'Extremely well, sir,' MacDougall was quick to assure him, with a Puckish grin.
'I thought just laying out how we… committed the deed, just like that,' Lewrie fretted, 'would doom us. Me.'
'As I shall tell the jury this afternoon, Captain Lewrie, was the deed an act of criminality… or, was it a deed of liberation? I will fill the afternoon with the testimony of your Black sailors, and there will not be a dry eye in the courtroom, once I'm done. Not one stony heart unmoved. Ready, Mister Sadler? Shall we go, then, for I am famished.'
Lewrie fingered a breeches pocket to assure himself that his coin purse was still present, and that it was suitably stuffed with a sufficiency of bank notes and coins, enough to bear the cost of dinner with such imposing trenchermen as MacDougall and Sadler. No matter the financial support of the Abolitionists, and other 'Progressives,' for his legal expenses (and all those visual aids), dealing with attorneys was a dear business.
'As a matter of fact, Captain Lewrie,' MacDougall said as he stowed away his court wear, 'I am so sanguine about the rest of the day that, this once, allow me to treat.'
Lewrie's jaw, it here must be noted, dropped rather far.
CHAPTER FOUR
The afternoon's testimony indeed turned out to be emotional and dramatic as Mr. MacDougall put all seven surviving Black sailors in the witness box, and led each of them first through their wretched lives as chattel slaves in the West Indies, and on the Beauman plantation in particular, then about their flight, their reception aboard Capt. Lewrie's frigate, and their experiences in the Royal Navy, since.
Shoddy clothing, if clothed at all; the poorest, meanest rations of condemned salt-beef or salt-pork, bug- infested rice, and but a few fresh greens or vegetables, with even so-called holiday victuals of a barely unremitted sameness, for even the rare duffs or puddings were, though cooked on a sugar cane plantation, sadly lacking in sweetness. How prime field hands, sleek when first they came from the slave ships and the vendue houses, wasted away to skin, gristle, and bones before three years were out… which was considered a bargain by unfeeling masters, considering the sad, low price placed on a human being they'd initially paid. There were always ships arriving with healthy slaves from Africa, the barracks and pens were continually full, and prices for people were nigh as low as those for cattle.
Crude huts for shelters, leaf-stuffed sacks for bedding on the dirt floors at night, exposed round the clock to insects and weather; up before the sun to the tolling of bells and the crack of whips, poor victuals choked down after being scooped by hand from communal pots, then back-breaking labour 'til the sun was all but set, with only one brief break in the shade for a miser's dinner.
And whips, and chains, and choke-collar boards round their necks for the slightest act of mis-behaviour, hot irons to brand recalcitrant shirkers; hot irons to sear the tongue from those who dared speak back without being asked a question, or for the merest suspicion of lying to an overseer, master, or mistress.
Poisonous snakes had been imported from Africa and India, turned loose in the surrounding forests to make sure that slaves wouldn't dare run off without risking a 'five-stepper' death.
For the slow, the slow-witted, or lazy, for those who broke the poor tools they were given, for hiding a cane- cutting machete or knife, there was the whipping post, where the lashes were doled out capriciously; thirty for this sin, fifty for another, perhaps an hundred for the same offence at the whim of the overseer's imagination, with age or sex no assurance of leniency.
And slave women… the young, firm, and handsome were masters' prey, overseers' perquisites. In the fields, in the huts after dark, it was just rape, when drunken sons of slave-masters and their friends or cousins felt like it, and the mother, the father, the lover who objected in the slightest laid himself open to pure torture, and no one could lift a hand to rescue the young girls. After all, slave children quickened by White men fetched more when auctioned off, and made lighter skinned, less-African-featured house servants-to-be.
Did house servants have it slightly better? Of a certainty, but they paid a high price. Did slave women, mothers against their will, hope that their offspring might be 'bright' enough to be spared field work? Of course. If girls, though, planters' sons desired them more.
Did anyone ever preach the Gospel to them? Only the snippets from Saint Paul's letters that urged, 'Slaves, behave your masters.'
