On the tenth stroke the body on the grating relaxed suddenly, the head lolled sideways and the fists unclenched slowly so that she could see the little bloody half-moon wounds where the nails had been driven into the palms. There was no further sign of life during the rest of the leisurely ritual of punishment.
At the twentieth stroke, she almost flung herself down the ladder to the maindeck and was feeling for the pulse before they could cut the body down from the grating. Praise be to God, ' she whispered as she felt it fluttering under her fingers, and then to the seamen who were lifting the man down, 'Gently now! ' She saw that Mungo St. John had got his wish, for the white porcelain crests of the spinal column were jutting up through the sliced meat of the back muscles.
She had a cotton dressing ready and she placed it across the ruined back as they laid him on to an oak plank and hustled him towards the forecastle.
In the narrow, crowded forecastle, thick with the fumes of cheap pipe tobacco and the almost solid reek of bilges and wet clothing, of unwashed men and mouldering food, they laid the man on the mess table and she worked as best she could in the guttering light of the oil-lamp in its gimbals overhead. She stitched back the flaps and ribbons of mushy, torn flesh with horsehair sutures and then bound up the whole in weak phenol solution, treatment which Joseph Lister had recently pioneered with much success against mortification.
The man was conscious again and whimpering with pain. She gave him five drops of laudanum, and promised to visit him the following day to change the bindings.
As she packed away her instruments and closed her black valise, one of the crew, a little pockmarked bosun, named Nathaniel, picked it up and when she nodded her thanks, he muttered with embarrassment, 'We are beholden, missus.'
It had taken all of them time to accept her ministrations. First it had been only the lancing of carbuncles and sea-boils, calomel for the flux and the grippe, but later, after a dozen successful treatments, which included a fractured humerus, an ulcerated and ruptured eardrum and the banishing of a venereal chancre with mercury, she had become a firm favourite amongst the crew, and her sick-call a regular feature of shipboard life.
The bosun climbed the companionway behind her, carrying the valise, but before they reached the deck, an idea struck her and she stooped to him, placing a hand on his shoulder. Nathaniel, she asked urgently, but in a low voice, 'is there a way of entering the ship's hold without lifting the maindeck hatches? ' The man looked startled, and she shook his shoulder roughly. 'Is there! she demanded. Aye, ma'am, there is. 'Where?
How? ' Through the lazaretto, below the officers' saloon there is a hatchway through the forward bulkhead. Is it locked? 'Aye, ma'am, it is, and Captain St. John keeps the keys on his belt.'
Tell nobody that I asked, she ordered him, and hastened up on the maindeck.
At the foot of the mainmast, Tippoo was washing down the lash in a bucket of seawater that was already tinged pale pink; he looked up at her, still stripping the water off the leather between thick hairless fingers, and he grinned at Robyn as she passed, squatting down'on thick, brown haunches with his loin cloth drawn up into his crotch, swinging his round bald head on its bull neck to follow her.
She found herself panting a little with fear and revulsion, and she swept her skirts aside as she passed him.
At the door of her cabin she took the valise from Nathaniel with a word of thanks, and then slumped down upon her bunk.
Her thoughts and her emotions were in uproar, for she had still not recovered from the sudden avalanche of events that had interrupted the leisurely pattern of the voyage.
The boarding by Captain Codrington of the Royal Navy overshadowed even her anger at the flogging or her joy at her first view of Africa in nearly two decades and now his accusations rankled and disturbed her.
After a few minutes' rest she lifted the lid of her travelling-chest that filled most of the clear space in the tiny cabin, and had to unpack much of it before she found the pamphlets from the anti-slavery society with which she had been armed in London before departure.
She sat down to study them once again, a history of the struggle against the trade up to the present time. As she read, her anger and frustration reawakened at the tale of unenforceable international agreements, all with built-in escape clauses: laws that made it an act of piracy to indulge in the trade north of the equator, but allowed it to flourish unchecked in the southern hemisphere; treaties and agreements signed by all nations, except those most actively engaged in the trade, Portugal, Brazil, Spain. Other great nations, France, using the trade to goad their traditional enemy, Great Britain, shamelessly exploiting Britain's commitment to its extinction, trading political advantage for vague promises of support.
Then there was America, a signatory to the Treaty of Brussels which Britain had engineered, agreeing to the abolition of the trade, but not to the abolition of the institution of slavery itself. America agreed that the transport of human souls into captivity was tantamount to active piracy, and that vessels so engaged were liable to seizure under prize and condemnation by courts of Admiralty or Mixed Commission, agreed also to the equipment clause, that ships equipped for transport of slaves, although not actually with a cargo of slaves on board at the time of seizure, could be taken as prize.
There was America agreeing to all of this, and then denying to the warships of the Royal Navy the right of search. The most America would allow was that British officers could assure themselves of the legality of the claim to American ownership, and if that was proven, they could not search, not even though the stink of slaves rose from her holds to offend the very heavens, or the clank of chains and the half-human cries from hertween decks came near to deafening them, still they could not search.
Robyn dropped one pamphlet back into her chest, and selected another publication from the society.
ITEM, in the previous year, 1859, estimated 169,000 slaves had been transported from the coasts of Africa to the mines of Brazil, and the plantations of Cuba, and to those of the Southern States of America.
ITEM, the trade in slaves by the Omani Arabs of Zanzibar could not be estimated except by observation of the numbers passing through the markets of that island.
Despite the British Treaty with the Sultan as early as 1822, the British Consul at Zanzibar had counted almost 200,000 slaves landed during the previous twelve-month period. The corpses were not landed, nor were the sick and dying, for the Zanzibar customs dues were payable to the Sultan per capita, live or dead.
The dead and those so enfeebled -or diseased as to have little hope of survival were thrown overboard, at the ed e of the deep water beyond the coral reef. Here a permanent colony of huge man-eating sharks cruised the area by day and by night. Within minutes of the first body, dead or still living, striking the water, the surface around the dhow was torn into a seething white boil by the great fish. The British Consul estimated a forty-percent mortality
