The Blackbirder

Chapter 30

Whydah.

Marlowe stood grim at the break of the quarterdeck, watched that city of slave traders emerge from the predawn black.

He had been up and down the African coast in his varied career at sea, from Cape Verde to the Congo. Mostly during his time with the pirates. Wealth bled from the continent’s dark interior, streams of blood money that poured over the Europeans that gathered on her shores. And Marlowe and his former mates had been there to relieve them of some of it. Africa was a good place for pirates.

Yes, Marlowe had tasted Africa. Had eaten the spicy, peppered food of the Kroomen, had slept in the mud and grass huts of the fierce men of the Bissagos Islands, had lain with dark-skinned girls in Cabo Monte and Elmina and Brass and Old Calabar.

But Whydah. He had been there only once before, as a very young man. Thirteen, perhaps. Experienced enough by then to be rated ordinary seaman. He had been seduced into joining a blackbirder’s crew. Good money, damned good money, and at thirteen he felt himself quite impervious to the fevers that struck down white men by the score along the Bight of Benin.

It had been worse than a nightmare, worse than anything he could have imagined. Those poor people, led down into the hold, terrified, beaten, wailing in their despair. And then the stink and the moaning and the rattling of chains. There was no escape from it, like being separated from hell itself by a few inches of oak planking.

And the bodies. Carried up every day and tossed overboard. Stiff, wide-eyed, covered in their own filth, body after body, and every day he had to help carry them up, had to go down into that place, look into the eyes of the living and fetch the dead ones up. Over the leeward side, to the trail of sharks that kept constant company with the ship.

They had arrived in Jamaica with half the number of Africans they had left with, and young Malachias Barrett had jumped ship, fled into the city, not even bothered to collect his pay.

A year later he was a pirate.

And in all his years with that marauding clan he had never sailed with a more depraved and soulless bunch as the crew of that black-birder.

It was odd, he realized, that he had never once felt the same pity for the victims of his piracy that he did for those slaves he had helped transport. The Lord knew he had seen terror aplenty in their eyes, had seen atrocities carried out against them, was guilty of enough himself to see him damned many times over.

Perhaps he did not think of those people as helpless victims as he did the slaves. Certainly those who had not resisted the pirates’ attack had not been harmed-they had that opportunity to save themselves- whereas nothing the Africans could have done would have spared them their awful fate.

He wondered if perhaps that experience with the blackbirder was the real reason he had freed his people at Marlowe House. But that would suggest an emotional rather than a pragmatical reason for his actions, and he rejected that outright. He had always scoffed at Bickerstaff’s notion that slavery should be abolished the world over. The world, Marlowe knew, consisted of the strong and the weak, and the strong preyed on the weak, as it was in nature. Emotion could not be allowed to hold too great a sway.

But sometimes he found himself listening to Bickerstaff’s arguments and finding some sense in them.

He had never told Bickerstaff about his having served aboard a blackbirder, never told Elizabeth or James or anyone that he could think of. The shame of it still clung to him, the way the stink of the ship had clung to his clothes until at last he had stolen a new set and burned the ones he had. He did not know why he felt such humiliation still for something he had done so long ago. Surely he had done worse since?

He shook his head. Seeing the whitewashed city of Whydah growing more distinct amid the thick forest was making his thoughts turn morbid and morose. He was not a man for such introspection, and the more he found his mind turning over such ideas, the more he told himself he was becoming an old woman, or a philosopher like Bicker-staff, and it did not suit him.

“Good morning, Captain,” said Bickerstaff, stepping up from the waist with two pewter mugs full of the fine, pungent black coffee they had picked up in Sao Miguel. Marlowe took the proffered mug gratefully, awkwardly, holding it in his left hand. His right arm hung in a sling around his neck. A clean break, no reason to think it would not heal, but it still hurt like the devil.

The coffee was hot, but no steam would rise in the warm, tropical morning air.

“Good morning.” The sun had all but broken free of the horizon, a blaze of brilliant orange off the starboard bow. The sky was a brittle blue, cloudless, promising heat. The shore that lay under their bows, running from horizon to horizon, was still mostly indistinct, a thick, dark shadow and only the white, white buildings were visible at all. Those, and the smattering of vessels that lay at anchor in the roads, no more than a few miles off.

“Whydah, is it?” Bickerstaff asked.

“Yes.”

“Have you been, before?”

“No.”

The two men were quiet, watching the rising sun reveal what lay before them: more buildings, with smoke curling up into the nearly white sky from a dozen, two dozen points among the trees, more vessels of all sizes. White sand and a line of white surf that ran the whole length of the shore, as far as they could see. Birds wheeling around overhead, seabirds, and occasionally the bright-colored natives of Africa.

