegetation. This channel proved to be about a mile long, and curved round gradually from a north-easterly to a south-easterly direction, ending in a fine spacious lagoon about eight miles long by from three to four miles wide at its widest point, arrived in which we once more felt the breeze and the sails were again set, the boat heading about south-east, close-hauled on the port tack, toward what eventually proved to be an island of very fair size, fringed with the inevitable mangroves, but heavily timbered, as to its interior, with magnificent trees of several descriptions, among which I distinguished several very fine specimens of the bombax. Handsomely weathering this island, with a few fathoms to spare, and standing on until we could weather a small, low-lying island to windward of us on the next tack, we then hove about and stood for the northern shore of the lagoon, by that time some five miles distant, finally shooting in between the mainland and an island nearly two miles long, upon which stood the slave factory that our lads had captured earlier in the day. The whole surface of this island, except a narrow belt along its southern shore, had been completely cleared of vegetation; and upon the cleared space had been erected two enormous barracoons and, as Purchase had said, a regular village of well-constructed, stone-built houses raised on massive piers of masonry, and with broad galleries and verandahs all round them, evidently intended for the occupation of the slave-dealers and their dependants. A fine timber wharf extended along the entire northern side of the island, with massive bollards sunk into the soil at regular intervals for ships to make fast to; half a dozen trunk buoys occupied the middle of the fairway; and the whole settlement was completely screened from prying eyes by the heavy belt of standing timber that had been left undisturbed on the southern shore of the island. I had thought that the factory on the Camma Lagoon represented the last word in the construction of slave-dealing establishments; but this concern was quite twice as extensive, and more elaborately complete in every respect.
By the time that we invalids were landed it was close upon sunset, and under Purchase’s guidance we were all conducted up to the largest house in the place, where, in one of the rooms, Murdoch was still hard at work attending to the batch of patients that were the result of that day’s work. We, the new arrivals, however, were shepherded into another room, where fairly comfortable beds were arranged along the two sides, and into these beds the worst cases were at once put and turned over to Murdoch’s care, while Hutchinson promptly pulled off his coat and took up Murdoch’s work in what might be termed the operating-room. I, however, was not considered a bad case, and was accordingly placed in another smaller room, or ward, along with about half a dozen others in like condition with myself.
While these arrangements were proceeding, a fatigue-party had been busy at work in a secluded spot chosen by the skipper, at some distance from the houses; and before we, the wounded, had all been comfortably disposed of for the night, the dead Nugent included—were laid to rest with such honourable observance as the exigencies of the moment would permit.
The casualties in this last affair were, of course, by no means all on the British side; we had suffered pretty severely in the three affairs in which we had been involved since the departure of the boat expedition from the ship, our total amounting to eleven killed and twenty-six wounded; but the losses on the part of the enemy had been very considerably greater, their dead, in this last fight alone, numbering nineteen killed, while thirty-three wounded had been hurriedly bestowed in one of the houses, to be attended to by the surgeons as soon as our own people had been patched up; thus Hutchinson and Murdoch were kept busy the whole of that night, while Copplestone, Keene, and Parkinson—the three uninjured midshipmen—were impressed as ward-attendants to keep watch over our own wounded, and administer medicine, drink, and nourishment from time to time.
