The Blackbirder

Chapter 11

King James poured a little trail of powder in the cannon’s touchhole, stepped back, and gestured to the men on the train tackles to haul away. They pulled; the gun rumbled up to the gunport.

They were small guns, four-pounders, and of all the men aboard, James alone had any experience in loading and firing such weapons. He had not bothered training the others. It was pointless. They would never win a fight with guns.

He gestured for the ad hoc gun crew to stand clear, and when they were out of the way he brought the match down on the powder train. A hiss, a spark, and then the gun went off, blowing smoke out over the empty sea. It was not an attack. It was a signal. A cry of distress.

James looked aloft. The sails were hanging half in their gear, sloppy, flogging in the wind. The ensign was flying upside down. The ship looked very much as she had the first time he had seen her, coming through the capes. But this time the black men were not chained down in the hold. This time they were armed and crouching out of sight behind the bulwarks.

He looked at Madshaka, wondered if he himself looked as foolish as the grumete did. Madshaka’s face and hands were painted white, with paint they had found in the bosun’s locker, as were James’s. They were wearing bits of the officers’ clothes that they had collected from those men who had been wearing them: coats, waistcoats, breeches. Like the paint, it was enough to give the right impression from a distance.

James felt like an idiot, painted up in that way. But it had been his idea, and he could think of no other.

He looked up at Cato, stationed as lookout high up on the mainmast, could see he had nothing to report.

“Tell them to haul the gun in,” James said to Madshaka, and Madshaka repeated the words. An unshotted gun did not hurl itself inboard like a loaded one. James picked up the wet swab, thrust it down the muzzle, ladled powder into the barrel once more, then rammed wadding home and gestured for the gun to be run out again.

Once the distance between the two ships had closed, there would be no mistaking their ship for anything but what she was. All the scrubbing and brimstone in the world would not wash away the stink from a blackbirder.

If a blackbirder were to run down on a strange vessel, she would immediately arouse suspicion. If an approaching merchant ship were to see black men on a slaver’s deck, they would haul their wind and bear away. No ship, save for a man-of-war, would knowingly approach a vessel that had suffered a slave uprising.

They had to get their victim to come to them.

More powder in the touchhole, the glowing match, and the gun went off again. The blast was still ringing in their ears when Cato called down. “Hauling her wind, James! Here she… here she goes, staying now!”

“What he mean by that?” Madshaka asked.

“She turning, coming up to us. I guess she believe we a ship in distress.”

Madshaka smiled again, wicked, piratical delight. Translated James’s words to the others, and they smiled as well.

“Tell them to get out of sight, behind the bulwark. We get aft, on the quarterdeck.”

The two men went aft and stood beside the lashed tiller, waiting, waiting. Tension undulated around the deck like heat from a furnace. The women and children were down below in the great cabin and the smaller cabins along the alleyway. They would not go back in the hold.

When the approaching ship’s topgallant sails were visible from the deck, James called for Cato to come down. “I think we set the foresail, you and me,” he said to Madshaka. “That don’t look wrong, that shouldn’t scare them. Then we can close faster, get down to them.”

Madshaka nodded and the two men went forward, all eyes following them, not knowing what they were about. The yards were not braced perfectly, but close enough. They did not want to look perfect in any event.

James cast off the buntlines and the foresail tumbled down into a big, flogging sack of canvas, the lower corners still held up by the clew-lines. He spun the weather clewline off the pin, let it run through his hand, and Madshaka took in the sheet as fast as he could.

The wind filled that half of the sail, bellied it out, and Madshaka could pull no more. James clapped on to the sheet and together they hauled away. They pulled together, in a steady rhythm, falling naturally into the work. Madshaka was a head taller than James, but both men were powerful, and soon they had the sail sheeted home despite the breeze’s trying to tear the line from their hands.

They crossed the deck and did the same on the leeward side. The bow of the ship began to turn, her bowsprit pointing toward the ship coming up with them. James unlashed the tiller, brought it amidships, steadied the blackbirder on a course to intercept the Samaritan that was speeding to their aid.

