Chapter Thirteen.
How Mendouca replenished his “Cargo.”
I could see that Mendouca was pretty thoroughly ashamed of himself, for despite his utmost efforts, there was a perceptible shrinking and embarrassment of manner apparent in him during the progress of the meal. Nevertheless, he exerted himself manfully to obliterate the exceedingly disagreeable impression that he knew had been made upon me by his late conduct; and it was evident that he was sincerely desirous of re-establishing friendly relations between us, whether from any selfish motive or not I cannot of course say, but I think not—I believe his pride was hurt at his late lamentable exhibition of weakness, and he was chiefly anxious to recover his own self-respect. Whatever his motive may have been, his demeanour was a perfect blending of politeness and cordiality that won upon me in spite of myself; and before the meal was over I had determined to render him the small amount of assistance that he had asked of me, reserving to myself the right to withdraw it at any moment that I might deem fit. He seemed sincerely grateful for my offer, and accepted it frankly and cordially with the reservation that I had attached to it; and having accompanied me on deck and turned the hands up, he informed them that I had offered to temporarily perform the duties of chief mate, and that they were to obey my orders as implicitly as they would those from his own lips; after which, as I had offered to take charge until midnight, he said that he was tired and would try to get a little sleep, and so retired below to his own cabin.
The breeze continued easterly, and very moderate, frequently dropping almost calm, on which occasion we were almost invariably treated to deluges of rain, with occasional thunder and lightning. Our progress to the eastward was therefore slow, and for three whole days and nights nothing occurred to break the monotony of the voyage. On the morning of the fourth day, however, when I went on deck just before eight bells—it having been my eight hours in, that night—I found the brigantine once more before the wind, with a slashing breeze blowing after her, and she with every rag of canvas packed upon her that could be induced to draw. But, to my exceeding surprise, we were heading to the westward, and, hull-down about ten miles distant, was another craft dead ahead of us, also carrying a press of canvas.
I turned to Mendouca for an explanation; and in answer to my look of inquiry he said—
“Yes, I want to overtake that brig, if I can. I am ashamed to say that among us we let her slip past in the darkness of the early part of the last watch, and so I missed the opportunity of speaking her. But I believe I know her; and if my surmise as to her identity proves correct, I think I shall have no difficulty in persuading her skipper to transfer his cargo to me, and so save me the trouble and risk of returning to the coast for one—a risk which was every day growing greater as we drew nearer to the ground haunted by your lynx-eyed cruisers, to fall in with one of which just now, with those niggers down in the hold, would mean our inevitable condemnation, as I need scarcely tell you.”
“Quite so,” I assented. “But should you fail to overtake yonder craft, you will lose a good deal of ground, will you not?”
“Oh, we shall overhaul her, if she be the brig I believe her to be, and I have very little doubt upon that point,” answered Mendouca. “She is a smart craft, I admit, but the Francesca can beat her upon any point of sailing, and in any breeze that blows; and, that being the case, the distance that we may have to run to leeward before getting alongside her is a matter of indifference to me, since it will be so much of our voyage accomplished.”
“Have you gained anything on her since you bore up in chase?” I asked.
“About a couple of miles, I should think. But then the wind has been light with us until within the last hour. If this breeze holds I expect to be alongside her about four bells in the afternoon watch.”
“By which time we shall have run close upon seventy miles to leeward,” I remarked.
“Nearer eighty,” observed Mendouca. “We are going close upon thirteen now. But, as I said before, that does not trouble me in the least, since we shall be that much nearer Cuba.”
This was serious news to me, for Cuba was about the last place that I desired to visit, at least on board the Francesca, for I foresaw that if once we got over there the difficulty of effecting my escape from the accursed craft would be very greatly increased; indeed, I had quite reckoned upon her being fallen in with and captured by one of our cruisers, either while standing in for a fresh cargo of slaves, or when coming out again with them on board, to which chance alone could I look with any reason for the prospect of deliverance from my present embarrassing and disagreeable situation. True, there was just a possibility of our being picked up by one of the West Indian squadron; but I had not much hope of that, our vessels on that station being mostly slow, deep-draught craft, altogether unsuited for the pursuit and capture of the swift, light-draught slavers, who, unless caught at advantage in open water, could laugh us to scorn by the simple expedient of taking short cuts across shoals, or seeking refuge among the shallow lagoons that abound among the islands, and are especially plentiful and spacious along the northern coast of Cuba. However, there was no use in worrying over a state of things that I had no power to mend; I therefore assumed charge of the deck, and allowed matters to take their course—since I needs must.