It was a most fortunate circumstance for all hands that this last factory had been discovered and captured; for we were thus provided with cool, comfortable living quarters, instead of being compelled to camp out on the exposed beach opposite the wreck; and to this circumstance alone may be attributed the saving of several of the more severely wounded, to say nothing of the fact that we now occupied a position which could be effectually defended from such attacks as that to which we had been exposed on the spit during the previous night. Moreover, it relieved the captain of a very heavy load of anxiety, since, but for the fortunate circumstance of this capture, he would have had no alternative but to have continued in the occupation of our makeshift camp on the spit, it being impossible for him to undertake a boat voyage to Sierra Leone with so many wounded on his hands. It is true that he might have sent away the launch, with an officer and half a dozen hands, to Sierra Leone to summon assistance; but his ambition was not to be so easily satisfied. We had done splendid service in capturing two factories and destroying one of them—the second would also, of course, be destroyed when we abandoned it—but the loss of the Psyche was a very serious matter, which must be atoned for in some shape or another; and he soon allowed it to be understood that he was in no particular hurry to quit our present quarters, where the wounded were making admirable progress, and the sound were comfortably housed, while provisions of all kinds were plentiful and the water was good. But this, excellent as it was in itself, was by no means all; with two such perfectly equipped factories as we had found upon the river it was certain that the slave traffic on the Fernan Vaz must have assumed quite formidable proportions; and it was the skipper’s idea that before our wounded should be lit to be moved, one or more slavers would certainly enter the river, when it would be our own fault if we did not capture them.
The most careful dispositions were accordingly made, with this object in view; the gig, in charge of an officer, was daily dispatched to the entrance of the lagoon in order that, herself concealed, her crew might maintain a watch upon the river and report the passage of any vessels upward-bound for the Camma Lagoon, while, so far as our own quarters were concerned, everything was allowed to remain as nearly as possible as it was before it fell into our hands, in order that, should a slaver arrive at the factory, there should be nothing about the place to give the alarm until it should be too late for her to effect her escape. As a final precaution, a sort of crow’s-nest arrangement was rigged up in a lofty silk-cotton tree which had been left standing in the screening belt of timber along the southern shore of the island, in order that a look-out might be maintained upon the approach channel during the hours of daylight, and timely notice given to us of the approach of slavers to the factory of which we were in occupation.
A full week elapsed from the date of our desperate fight on the sand spit, with no occurrence of any moment save that, thanks to the skill and indefatigable exertions of Hutchinson and Murdoch, all our wounded were doing remarkably well, two or three of them, indeed, having so far recovered that they were actually able to perform such light duty as that of hospital ward-attendants; while the unwounded had been kept perpetually busy at the scene of the wreck, salving such matters as were washed ashore, and transferring everything of any value to our quarters. Meanwhile, the ship had parted amidships, and was fast going to pieces, so that our labours in that direction were coming to an end, and in the course of another week or two there would be nothing more than a rib showing here and there above water, and a few trifles of wreckage scattered along the beach to tell to strangers the story of our disaster. The enemy’s wounded also, who were sharing with us the attentions of the surgeon and his mate, were doing well upon the whole, although there had been some half a dozen deaths among them, and there were a few more, whose hurts were of an exceptionally severe character, with whom the issue still remained doubtful.
It chanced that among these last there was a negro who seemed gradually to be sinking, despite the utmost efforts of Hutchinson to save him; and this individual, named M’Pandala, had latterly evinced a disposition to be friendly and communicative to Cupid, our Krooboy, who had been told off for hospital duty in the house occupied by the enemy’s wounded; and at length—it was on the tenth day of our occupation of the island, and I was by this time well enough to be out and about again, although still unable to do much on account of my disabled arm—this negro made a certain communication to Cupid which the latter deemed it his duty to pass on to me without loss of time. Accordingly, on the evening of that day, after Cupid had been relieved—he was on day duty—he sought me out and began—
“Mr Fortescue, sar, you know dem M’Pandala, in dere?” pointing with his chin toward the house in which the wounded man was lodged.
“No, Cupid,” I answered. “I cannot truthfully say that I enjoy the honour of the gentleman’s acquaintance. Who and what is he?”
Cupid grinned. “Him one Eboe man,” he answered, “employed by dem Portugee to cook for and look after dem captain’s house. He lib for die, one time now; and ’cause I been good to him, and gib him plenty drink when he thirsty, he tell me to-day one t’ing dat I t’ink de captain be glad to know. He say dat very soon—perhaps to-morrow or next day, or de day after—one big cauffle of slabe most likely comin’ here for be ship away from de coas’; and now dat he am goin’ to die he feel sorry for dem slabe and feel glad if dem was set free.”
