Chapter Eleven.
Don Fernando De Mendouca.
The most striking figure in the ship, however, was, beyond all question, a tall, well-built man, with a firmly-knit, powerful frame, every movement of which was eloquent of health and strength and inexhaustible endurance, while it was characterised by that light and easy floating grace that is only to be acquired by the habitual treading of such an unstable platform as a ship’s deck. He was very dark, his hair, moustache, and beard being coal-black and wavy, while his skin—or at least the exposed parts that met my eye—was tanned to so deep a bronze as to give him quite the complexion of a mulatto. But there was not a drop of black blood in him; his nose alone—thin, shapely, and slightly aquiline—was evidence enough of that. He was clad in the inevitable suit of white drill, girt about the waist with a crimson cummerbund; his head-covering was the equally inevitable Panama broad-brimmed hat, and his otherwise naked feet were thrust into a pair of Turkish slippers of red morocco, embroidered with gold thread. And, early as was the hour, he held a half-smoked cigar between his large, even, white teeth. As I emerged from the companion he was standing to windward, near the helmsman, critically eyeing the set of the brigantine’s beautifully cut canvas; and upon seeing me he—without moving from his position or offering me his hand—bowed with all the stately grace of a Spanish hidalgo, and exclaimed in Spanish, in a firm, strong, and decidedly musical voice—
“Good-morning, señor! I congratulate you upon being sufficiently recovered to leave your cabin. I suppose I ought, by every rule of good manners, to bid you welcome to my ship; but I have discarded conventional forms of speech—among other things—and now make a practice of speaking only the strict truth; and—as Pedro has probably told you—I had little to do with your being here beyond the mere issue of the order for your transfer from the deck of the French schooner. But, if I cannot at this moment truthfully bid you welcome, I can at least say that I sincerely hope we shall be good friends; and should that come about, you shall be welcome not only to my ship, but, as we Spaniards say, to my house and all that is in it.”
“Thank you, Don Fernando,” I answered. “I can easily understand that you find it exceedingly difficult to regard me as a welcome guest, and believe me, I am not going to be so foolish as to feel hurt at your frankly telling me so. And I heartily unite with you in the hope that as long as we may be compelled into intimate association with each other, we shall be able to forget that our professions are antagonistic, and that personally it may be quite possible for us to be good friends. And now, señor, permit me to seize this, the first opportunity that has presented itself, to express to you my most grateful thanks for having saved my life yesterday—”
“Stop, señor, if you please,” he interrupted, holding up his hand. “I have already explained to you that I had absolutely nothing to do with that beyond the mere issuing of an order. To be perfectly frank with you, I was in no mood to show mercy to any one just then, for you and your pestilent, meddlesome crew fought like fiends, and cost me several good men that I could ill spare. Your gratitude, therefore,” and I thought I detected an echo of something very like scorn in his voice, “is due solely to my boy Pedro, whose whim of saving you I did not even then care to thwart. But enough of this; you are my guest, and may, if you will, become my friend. I hope your accommodation is to your liking?”
“Excellent, indeed,” answered I, glad enough to get away from a topic that seemed to be somewhat distasteful to my host. “Excellent, indeed, and far more luxurious than anything to which I have been accustomed on board my own ship.”
“Yes,” he smiled; “the English are clearly anxious that their officers shall not become enervated through overmuch luxury. I have been on board several of your ships, and saw but little to admire in the accommodation provided for and the arrangements made for the comfort of their officers. How long have you been on the West African station, señor?”
I told him, and the conversation gradually took a more agreeable turn, my host proving himself, not only a thorough man of the world, but also surprisingly well educated and well read for a Spaniard. He was well acquainted with several of our best English writers, and professed an admiration for our literature as great and thorough as was his evident hatred of ourselves and our institutions as a nation. He had very considerably thawed out of his original coldness of manner, and was discussing with much animation and in well-chosen language the British drama, and especially Shakspeare, when we were summoned to breakfast and found Pedro waiting for us in the cabin. The lad was very demonstrative in his delight at finding me so much better, and I could see that he was also greatly pleased—and I thought relieved—at the prospect of amicable if not cordial relations becoming established between his father and myself.
