suppose it stands out in my mind because the next few weeks were so uneventful — that may seem an extraordinary thing to say about a slave voyage on the Middle Passage, but once you are used to conditions, however remarkable, you start to twiddle your thumbs and find life a bore, I had little to do beyond stand my watches, help dance the slaves, and continue the instruction of Lady Caroline Lamb. She took to following me about, and had to be made to wear a cotton dress that the sailinaker ran up, in case Mrs Spring caught sight of her — as though she'd never seen naked black wenches before, by the hundred, Lady Caroline Lamb didn't care for this, and whenever she was in my berth she used to haul the dress off, and sit stark by the foot of my cot, like a black statue, waiting to be educated, one way or the other.
One other thing I should mention, because it turned out to be important, was the behaviour of Looney. Whether Spring's hammering had driven him even more barmy I can't say, but he was a changed man after Comber died. He'd been a willing, happy idiot, but now he became sullen, and started if anyone spoke to him, and took to muttering to himself in corners. I cuffed him smartly to make him stop it, but he wouldn't; he just blubbered and mowed and shuddered if Spring's name was even mentioned. 'He's the Devil!' he whined. 'The b––y Devil! He bashed us, for nowt. He did, the ––.' And he would crawl away, whimpering obscenities, to find a place to hide. Even Sullivan, who was softer with him than most, couldn't prevail on him to do his duties aft as steward, and the cook's Chinese mate had to serve in Spring's cabin.
So we ran westward, and then north-west, for about a month if I remember rightly, until one morning I learned that we were out of the Atlantic and into the Caribbean. It all looked alike to me, for the weather had continued fine the whole way and I'd never worn more than my jersey, but now a change came over the ship. Each day there was gun drill at the long nines and twelves, which struck me as ominous, and you could sense a growing restlessness among the hands: where men off watch had been content to loaf before, they now kept watching the horizon and sniffing the wind; either Spring or Sullivan was always at the after rail with the glass; whenever a large sail was sighted Spring would have the guns shotted and their crews standing by. As the weather grew even hotter, tempers got shorter; the stench from the slave-deck was choking in its foulness, and even the constant murmuring and moaning of the cargo seemed to me to have taken on a deeper, more sinister note. This was the time, I learned, when slave mutinies sometimes broke out, as more of them died — although only five perished all told in our ship — and the others became sullen and desperate. You'd been able to feel the misery and fear down on the slave-deck, but now you could feel the brooding hatred; it was in the way they shuffled sulkily round when they were danced, heads sunk and eyes shifting, while the hands stood guard with the needle-guns, and the light swivel pieces were kept armed and trained to sweep the decks if need be. I kept as well away from those glowering black brutes as I could; even the sharks which followed the ship didn't look more dangerous — and there were always half a dozen of them, dark sinuous shapes gliding through the blue water a couple of fathoms down, hoping for another corpse to come overside,
I wasn't the only one in a fine state of nerves on the last week's run along the old Spanish Main; apparently even Spring was apprehensive, for instead of running up north-west to the Windward Passage and our intended destination — which was somewhere on the north side of Cuba — he held almost due west for the Mosquito Coast, which if anything is a more God-forsaken shore than the one we had left in Africa. I saw it only as a far distant line on our port beam, but its heavy air lay on the ship like a blanket; the pitch bubbled between the planks, and even the wind seemed to have come from a blast furnace door. By the time we stood into the bay at Roatan, which you'll find on the map in the Islas de la Bahia, off the Honduras Coast, we were a jittery, sun-dried ship, and only thankful that we'd come safe through with never a Yankee patroller or garda costa in sight.27
We dropped anchor in that great clearing-house of the African slavers, where Ivory Coast brigs and schooners, the Baltimore clippers and Angola barques, the Gulf free-traders and Braziliano pirates all rode at their moorings in the broad bay, with the buinboats and shorecraft plying among them like water-beetles, and even the stench of our own slave-deck was beaten all to nothing by the immense reek of the huge barracoons and pens that lined the shore and even ran out into the sludgy green waters of the bay on great wooden piers. One never dreams that such places exist until one sees and hears and smells them, with their amazing variety of the scum of the earth — blacks and half-breeds of every description, Rio traders with curling mustachios and pistols in their belts and rings in their ears, like buccaneers from a story-book; Down Easter Yankees in stove-pipe hats with cigars sticking out of faces like flinty cliffs; sun-reddened English tars, some still wearing the wide straw hats of the Navy; packet rats in canvas shirts and frayed trousers; Scowegians with leathery faces and knives hanging on lanyards round their necks; Frog and Dago skippers in embroidered weskits with scarves round their heads, and niggers by the hundred, of every conceivable shape and shade — everyone babbling and arguing in half the tongues on earth, and all with one thing in common: they lived by and on the slave trade.
