“Then, if that is the case, all hands must be put on short allowance—half rations—at once!” exclaimed Mendouca, with an oath. “But, stop a little; there must be some mistake. Light your lantern again, and I will go down below with you, and satisfy myself on the point.”
Accordingly Mendouca and the steward went down into the hold together, and gave the stores an exhaustive overhaul, with the result that the original report of the latter was fully confirmed!
Mendouca came up from the hold, raging like a maniac, cursing the weather, the provisions, and everything else that he could think of, including myself, whom he denounced as a Jonah, his ill-luck having commenced, according to his assertion, with the sparing of my life and my reception on board the Francesca. As for the calm, he declared that it should detain him no longer; and, having searched the sky and examined the barometer in vain for any signs of a change, he gave orders for all canvas to be furled, and for the negroes to be set to work forthwith upon the sweeps, his intention being, as he stated, to keep them at it in relays or gangs until the region of apparently eternal calm had been left, and a breeze of some sort found. There were ten of these sweeps, or long, heavy oars, working through the ports, in beckets firmly lashed to ringbolts in the stanchions, that were evidently placed there expressly for that particular purpose. The loom of the sweep was long enough to admit of four men working at it, and accordingly the boatswain, having received his orders from Mendouca, selected forty of the strongest-looking of the negroes, and set them to this exhausting labour, the rest of the unfortunate creatures being driven below out of the way. The vessel, lying there inert as a log on the water, proved very heavy to start, especially as the blacks knew not how to handle the sweeps, having evidently never touched one before; but, once fairly started, the craft was kept moving with comparative ease at a speed of about three and a half knots per hour. But it was cruel work for the unhappy blacks, who, naked as when they were born, were remorselessly kept at it by the boatswain and his mate, both of whom paced the deck, fore and aft, armed with a heavy “colt,” which they plied unmercifully upon the shoulders of any man whom they chose to believe was not fully exerting himself, although the perspiration poured from the dark naked hides like rain. “Short spells and hard work” was, however, the order of the day, and after half-an-hour of almost superhuman exertion a relief was called, a fresh gang was set to work, and the exhausted toilers were hustled below to rest and recover themselves as best they could. I remonstrated hotly with Mendouca upon the needless cruelty practised by the boatswain and his mate, but I was roughly told that I did not know what I was talking about; that negroes would never work unless kept continually in wholesome dread of the lash; and that it was absolutely necessary to get every ounce of work out of them if we were not one and all to perish miserably of hunger and thirst. So, as I could do no better, I got a piece of the oldest and softest canvas I could find, and a bucket of water, with which I descended to the slave-deck and carefully bathed the poor lacerated shoulders of those unfortunates who had suffered most severely at the hands of the boatswain and his mate, a little piece of attention that I saw was most gratefully received.
We made fully twenty miles of westing that day, from the time when the negroes were first set to work up to sunset, to Mendouca’s great gratification. Indeed, so delighted was he with his own brilliant idea, that he did that night what I had never known him to do before, he indulged rather too freely in the contents of the rum-bottle. And, as a consequence, he grew garrulous and good-humouredly sarcastic over the efforts made for the suppression of the slave-trade, which he emphatically asserted would never be put down.
“One very serious disadvantage which you labour under,” he remarked, referring particularly to the operations of the British slave-squadron, “is that you are altogether too confiding and credulous; you accept every man as honest and straightforward until you have learned, to your cost, that he is the reverse. Take the case, for example, of your attack upon Chango Creek. You were led to undertake it upon the representations made and the information given by Lobo, the Portuguese trader of Banana Point, weren’t you? Oh, I know all about it, I have heard the whole story,” he interrupted himself to say, in reply to my ejaculation of surprise. “You were all very much obliged to Lobo, of course; and your captain paid him handsomely for his information and assistance. I suppose there was not one of you, from the captain downward, who ever had the ghost of a suspicion that the fellow was playing you false, and that the affair was a bold yet carefully arranged plot to exterminate the whole of you, and destroy your ship, eh? No; of course you hadn’t; yet I give you my word that it was. Ay; and the only wonder to me was that it did not succeed. I suppose it was that you had a good deal more fight in you than any of them gave you credit for; and that is where so many excellently arranged traps have failed; the plotters have never made sufficient allowance for the fighting powers of the British, as I have told them over and over again. It was just that important oversight that caused what ought to have been a splendid success to result in a serious disaster; the intention was good, but, as is much too often the case, they had reckoned without their host.”
“But I do not understand,” I cut in, as Mendouca paused. “What was the plot? and how was Lobo concerned in it? It appears to me that the man acted in perfect good faith; he gave us certain information which proved to be substantially correct—except that he was mistaken as to the force that we should have to encounter—and he safely piloted us to the spot from which our boat attack was to be made; I can see nothing like a plot or treachery in that.”
“No; of course you cannot, you sweet innocent,” retorted Mendouca, with fine sarcasm, “for the simple reason, as I say, that the British are altogether too trustful and confiding to see treachery or double-dealing until it is thrust openly in their faces. You are altogether too simple and unsuspicious, you navy men, to deal with the tricks and ruses of the slave-dealing fraternity; and before your eyes are opened you either die of fever, or are killed in some brush with us, or are invalided home.”
“It may be so,” I agreed; “but so general a statement as that does not in the least help me to see what was the character of Lobo’s plot, or even that there was a plot at all.”
“Well, I will tell you,” said Mendouca thickly, helping himself to another caulker of rum—he had already swallowed two tumblers of stiff grog since the subject had been broached, in addition to what he had previously taken—“I will tell you, because, having made up my mind that you shall never rejoin your own people, the information is not likely to do Lobo any harm. When you arrived at Banana Point on that particular morning, your presence seriously threatened to entirely upset a very important transaction which Señor Lobo had in hand, namely, the disposal and shipment of a prime lot of nearly a thousand able-bodied, full-grown, male blacks that he had got snugly stowed away in two big barracoons a short distance up the creek from his factory. Had your captain taken it into his head to land a party and make a search of the peninsula, the barracoons would have been discovered, and friend Lobo would have been a ruined man. So, as soon as your brig was identified as a man-o’-war—and that was as soon as she could be distinctly made out—another mistake that you man-o’-war’s men make, friend Dugdale; you can scarcely ever bring yourselves to disguise your ships; they declare their character as far as it is possible to see them.—Let me see, what was I saying? I have run clean off my course, and don’t know where I am.”
“You were going to tell me what happened when the Barracouta was identified from Banana Point as a man-o’-war,” said I.