I have said that the morning was brilliantly fine, and so it was; but I had noticed even when I first went on deck, that there was a certain pallor and haziness in the blue of the sky, the appearance of which I did not altogether like; and when after breakfast we went on deck—Mendouca with his sextant in his hand, for the purpose of finding the ship’s longitude—our first glance aloft showed us that a large halo had gathered round the sun, and certain clouds that had risen above the horizon were carrying windgalls in their skirts. I drew Mendouca’s attention to these portents, and he agreed with me that we were probably about to have bad weather. And sure enough we had, for that afternoon it came on to blow heavily from the eastward, and after running before it as long as we dared—indeed a good deal longer than in my opinion was at all prudent—we were compelled to heave-to; and we thus remained for sixty-two consecutive hours, during which Mendouca fumed and raved like a madman; for the sea was making clean breaches over the brigantine during the whole of that time, so that a considerable portion of our bulwarks and everything that was not securely lashed was washed away, and, worst of all, it was imperatively necessary to keep the hatches battened down during the entire continuance of the gale, thus depriving the unhappy slaves pent up below of all air save such as could penetrate through a small opening in the fore-bulkhead, communicating with the forecastle, and used for the purpose of gaining access to the hold in bad weather, in order to supply the slaves with food and water. As, however, the sea was breaking more heavily over the fore-deck than anywhere else, the utmost care had to be exercised in opening the fore-scuttle, a favourable opportunity having to be watched for, and the hatch whipped off and on again in a moment. Very little air, therefore, was obtainable from that source, and none whatever from elsewhere; the blacks, therefore, were dying below like rotten sheep, of suffocation, as was reported by those who came up from time to time after attending to the most pressing wants of the miserable creatures. And to make what was already bad enough still worse, it was impossible to remove the dead from among the living so long as the bad weather continued.
When at length the gale moderated and the sea went down sufficiently to permit of sail being once more made, the hatches were lifted; and never to my dying day shall I forget the awful, poisonous stench that arose from the brigantine’s hold. The fumes could be actually seen rising through the hatchway in the form of a dense steam that continued to pour up for several minutes, and when the men were ordered below to pass up the dead bodies, even the toughest and most hardened of them recoiled from the task, and staggered away forward literally as sick as dogs. At length, however, after the lapse of about a quarter of an hour, a gang ventured down into the now comparatively pure atmosphere, and the work of passing up the dead bodies began. I stood to windward, as near the hatchway as I could get without being sickened by the still pestilential effluvium that even now arose from the hold, and watched the operation, not from any feeling of morbid curiosity, but in order that I might become aware, by the evidence of my own eyesight, of some of the blacker horrors of this most foul and accursed trade, and the sights that I then witnessed literally beggar description. The unhappy wretches had been packed so tightly together that they had been unable to move more than an inch or so, while the slave-deck was so low that a sitting posture with the head bowed to the knees and the hands clasped in front of them had been absolutely necessary; and the miserable creatures had died and stiffened in this cramped and painful posture; it was gruesome enough, therefore, to see the bodies passed up and thrown overboard in so woeful an attitude; but the worst sight of all was in those cases where, in the dying agony, some unfortunate wretch had writhed his head back until it looked as though the neck had become dislocated, thus revealing the distorted features, with the eye balls rolled back until only the whites were visible, and the mouth wide open as though gasping for air. The brigantine had left the Congo with four hundred and fifty-five slaves on board, about three-fifths of whom were men, the remainder being young women and children; and of these every woman and child, and one hundred and twenty-seven men had succumbed, leaving, out of the grand total, the miserable moiety of only one hundred and forty-six survivors! It was horrible beyond the power of words to express, and to crown all, as the work went on, the water in the ship’s wake became alive with sharks, who fought and struggled with each other for their prey, literally tearing the bodies limb from limb in their frantic struggles to secure a morsel. It was a sight that, one might