But best of all I remember a big fellow all in dirty white calicos and a broad-brimmed Panama, holding on to a stay in one of the shore-boats that came under our counter, and bawling up redfaced in reply to some one who had asked what was the news:
'Ain't ye heard, then? They found gold, over to the Pacific coast! That's right — gold! Reckon they're pickin' it up fast as they can shovel! Why, they say it's in lumps big as your fist — more gold'n anyone's ever seen before! Gold — in California!'28
5
We landed all our slaves at Roatan, herding them down into the big lighters where the Dago overseers packed them in like sheep, while Spring conducted business aft of the mizzen-mast with half a dozen brokers who had come aboard. A big awning had been rigged up, and Mrs Spring dispensed tea and biscuits to those who wanted it — which meant to Spring himself and to a wizened little Frenchman in a long taffeta coat and wideawake hat, who perched on a stool sipping daintily from his cup while a nigger boy stood behind fanning the flies off him, The other brokers were three greasy Dagoes in dirty finery who drank rum, a big Dutchman with a face like a suet pudding who drank gin punch, and a swarthy little Yankee who drank nothing at all.
They had all made a quick tour of the slave-deck before it was cleared, and when they bickered and bid with Spring, the Dagoes jabbering and getting excited, the other three mighty calm and business-like. In the end they divided the six hundred among them, at an average price of nine dollars a pound — which came to somewhere between seven and eight hundred thousand dollars for the cargo. No money changed hands; nothing was signed; no receipts were sought or given. Spring simply jotted details down in a note-book — and I daresay that after that the only transactions that took place would be the transfer of bills and orders in perfectly respectable banks in Charlestown, New York, Rio and London,
The niggers we landed would be resold, some to plantation owners along the Main, but most of them into the United States, when smugglers could be found to beat the American blockade and sell them in Mobile and New Orleans at three times what we had been paid for them. When you calculate that the trade cargo we'd given to King Gezo, through Sanchez, had been worth maybe a couple of thousand pounds — well, no wonder the slave trade throve in the forties.29
I said we sold all our slaves, but in fact we kept Lady Caroline Lamb. Spring had decided that if I persevered with her instruction in English, she would be worth keeping as an interpreter for later voyages — such slaves were immensely valuable, and we had actually made our last trip without one. I didn't mind; it would help pass the time, and I felt somehow that it was a feather in my cap.
To her Spring also added about a dozen mustee and quadroon girls sent aboard by the brokers, who wanted them shipped to America where they were destined for the New Orleans brothels. Spring agreed for a consideration to take them as far as Havana, where we were to load cargo for our homeward trip. These yellow wenches were quite different from the blacks we had carried, being graceful, delicate creatures of the kind they called 'fancy pieces', for use as domestic slaves, I'd have traded twenty Lady Caroline Lamb's for any one of them, but there was no chance of that. They weren't chained, being so few and not the kind who would make trouble anyway.
We didn't linger in Roatan. Slaves from the barracoons came aboard with a load of lime and scoured out the slave-deck, and then we warped out of the bay to cleaner water, and the pumps and hoses washed out the shelves for twenty-four hours before Spring was satisfied. As one of the hands remarked, you could have eaten your dinner off it — not that I'd have cared to, myself. After that we made sail, due north for the Yucatan Passage, and for the first time, I think, since I'd first set foot on that d––d ship, I began to feel easy in my mind. It was no longer a slaver, I felt — well, give or take the few yellows we were carrying — we had turned the corner, and now there was only Havana and the run home. Why, in two or three months, or perhaps even less, I would be in England again, the
