“Alas, monsieur, it cannot be done,” interrupted Lemaitre, in his turn. “A cargo of slaves is even now awaiting me in the Cameroon River, and my patrons in Havana are impatiently looking forward to their delivery. If I were to disappoint them I should be ruined, for I have many competitors in the trade to contend with, especially since all this talk has arisen about making slave-trading illegal. No; I regret to be obliged to refuse you, monsieur, but there is no help for it.”
“At least,” said I, “you will transfer me to a British man-o’-war, should we chance to fall in with one?”
“And be myself captured, and lose my ship for my pains!” exclaimed Lemaitre. “Oh no, monsieur; we will give your ships a wide berth, if we fall in with them, and trust to our heels.”
“Nonsense, monsieur,” I returned. “Surely you cannot suppose I would be so ungrateful as to permit any such thing. I am a British officer, and should, of course, make a point of seeing that, in such a case, you were held exempt from capture. My representations would be quite sufficient to secure that for you.”
“Well, monsieur, we will see, we will see,” answered Lemaitre; and therewith he took the empty soup bowl from my hand, and retired from the cabin, slamming the door, as usual, behind him.
For the next three days I continued to occupy my bunk, my strength returning slowly; but on the fourth I made shift, with Lemaitre’s assistance, to get into my clothes, and crawl on deck; and from that moment my progress toward recovery was rapid. Meanwhile, the “hazing” of which I have spoken continued at regular intervals, day and night, and I soon ascertained that the individual responsible for it was none other than the François who so kindly suggested that I should be hove overboard to the sharks. This fellow was evidently a born bully; he never opened his mouth to deliver an order without abusing and insulting the men, and as often as not the abuse was accentuated with blows, the sounds of which, and the accompanying cries of the men, I could distinctly hear in my cabin. That, however, was hardly the worst of it; for I soon discovered that Lemaitre, the skipper of this precious craft in which such doings were permitted, was a drunkard; for every night, at about nine o’clock, I used to hear him come below, and order out the rum and water; after which he and François, or the second mate,—according to whose watch below it happened to be,—would sit for about an hour, drinking one against the other, until the language of both became incoherent, when the pair of them would stagger and stumble off to their respective staterooms.
This was my first experience of a slaver, and a most unpleasant experience it was. The vessel herself,—a schooner of one hundred and twenty tons register,—although superbly modelled, a magnificent sea-boat, and sailing like a witch, was rendered uncomfortable in the extreme as an abode by her filthy condition. Cleanliness seemed to be regarded by Lemaitre as a wholly unnecessary luxury, with the result that no effort was made to keep in check the steady accumulation of dirt from day to day, much less to remove that which already existed. Even the daily washing down of the decks—which, with the British sailor, has assumed the importance and imperative character of a religious function—was deemed superfluous. Nor were the crew any more careful as to their own condition or that of their clothing. It is a fact that during the whole period of my sojourn on board La belle Jeannette I never saw one of her people attempt to wash himself or any article of clothing; and, as a natural result of this steadfast disregard of the most elementary principles of cleanliness, the little hooker simply swarmed with vermin.
But, bad as it was, this was not the worst. The crew, from Lemaitre downward, were a low, brutal, quarrelsome gang, always wrangling together, and frequently fighting; while, as I have already mentioned, the one predominating idea of François, the chief mate, was that they could only be kept in order by constantly and impartially rope’s-ending them all round. Possibly he may have been right; at all events, I found it far easier to excuse his behaviour after I had seen the crew than I had before.
All this time Lemaitre had been behaving toward me with a rough, clumsy, off-hand kindness that his personal appearance would have led no one to expect, and which, try as I would, I could not bring myself to regard as genuine, because, through it all, there seemed now and then to rise to the surface an underflow of repressed malignity, not pronounced enough to be certain about, yet sufficiently distinct to provoke in me a vague sensation of uneasiness and distrust. To put the matter concisely, although Lemaitre was by no means effusive in his expressions of good-will toward me, and although there was a certain perfunctory quality in such attentions as he showed me, there was with it all a curious subtle something, so intangible that I found it utterly impossible to define or describe it, which yet impressed me with the feeling that it was all unreal, assumed, a mockery and a pretence; though why it should be so, I could not for the life of me divine.