Story 6—Chapter 1.
Our First Prize—A Yarn.
Away on her course, before a strong north-easterly breeze, flew her Majesty’s brig Gadfly. Every stitch of canvas she could carry was set, each sail was well trimmed, each brace hauled taut, and it might have been supposed that we were eager to reach some port where friends and pleasure awaited us. But it was far otherwise. We were quitting England and our home, that spot which contains all a seaman holds most dear, and were bound for a land of pestilence and death, the little delectable coast of Africa, to be employed for the next three years in chasing, capturing, or destroying, to the best of our power and ability, all vessels engaged in the traffic of human flesh. We touched at the Azores, and reached Sierra Leone, the chief port on that station, without meeting with any adventure worth relating. We remained there a week to wood and water, to perform which operations we shipped a dozen stout Kroomen. These people come from a province south of Sierra Leone, and are employed on board all vessels on that coast to perform such occupations as would too much expose Europeans to the heat of the sun. They are an energetic, brave, lively set of fellows, and very trustworthy; indeed, I do not know how we should have got on without them. They work very hard, and when they have saved money enough to buy themselves one or more wives, according to their tastes, they return to their own country to live in ease and dignity. As they generally assume either the names of the officers with whom they have served, or of some reigning prince or hero of antiquity, it is extraordinary what a number of retired commanders and lieutenants, not to speak of higher dignitaries, are to be found in Krooland. Sierra Leone has been so often described that I will not attempt to draw a picture of its romantic though deceitful beauties. Its blue sky and calm waters, its verdant groves and majestic mountains, its graceful villas and flowering shrubs, put one in mind of a lovely woman who employs her charms to beguile and destroy those who confide in her.
On turning to my log, I find that on the —, at dawn, we unmoored ship, and under all plain sail ran out of the river of Sierra Leone. As soon as we were clear of the land we shaped a course for the mouth of the Sherbro River, a locality notorious for its numerous slave depots. On our way thither we chased several sail, but some of them got off altogether, and others proved to be either British cruisers, foreign men-of-war, or honest traders; so that not a capture of any sort or kind did we make. It was for no want of vigilance, however, on our part; early and late, at noon and at night, I was at the masthead on the look-out for a sail. I knew that if I did not set a good example of watchfulness, others would be careless; for I held the responsible post, with all the honour and glory attached to it, of first lieutenant of the Gadfly.
“Mr Rawson,” said the captain one day to me, in a good-natured tone, as I was walking the quarter-deck with him, “you will wear yourself out by your never-ceasing anxiety in looking out for slavers. There may be some, but my opinion is that they are a great deal too sharp-sighted to let us catch them in the brig. We may chance to get alongside one now and then in the boats and up the rivers, but out here it’s in vain to look for them.”
He was new to the coast, and the climate had already impaired his usual energy.
“Never fear, sir,” I answered; “we may have a chance as well as others; and at all events it shall not be said that we did not get hold of any slavers for want of looking for them.”
The next day we made the land about the mouth of the Sherbro River, and had to beat up against as oppressive a wind as I ever recollect experiencing. One is apt to fancy that the sky and water in that climate must always be blue. Now, and on many other occasions, instead of there being any cerulean tints in any direction, the sky was of a dirty copper tinge, or rather such as is seen spread out like a canopy over London on a calm damp day in November; while the sea, which rolled along in vast and sluggish undulations, looked as if it was formed of sheets of lead of the same hue. Looking astern, one almost expected to see the wake we ploughed up remaining indelible as on a hard substance. Over the land hung a mist of the same brownish-yellow hue, hiding everything but the faint outline of the coast.