Now the house rang with the screams of the injured man! Fanny wept and buried her head under her pillow until sudden silence fell upon the household.
* * * * * *
William Gibson held his hand and forearm up before his eyes and thought, impartially, that he would not have recognized the limb for his own, it was so browned from the tropical sun, and so thin and wiry—just bone and gristle. He lay back, closed his eyes and thought of the delicious food available to him in Portsmouth, if he could only leave his hammock and obtain it—fresh bread and butter, fried eggs and ham, roast chicken, frothy ale, perhaps some oysters, or an apple tart.
And that was supposing that he had the ready funds to buy something in Portsmouth, and the clothes to be seen in among decent folk. The Navy was fairly nonchalant in the matter of what and when he would be paid. More precious than the pay, though, was the fact that Captain Columbine had procured his discharge from the Navy. “You are no sailor, and never will be, Gibson,” he had said with a smile. “You can do more good for the cause of abolition if you stay ashore. I will write you from Sierra Leone after I’ve assumed the governorship and let you know how matters prosper there.”
Gibson remembered little of the last two weeks, after succumbing to the fever and dysentery that swept through the crowded sloop. He thought he could remember the nightmares more vividly than the waking; nightmares of struggling in a dark cave through green water, chest deep, sweating and panting in the stinking heat, as he frantically pushed barrels and bales through a hole smashed in the side of—the side of what? He blinked, confused. It had been no cave. It had been no nightmare. There had been an exhausting and totally futile hour of working the pumps in the bowels of the ship to try and keep the hold from flooding. He could feel the Solebay slowly listing beneath his feet, could hear the planks crack and separate and the warm water rush in. The pumps were abandoned and he and his mates turned to trying to save the stores of food and rum and ammunition. At last, as the waters surged around his waist, he climbed out of the hold and struck out for the shore, limp as a rag and gasping for breath.
Other fragments of the expedition against the French came back to him; the pathetic little boats attempting to ferry the soldiers and sailors across the sand bar at the mouth of the river, fighting the river currents as they plowed into the ocean tides, watching one of the boats flip and seeing seven men from the Derwent tossed out, clawing at the waves and swept under to rise no more; the misery of the soldiers, who were, of course, compelled to wear the same wool jackets and rigid stocks around their neck that they would have worn on a cool morning back in Merrie Old England, except now they were in the middle of a steaming jungle where no one in his right senses would wear more than a loin cloth if he had any choice in the matter; the poor old sergeant, overcome by the heat, falling face down, never to rise again, the cabin boys, round-eyed and silent, poised by their gun crews, ready to run on command to fetch more gunpowder, the deafening sound of that first salvo sent across the river to smash into the French defenses, the general joy when it was realized that the French had abandoned their posts and withdrawn into the jungle, and the smile on Captain Columbine’s tired, sweat-streaked face when he returned with the articles of surrender from the French encampment, and the answering cheers of the crew.
Gibson hoped that his illness had not wiped out other details, for he needed to recall everything for his book. Did he remember correctly, or was it some feverish fantasy, that the surrendering French were allowed to keep their own slaves, because they were, after all, the property of the French?
Gibson had spent the last part of the voyage home to England crammed into a stinking infirmary with other stricken sailors, some of whom had been carried out wrapped in a shroud. Now safely anchored in the Spithead, Gibson was still lying on board the Derwent, gently bobbing in English waters, for lack of anywhere else to go. His friend Lieutenant Price had been granted shore leave to arrange lodging with his family, but he could not flatter himself that the Price family would want to take in an invalid stranger, as the ever-sanguine William Price assured him they would. Should that fail, he would write to his old friend Mrs. Butters for the name of some friend of the abolitionist cause in Portsmouth—a friendly and compassionate Quaker, perhaps—for he doubted he could survive the journey to London or Bristol, as he could not even crawl to the head and back without fainting.
He allowed himself to briefly feel some pity on his own behalf; he had no anxious family waiting for him on the pier upon his return—no parents, no cousins, no relations who were obliged to take him in while he recovered
