The Blackbirder

Chapter 3

King James watched the breeze ruffle the surface of the wide river, felt it cool the wet fabric of his shirt. His eyes swept along the river, noting the strength of the current in the angle of the reeds, predicting the coming steadiness in the wind from the cat’s-paws that spread shivering ripples over the brown water.

Jamestown. The James River. King James. All three of them named for some long-dead monarch, all connected, intertwined, running together like the dark rivers of Africa searching for the sea.

He stood on the river sloop’s quarterdeck, all the way aft by the taffrail. His bare foot rested on the head of the rudder post that thrust up through the deck. It twisted underfoot, as if trying to shake him, as the tiller swung side to side within the confines of the beckets that held it amidships.

Lucy was hurrying along the road, making for the sloop, a basket on her arm. She was young; James doubted she was above seventeen, but of course most of those who had been enslaved had lost track of the passing years; and she was beautiful, with her soft black curls spilling out from under her mobcap, her skin the color of cocoa with cream.

At another time James might have let his eyes linger, might have teased himself with the sight of his wife. But at that moment he was in command of the Northumberland, and his inspection of Lucy as she hurried toward them became just a part of his overall assessment of the vessel and her people.

King James was more mariner than husband. He understood that, did not necessarily see it as a flaw.

His gaze moved past her, inboard, to the six men on deck. Cato and Joshua, casting the last of the lashings off the foresails, were sailors. They had been part of the sloop’s crew for nearly a year now.

William, Good Boy, and Quash were passengers. Good Boy and William were carpenters, natural talents with wood, and Quash an experienced blacksmith. Along with material, James was transporting the skilled people who would transform Marlowe’s new wilderness. They were strong and smart young men, all somewhere around twenty years old, all former slaves like himself, freed by Thomas Marlowe.

He felt like an old man around them.

It would have been worse, were it not for Sam, the only white man among them. Once a blue-water sailor, Sam now considered himself too old for deep-sea voyaging and was happy making short trips around the bay.

James loved the sloop, every inch of her, the sweep of her sheer, the elegant curve that the bulwarks made as they met at the bow, the mast, straight, solid.

Sometimes in the curve of Lucy’s hips he saw the Northumberland’s tumble home, in the taper of her bare leg he saw the bowsprit jutting out over the water.

The little ship was freedom and the dignity of command. In making the sloop his, he had met and defeated the horrors of his first taste of the sea and ships, the Middle Passage.

“Come along, woman, we’ll miss the tide!” James called out as Lucy came huffing up to the dock.

“Wouldn’t be so late if one of you was a gentleman, would help a lady with her things,” Lucy called back, but she was smiling and James was smiling. It was just banter.

“Forward there!” he called out as Lucy was helped aboard. “Let’s go.”

No more needed saying. They had been sailing together for three years, two of those years under James’s command. Cato and Sam clapped on to the jib halyard and hauled away. The sail jerked up the forestay, flogging slightly in the breeze.

“Stand by that bow fast, there,” James called out as he slipped the becket from the tiller with his foot.

And then, from forward, Lucy’s voice, shrill, with an edge of panic. “No!”

Everyone aboard the sloop froze. Lucy was standing in the waist, her eyes wide, staring at nothing. She took a step back, toward the rail.

“What, Lucy, what is it?” James hurried forward.

Lucy shook her head in mute protest.

“What?”

“I got a bad feeling. Something ain’t right.”

“What? What you talking about?” There was nothing wrong that James could see, and if there were, he would certainly notice it before Lucy did.

“Something ain’t right…,” Lucy said again. It was the best she could do, by way of explanation.

“Girl, you are being foolish. Now get aft and stop this nonsense.”

“No, I ain’t going!” She turned and stepped up onto the rail and onto the dock before James could stop her. “I ain’t going and if you was smart you wouldn’t neither!”

James scowled at her. This was insane. Lucy could be flighty at times, but he had never seen anything like this.

“Goddamnit, girl, get back on this boat!” James shouted, but Lucy only shook her head and backed away. He glanced forward. The others were watching, wide-eyed. Losing an argument with his wife was not helping his authority.