“Whew!” I whistled. “That is a bit of news well worth knowing—if it can be relied upon. Do you believe that the fellow is telling the truth, Cupid?”
“Cartain, Mr Fortescue, sar,” answered the Krooboy, with conviction. “He lib for die now; what he want to tell me lie for? He no want debbil to come after him and say, ‘Hi, you M’Pandala, why you tell dem white men lie about slabe cauffle comin’ down to de coas’? You come along wid me, sar!’ No, he not want dat, for cartain.”
“When did he tell you this, Cupid?” I demanded.
“’Bout two hour ago,” answered Cupid. “He say to me, ‘Cupid, I lib for die to-night, and when you come on duty to-morrow you find me gone. So I want to tell you somet’ing now, before it too late.’ And den he tell me de news, Mr Fortescue, sar, just as I tell it to you, only in de Eboe language, which I understand, bein’ well educate.”
“All right,” said I. “In that case you had better come with me at once to the captain, and we will tell him the yarn. The sooner he hears it the better. Did he tell you where the cauffle was coming from, and which way?”
“He say,” answered Cupid, “dat dem cauffle am comin’ down from de Bakota country, where ’most all de slabe sent from dis place come from; and dere is only one way for dem to come here, t’rough de bush ober de oder side ob de water. Den dey bring dem across to de island in dem big flat-bottom punt dat lay moored up by de top end ob de wharf.”
We found the captain in the store with Mr Futtock, the boatswain, overhauling the various articles salved from the wreck, and as soon as he had seen all that he desired, and was ready to leave the building, I got hold of him and repeated the yarn that Cupid had spun to me, the Krooboy confirming and elaborating my statement from time to time as I went on, and answering such questions as the skipper put to him. When at length we had brought the yarn to an end the captain stood for some minutes wrapped in deep thought, and then said—
“This is a very valuable piece of information that you have managed to pick up, Cupid: and if it should prove to be well founded I will not forget that we owe it to you. It is too late now, Mr Fortescue, to do anything in the matter to-night, for it will be dark in less than half an hour; but the first thing to-morrow morning you and Cupid here had better take the dinghy, pull across to the mainland, and endeavour to find the road by which the cauffle will come—there ought not to be very much difficulty in doing that, I should think. And, having found it, it will be well for the pair of you to proceed along the road on the look-out for some suitable spot at which to ambush the party, after which the rest should be easy. There is, however, another matter that needs consideration. How are we to ascertain the precise moment at which to expect the arrival of the slave-dealers? Because it will be hardly desirable to take a party out, day after day, and keep them in the bush all day waiting for the cauffle to come along. We are all doing excellently well here; but two or three days spent in the bush would very possibly mean half the party being down with fever.”
Here Cupid, bursting with pride and importance at finding himself, as it were, a member of a council over which the captain was presiding, struck in—
“You jus’ leabe dat to me, sar. Suppose you gib me leabe to go, I take ration for, say, free day, and go off by myself into de bush to meet dem cauffle. Dhen when I hab met dem I soon find out when dem expec’ to arribe here, and I come back and tell you.”
The skipper regarded the black doubtfully.
“But,” he objected, “if you fall in with them, my man, the traders are as likely as not to shoot you; or, if not that, at least to seize you and chain you on to the cauffle. Then how could you let us know when to expect the beggars?”
“No fear ob dat, sar,” answered Cupid with a grin. “I shall take care dat dem do not know I, Cupid, am anywhere near dem. Dem shall neber suspec’ my presence, sar; but I shall be dere, all de same, and shall take partikler care to hear eberyt’ing dat dem say, so dat we may know exactly when to expec’ dem. And when I hab learned dat piece of information, I shall hurry back so as to let you know as early as possible. I don’ t’ink dat dere is much fault to find wid dat plan, sar.”
“No,” answered the skipper, smiling at the black’s eagerness and excitement, “provided, of course, that you are quite confident of your ability to carry it through.”