The breeze continued to freshen as the sun increased his distance above the horizon, and we went bowling along at a most exhilarating pace, overhauling the brig ahead, slowly but surely; and when at one o’clock the steward summoned me to the cabin to dinner, a space of barely two miles separated the two craft. She had just hoisted Portuguese colours, of which, however, Mendouca took no notice, somewhat to my surprise, since he reiterated the statement that she was the craft he had believed her to be, and that the captain of her and he were old friends. It was my afternoon watch below; so when I rose from the dinner-table I said—
“Captain Mendouca, I have no wish to identify myself in any way with the transaction you are about to negotiate; you must excuse me therefore if, it being my watch below, I retire to my cabin.”
“Very well, Dugdale,” he answered, quite good-humouredly, “I can manage the business perfectly well without you; if therefore your conscience”—with just the faintest suggestion of a sneer—“will not permit you to take an active part in it, you are quite welcome to stay below until the affair is at an end, when I will call you.”
I even thought that he spoke with an air of relief, as though my withdrawal had smoothed away a difficulty. About an hour later I was awakened from a nap by the sound of hailing in a language which I did not understand, but which, from its decided resemblance to Spanish, I concluded to be Portuguese. I could not hear what passed, nor did I attempt to do so, being of opinion that the less prominently I was mixed up with the affair, and the less I knew about it, the better. The hailing soon ceased, and then the brigantine was hove-to, as I could tell by the difference in her movements. I had the curiosity to rise from my bunk and take a peep through the scuttle at the sea, but it was bare as far as my eye could reach; so, as my state-room was to windward as the Francesca then lay, I came to the conclusion that the brig was hove-to to leeward of us. The moment that our topsail was backed I heard the creaking of davit blocks, and the other sounds of a boat being lowered; and a few minutes later I heard the roll of the oars in the rowlocks as she was pulled away from the ship. Then the hatches were taken off fore and aft, and in about half-an-hour from the time of our having hove-to I became aware that the first boat-load of slaves had arrived alongside and were being driven down into the hold. The boats now began to arrive in rapid succession, and there was a good deal of bustle and confusion on deck, which lasted until close upon sunset, and in the midst of it I laid down and went to sleep again, for want of something better to do. When I awoke the dusk was thick upon the glass of my scuttle, the steward was lighting the lamp in the main cabin, and I could feel that we were once more under way again; concluding, therefore, that the exchange had been completed, I rolled out of my bunk and, slipping my feet into my shoes, left my state-room and went on deck, where I found Mendouca in jubilant spirits, but rather disconcerted, I thought, at my appearance.
“Hillo!” he exclaimed in English, “where the deuce did you come from, and how long have you been on deck?”
“I came from my state-room, and have but this moment emerged from the companion. Why do you ask?” said I.
“Because,” he answered, “to tell you the truth you startled me, making your appearance in that quiet manner. I thought you were going to stay below until I called you?”
“It was you who said that, not I,” answered I. “And, to tell you the truth, I felt tired of being below, and so—finding that you were under way again—came on deck.”
The brig was about five miles astern, and, as far as I could see in the fast-gathering darkness, still hove-to, which struck me as being so peculiar that I made some remark to that effect.
“Oh no; nothing strange about it at all,” answered Mendouca carelessly. “Her people are getting their supper, probably, and are too lazy to start tack or sheet until they have finished their meal. Bless you, you have no idea what lazy rascals the Portuguese are; their laziness is absolutely phenomenal; they are positively too lazy to live long, and so most of them die early. More over, I expect her skipper is still below poring over his charts and trying to make up what he is pleased to call his mind what spot to steer for in order to get another cargo.”
“Very possibly,” I assented, with a laugh. “By the way, it is curious, but I could almost fancy her deeper in the water than she was; does it not strike you so?”
“Deeper in the water?” he exclaimed sharply. “No, I cannot say that it does; and even were such a thing possible, it would need an uncommonly sharp eye to discern it in such a light as this. She may be, however, for that rascal José wrung enough good Spanish dollars out of me, for his rubbish, to sink her to her waterways. But come, here is the steward, so I suppose supper is ready, and if so we may as well go below and get it, for I must plead guilty to being most ravenously hungry.”