Worse still, he could see that his men were getting spooked by all this. If they believed whatever premonition Lucy thought she was having, then soon he would be without a crew.

“Fine, then, you walk back to the damn house and we’ll talk about this when I gets back!”

He spun around and walked aft, head up, and his men avoided meeting his eyes.

Joshua slipped the bow fast off the piling, pulled the line aboard and coiled it down.

The forward edge of the sail came taut and Cato and Sam sweated the last bit of slackness out and belayed and Joshua hauled the canvas out by the sheet. The breeze caught it and the bow of the sloop swung away from the dock and out into the river.

James stamped aft, swung the tiller out to starboard. Joshua jogged after him and slipped the stern fast off the piling. A minute later the sloop was on her way downriver, leaving Lucy behind as she stood on the dock, watching.

Damned foolish, foolish woman. But in fact James was spooked too, by her fear, so clearly genuine.

A minute later and they were passing down the larboard side of the Elizabeth Galley. Through the quarter gallery windows James caught a glimpse of Marlowe, leaning back in his chair, feet up on the mahogany table. The table that cost more than half a year’s worth of the wages that Marlowe paid one of the black men that worked for him.

But James could no longer be angry with Marlowe. The anger at his enslavement was still there, of course, the knife edge of rage, fast and lethal, but it was no longer poised to strike.

Marlowe’s releasing him from bondage had not released him from the anger as well. James had not believed Marlowe’s words about freeing his people and paying them. He had not been impressed when Marlowe spoke to them in the patois of the African coast.

It had not occurred to the others that Marlowe might have learned that language as a slaver himself, but it had occurred to James.

His rage had not been quelled by Marlowe’s keeping his promise, or Marlowe’s making James majordomo of the household. A white man’s trick to exact the best labor from the best people. And it had worked.

It was the Northumberland that had done it at last. Pushing James to the challenge of learning seamanship, setting him aboard a ship, a cursed ship. Giving him responsibility. Giving him weapons and asking him to fight aboard the guardship, side by side with white men. It was treating him like a man that had done it at last.

He understood Marlowe now, knew the real reason that Marlowe had freed his people. Knew that Marlowe had fought side by side with black men during his days as a pirate, that most egalitarian of communities. The only rich white man in the tidewater to ever have called a black man an equal.

James loved him more because of his history, his motives. Marlowe freed his people for pragmatic reasons, not for some lofty intellectual ideal such as Bickerstaff might espouse. Now James wanted nothing more in life than to plunge into battle again, at Marlowe’s side.

The Northumberland was gathering way, carried by the tide and pulled by the breeze in the jib. At the base of the mast the crew tossed off peak and throat halyards and made ready to raise the big mainsail.

Five minutes later the mainsail was set and drawing, the halyards faked out on deck for running, and the sloop settled down for the short, pleasant trip downriver. The Elizabeth Galley and the bright spot of color that was Lucy, standing on the dock watching them, and what was left of Jamestown fell astern, and then were lost from sight as the Northumberland swung round Hog Island and James turned her more southerly for the reach downriver to Hampton Roads.

It was there, just below Hog Island, that the Plymouth Prize had fought to the death with the pirate LeRois. The governor had unknowingly set a thief to catch a thief when he had sent Marlowe after that murderer and sea robber.

The charred remains of the two ships were still visible at low tide. James had got to know them well during the past months as he oversaw the salvage of the cannons from the wreck.

Marlowe called the divers “his people,” called all the blacks “his people.” But they were not King James’s people. They were Congolese, a tribe more accustomed to the water than were the Malinke. The distinctions were blurring, but they were still real.

The river was huge, over three miles wide, and the Northumberland ran easily downstream. Cato ambled aft, took the tiller from James.

“Favor the north shore,” James instructed the young black man. They would need the room to leeward when they passed Newport News and swung round into Hampton Roads.

James stepped up on the low bulwark, steadied himself with a hand on the backstay. Past the tall reeds, the fields ran up easy slopes to the big plantation houses along the shore. The seabirds wheeled around the topmast head and the ducks made their little flotillas along the banks.

The sun beat down on the deck, warm, even hot, but not oppressive. James could feel the soft caulking that stuck to the bottoms of his feet.