“It would be odd to find them here, would it not?” Bickerstaff asked. “Whydah is notorious for its traffic in slaves. One would think it the last place they might come.”

“One would think. I have all but despaired of guessing what is in King James’s mind. If I can only go back and tell the governor that I have truly looked in every port they might have ventured to, then at least I will be satisfied. The world is a damned big place, even Nicholson must realize that, and they could be any damned where in it.”

He had not meant for his reply to be as bitter as it was, but as the words came out, they drew the venom with them. He was tired of this, tired of putting such superhuman effort into a search he did not think was his responsibility. A search that he did not want to be a success. But neither did he want it to fail.

James, damn your black hide…

The French East Indiaman, after blowing away the Elizabeth Galley fore topmast, had simply sailed off. They apparently had more important things to do than capitalize on their victory, or they did not think the cost in blood was worth whatever they might get from the Galley. Whatever their thinking, Marlowe was glad of it, glad to see the big ship disappear beyond the horizon.

It took the crew of the Elizabeth Galley a full twenty-four hours to repair the damage they had suffered in fifteen minutes of fighting. With the threat of being blown from the sea gone, they were able to salvage a great deal of the wreckage, and happily they had on the booms a spare topmast, so in the end there was little apparent damage.

Once things were squared away they set sail, again hunting for King James, the men still eager for the fortune carried by those fabled black pirates.

Two days later they made their African landfall at Cape Verde, the northernmost point to which Marlowe thought James might be heading. They had looked there and into the mouth of the Gambia, gone around to Cacheu and Bissau, poked into those few anchorages in the Bissagos Islands, and then southeast along the Guinea Coast.

The only thing in their favor was the sparsity of anchorages along Africa’s west coast, the few places where they had to negotiate their way into a well-defined harbor. Most of the coast was open roads, great long stretches of beach where the treacherous surf pounded and pounded and vessels took their wary moorings far from the land, relying on the skills of native boatmen to get them to shore and back.

In that case they had only to sail by, to make their way inshore close enough to survey the vessels there and see if any were the French merchantman taken by James and his pirate band.

And none of them were.

Past Cape St. Anna and Cabo Monte, southeast along the Pepper Coast, then northeast at Cape Palmas and along the Ivory Coast to Axim. They doubled Cape Three Points and stood on to the Gold Coast, Ashanti country, past the open roads of Shama and Komende and Elmina and Cape Coast with its great, looming castle, the best anchorage for a thousand miles and the least likely place to find fugitive slaves. And indeed they did not.

They checked the vessels anchored at the mouth of the Volta River and made their easting into the Bight of Benin, the Slave Coast, not a place that Marlowe had any hope of finding them.

Up until that point the search had been a simple matter. Once they passed Lagos, however, and entered the area of the Niger River Delta, then there would be hundreds of creeks and rivers and backwaters where they might have hidden, indeed where they probably had. He would have to check them all, all the fetid breeding grounds of yellow jack and black fever, and he dreaded even the thought of it.

Damn, damn, damn you to hell, James, for putting me through this! He was angry enough that the idea of James being hanged was not so terrible. When he thought of what they had been through already, what more they had to do, he was ready to hang the man himself.

The sun was fully up and the shore with which they were closing quite visible. Marlowe took the last swig of coffee, spit a few errant grounds over the side. The native canoes were starting to close with them. He could see the boatmen working their paddles, racing out to the new arrival. Some would be grumete, come out to offer their services in getting the white men safe through the surf, some would be bumboats offering for sale those things that sailors long at sea hankered for. That would be rum, chiefly, and he would have to tell Fleming to see that the men did not get their hands on enough of it to cause trouble.

He ran his eyes over the ships and brigs and snows at anchor, more out of habit than any thought that he might find the one he was searching for. His eyes settled on one ship anchored further to the east, away from the central part of Whydah, and he stared at it but his thoughts were elsewhere, with Governor Nicholson, explaining how he had searched the entire coast and had found nothing.

And as he stared, and as his mind traveled back over the Atlantic, back over the water they had just crossed, an odd something began to gnaw at him, like a dream he had told himself in his sleep to remember but on waking could not. It was the dull sensation of knowing there is something one must not forget, but forgetting what that something is.

And so he stared and he mucked around in the silt of his mind, trying to find what it was under there. So much had he come to accept the fact that he would not find James’s ship, it took him a good five minutes before he realized that it was the French merchantman, or something very like it, that he was looking at now.

“Dear God…” He stood up straight, knocked the pewter mug off the caprail. It bounced once on the channel and then plunged into the blue water, but Marlowe spared it never a thought.