'And, since signing articles aboard Proteus,' MacDougall asked the wiry young George Rodney, who had been a spry topman and a sharpshooter, 'did Captain Lewrie ever put you, or any of the other volunteers to any work in his great-cabins? To wait upon his table, buff his boots, do his laundry? Anything like that?'
'Nossuh, he nevah did. Wull, Jones Nelson be in 'is boat crew, but dat 'coz he big un' strong oarsman. Be a run-out tackleman on de twelve-poundah'r eighteen poundah'r, sah.'
'So Captain Lewrie did not consider you his personal property?'
'Oh, nossuh!' Rodney firmly replied. 'I'z a British sailah in de Royal Navy, sah. I'z a sailah o' King George.'
'Captain Lewrie rated you a topman… one of the lads who goes aloft? Yes. Did you want to be one?'
'Oh, yassah. Topmen be kings o' de ship, sah.'
'And he trained you, all of you, with pistols, muskets, swords, and boarding pikes?' MacDougall asked, as he had of all the rest, but Mr. Cooke, who was a bit too old and stout for close combat; for he was indeed well-named, and had been Proteus's ship's cook.
'Lemme shoot Frenchmen wid his own Ferguson rifle-musket, me or his ol' Cox'n, Andrews, 'e did, sah,' Rodney boasted. 'Said de bot' o' us have de good eye.'
'Yes, and have you killed a lot of Frenchmen?'
'Yassuh, I sho' have! 'Specially when we fight de French frigates two year ago,' Rodney supplied. 'Round dozen, right dere.'
'You mentioned Coxswain Andrews,' MacDougall went on. 'Of what race was Coxswain Andrews?'
'He Black, like me, sah, well… fo' he run, I hear tell he wuz a house slave'r body slave,' Rodney related, 'so he wuz light-skinned. He be Cap'm Lewrie's Cox'n almos' since de 'Merican Revolution. But he got killed in de South Atlantic, two year ago.'
'Was he a body servant to Captain Lewrie?' MacDougall shrewdly asked, looking at the jury, not his witness.
'Nossuh, he run de Cap'm's boat when he be called ashore, an' such,' Rodney said. 'Only fellah dat sees t' th' Cap'm is 'is cook an' cabin steward, Mistah Aspinall, ovah yondah,' Rodney said, with a jab of his arm to the sailors behind the Defence table.
'And did Captain Lewrie ever have one of you fellows flogged for disobedience?' MacDougall asked.
'Can't recall dat evah happen, sah,' Rodney said, frowning in reverie. 'Cap'm Lewrie ain't big on floggin', 'cept fer when a man's been real bad. Didn't even flog Hood, Howe, Whitbread, Groome, and Bass, when dey git wobbly-drunk on Saint Helena, an' borrowed Mistah Wigmore's donkeys f'um de circus, an' raced 'em up de valley. Weren't no zebras, like dat Mistah Wigmore said, just painted up t'look like 'em. Dey git de donkeys drunk, too, at de las' tavern up de valley.'
'And Captain Lewrie didn't flog anyone else on Saint Helena?' MacDougall enquired. 'Not even when they tore up the island governor's gardens? Stole a magnolia tree, and rose bushes?'
'Cap'm be plenty mad, aye, sah,' Rodney tittered with delight, 'but 'e didn' flog nobody, just put 'em on bread an' watuh, wid no rum ner 'baccy fer a week. Didn't even flog when me an' Groome run off t'see Africker. Well, Groome died when de Cape Buff'lo trample 'im, an' I got mauled by a she-lion, so I s'pose I wuzn't fit t'flog fo' a spell… it ain't like we wuz desertin', sah, 'cause de circus people hadta come back t'Cape Town wid dey new beasts fo' de shows, but Groome an' me jus' wanted t'see where we come f'um fo' a bit, sah. I'z clawed up and bit on right bad, an' I s'pose de Cap'm think I punished enough.'
The spectators could not contain simpers and snickers when the lad named his compatriots, who, at Mr. Winwood's urging, had taken new, freemen's names after their mustering-in baths under the wash-deck pump, as if leaving pagan lives of sin behind and being 'washed white as snow' by baptism; new souls with new identities, and not what some capricious slave-master had named them.