He felt the sloop heel to leeward in response to a gust from the shore, heard the note of the water rise a bit in pitch.

He ran his eyes along the deck, looking for something that needed attention. There was nothing that he could see. His sloop was perfect. He felt his anger with Lucy subside, his disquiet brought on by her fear fade away.

He was happy, and that emotion still seemed like a stranger to him, like something from another place. There was his boyhood in Africa, a life of princely indulgence, and then the long, long black nightmare of slavery. And now, so many years after going to sleep, he was awake again.

Three uneventful hours later they turned northeasterly and ran across the wide mouth of Hampton Roads. There were a few ships anchored there, and the sun, now inclining toward the west, burnished the roofs of the buildings that made up the town of Hampton.

James had lived in Virginia for twenty years now, five more than he had lived in Africa. He had watched the extraordinary speed with which the settlements had sprung up, taken firm root, spilled over and taken root in half a dozen places further out, spreading over the countryside.

He had never been to England, but he pictured the shoreline there crowded with people, mobs, hundreds deep, waiting, jostling onto the ships that brought more and more immigrants to be absorbed by this new land.

The wind was from the northeast and freshening. They left Point Comfort in their wake and stood out into the wide Chesapeake Bay. They would have to make a few miles of easting at least before they could tack up-bay and fetch the landing at Marlowe’s new property.

Off the starboard side, the mouth of the Chesapeake opened up, and beyond it, the Atlantic Ocean. Acclimated as he was to having land all around, the wide, endless space between the capes gave James an odd feeling, like hanging over a precipice, like being in a house with only three walls.

“Do you see that?” Cato asked, breaking into James’s reverie. “The ship?”

“Yes.”

He had seen it three minutes before. It was his job as captain to be more alert than anyone else on board.

“Something ain’t right…,” Cato offered.

James grunted in reply, unwilling to offer an opinion. But he had been thinking the same thing as he watched the ship struggling along, nine miles or so to the south. She was too far off to make out any detail, but there was something in the way her sails were trimmed, something in her plodding motion, as if she were dragging something, that raised an alarm in James’s head.

He picked up the sloop’s telescope and trained it on the distant vessel. The image in the lens yielded no more definite information, but neither did it lessen James’s conviction that something was wrong with her. He could see foresail and mainsail lashed to the yards-they could not have been called furled, with the great ungainly folds and lumps of canvas-merely tied up out of the way. The mizzen yard and its lateen sail seemed to lie across the quarterdeck. Heaps of gray cloth were just visible. James thought he could see some bits of rigging swinging loose.

And then, a puff of smoke, a flash from a muzzle. A cannon fired, not at the river sloop, but from the other side, to leeward. A few seconds later, the muffled report, like the sound of someone beating a rug. A gun to leeward. A universally accepted sign of surrender or distress.

“Let’s run down on this fellow,” James said to Cato, then, as the helmsman eased the tiller to weather and the Northumberland’s head turned more southerly, he called out, “Joshua, Sam, see to them sheets. We’re going run down on yon ship, see if she needs help.”

The Northumberland moved fast with the wind over the quarter and soon she had halved the distance. Through the glass James could make out the ensign, the British merchantman’s ensign, flying from the masthead, upside down, another distress signal.

The ship was sagging off to leeward, the wind setting her down on the beach, and while she was in no immediate danger of taking the ground, it was clear that she would have to come about, and soon.

The Northumberland was no more than two miles away when the merchantman tried to tack, swinging up into the wind, slowly, her sails beating in disorderly array. Her bow came up, up, and hung there, unable to turn further, like a dying man making one last feeble and useless attempt to save himself.

And then she fell back again, having missed stays, her sails in a shambles.

James watched through the glass. One by one the yards came sailing down as halyards were let go. No topmen racing aloft to stow them, the clews and bunts were not even hauled up. The sails just hung there, as if letting the halyards run was all the effort those on board could manage.

A flash of white under the bow and James knew they had dropped the anchor. They would go no further. Now that they could see help was on the way, they would anchor and wait rather than struggle on.

