THE CHOLERA SHIP
A COMPLETE SHORT STORY[1]
By Cutcliffe Hyne. Illustrated by Richard Jack.
She was not the regular Portuguese mail. She was an ancient seven-knot tramp, which had come across from Brazil to Loando, and had been lucky enough to pick up half a cargo of coffee there for Lisbon. She called in at Banana, the station on the mangrove-spit at the mouth of the Congo, where the river pilots live (and on occasion die), and where the Dutch factory used to bring trade till the Free State killed it with duties; and at Banana she had further fortune. There were two hundred and thirty negroes there, Accra men and Kroo-boys mostly, a gang that had made their fifteen or twenty pounds apiece on the railway, and were waiting to go home.
The passenger-boys had collected their chattels, and were gathering in a howling chattering mob by the surf-boats ready to go on board, when the first notion came to me of joining her. It was the Danish harbour-master who gave it. He came up, under his old white umbrella with the green lining, to the house where I was staying, and told me that the tramp was going to call in at San Thomé and the Bonny River.
"Now, we don't hanker to get rid of you here, Mr. Calvert," he said, "but if you want to climb that mountain in Fernando Po, you're not likely to get so good a chance for the next three months to come. Your place is on the road between San Thomé and Bonny, though of course you'll have to make it worth the skipper's while to stop. But that's your palaver."
"Can you put a figure on it?" I asked.
"I should take it," said the harbour-master, "that you could hustle the man into Fernando Po for ten sovereigns. He's only a Portugee. Come aboard now in my gig and see him."
The tramp's interior was not inviting. We went into the chart-house and drank the inevitable sweet champagne with the captain; and whilst the bargain was being made, a thousand cockroaches crawled thoughtfully over the yellow-white paint.
"I tell you straight," said the harbour-master in English, "she's a dirty ship, and the chop'll be bad enough to poison a spotted dog. But if you will go to these Portugee and Spanish places to sweat up mountains, that's part of the palaver."