Price and his sailors were accompanied by half a dozen Africans of the Kru tribe; short wiry men with tattooed faces and sharp, filed-down teeth, naked save for their loincloths. The Kru were not as susceptible to the fevers of the coast, and of course they knew how to navigate the treacherous shoals of the creek while Price and his men watched the shoreline on each side, clutching their loaded muskets. An attack could come from anywhere, at any moment, as they made their way upstream; the jungle provided the most perfect cover for any armed assailant, while they were perfectly exposed in their vessel, and still the launch was reckoned the safest place to be, for the crocodiles awaited anyone foolish enough to jump overboard.
The sun blazed down unrelentingly on William and his crew, but he dared not order the rowers to move from the middle of the river to one of the shady banks, for there awaited swarms of mosquitoes and sand flies, whose torments rendered all the rest of their discomforts insubstantial.
The sailors were silent and sullen, aware that an expedition of this sort would in all likelihood be a death sentence for some of them, even if they never heard a shot fired. The pestilential airs of Africa, especially the shock of the night dews after a day of blazing heat, could strike a man down with fever in a single day.
The excursion was only moderately successful. They did surprise an American schooner in the act of loading some captives, and captured the ship and rescued the slaves on board, but the dozens of Africans still being held on shore in the long sheds, known as barracoons, were swiftly driven into the jungle out of their reach.
Their small victory came at a heavy price: No sooner had the expedition returned to Freetown, than William’s men fell ill. Within a week, yellow fever swept through the crew of the Kangaroo. Out of 120 men, William Price was the only officer still on his feet, and only fifteen men of the company were fit for duty.
The invalids who appeared to stand some chance of survival were quartered in a hut by the beach, which was in fact more comfortable than the Freetown hospital, for the promise of an occasional breeze from the ocean.
About a fortnight after his return to Freetown, William rose early, to make an accounting of the convalescents. He awoke with a headache, and his joints ached, but he mentioned it to no-one. These were the first symptoms of the onset of the yellow fever but, he told himself, perhaps I merely have a head ache.
The sun, glancing on the water as his little dinghy was rowed to shore, was so bright as to sting his eyes, and his spirits and energy were very low by the time he reached the town. His limbs felt leaden, and his eyes burned.
Reaching the convalescent shed, William was greeted by a tall and angular Negress who, in contrast to many of the female inhabitants of Sierra Leone, was modestly covered from neck to ankle.
“Good day to you, sir. We lost no men last night, praise be to Jesus.”
“Thank you, Ruth,” the young lieutenant smiled at her nervously, recalling that she was an ardent Methodist. The Admiralty disliked Methodism and tried to discourage its spread amongst the navy, but William thought they were mostly harmless. “You have a new preacher for your church, I think? How do you like him?”
“We liked him well enough sir, but this here fever took him before he had been here a week. God’s will be done.”
Not knowing what else to say, William stepped into the hut, and was assailed by the smells of unemptied chamber pots and vomit. His stomach lurched, and the bile rose to his throat.
“Do you have everything you require to take care of my men, Ruth?”
“I need me two strong fellas to help me turn and wash everybody. They is being sick everywhere.”
William pulled off his hat and wiped the sweat off his forehead. “I am afraid I cannot spare anyone from the crew.”
Ruth’s lips pouted out in disdain. “Don’t put no Englishman on this job. Get me some Kru men, they do it.”
“They won’t like to work for a woman, I think.”
“Ha! They do anything for money. Then they go back home and buys them another wife.”
William promised to hire some helpers, then moved on to greeting the men who lay on narrow trestle beds, packed into Ruth’s little one-room hut. He helped Ruth bring cups of water to parched lips, until a wave of nausea overtook him. He looked up and saw that the walls of the shack were undulating like a sheet hanging on a laundry line in a gentle breeze. He looked over to Ruth, but she was not alarmed by the strange sight, so he decided not to mention it to her.
William stepped out on the veranda and leaned against the door post, looking at the Kangaroo bob up and down in the harbour and listening, with failing spirits, to the murmured conversation of the sick men inside, whose discontents seemed to pull him down with them.
“Half of my best mates are dead and gone—and for what? Why did Tom and Pete and Benjy shit themselves to death, to save these black devils from being slaves on t’other side of the ocean, when they was already slaves here? Can you tell me that?”
“Our own people was being stolen right off of our shores by the Barbary pirates—”
“Aye, by the hundreds. Entire villages taken by the Moslem bastards, and free Irish men and women made into slaves, and made to row their boats, or serve in their hareems, and how many fooking ships