Notwithstanding which statement I could not avoid noticing that he toyed a great deal with his food and ate very little; which was not to be wondered at under the circumstances, for I afterwards learned that while I was below in my berth, suspecting nothing worse than the purchase and transfer of a cargo of slaves from one ship to another, a most atrocious and cold-blooded act of piracy had been committed, and that, too, under the shadow and disguise of the British flag; Mendouca having coolly hoisted British colours the moment that I left the deck, and, in the guise of a British cruiser, compelled the Portuguese brig to heave-to and disgorge her cargo; after which he had confined the crew below, bound hand and foot, and had scuttled their ship, leaving them to perish in her when she went down! But of this I had not the faintest suspicion until the tale was told me some time afterwards by one of the Francesca’s own crew.
With the setting of the sun the wind evinced a very decided tendency to drop, growing steadily lighter all through the first watch, until when Mendouca relieved me at midnight the ship was moving at a rate of barely five knots, although she was carrying studding-sails on both sides; and when I went on deck again at four o’clock next morning it was a flat calm, and the ship was lying motionless upon the water, with her head swung round to the south-east; the swell, too, had gone down, and there was every appearance of the calm lasting for several hours at least. The appearance of the sun, as he rose, also confirmed this impression, the sky being—for a wonder in that latitude—perfectly cloudless, and of a clear, pure, soft, crystalline blue, into which the great luminary leapt in dazzling splendour, palpitating with breathless heat that promised to soon become almost unendurable. It was my custom to indulge in a saltwater bath every morning in the ship’s head, one of the men playing the hose upon me for a quarter of an hour or so, and never did that bath seem a greater luxury to me than on this particular morning, for the heat came with the sun, and I envied the fish their ability to escape it by sinking deep into the cool, blue, crystalline depths; indeed I should most probably have been tempted to imitate them as far as possible by plunging overboard and swimming twice or thrice round the ship, had I not happened to have noticed a large shark under her counter, when, to test the clearness of the water, I happened to lean over the taffrail to look at the rudder and stern-post. Even the men dawdled over the job of washing decks that morning, using a much greater quantity of water than usual, and placing themselves where there was a chance to get the hose played upon their bare feet and legs. And if it was hot on deck, what must it have been down in the crowded hold? It was Mendouca’s habit to have the gratings put on the hatchways and secured every night—when the weather would permit of the use of them instead of the solid hatches—in order to prevent anything in the shape of a rising on the part of the negroes; and all night long a thin, pungent vapour had been rising through them, telling an eloquent tale of the frightful closeness and heat of the atmosphere down there, while at frequent intervals could be heard the sound of a restless stirring on the part of the living cargo, accompanied by a long-drawn, gasping sigh, as if for breath. There was usually a good deal of carelessness and remissness manifested by the men in the removal of the gratings in the morning. I have frequently gone on deck at seven bells—when it was my eight hours in—and found them still on, although it was well understood that they were to be taken off at four bells. I was always very particular, when it was my morning watch on deck, to have the gratings removed prompt to time; on this particular morning, however, I did not wait until four bells, but took it upon myself to have the hatches thrown open as soon as there was daylight enough to enable us to see, clearly, and I am sure that the poor wretches below were grateful for even so small a measure of relief.
As the day advanced the heat grew intolerable, and the consequent suffering of the blacks more intense. It is the custom on board slavers, I believe—at least it was so on board the Francesca—to feed the slaves twice a day, the food consisting of a fairly liberal quantity of boiled rice, farina, or calavance beans—these latter being used on account of their great fattening powers, whereby the slaves are maintained in a tolerably good condition of body—with a pint of water at each meal. Mendouca made it a rule to vary the diet of the slaves as much as possible on these three articles, one or the other of which was given every third day, he having found that the poor wretches thus thrived better, and took their food with more enjoyment than when fed during the entire voyage upon one kind of food only; and whenever the weather was sufficiently moderate to permit of it, he always had one-half of the slaves on deck for an airing during the time that the other half were being fed below, thus allowing room for the men who dispensed the food and water to move about, and also for the slaves to use their hands in the process of feeding; and on the particular morning of which I am now writing it was unspeakably moving and pathetic to note, as I did, the feverish eagerness and longing with which the unhappy creatures waited and watched for the arrival of the moment when they might come on deck and breathe for a few brief minutes the pure and—to them—cool and refreshing outer atmosphere. My heart ached with pity for them, and I determined that I would utilise my presence on board this accursed ship by doing everything in my power to ameliorate as far as possible the condition of the unfortunates that were imprisoned within her. And I made up my mind to begin on that very morning, if, when Mendouca made his appearance, he seemed to be in a temper amenable to persuasion.