have thought, would have excited pity in the breast of the arch-fiend himself, but with Mendouca it only had the effect of goading him into a state of mad, ungovernable fury. “See,” he exclaimed at last, stalking up to me and grasping me savagely by the arm—“see the result of the thrice accursed meddlesome policy of your wretched, contemptible little England and the countries who have united with her in the hopeless task of suppressing the slave-trade! But for that, these negroes might have been comfortably stowed in three or four ships, instead of being packed like herrings in a barrel in the hold of one only, and then all this loss of life and money might have been avoided. By this infernal mishap I am a loser to the extent of over thirty thousand dollars, and all for what? Why, simply because you British, with your sickly sentimentality, choose to regard the blacks as human beings like yourselves. You are all virtuous indignation because forsooth we slave-traders have bethought ourselves of the plan of removing them from their own country, where their lives would have been passed in a condition of the lowest and most degrading barbarism, and transporting them to another where they can be rendered useful and valuable; where, in return for their labour, they are fed, clothed, tended in sickness, and provided with comfortable homes; where their lives may be passed in peace and comfort and perfect freedom from all care; and where, if indeed they are human, like ourselves, which I very much doubt, they may be converted to Christianity. You violently object to this amelioration of the lot of the negro savage; but you shut your eyes to the fact that thousands of your own countrymen and women are actually slaves of the most abject type, made so by your own insatiable and contemptible craving for cheap clothing, cheap food, cheap every thing, to satisfy which, and to, at the same time, gratify his own perfectly legitimate desire to make a living, the employer of labour has to grind his employés down in the matter of wage until their lives are a living lingering death to them, in comparison with which the future of those blacks down below will be a paradise. Bah! such hypocrisy sickens me. And yet, in support of this disgusting Pharisaism, you, and hundreds more like you, claiming to be intelligent beings, willingly endure hardships and face the perils of sickness, shipwreck, shot and steel with a persistent heroism that almost compels one’s admiration, despite the mistaken enthusiasm which is its animating cause. Nay, do not speak, señor; I know exactly what you would say; I have heard, until I have become sick of it, the canting jargon of those meddlesome busy-bodies who, knowing nothing of the actual facts of slavery, or for their own purposes, hunt out exceptional cases of tyranny which they hold up to public execration as typical of the system—I have heard it all so often that I have long passed the point where it was possible to listen to it with even the faintest semblance of patience; so do not attempt the utterly useless and impossible task of trying to convert me, I pray you, lest in my anger I should say words that would offend you.”
Good heavens! did the man suppose that he had not offended me already? I saw, however, that I might as well attempt to quell the hurricane as argue with him in his present mood; moreover I am but a poor hand at argument; I therefore bowed in silence, turned away and went below, fully determined to have the matter out with the fiery Spaniard the first time that I caught him in a more amenable temper. Pedro would have followed me, and indeed attempted to do so, but as I entered the companion, I heard his father call him back and bid him remain on deck.
With the moderating of the gale the wind had come out dead ahead, and the brigantine was consequently on a taut bowline on the starboard tack when the hatches were opened and the bodies of the suffocated negroes were passed up on deck and thrown overboard. She remained so for the rest of that day; but when I awoke next morning, I at once became aware, from the steady, long, pendulum-like roll of the ship, that she was once more before the wind, and I naturally concluded that the wind had again become fair. To my great surprise, however, when I emerged from my state-room and caught a glimpse of the tell-tale compass hanging in gimbals in the skylight opening of the main cabin, I saw that the ship was heading to the eastward! Wondering what might be the meaning of this, I went on deck, but neither Mendouca nor Pedro was visible, and I did not choose to question the mate—a surly, hang-dog, cut-throat-looking scoundrel, who had chosen to manifest an implacable hostility to myself from the moment that our eyes had first met. However, I had not been on deck long when Mendouca made his appearance, and in response to his salutation I said—
“Good-morning, captain; I see you have shifted your helm during the night.”
