Lost ships and lonely seas

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

I would have arisen to greet him but was too feeble. He sat down at my side, the tears streaming from his eyes, while he gave an account of himself. His name was George and he had been the steward of a ship called the Martin Hall of London, cast away upon that coast more than a year before. Part of the crew had been marched in a southeasterly direction to a place they called Elic, another part had been carried to Swearah and there ransomed, and four of them yet remained among the wandering Arabs who had been very cruel to them. He had no doubt that some of the men had been murdered because it was rumored that their owners could not find a ready sale for them, or the prices offered were too small.

A few days after this, the chief of the tribe, Ahamed, came back from a journey with two other lads of this same English crew. One was Jack, a cabin boy of thirteen, and the other was named Lawrence, a year or two older. Curiously enough, the English-born urchin, Jack, seemed contented among these wild Bedouins, and was rapidly forgetting his own people and the memories of childhood. These three youngsters from the Martin Hall had learned to speak Arabic quite readily, and they informed Captain Paddock that all the white slaves were to be sold at once and that bargaining had already begun.

The captain of the Oswego and his two black seamen were held at very high prices, and apparently there was no immediate market for them. In this year of 1800 thrifty New England skippers and merchants were piling up money in the African slave-trade, and there was logic in the argument of Ahamed, the Bedouin chief:

“I do not wish to sell these two black men at any price. They are used to our climate and can travel the desert without suffering. They are men that you Christian dogs stole from the Guinea coast, and you were going there to get more of them. You are worse than the Arabs who enslave you only when it is God’s will to send you on our coast.”

Captain Paddock confessed that never did he feel a reproach more sensibly; that a great many wearing the Christian name did force away from their homes and carry into perpetual slavery the poor African negroes, and thereby did make themselves worse than the Arabs. The English lads drove this truth home by secretly admitting to him that their ship, the Martin Hall, had been engaged in the Guinea slave-trade when wrecked on the coast of Barbary.

After much dickering with Ahamed, the captain agreed to purchase freedom at the rate of forty dollars per head, in addition to two looking-glasses, two combs, two pairs of scissors, a large bunch of beads, and a knife, as soon as he and his companions should be safely delivered at a friendly port. This price was not to include any official ransom which the crafty Arabs might squeeze out of the representatives of the British or American governments.

Several days of noisy haggling were necessary before Captain Paddock, Irish Pat, and the three English boys were transferred to a new owner, but the chief retained Black Sam and Black Jack, and his caravan moved off to the mountains with them. “The looks of these poor fellows were so dejected, it was painful to behold them,” wrote the skipper, and in this forlorn manner vanished forever these two seamen of the Oswego’s forecastle who had served with a cheerful fidelity and whose hearts were as white as their skins were black.

The Arabs drifted into a region more fertile, where there was grain to reap with sickles and grazing for the large flocks. The mariners were kept at unremitting toil on the scantiest rations, and they became mere skeletons; but their health bore up astonishingly well, and not one of them died by the wayside. The irrepressible Pat came nearest to death when he sang Irish songs and danced jigs for the Arab women, and so delighted them that they fed him on porridge, or “stirabout,” as he called it, until he swelled like a balloon.

That astute chieftain, Ahamed, reappeared on some important errand of tribal conference, and again held discourse with Captain Paddock concerning the ethics of the slave-trade. In his stately fashion he declaimed:

“You say that if I were in your country, your people would treat me better than I treat you. There is no truth in you; nothing but lies. If I were there, I should be doomed to a life-time of slavery and be put to the hardest labor in tilling your fields. You are too lazy yourselves to work in your fields, and therefore you send your ships to the negro coast, and in exchange for the worthless trinkets with which you cheat those poor blacks, you take away ship-loads of them to your country from which never one returns. We pray earnestly to Almighty God to send Christians ashore here in order that we may gain a little profit of the same kind, and God hears our prayers and often sends us some good ships.”