“You keep to windward of them,” James growled at Cato, and Cato replied, “Windward, aye.” James wanted a look at these people first before he laid his sloop alongside of them. He had seen enough of pirates’ deceptions to be wary. They would stay safely to windward until they were certain.

One mile, then half a mile, and they could see more and more of the frightening condition that this ship was in. Shrouds and backstays hung loose, great gouges were shot out of the bulwarks. Strips of torn sail fluttered aft in the breeze. Those, and the inverted ensign, were the only bunting showing.

“What the devil happened to you?” James muttered to himself.

“What do you think?” asked Joshua, standing by the main sheet.

“I do not know… Attacked, maybe, or caught in a gale, shorthanded. Plenty out there can do that kind of damage.”

James studied the ship as they approached, and there was nothing about her that said “pirate.” She was armed, of course, but no more than any merchantman would be in those dangerous times. There were none of the rough-cut gunports of hastily rearmed ships, no forecastle or quarterdeck cut away to make a flush-deck vessel, as one often saw among the Brethren of the Coast. No, this one looked to be just what she appeared: a merchant ship in dire trouble.

They were only a few hundred yards away when the smell reached them.

Had they been downwind of her they would have noticed it miles before, but with the fresh breeze, it required they get much closer than that.

James felt the foulness wafting into his nose, his mouth, his lungs. It made his hands clench, his stomach convulse like ingesting some airborne poison. It set the anger and hatred racing through him like fire

on a powder train before he even understood why.

“Dear God,” he heard Sam behind him muttering. “A blackbirder.”

A blackbirder: slave ship. And the smell, that of human beings packed in and battened down. Piss and shit. Blood. Pleading, desperate fear. The unknown. Worse, far worse than quiet death.

Not for twenty years had James smelled that stink, but with one breath it all came back to him, and all the rage he had locked away in some small cage of his soul came tearing free again.

The Northumberland was charging down on the slave ship, making right for her bows, and if something was not done immediately she would smash headlong into her.

Someone was standing on the slaver’s bows, waving. A warning or a plea, James could not tell.

He pulled his eyes from the battered vessel, pushed Cato from the tiller, grabbed it, swung it a bit to larboard. The sloop turned until she was on a heading to run down the blackbirder’s leeward side. The wind came over the sloop’s transom, the mainsail by the lee, fluttering, the boom right on the edge of sweeping across the deck in a great destructive arc, but James did not care.

They passed under the blackbirder’s jibboom, just missed fouling the sloop’s shrouds on the spar, and passed down the ship’s side. Now, to leeward of the vessel, the smell enveloped them entirely, like a fog, so strong it seemed they should be able to see it. And from the hold- muffled and quiet-the screams, the cries, the rattling chains.

James pushed the tiller harder over, swinging the sloop away from the slaver.

“Damn it, James, be careful, you’ll jibe the damned…,” Sam started, got no further.

“Shut it! Shut your gob!”

James felt a wild anger, an anger that did not care what it destroyed, that tried to cause some destruction, some injury, if just for the release.

And then, just as the big mainsail was ready to jibe and tear the sloop’s rigging apart, he swung the tiller back the other way. The sloop described a great arc, swinging back toward the slave ship, turning up into the wind, the sails flogging. She came to a stop at the base of the slaver’s boarding steps.

James pushed his way through his gawking men to the bulwark that bumped against the high-sided blackbirder. A white face with equal measures of soot black and filth brown looked down at him, a man standing at the slave ship’s gangway. Clothes torn, hair wild, streaks of blood on his filthy shirt. Pistol in his belt. The face of a man who could not recall his last rest. But more defiant for it.

James stopped, looked up. The man looked down. Then the man said, “Where is the captain of this sloop?”

“I am the captain.”

They held each other, stare for stare. James could see the narrowing eyes, could hear the debate in the man’s head.

A nigger? A nigger coming to our aid?

“Cast off,” the white man said. “Leave our ship. It is no concern of yours.”

Nigger.

And then another man was there, just as haggard, but with the defiance beaten out of him, and the other man said, “For the love of God, Captain, let them aboard if they can be of some help.”