“You trust me, sar; I’ll carry it through all right, sar,” answered Cupid, in huge delight at being specially entrusted by the skipper with this mission. “You hab but to gib me leabe to go, and I will undertake to carry out de enterprise to your entire satisfaction.”
“Very well,” said the skipper, now struggling manfully to suppress his inclination to laugh outright at the man’s high-flown phraseology; “let it be so, then. Mr Fortescue, I leave it with you to arrange the matter.” And he turned away.
On the following morning, Cupid having called me at daylight, I snatched a hasty breakfast of cocoa and biscuit, and then wended my way to the wharf, where the Krooboy, in light marching order, with three days’ rations—which he proposed to supplement on the way, if necessary—tied up in a gaudy bandana handkerchief, awaited me in the dinghy. Scrambling down into the boat with some circumspection—for my broken arm, although knitting together again nicely, was still rather painful at times, and very liable to break again in the same place if treated roughly—I took my place in the stern-sheets, whereupon Cupid, giving the little cockle-shell a powerful thrust off from the wharf wall, threw out the two tiny oars by which the boat was usually propelled, and proceeded with long powerful strokes to row across to the mainland, at this point a bare half-mile distant. As we went the black informed me that, with the view of ascertaining a few additional items of information of which he had thought during the night, he had looked into the ward wherein his friend M’Pandala had been lodged, but had discovered, as he indeed more than half feared, that the Eboe had quietly slipped his moorings during the night and passed on into his own particular “happy hunting grounds.” But he added cheerfully that, after all, it really did not greatly matter; he would probably be able to obtain the required information in some other way.
Arrived at the other side of the inlet, it became necessary for us to search the shore for the spot at which the bush road debouched, and this we eventually found with some difficulty, for, like everything else connected with the factory, it had been very carefully arranged with the object of screening it from casual observation. But once discovered, our difficulties in that respect were at an end, for we found that it ran down into a tiny indentation in the shore, just sufficiently spacious to accommodate two of the large flats or punts at a time, with firm ground, sloping gently down into the water, affording admirable facilities for the rapid embarkation of large numbers of people.
Hauling the dinghy’s stem up on this piece of firm sloping ground, and making fast her painter to a convenient tree, as a further precaution, Cupid and I set out along the firm, well-beaten path, some six feet in width, which had been cleared through the dense and impenetrable bush that hemmed us in on either hand, tormented all the while by the dense clouds of mosquitoes and other stinging and biting insects that hovered about us in clouds and positively declined to be driven away.
We walked thus about a mile and a half when we came out upon an open space, some ten acres in extent, through which the path ran. This cleared space had evidently been caused by a bush fire at no very distant date, for a few charred trunks and portions of trunks of trees still reared themselves here and there; but the undergrowth had all been burned away down to the bare earth, and was now springing up again, fresh and green, in little irregular patches, all over the open area. The spot would serve admirably for an ambuscade, for while it was sufficiently open to permit of straight shooting, there was cover enough to conceal a hundred men, or more, at need. But what made the place especially suitable for our purpose was the fact that away over in one corner of the clearing there grew a thick, dense belt of wild cactus, newly sprung up, fresh, tough, and vigorous, every leaf being thickly studded with long, strong, sharp spikes growing so closely together that nothing living would dare to face it, or attempt to force a passage through it—or, at all events, if they should be foolhardy enough to try it once they would not attempt it a second time. It immediately occurred to me—and Cupid promptly corroborated my view—that if our party could but find or make a way in behind this belt of cactus, they would be at once in a natural fort from which it would be impossible to dislodge them, and after further careful investigation a passage was found through the bush by which our lads could easily gain access to the interior of the cactus fort, and hold it against all comers. There was therefore no need to search farther; the place was admirably adapted to our requirements; and, once satisfied of this, I bade Cupid proceed on his way in quest of the approaching cauffle, while I leisurely wended my way back to the dinghy and, with a single oar thrown out over the stern, sculled myself back to the factory.