Coming to our aid indeed, James thought. In a way you will never guess. “You told them, we only going for food?” he said to Madshaka. “And we ain’t going to kill no one unless we have to?”

“I told them.”

The distant ship tacked and half an hour later tacked again, and by then she was hull up, no more than a mile away. With the foresail set and the blackbirder running with the wind between two sheets, the distance was dropping away fast.

Through the cracked telescope James could see figures moving around on the deck and he instructed Madshaka to wave his arms over his head, as if trying to attract their attention. There were not many people on the other ship, as far as James could tell, and he did not see very many guns. He did not think she was a man-of-war.

“Madshaka, tell them just a few minutes more,” James said, and Madshaka hurried forward again, along the bulwark, speaking to the men crouched there.

A quarter mile from them the other ship rounded up into the wind, foresails aback. She was heaving to, as James had guessed she would. A moment later he could see a boat lifting off the booms. They would want to find out what the trouble was before committing themselves. If it was fever on board, for instance, the aid they would offer would be limited to floating supplies down to them in a boat.

The boat pushed off, pulling for them, and there was no alarm that James could see. By the time they realized that the blackbirder was not going to heave to it would be too late for them.

The blackbirder was making a good three knots with just her foresail set. She swept past the yawl boat with never a word to its confused crew, her bow aimed at the merchant ship one hundred feet away.

On the merchantman’s deck, men were running like roaches, flinging off lines, but it was too late for them. Their foresails were bracing around, filling with wind, when the blackbirder struck, amidships, with a great rendering crash, smashing down bulwarks, snapping her own spritsail yard, sending a shudder like an earthquake through both ships.

The blackbirder was still driving herself into the merchant ship, the grinding, crunching, snapping still loud, when Madshaka wheeled his cutlass over his head and charged forward. He was screaming-it did not sound like words of any language-but the meaning was unmistakable.

From behind the bulwarks the waiting men sprung to their feet, raced after Madshaka, down the blackbirder’s deck, up onto the bowsprit, out along that spar for a dozen feet, and then down onto the quarterdeck of their unhappy victim.

James ran too, as fast as he could, more angry with Madshaka for charging off than worried about the fight. There were no more than a dozen white men on the merchant ship’s deck, terrified men, looking with wide eyes and gaping mouths at the black host, fifty strong, coming from the bowsprit above them and dropping to the deck, swords, cutlasses gleaming, all of them screaming in their alien and barbaric tongues.

James tried to push his way to the point of the attack but he could not get through the press of Africans racing for the bow and over onto the other ship. He leapt up on the foremast fife rail, craned his neck to see what was happening. Screams, white voices and black, blades raised overhead.

He leapt down again, raced around the larboard side of the bow, and clambered up onto the bowsprit that way, pushing his own men aside to gain his place. Up along the spar, hand on the forestay to balance him.

It was a slaughterhouse on the deck below. Madshaka was leading the charge aft, swinging his heavy cutlass like it was a twig, hacking away at any white man in front of him.

One of the crew threw aside the handspike with which he was defending himself, fell to his knees, arms raised in surrender, and Madshaka brought his cutlass down like an ax, catching the man right on the collarbone, all but cleaving him in two. He fell away and Madshaka jerked the weapon free, looked for the next man.

“No! No! Stop!” James shouted. “No!” His voice could just be heard above the screams of the warriors, the shrieks of their victims, but it did not matter because not one of the men, black or white, could understand him.

He leapt down to the deck, hit the planks with his bare feet, took the shock with his legs. Warm, wet, he was standing in a pool of blood. There was blood everywhere, great splattered patterns shot along the white deck, pools, sprays of blood against the deck furniture.

Running, screaming, chaos, swords hacking at anyone who lived. James leapt forward, eyes on Madshaka’s wide back. Madshaka’s arm lifted again, cutlass in hand, and James grabbed it, spun the man around, his own sword under Madshaka’s chin.

“Stop it! Tell them to stop it, or I kill you here!”

Madshaka’s face was terrifying, subhuman. White paint and red blood and dark skin swirled together, and through it those eyes, dark and bloodshot and utterly wild. He was heaving for breath, and he looked at James with no spark of recognition.