I saw, when it was too late, that my remark was an unfortunate one, for Mendouca scowled as he replied—
“Yes; it was not worth while to make the trip across the Atlantic and back for the mere purpose of landing one hundred and forty odd negroes—even could we have got them over without further loss, which I greatly doubt—so I am going back to the coast for more—unless I can pick them up without going so far,” he added, after a momentary pause, and with a peculiar look which I could not at the moment fathom. “And all this loss of life, and money, and time, and all this extra risk are forced upon me by the meddlesome policy of Great Britain. Great! Faugh! Could she but see herself as others see her she would, for very shame, strike out that vaunting prefix, and take that obscure place among the nations which properly befits her. Señor Dugdale, do you value your life?”
“Well, yes, to a certain extent I do,” I replied. “It is the only one I have, you see; and were I to lose it the loss would occasion a considerable amount of distress to my friends. For that reason, therefore, if for no other, I attach a certain amount of value to it, and feel bound to take care of it so far as I may, with honour.”
“Very well, then,” remarked Mendouca, with a sneer, “so far as you can with honour, refrain, I pray you, from thrusting your nationality into my face; for I may as well tell you that I have the utmost hatred and contempt for the English; I would sweep every one of them off the face of the earth if I could; and some day, when this feeling is particularly strong upon me, I may blow your brains out if I happen to remember that you are an Englishman.”
“I hope it will not come to that, Don Fernando, for many reasons,” I remarked, with a rather forced laugh, “and among them I may just mention the base cowardice of murdering an unarmed man. I rather regret that you should be so completely as you appear to be under the dominion of this feeling of hatred for my nation; it must be as unpleasant for you as it is for me that we are thus forcibly thrown together; but it need not last long; you can put me out of the ship at the first land that we touch, and I must take my chance of making my way to a place of safety. It will be unpleasant for me, of course, but it will remove from you a constant source of temptation to commit murder.”
Mendouca laughed—it was rather a harsh and jarring laugh, certainly—and said—
“Upon my honour as a Spanish gentleman, you appear to be mightily concerned to preserve me from the crime of bloodshed, young gentleman. But do you suppose it would not be murder to put you ashore, as you suggest, at the first land that we reach? Why, boy, were I to do so, within six hours you would be in the hands of the natives, and lashed to the torture-stake! And would not your death then be just as much my act as though I were to shoot you through the head this moment?”
And to my astonishment—and somewhat to my consternation, I must
admit—he whipped a pistol out of his belt and levelled it full at my head, cocking it with his thumb as he did so.
“I presume it would,” I answered steadily; “and on the whole I believe that to shoot me would be the more merciful act of the two. So fire by all means, señor, if you must take my life.”
“By the living God, but you carry the thing off bravely, young cockerel!” he exclaimed. “Do you dare me to fire?”
“Yes,” I exclaimed stoutly. “I dare you to fire, if you can bring yourself to perpetrate so rank an act of cowardice!”
“Well,” he returned, laughing, as he lowered the pistol, uncocked it, and replaced it in his belt; “you are right. I cannot; at least not in cold blood. I dare say I am pretty bad, according to your opinion, but my worst enemy cannot accuse me of cowardice. And, as to putting you ashore, I shall do nothing of the kind; on the contrary, widely as our opinions at present diverge upon the subject of my calling, I hope yet to induce you to join me. You can be useful to me,” he added, in pure English, to my intense astonishment; “I want just such a cool, daring young fellow as yourself for my right hand, to be a pair of extra eyes and ears and hands to me, and to take command in my absence. I can make it well worth your while, so think it over; I do not want an answer now.”
