He put up the helm, in that gesture acknowledging the final end to a disastrous voyage, the dhow came around reluctantly, creaking in every timber, the great sail flogging before it could be trimmed to take the wind over the stern .
There had seemed to be so little risk, he thought with weary resignation. Of course, the treaty that the Sultan had made with the Zanzibar consul of these dangerous infidels allowed his subjects to trade in the black pearls, between any of the Sultan's possessions, with the proViso that only Omani Arabs loyal to the Sultan could indulge in the lucrative traffic. No person of Christian European extraction, not even a converted Moslem, could sail under the Sultan's flag, and not even an Omani Arab might trade beyond the borders of the Sultan's possessions.
The Sultan's African possessions had been very carefully defined in the treaty, and here was he, Sheikh Yussuf, with a cargo of three hundred and thirty living, dying and dead slaves at least one hundred and fifty miles south of the furthest of the Sultan's borders with a British gunboat bearing down upon him. Truly the ways of Allah were wonderful, passing the comprehension of man, Sheikh Yussuf thought with only the slightest taste of bitterness in his throat, as he hung grimly on to the tiller and made his run for the land.
A gun thumped from the gunboat's bows, powder smoke flew bright as a seabird's wing in the first rays of the low sun, and Sheikh Yussuf spat passionately over the lee bulwark and said aloud, El Sheetan, the Devil, ' using for the first time the name with which, in time, Captain Clinton Codrington would be known throughout the length of the Mozambique channel, and as far north as the great Horn of Africa.
The bronze screw under Black fake's counter thrashed out a long wide wake behind her. She still had main and jib set, but Codrington would shorten to 'fighting sailjust as soon as he had made the adjustment to counter the dhow's turn away towards the land.
Zouga and Robyn were on the quarterdeck to watch the chase, infected by the restrained businesslike excitement which gripped the vessel so that Zouga laughed aloud and called, 'Gone away! Tally-ho! ' as the dhow turned, and Clinton glanced at him with a conspiratory grin.
She's a slaver. Apart from the stink, that turn-away proves it beyond doubt.'
Robyn strained forward to watch- the filthy little vessel, with its discoloured and patched sail, the unpainted timbers of the hull striped with zebra stripes of human excrement and other wastes. It was her first view of a slaver actually carrying on its grisly trade, and she felt herself filled with a new purpose; she had come so far for this moment, and she tried to capture every detail of it all for her journal. Mr. Denham, give him a gun, if you please, ordered Clinton.
The bow-chaser thudded, but the dhow held to her new course. Be ready to round up and send the boat away on the instant. ' Clinton's excitement had given way to obvious anxiety. He turned to look across at his boarding party.
They had been issued with cutlass and pistol, and waited now in the waist under the command of a young ensign.
Clinton would dearly have liked to command the boarding-party himself but his arm was still in its sling and the stitches still in the wound. To go aboard a dhow in a, rough sea, and fight its crew required both hands and the agility which his wound denied him. Reluctantly he had put Ferris in charge of the boarders.
Igo Now he looked back at the dhow, and his expression was grim. He is going to beach.'
They were all silent now, staring ahead, watching the slaver run in towards the land. But there is a coral reef. ' Robyn spoke for them all, pointing to the black points that broke the surface a quarter of a mile short of the land itself, they looked like a necklace of sharks' teeth, and the surf broke and swirled about them as it was driven in upon the trade wind. Yes, Clinton agreed. 'They will run it up on the coral and escape across the lagoon. 'But, what about the slaves? ' Robyn asked, horrified, and nobody answered her.
Black joke rushed on purposefully, but with the wind almost dead astern the dhow trained her long boom around to go on to her best point of sailing. The boom was longer than the hull itself, and the huge triangular mainsail bulged far out, almost touching the surface of the water as she hurled down upon the reef. We may just cut her off, ' Zouga said loudly, but he did not have the seaman's eye for bearing and speed, and Clinton Codrington shook his head angrily. Not this time.'
But it was very finely run. Clinton held his course up until the very last moment, and the dhow passed a mere two hundred yards ahead of his bows. So close that they could clearly make out the features of the helmsman on the vessel's poopdeck, a skinny old Arab in long, flowing robe and with the tasselled fez on his head that declared that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. On his belt glittered the gold filigree hilt of the short curved dagger of a sheikh, and his long sciaggling white beard fluttered in the wind as be leaned on the long tiller and turned his head to watch the high black hull bearing down on him. I could put a bullet through the bastard, ' Zouga growled. It's too late for that, ' Clinton told him, for the dhow had passed beneath their bows and the gun boat was as close to the menacing fangs of coral as she dared go.
Clinton called to his quartermaster at the gunboat's wheel, 'Heave to! And bring her head to wind. ' Then, spinning on his heel, 'Away, the boarding-party! ' There was a squeal of davits as the crowded whaler dropped out of sight towards the choppy green sea alongside, but already the dhow was pitching wildly in the lines of seething white surf that guarded the reef.
It was two days since that dead flat calm had broken, and since then the trades had worked up a goodly swell.
It came sweeping in across the inshore channel, in low green humps with dark wind-scarred backs, but as soon as they felt the tilt of the land, they peaked up eagerly, the crests turning opaque as green jelly, shivering and wobbling, and then collapsing on themselves and surging in tumultuous white water up on to the black fangs of the reef.
The dhow caught one of the taller swells, threw up her stern and went racing down upon it like a surf boat, with the skinny old Arab at the tiller prancing like a trained monkey on the stick of the tiller to hold her in the wave, but the dhow was not built for this work, and she dug her shoulder rebelliously into the sliding, roaring chute of green water, breaching so fiercely to the wave that the water poured aboard her in a green wall and she wallowed broadside, half swamped before she took the reef with a force that snapped off her single mast at deck level and sent yard and sail and rigging crashing over the side.
In an instant she was transformed into a broken hulk, and clearly the watchers on Black Joke's deck could hear the crackle and rending of her bottom timbers. There they go! Clinton muttered angrily, as the dhow's crew began to abandon her, leaping over the side and using the swells to carry them over the reef into the quieter waters of the lagoon, thrashing and kicking until the beach shelved up beneath them.
They saw the old Arab steersman amongst the survivors. He waded ashore, beard and robe plastered against his body with seawater, and then lifted his robes to his waist, exposing skinny legs and shrunken buttocks as he scampered up the white beach with the agility of a goat and disappeared amongst the palm groves.