But James too was just hanging on to control, and the fury in which he had killed the captain of the blackbirder was gathering against Madshaka. The shaking in his hand was transmitted through the steel of his sword. The point trembled an inch from Madshaka’s Adam’s apple.

The big man moved his arm, a quick jerk, and James almost drove his sword through his throat.

Then Madshaka let his arm drop and his whole body seemed to relax. He smiled. “Yes, yes,” he said. He turned and addressed the men, shouted out, his voice commanding, cutting through what din was still echoing around the deck. He grabbed a cutlass-wielding African as he ran past, checked him, pushed him back against the bulwark, shouted something in the man’s language.

Fore and aft weapons were lowered, voices silenced, and soon the only sound was the groan of the dying, the crunch of the two ships still locked together.

And in James’s mind, he could see nothing but Madshaka’s face, smiling through the paint and blood. It was the most hideous sight he had seen on that hideous day.

“Congratulations, Captain.” Madshaka was looming over him again, his face a mask of humble admiration.

“You bastard!” James hissed. “I told you to tell them no killing unless we had to! You butchered them! You bloody butchered them!”

Madshaka frowned, shook his head. “I told them. I told them many time, like you say. They go crazy.”

“You led them. You led them and you started them on this!”

Madshaka took a step forward so he was looking down at James, his voice low, little more than a growl. “Look here, King James. You been too long with the white men. You don’t remember how much these people hate. Maybe I go crazy too. I just get stolen from my home, remember. I just come across the ocean on the death ship. You just try to remember how you feel, twenty years ago.”

The two men stood, eyes locked. Madshaka said, “When you kill the captain of that slave ship, I think then you remember.” He turned quickly away, moved down the deck, shouting orders in one language then another.

James stared out over the ocean. Madshaka was right, of course. Twenty years before there would have been no stopping him until every white man before him was dead. It was that same rage that had driven him to stick a knife in the slaver’s captain, to make them all outlaws, pirates.

Here he was cursing Madshaka when it was his own lack of control, his own fury, that had led to their being at that place, adrift on the trackless sea.

He would not have balked at slaughtering slavers, plantation overseers. Was it because these men were sailors, merchant sailors, that he felt differently?

He shook his head. So much to do, so many consideration still before him. So much blood on his hands already. How he longed for the Northumberland, his little crew, the simple freedom of plying the Chesapeake Bay.

I am getting old, he thought.

Madshaka was rounding the men up, gathering them together aft. There was talk now, quite a lot of talk, vigorous arguments with hands waving and fingers pointing around, men shouting back and forth, heads nodding in agreement, faces screwed up in expressions of incomprehension.

James felt like he had no part of it, like he was not a part of the crew. But that was not right, he goaded himself. He was in charge, he was their leader, and until he had taken them to safety he could not abandon that.

He walked aft, stepped up on the carriage of a small gun, and shouted, “Quiet, quiet!” Held his hands up over his head, and even though they could not understand him, the power of his voice, the commanding presence of a Malinke prince, brought the discussions to a halt.

“Madshaka, here.” The big man ambled over. “Tell them they fought well, they should be proud.”

Madshaka translated and heads nodded, faces looking not joyful but satisfied.

“We have done what we needed. We have food now, and water, enough to get us home.” There was no need to mention the pointless slaughter. It was done, there was no changing that, and they would not be attacking any other ships.

“We have work to do now-” James continued, but one of the men cut him off, shouting out a question that met with murmured concurrence from several others.

James turned to Madshaka. “He say, ‘Why don’t we take this ship now? Why we go back in the death ship?’ ”

Why indeed? Before James could formulate a response that might make sense to that man, Madshaka translated the question to the others, and James could see more nodding heads, more agreement.

Why not? It was piracy, robbery on the high seas. But what would that mean to these people, who had been stolen from their homes and sold into bondage? They were victims of the most depraved kind of robbery. They were Africans, what did they know or care of the Europeans’ customs and uses of the sea? Why should they ever think it was wrong to take a ship from white men, most of whom were dead?