“Whatever is it?” Bickerstaff asked, but Marlowe turned and fled aft and picked up the big telescope from the binnacle box and trained it forward. He shook his head as he stared through the glass. The ship was a mile and a half away-he could see none of the little details that would give him absolute confirmation-but nothing that he saw told him he was wrong.

He felt the emotions crashing together like surf coming across either side of a sandbar: the thrill that he might have found them, the relief that it might soon be over, the fear of disappointment, the dread of finding King James and killing him or bringing him back to an even worse death, the confusion of conflicting loyalties and desires.

The more he tried to make his life a simple thing-a wife, a home, a planter’s life-the more it eluded him, the more his problems grew in complexity, like a vine out of control, wrapping itself around him.

Bickerstaff was there, but too polite to inquire, so Marlowe said, “I think perhaps that is the Frenchman, yonder. James’s Frenchman.”

Bickerstaff cocked an eyebrow, which for him was tantamount to a shout of surprise. Marlowe handed him the glass and he trained it forward, though he did not have anything like the seamanship to pick out the tiny details that might distinguish one ship from another.

“Hmmm,” said Bickerstaff, thoughtfully. “They fly no flag, and their sails are not stowed in any manner that would do a captain credit, if he were concerned about such things, and the yards all askew.”

Marlowe smiled. Bickerstaff was right, and it was a good indication that this was the right ship and he, Marlowe, had missed it entirely. He was too busy looking at the steeve of the bowsprit, the sheer, the number of black-painted wales, the somewhat archaic lift at the peak of the mizzen yard, to even notice the more obvious clues. Sometimes knowledge just got in the way.

“You think it is King James?”

“I think it might well be,” Marlowe said. “I am sorry now we put those mad Frenchmen ashore in Sao Miguel, they could have told us for certain.” Then after a moment’s reflection he said, “No, I am still glad to be shed of them. But I think we will clear the ship for action and go to quarters and be ready when we come up with them.”

This order he passed to first mate Fleming who had it relayed in bellowing voices along the deck and below, an order that took the Elizabeth Galleys entirely by surprise. None of them were still abed; it being past dawn, the watch below had been roused and were making a clean sweep fore and aft and seeing to breakfast and attending to those many jobs that needed doing before breakfast and the change of watch. It was a steady routine that had gone unbroken for several weeks now, since their fight with the Frenchman, and there had been no indication that things would be different that morning.

For that reason there was more staggering around, more dumb looks, more questions than Marlowe would have preferred. But still the men fell to with credible speed, casting off guns, arranging tubs of match and buckets of water, fetching out cutlasses and pikes.

They were a good crew, disciplined, happy enough. Griffin’s death had been like pulling a rotten tooth: painful at first, but in the end a vast improvement.

Fifteen minutes later they were ready, as the sea breeze carried the Elizabeth Galley inshore, closing, closing with the Frenchman. Marlowe kept the glass trained on the ship, but he could see nothing out of the ordinary. A few figures moved around the deck, and they looked to be Africans, though it was still too far to tell. A plume of smoke rose from just abaft the foremast, but it looked like nothing more sinister than a galley fire.

“Where there is smoke, there is breakfast,” Marlowe observed to Bickerstaff.

“Where there is breakfast, there is no fear of imminent attack.”

That was true enough, and it added to the confusion of the thing. And then overhead the Galley’s main topsail gave a slap as it collapsed and then snapped full again in a fluke of wind. They were losing the sea breeze. Soon it would be dead calm, and after that the wind would fill in right on their nose.

“Mr. Fleming, let us see to the anchor. We’ll carry on as close as we can.”

The wind held for ten minutes more, then came in puffs that began to box the compass, and then died away altogether, leaving the Elizabeth Galley to drift beam on to the incoming seas. She wallowed side to side in those swells that marched on under her keel and then flung themselves in breaking foam onto the beach a mile away.

The anchor was let go and the bow came around to point into the waves, making the ship pitch rather than roll, an altogether more comfortable motion. And when she finally snubbed to a stop at the end of the anchor hawser, they were no more than one hundred yards from the suspect ship.

Both ships were pointing into the waves and so were nearly in line with each other. Thomas stood at the taffrail, scrutinizing the other.

He could see that the people aboard were indeed Africans, but they appeared to be women. He could see no one that he could positively identify as a man. Perhaps all the men were ashore. That would explain the absence of alarm. But how odd. Why would they do that? Why would James go ashore in Whydah, of all places? It made no sense at all. The disparate parts could not be made to fit.

But that was all right. He did not have to understand everything. The facts were these: He had found a ship that looked very like the one James had taken. Aboard that ship were African women. Not slaves bound in chains and ready to be stowed down but women walking the decks free, cooking, going on with life.

That was not at all what one would expect to see aboard a ship anchored off Whydah.

And that meant that he had found King James.