When he came on deck, however, the conditions appeared anything but promising, for he was in a frightfully bad humour at the calm, cursing the weather, his own ill-luck, and everything else that he could think of to execrate. I allowed him to give unrestrained vent to his ill-humour for some minutes, and when at length he had calmed down somewhat I said—
“And yet it appears to me that this calm, about which you are complaining so bitterly, may be made excellent use of, if you will, to benefit and increase the value of your property.”
“Indeed? in what way, pray?” he demanded.
“Well,” said I, “there is no sail trimming to be done in this weather, and it would be downright cruelty to send the men aloft to work about the rigging in this blazing heat; why not therefore spread an awning aft, here, and set the entire watch to work, beneath its shade, to patch up such of your canvas as needs repairing? And while they are engaged upon that job I will see—if you approve of the plan—whether I cannot get the negroes to take a bath in batches in a studding-sail rigged on the fore-deck, and thus rid themselves of some of the filth that is fast accumulating on their bodies; it will do them more good and tend more to keep them in health than a double allowance of food for the remainder of the voyage. And when they have done that they can be divided into two gangs, one on deck to draw and pass water, and the other below, with all the scrubbing-brushes and swabs that can be mustered, to give the slave-deck a thorough cleansing. That is what I should do, were they my property.”
“Well,” he said musingly, “I dare say it would do the rascals a lot of good, and would certainly make the ship sweeter—I’ll be bound that she could be scented a mile away in her present condition. But who is to undertake the supervision of such work? Not I, I tell you, frankly; and I believe the hands would refuse, to a man, were I to attempt to set them to such work.”
“If they will rig me a studding-sail, or an old fore-course for’ard, I will do the rest—or try to do it,” said I.
“Will you?” exclaimed Mendouca, in surprise. “Then I am sure you may, and I heartily wish you joy of the job.”
“Very well, then, I will set about it the first thing after breakfast,” said I.
And I did. I got the poor wretches forward in batches of thirty, induced them to stand in the basin-like hollow of the sail, and then set half-a-dozen of their number pumping and drawing water, and playing upon their fellows with the hose, or sluicing buckets of water over them, and the exquisite enjoyment, the unspeakable luxury of that bath, as the cool, sparkling liquid dashed upon the filth and sweat-begrimed bodies, was a sight to see! Enjoyed it? Why they revelled in it, so that it was with difficulty that I could get them out; the stony look of hopeless, utter despair faded temporarily out of their eyes, and some of them actually laughed! It was by no means a pleasant or a savoury job that I had undertaken, but witnessing the keen enjoyment that I had thus bestowed made it the most delightful that I had ever been engaged in. It occupied me the whole morning to pass the entire cargo through the bath and secure the thorough cleansing of their persons, and the whole of the afternoon to get the slave-deck properly cleansed and purified; but when the sun set that evening the ship was once more sweet and wholesome, while the slaves had—taking one with another—been on deck and actively exercised for about half a day instead of about twenty minutes morning and evening. As I had said, it did them more good than double rations for the entire voyage. Even Mendouca was fain to acknowledge that the day, instead of being wasted, had been well spent.
We had been hoping all day that with sunset a breeze would spring up from somewhere—I think nobody was very particular as to the quarter from which it should come, so long as it came at all—but our hopes were doomed to disappointment; the sun went down in a perfectly clear sky, and there was no sign whatever of wind from any quarter. The same weather conditions prevailed all through the night; and when the sun rose next morning there was still not the slightest sign of wind, while the glass exhibited a slight tendency to rise. Under these circumstances I thought I would endeavour to secure a repetition of the proceedings of the previous day, and so well pleased was Mendouca with the improved appearance of the blacks when, as usual, half of them came on deck at breakfast-time, that he readily gave his consent; and accordingly the poor creatures were again treated to the luxury of the bath, while the slave-deck received another thorough scrubbing to cleanse it from the filth accumulated during the night. And thus the negroes were enabled to pass a second day in pure air, to the great improvement of their health and spirits; indeed, the ecstatic delight with which they lingered over their bath, and the cheerfulness with which they afterwards worked at their task of drawing water and scrubbing, chattering almost gaily together all the time, were, to me, most eloquent testimony as to the miseries that they had previously endured, cooped up, tightly wedged together, day and night, in the close and noisome hold.