Now Madshaka was talking again, addressing the assembled men. “Madshaka!” James cut him off. “What you telling them?”

“I telling them what you said.”

“No you ain’t. What you telling them?” His fury was met by Madshaka’s defiant eyes.

“I telling them they can vote. They can, can’t they, or you calling yourself king now? King James?”

James held his eyes, did not let his expression waver, did not let his face reflect the raging inside. They could vote, he had agreed to it. In a moment of weakness he had said they would run things in the way of a pirate ship, and for his sins that was what they were doing.

Madshaka turned back to the men, delivered a few quick, clipped sentences; heads nodded all around, and then every man on the deck raised his hand.

Madshaka turned to James, gave him a hint of a smile. There was no need to translate the results.

“Very well. Tell them to go collect the women and children and whatever they want from the old ship. But first we throw these dead ones over.”

Madshaka gave the orders, pointed here and there, and men lifted corpses out of the sticky puddles of blood and carried them to the leeward rail and heaved them over the side. A dozen white men, slaughtered.

James closed his eyes. His head sunk to his chest. The nightmare went on and on and on.

It was with a great sense of relief that Thomas Marlowe stared through the glass at the ship, the battered wreck of a ship, drifting a cable length away. Relief, tempered with anger, regret, self-loathing, self-pity. A mixed brew, a rumfustian of emotion.

She was a mess, her spritsail yard broken, just the courses and fore topsail set. The smell told him she was a slaver. Reasonable deduction told him it was King James’s.

She was flying her ensign upside down, was firing guns to leeward as a signal of distress, but Marlowe was not buying it. It was just what he would expect James to do, to lure them in. But he would not be fooled.

Now there would be an end to it, one way or another.

He could hear the muttering. The men at the great guns and the men at sail trimming stations and the men with pistols and cutlasses at their sides, ready to board, all murmuring, all expressing that discontent for which sailors were deservedly famous.

“What’s the good of taking yon wreck, then? Bloody risk our necks for flotsam, not worth a sou.”

“It’s them niggers, and Marlowe using us for his own good.”

“Ain’t what I signed on for.”

“Nor me. Signed aboard a privateer, and Marlowe leaving off whatever he thinks looks like a man-of-war, and attacking some hulk.”

“It was Billy Hood was aloft then, said it didn’t look like no man-ofwar to him.”

They had too much time to think. Sailors would always get into trouble if they were given time to think. But in ten minutes’ time they would be into it, some bloody work, and then it would be over.

The Elizabeth Galley had come up with the ship that morning, closed with her. Now she was hove to a cable length to windward. Marlowe would beat King James into submission and be done with it.

“We will not board?” Bickerstaff asked.

“We will not. Those freed slaves could be the death of us, fighting hand to hand. They understand there is no quarter for them. Fight to the last man. But I reckon they know little of fighting with great guns. We’ll stand off, give them a cannonading, hope they see fit to surrender.”

“You just said they would not call for quarter in fighting hand to hand. Do you think they will surrender under cannon fire?”

“No.”

“I do not see any but two men aboard, and they look to be white men.”

They did look to be white men, and the view through the glass only strengthened that impression. They waved, beckoned, but Marlowe stood firm, did not make a move one way or another. He could picture the hordes of armed black men crouching behind the bulwark, waiting for them to board.

He would let King James take the first shot, and then he would decimate them.

Ten minutes passed, and no one other than the two white men appeared on the deck. At last they seemed to realize that Marlowe would not be sending any aid, or laying his ship alongside. They disappeared down the leeward side of the blackbirder, and a moment later came pulling under her counter in a yawl boat, making for the Elizabeth Galley.

“Some of you men with small arms, come with me.” Marlowe stomped forward to the gangway, armed members of the boarding party behind him. He could not imagine how the two men in the yawl boat were part of some trick, but he would never, never be caught unawares.

The yawl boat pulled up below the boarding steps and the two men scrambled up the side, not asking permission to board, not even bothering to tie the boat to the chains. It drifted well clear of the Elizabeth Galley’s side even in the few seconds that it took them to come aboard, but they seemed entirely oblivious, as if gaining the Galley’s deck was the singular goal in their lives and nothing beyond that mattered.