“But I must answer now,” I returned, also in English; “I cannot allow a single minute to elapse without assuring you, Don Fernando, that you altogether mistake my character if you suppose me capable of any participation whatever in a traffic that I abhor and detest beyond all power of expression; a traffic that inflicts untold anguish upon thousands, and, not infrequently, I should imagine, entails such a fearful waste of human life as I witnessed yesterday. Moreover, it has just occurred to me that when we attacked you and your friends in the creek this brigantine was flying a black flag. If that means anything it means, I presume, that you are a pirate as well as a slaver?”
“Precisely,” he assented. “I am both. Some day, when we know each other better, I will tell you my story, and, unlikely as you may now think it, I undertake to say that when you have heard it you will acknowledge that I have ample justification for being both.”
“Do not believe it, Don Fernando,” I answered. “Your story is doubtless that of some real or fancied wrong that you have suffered at the hands of society; but no wrong can justify a man to become an enemy to his race. I will hear your story, of course, if it will afford you any satisfaction to tell it me; but I warn you that neither it nor anything that you can possibly say will have the effect of converting me to your views.”
“You think so now, of course,” he answered, with a laugh; “but we shall see, we shall see. Meanwhile, there is my steward poking his ugly visage up through the companion to tell us that breakfast is ready, so come below, my friend, and take the keen edge off your appetite.”
It was on the day but one after this, that, about four bells in the forenoon watch, one of the hands, having occasion to go aloft to perform some small job of work on the rigging, reported a strange sail ahead. The brigantine was still running before a fair wind, but the breeze had fallen light, and it looked rather as though we were in for a calm spell, with thunder, perhaps, later on. We were going about four or maybe four and a half knots at the time, and the report of the strange sail created as much excitement on board us as though we had been a man-o’-war. For some time there seemed to be a considerable amount of doubt as to the course that the stranger was steering; for, as seen from aloft, she appeared to be heading all round the compass; but it was eventually concluded that, in general direction, her course was the same as our own.
As the morning wore on the wind continued to drop, while a heavy bank of thunder-cloud gathered about the horizon ahead, piling itself steadily but imperceptibly higher, until by noon it was as much as Mendouca could do to get the sun for his latitude. By this time we had risen the stranger until we had brought her hull-up on the extreme verge of the horizon; and the nearer that we drew to her the more eccentric did her manoeuvres appear to be; she was heading all round the compass, and but for the fact that we could see from time to time that her yards were being swung, and some of her canvas hauled down and hoisted again in the most extraordinary manner, we should have set her down as a derelict. I ought, by the way, to have said that she was a small brig of, apparently, about one hundred and forty tons. Mendouca was thoroughly perplexed at her extraordinary antics; his glass was scarcely ever off her, and when he removed it from his eye it was only to hand it to me and impatiently demand whether I could not make out something to elucidate the mystery. At length, after witnessing through the telescope some more than usually extraordinary performance with the canvas, I remarked—
“I think there is one thing pretty clear about that brig, and that is that she is in the possession of people who have not the remotest notion how to handle her.”
“Eh? what is that you say?” demanded Mendouca. “Don’t know how to handle her? Well, it certainly appears that they do not,” as the fore-topsail-halliard was started and the yard slid slowly down the mast, leaving the topgallant-sail and royal fully set above it. “By Jove, I have it!” he suddenly continued, slapping his thigh energetically. “Yonder brig is in possession of a cargo of slaves who have somehow been allowed to rise and overpower her crew! Yes, by heaven, that must be the explanation of it! At all events we will run down and see. Blow, good breeze, blow!” and he whistled energetically after the manner of seamen in want of a wind.