I must not omit to mention a very curious phenomenon of which I had often heard, but had never before beheld until this day. It is known among sailors as the phenomenon of “the ripples.” I was on the forecastle superintending the bathing operations when it first made its appearance, the sky being at the time clear and cloudless, with the sun blazing in its midst like a huge ball of living flame, while the water was so oil-smooth and glassy that it was quite impossible to distinguish the horizon, or to determine where the sea ended and the sky began. It was hotter than I had ever felt it before; dressed only in a thin shirt and the thinnest of white trousers, the perspiration was gushing so freely from every pore of my body that my light and airy garments were saturated with it, while the atmosphere was so stagnant that it seemed impossible to inhale a sufficiency of air for breathing purposes. Under these trying conditions we were, of course, all anxiously watching for a breeze; and it was with a feeling of exquisite delight that, happening to look abroad toward the north, I saw the horizon strongly marked with a line of delicate blue, indicating, as I believed, the approach of a thrice-welcome breeze. In the exuberance of my delight I shouted to Mendouca, who was reclining in a hammock aft slung from the main-boom, and, of course, under the shelter of the awning—
“Hurrah! here comes a breeze at last, although I do not know where it has sprung from, for there is not a cloud to be seen.”
Mendouca sprang up in his hammock at this news, and looked in the direction to which I was pointing; then sank back again, disgustedly.
“Pshaw, that is no breeze—worse luck!” he cried. “That is only ‘the ripples.’”
“The ripples?” I ejaculated. “Surely not. It has every appearance of a genuine breeze!”
Mendouca, however, was too intensely disgusted to reply. Meanwhile, the streak of blue, stretching right athwart the horizon, was advancing rapidly, bearing straight down upon the brigantine, and soon it became possible to see the tiny wavelets sparkling in the dazzling sunlight, and to detect a soft, musical, liquid-tinkling sound, such as one may hear when the tide is rising on a flat, sandy beach on a calm summer’s day. But by this time I had made the disappointing discovery that the blue line was merely a belt of rippling water about a quarter of a mile wide, with a perfectly calm, glassy surface beyond it, and, as there was no advance-guard of cat’s-paws, such as may usually be seen playing on the surface of the water as forerunners of an approaching breeze, I was reluctantly compelled to acknowledge to myself that Mendouca was right. And so it proved; for although the line—or rather belt—of rippling water not only advanced right up to the ship, giving forth a most pleasant and refreshing liquid sound as it came, and lapping musically against the brigantine’s sides for a few minutes when it reached her, but also passed on and traversed the entire visible surface of the ocean, finally disappearing beyond the southern horizon, the whole phenomenon was absolutely unaccompanied by the slightest perceptible movement of the air. This curious disturbance of the ocean’s surface was twice repeated on that same day.
The long, hot, breathless, and wearisome day at length drew to an end, and still there was no sign of wind; the night passed; another day dawned; and still we lay, like the craft in Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, “as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.” That day too waxed and waned without the sign of so much as a cat’s-paw to revive our drooping hopes; and although during the succeeding night we were visited by a terrific thunderstorm, accompanied by a perfect deluge of rain, during which a few evanescent puffs intermittently filled our sails, and moved us perhaps a mile nearer Cuba, when day again dawned there was a further recurrence of the same staring, cloudless sky of dazzling blue, the same blazing sun, the same breathless atmosphere, and the same oil-smooth sea. And as these days of calm and stagnation succeeded each other with relentless persistency, I kept up the custom of bathing the negroes and thoroughly cleansing the slave-deck, until at length the poor creatures actually grew fat and merry, so that Mendouca, despite his fast-growing impatience and irritability at the continued calm, was obliged to admit that he had never seen a cargo of “black ivory” in such promising condition before. This, however, was not all; for while superintending these bathing and scrubbing operations I talked cheerfully and pleasantly to the fellows, giving them such names as Tom, Bob, Joe, Snowball, and so on, to which they readily answered, instead of abusing them and ordering them about with brutal oaths and obscenity, as was the habit of the crew; and although the poor wretches understood not a word of what was spoken to them either by the crew or by myself, yet they readily enough distinguished the difference of manner, and not only so, but they seemed to possess the faculty of interpreting one’s meaning from the tones of one’s voice, so that they quickly grew to understand what I wanted them to do, and did it cheerfully and with alacrity. In this manner, with persistent calm recurring day after day, we passed no less than the almost incredible time of over three weeks without moving as many miles from the spot where the wind had deserted us, Mendouca’s temper growing steadily worse every day, until at length he became absolutely unbearable, and I spoke to him as little as possible. And the climax was reached when one day the steward, who had been sent down into the hold to overhaul the stores, came on deck with a face as long as the main-bowline, and reported that there was only food and water enough in the ship to last ten days longer.