They stopped short at the gangway and looked around at the armed men, the row of guns, Marlowe and Bickerstaff. Their eyes were wide, bloodshot. Their hands were trembling. Marlowe had seen that look on men’s faces before. It was how they looked when the pirates were done with them.

“Who are you? What ship is that?” Marlowe asked, but the men just looked at him, dumb.

“What ship is that?” he asked again.

One of the men uttered a sound. It was not a word that anyone could tell, but it seemed to break the impasse in his throat and suddenly sentences were spilling out. But they were not English. Marlowe shook his head to indicate that he did not understand; the man kept on talking.

And then Bickerstaff interrupted, talking the same language, and Marlowe realized it was French. The man turned to Bickerstaff and continued his explanation. At last Bickerstaff turned to Marlowe.

“You were right. This is indeed James’s slaver. Or was, in any event. These men are from a French merchantman. They were attacked by black pirates, he says, from this ship.” He nodded toward the slaver, drifting away downwind. “The whole crew was butchered, save for them, because they were in the yawl boat when the attack took place. I must say, James is a man of some passion, but I am hard pressed to see him killing unarmed sailors in cold blood, white though they may be.”

“As am I. But I was surprised to hear of his sticking a knife in the blackbirder’s captain, so it is hard to know what he is capable of.”

Bickerstaff turned and asked the French sailor a question, nodded as the man made a lengthy reply, and then turned back to Marlowe.

“They abandoned the slaver, which is in a wretched state, and took the merchantman. They carried away the merchantman’s chief mate, who was also in the yawl at the time of the attack.”

“Oh, God!” Marlowe threw his head back, let out a long sigh of aggravation that built into a frightening shout as he tried to vent his pent-up anger. Then he turned to the first officer.

“Mr. Fleming, pray see that the Frenchmen have some rum and some food. These poor bastards need some drink, some strong drink, I should imagine. Mr. Griffin, clear the longboat away and tell off a boarding party.”

The slaver, her sails all aback, had drifted a good distance downwind from the Elizabeth Galley. An hour later she was safely to leeward when the fire that Marlowe and the boarding party had built in her hold worked its way through the main deck and up the rigging, turning the entire stinking affair into a great pyre.

James and the others had tried to clean it. Marlowe could see the signs: the recently scrubbed decks, the faint trace of sulfur in the hold where they had apparently lit brimstone to drive out the even more horrid smells of people locked down for weeks.

But he could imagine that all the cleaning in the world would not wash away the horror that that ship carried aboard. They must have been glad to be rid of her. In her state she would not have carried them back across the ocean.

Now he and Bickerstaff stood together on the Elizabeth Galley’s quarterdeck, all the way aft, out of earshot of the helmsmen or any of the crew. In the gathering dark they watched the bright column of flame that rose above the hated vessel and danced across the ocean swells.

Damn that ship, Marlowe thought. He hated her as much as James must have. Damn her, she was the cause of all this.

Burn, you whoreson villain.

“Ah, Francis,” he sighed. “It was all so much simpler once. Being a barbarous pirate has its advantages, you know. When one operates beyond all morality, then one never suffers such a thing as a moral dilemma.”

Bickerstaff sniffed. “Neither does a frog or a maggot concern itself with moral considerations, but I couldn’t recommend the life. But let me ask you, Thomas, why were you so distraught to find they had carried off the chief mate? It did not seem to be from concern for his safety.”

“No, faith, it was not. The damned annoying thing is now they have someone who can navigate. If it had just been James I reckon he would have tried to beat to the eastward against the trades-he would not guess at any other way to fetch Africa. We could have run him down easy, put an end to this. As it is we are but a day or two behind them.

“But now they have someone who knows the sailing route. Now they can sail to Africa and we have to follow and I have to convince these dogs forward that we’re doing it all for their greater glory and riches, or who knows what they will do.”

He stared at the flames. They were all he could see now, with night having come full on them while they talked.