The breeze, however, utterly refused to blow; on the contrary, it was growing more languid every minute, while our speed had dwindled down to a bare two knots; and the thunder-clouds were piling up overhead blacker and more menacing every minute. At length, when we were a bare three miles from the brig, the helmsman reported that we no longer had steerage-way, and as the Francesca slowly swung round upon her heel, bringing the brig broad on her starboard quarter, Mendouca stamped irritably on the deck, and cursed the weather, the brig, the brigantine; in fact he cursed “everything above an inch high,” as we say in the navy when we wish to describe a thorough, comprehensive outburst of profanity. At length, having given free vent to his impatience, he stood for a moment intently studying the lowering heavens, strode across the deck and glanced through the open skylight at the barometer, then turned to me and said, in English—
“What think you, Dugdale; would it be safe, in your opinion, to send away a couple of boats to take possession of that brig? The glass has dropped nothing to speak of since it was set this morning, and that stuff up there promises nothing worse than a sharp thunderstorm and a pelting downpour of rain. The boats could reach her in forty minutes, when their crews would take possession, shorten sail, and wait for us to join. I’ll be bound there is sufficient ‘black ivory’ aboard there to spare me the necessity to return to the coast and to make good all my losses.”
In my turn I too looked at the sky intently.
“I hardly know what to make of it,” I answered at length. “It may be, as you say, that there is nothing worse than thunder brewing up there; yet there is something in the look of those clouds that I do not altogether like; their colour, for instance, is too livid a purple for thunder alone, according to my idea, and I do not like the way in which they are working; why, they are as busy as a barrel of yeast; depend on it, señor, there is wind, and plenty of it, up there. As to how long it may be before the outburst comes, you have had more experience than I of this part of the world, and ought to know the weather better than I do.”
“Well, I dare say I do,” he assented, with apparent relief, and again raised his eyes and anxiously scrutinised the clouds. “I’ll risk it,” he at length exclaimed, decisively, and forthwith turned and issued the necessary orders to his chief mate, who trundled away forward, bawling to the men as he went; and in a few minutes all was bustle and activity about our decks, the arm-chests being brought on deck, and the selected boats’ crews coming aft and receiving their weapons from Mendouca himself, while the gunner served out the ammunition. The rascals were a smart, active lot—I will give them credit for so much—and in less than ten minutes from the announcement of Mendouca’s decision, the boats, two of them, with ten men in each, were in the glassy water, and their crews stretching out lustily for the brig.
It was perfectly evident to me that Mendouca was possessed by a feeling that his eagerness to acquire the brig’s cargo of negroes had warped his judgment and egged him on to an unduly risky course of action in sending his boats and so many of his people away in the face of that threatening sky; the boats had no sooner shoved off than he became consumed by anxiety, and, oblivious of the suffocating heat and closeness of the atmosphere, proceeded to pace the deck to and fro with hasty, impatient strides, halting abruptly at frequent intervals to scrutinise the aspect of the sky, and, anon, to watch the progress of the boats. The crews of the latter were evidently quite aware that the expedition upon which they were engaged was by no means free from peril, for until they had reached a distance too great to enable us to distinguish their actions, I could see first one and then another glancing aloft and over his shoulder at the sky, the action being invariably followed by the exhibition of increased energy at the oar. They were clearly doing their utmost, one and all; in fact the boats were making a downright race of it for the brig; the men bending their backs and throwing their whole strength into every stroke, churning the oily-looking surface of the water into foam with their oar-blades, and leaving a long, wedge-like wake behind them, while the two mates in charge, and who had hold of the yoke-lines, were bowing forward at every stroke in true racing style. Yet, rapid as their progress was, it did not satisfy Mendouca, who, every time that he paused to watch their progress, stamped upon the deck with impatience, and cursed the oarsmen for a set of lazy, good-for-nothing lubbers.
And there was ample, justification for his anxiety; for scarcely had the boats reached a quarter of a mile from the Francesca than there was a sudden and very perceptible darkening of the heavens, followed by a vivid flash of lightning low down toward the eastern horizon, the low, muffled boom of the thunder coming reverberating across the glassy water with the sound of a cannon-shot rolled slowly along a timber floor.