“He talked to me about his past,” Dr. Saunders said, “with the tears in his eyes, and in a voice broken by grief. I have great hopes of the poor fellow. Time was, and not long ago, when I looked upon him as a Norfolk Islander: I should never be surprised to hear that he was favoured when out in the colony and was doing exceedingly well.”
“Is it the square powerfully-built man, pitted with smallpox, with little black eyes, and a coal-black crop of hair?” asked Captain Gordon.
The doctor inclined his head.
“His name’s Simon Rolt,” said Lieutenant Venables. “I was in town at the time of his trial, and, having plenty of leisure, went one day down to the Old Bailey. He was convicted——”
Dr. Saunders lifted his hand with an expressive look. Indeed, it was never his wish that the prisoners should be named, and he was deaf to all inquiries concerning the crimes for which they were being transported.
Well, we had been driven by prosperous winds to the parallel of 5° N. Here the breeze failed. It was the zone of equatorial calms, where the dim, hot, blue water fades out into a near silver faintness of sky, and where the lofty white canvas of the stagnated ship melts into the azure brine under her, like quicksilver cloudily draining through the keel. For the past week the heat had been fierce; but always had there been a breeze to fill the windsails and render the roasting atmosphere of the ’tween-decks endurable. But now, when the wind was gone, the temperature was scarcely to be supported, even by the most seasoned of our lobscousers. The pitch lay like butter in the seams of the planks; the wheel, flaming its brass-clad circle to the small high sun, turned red-hot in the grip of the helmsman; the tar came off the rigging in strings upon the fingers like treacle, and the hush of the heat lay upon the plain of ocean as the silence of the white desert dwells upon its leagues of dazzling sand.
I had charge of the ship during the second dog-watch, that is, from six to eight. Some little time after sundown, and when the sky over our mastheads was full of large, dim, trembling stars, whilst the sea floated from alongside in a breast of ink into the obscurity of the horizon, Dr. Saunders approached Captain Gordon, who was talking to the commander of the ship close to where I stood, and exclaimed—
“The heat is too much for the people below. A hundred and twenty souls in those low-pitched contracted ’tween-decks! The sufferings of slaves in the Middle Passage can’t be worse.”
“What’s to be done, sir?” said Captain Wickham. “The wind don’t come to the mariner’s whistle in these times.”