The captain turned, shoved the man with more force than James would have thought he had in him, screamed, “Shut your mouth!” and James was on the boarding steps, scurrying up, Cato and Joshua and Sam right behind him.

He stepped through the gangway onto the deck, met the captain’s loathing with hatred of his own, looked around at the destruction.

Lines lay strewn about the deck, great tangles of rigging draping off the pinrails and lying in heaps in the scuppers. One of the small cannon amidships, aiming down into the hold. Smashed bits of grating, smashed bits of rail, smashed barrels, bottles, crates of cabin stores torn open, their contents scattered around.

The doors to the binnacle box were half torn off their hinges, hanging open, swaying with the rocking of the ship. There was a wide black scorched circle on the deck where someone had apparently built a fire, an inconceivable thing on a wooden ship.

Black patches on the deck, swirled into bizarre patterns, marking those places where people had thrashed and bled their lives away. Chains. Netting full of stone, bent to fathoms of rope, ready to carry the bodies, living or dead, to the ocean floor.

James’s hands were trembling. A film of sweat covered his body. He could smell its unhealthy odor, even over the stink of the slaver. His jaw ached from the pressure with which he clenched his teeth together.

James turned slowly to the slaver’s captain and the five white sailors who stood behind him. At the gangway stood Cato, Joshua and Sam, William, Good Boy, and Quash.

“What happened?”

One of the sailors replied, addressing his words to James. “We was took by pirates. They used us horrid, for days. Killed half our men. Took two dozen of our nig…Negroes, and before they left, set the rest loose. Stood off in their boats, watched us fighting to…to get them down below again.”

James breathed, loud, panting, trying to get control. He could see it before him, like a play, the desperate blacks pouring out of the hold, not knowing what to do because they did not understand enough to form a plan, just wanting to be free of the hold.

And then on deck meeting guns, cutlasses, cannon. The cannon blast down through the hatch, canister shot tearing men, women, children apart in the darkness, the dead and wounded left below. Too dangerous to open the hatches. Wounded on deck thrown overboard. Retribution taken, a lesson for those listening below, and then over the side.

The trembling had turned into shaking, King James’s arms and hands vibrating like a luffing sail. A keening sound formed in his throat. James realized that he had no control over himself, like a sleepwalker, some part of his mind was in control but he had no control over it, some dark part that he did not know was there.

He heard Sam saying, “James, James, get ahold of yourself, this here is for the Court of Admiralty…”

He met the captain’s eyes, saw no sorrow, no remorse, only malevolence there.

“Get off my ship, nigger.”

James stepped across the deck, moving on the captain. “Nigger?”

“I said get off my ship!” the captain shouted, and as James advanced he jerked the pistol from his belt, pulled back the lock with his palm.

James’s hand fell on the handle of his sheath knife and before he could think, the steel was clear of the sheath and he was advancing

into the barrel of the captain’s gun.

“Nigger?”

“Draw a blade on me? You’ll hang for this, you black bastard!”

They were a yard apart. Two men motivated by hatred alone, neither able to think beyond the moment.

The captain raised the gun higher, the round hole at James’s head. James took a great stride, grabbed the barrel, twisted it. The gun went off, the bullet tore through James’s shirt, thudded into the deck, and the knife shot forward and plunged hilt deep into the man’s chest.

Then, screams, shouts of rage. The white men behind their captain surged forward. James felt hands grab him, a fist strike the back of his head, but he could not take his eyes from the haughty captain’s face, the wide eyes, the blood erupting from his mouth.

A cutlass flashed over him and James gritted his teeth and waited for the deathblow but then his men were there, the crew of the Northumberland, surging into the slaver’s crew with fists and sheath knives. They were all fighting-his men, the blackbirder’s men-slavers and former slaves locked into it. A gun went off, steel clashed on steel, someone screamed. A great brawl was taking place around him and James knew he had to stop it.

“Enough! Enough!” James shouted, and the volume and authority of his voice made the fighting men step back, weapons lowered, glaring at one another but not moving.

It was silent, save for men gasping for breath or moaning in agony.

There was a dead man at the tip of King James’s knife. A white man, a ship’s captain. James had killed him.

And in this way he had ended his own life as well.