CHAPTER XXIII.
HOW WE SAIL TO JOIN THE PEARL FLEET, AND THE NEGRO
DIVER’S STORY.
The night I sailed from Carthagena was as starry and still as that in which I entered the bay. Negro fishermen, in canoes, again sung rude ditties as they shot their lines for pisareros—the rigging of stately merchantmen again cut with many dark and interlaced lines the sparkling sky—and again, and for the last time, I heard the bells of the rich Monastery of the Hill come pealing over the music of the surf.
The night-breeze was very faint and feeble, so ‘Out sweeps’ was the word; and presently all the crew, myself among the rest, were tugging at our great heavy oars, and slowly urging the small bark out to sea. We were not alone upon the water—close to us, another vessel of our own rig and size, and bound upon the same voyage, was making head in the same way—the blades of her long oars sparkling in the sea, and both crews singing and shouting cheerily to each other. Every year there sails from Carthagena to the pearl banks of the Rio de la Hacha, about a dozen or a dozen and a half small vessels, called the Pearl Fleet. The greater part of the squadron had already gone, with a man-of-war to guard them. We were laggards, but Garbo, so the captain of our bark was named, trusted in a few days to join his comrades upon the banks. The Pearl Fleet is composed of small ships generally used for coasting. When I describe our craft, called the Pintado, the reader will have a good notion of all. She was, then, a two-masted vessel, of about thirty tons burthen, very shallow, and of great beam. Her mould was beautifully designed, sharp and wedge-like at the bows, with her sides towards the gunwale gently curved, as it were, like the lips of a bell, so that let her lie over before a smart gale, as much as she would, it was next to impossible to capsize her. She was but partially decked, towards the stem and stern, having an open space amidships, which was used when fishing for heaping the oysters in. Her crew consisted of four Spanish seamen, the captain, and two negro divers, of whom more anon. Thus there were eight of us in all, and we lived stowed away as we could best manage it, in the two little choky cabins, forward and aft, there being no distinction made between captain and crew. My up-bringing was not, as you may guess, much calculated to make me squeamish about where I lived and where I lay, but I confess, that the sweltering holes, all greasy and foul, with their brown swarms of cockroaches, and every now and then their stray centipedes, in which the Spanish sailors ate their garlic-smelling messes, and in which they flung themselves down often in their wet frowzy steaming clothes to sleep—I say these cabins were so horribly choky and miserable that, day and night, I kept upon deck, although, from the sharpness of the bark’s model forward, and the quickness of her pitch, she was very wet. Indeed, when it blew stronger than common, we shipped so much water, that we had to cover the open waist with a species of grating on which tarpaulings were stretched tightly, otherwise we would speedily have filled and gone down. The bark carried two tall, slim masts, raking very much aft, and supporting a couple of large lug or square sails, over which two broad, but low topsails, could be hoisted. Round her decks, at stem and stern, was a low iron rail, but no bulwark, so that the washing of the sea over us, in a breeze, was almost incessant.
Garbo, the captain, was a good fellow, and a prime seaman, and he only on board knew that I was an Englishman, and what my real intentions were. The rest of the crew were told that I was a mariner of the Low Countries, who had also served in Spanish ships at home. They were a wild-looking set of fellows, with short trousers, not reaching much below the knee, broad leathern belts, in which were stuck formidable knives, and round their heads they wore yellow silk kerchiefs, over which they clapped broad straw hats during the heat of the day. All of them carried crucifixes of a black wood ornamented with gold, and if they did not pray much to the saints, at least they swore sufficiently by them. The two negroes took no part in the management of the ship, except it might be now and then lending a hand to their shipmates when a rope required an extra strain. One of them was very tall and gaunt, the other was short and stout. The latter, who was called by some common Spanish name, which I forget, was, or pretended to be, a Christian. He had a crucifix slung round his neck by a bit of rope yarn, and gabbled away about the saints like the European part of the crew. Further, he was quite ‘Hail fellow, well met,’ with the Spaniards. He played a sort of wooden drum, and sung strange uncouth songs of his country to them, and sometimes he would mimic the manners and voice of some one of the Spaniards very skilfully, and to the great delight of the rest. In fact, he was a fat, little, good-natured, hearty soul, with a grin almost always upon his black mug, and, except when he was asleep, his chattering tongue never lay still. He would go gambolling about the deck like an overgrown monkey, whooping, and grinning, and singing, so that not a soul on board but he would set at last to laughing as loudly as himself. His comrade was a man of a very different sort, and him I would describe particularly. He was the blackest negro I ever saw, not having anything of the brown copper colour which some of that people and the Indians show. On the contrary, his skin was of a most sooty black hue, without the least redness of tinge. I have seen many big and strong men, but a vaster, a more gaunt, yet sinewy form, than that of this black, saw I never. He was more than six feet high; his great spreading shoulders were lumps of bone and hardened muscle, and his huge chest rose and fell so slowly, that he seemed to breathe but half as often as other men on board. His limbs were immensely gaunt and spare, and nothing but his great splay feet, which covered more than two streaks of the deck, could support the pile of bone and sinew which they bore erect. The face of the diver was most ill-favoured and lowering. It was a broad, flat visage, like the face of a grim and grisly idol. Just under the low, wrinkled forehead, two little pig eyes winked forth, half hidden by the patches of eyebrow which scowled in hairy folds above them. The corners of the fat blubber lips were drawn down with a most sour and evil expression, and all round them, and on the chin, were ragged sprouts of beard, like flakes of black wool stuck upon the grisly visage. Such was the tall diver, who was called by his African name of Wooroo. His speech was broken Spanish, which he did not speak half so well as his countryman, the short negro. But, in truth, he seldom spoke at all, being generally squatted on his hams in some remote corner of the vessel, where he would pass hours muttering to himself. He wore a pair of tattered old breeches, and upon his naked chest, fastened round his neck, there lay a sort of amulet, or charm, made of feathers, stuck through a ball of hard baked clay, crammed into a rude wooden case full of uncouth carvings. He was a worshipper of Ob, and this was his fetish.
‘Look at that hangdog thief Wooroo,’ said Garbo to me the second afternoon we were at sea. ‘That fellow has just two good qualities. He is the best diver who ever went into the sea, and he is tractable to me who am his owner. I took him from the mines among the mountains, and the animal, after his sort, is grateful. For, in truth, I believe that he is amphibious in his nature, and that the water is as necessary for him that he may live, as is land, and, perhaps, a little more so.’ In answer to my further inquiries, the captain said that he was a slave, brought from the Guinea coast, where of late a great many negroes had been delivered up bound by tribes hostile to them, and sold to Spaniards, Englishmen, Frenchmen, and others, who employed them in those sorts of work in the Indies, which white men cannot perform and live. Soon after this, imagining, from the sombre and brooding look of this savage, that he could if he pleased tell us some story of his nation and of his captivity which would be worth hearing, I communicated my thought to Garbo. The captain laughed. ‘What can the savage have to say,’ quoth he, ‘but that some other savage fetched him a blow on the head with a war-club, or battle-axe, and then sold him to some Spanish trader for a cup of strong waters? But you shall be gratified: that is, if the monster chooses to unloose his tongue.’
That night, the captain keeping the first watch, the weather being clear, and we and our consort sliding slowly over the long swells of the sea, the captain called the negro aft to where we sat upon the deck. The savage came with his usual slouching gait and scowling visage.
‘Wooroo,’ quoth the captain, ‘we want to hear something about you; where you were born, and how you came hither.’
The gigantic African only stared.
‘Come, now,’ says Captain Garbo, ‘tell us your story, Wooroo—tell us about what you were in Africa, and what you did there.’