The Guineaman Read online

  As if sensing this lightening of the surgeon’s mood, though in fact merely reacting to his obvious recovery from sea-sickness and his appearance on deck, Captain Makepeace called out to him.

  ‘Mr Kite!’ Kite turned. Just for a moment he realised his escape was compromised by the fact that Makepeace knew his name and had presumably used it to obtain the false papers declaring Kite a surgeon. But the thought failed to dampen his mood as he crossed the deck, almost sure of his footing, to pay his respects to the master.

  ‘Good morning, Captain,’ he said, and recalling Gerard’s remark, added, ‘I apologise for failing in my duty…’

  Makepeace cut him short. ‘No matter, Mr Kite, there is little duty for you to attend to at the moment and that is why you may stand your watch on deck with Mr Gerard. ‘’Twill be useful for you to acquire a working knowledge of the ship,’ Makepeace said, fixing his eyes on Kite and giving his next remark significance. ‘You never know when you might find it expedient to become a proper sea-officer.’

  If Makepeace guessed anything of Kite’s predicament, and the gravity of his utterance suggested to the susceptible Kite that he not only guessed but could see into Kite’s very conscience, the captain’s expression was not unsympathetic. Instead of holding over Kite the Damoclean sword of exposure, Makepeace seemed to offer a friendly, almost disinterested complicity. As if underwriting this unspoken bond, Makepeace went on, ‘at sea, Mr Kite, one never knows what will happen. You have joined a fraternity whose fates are inextricably linked. We are, forgive the abject pun, all in the same boat.’

  Makepeace was smiling with that charming air that Kite had first noticed in the Liverpool tap-room. He smiled back. ‘I take your point, sir, and will do my utmost to acquire some sea-sense, if that is what you call it.’

  ‘Very well, Mr Kite. That will do splendidly.’

  As if to set its seal of approval upon this accommodation, the overcast broke and the sun suddenly shone down, transforming the world, turning the under-crests of the grey and breaking seas to a remarkable pellucid green. From one of these there suddenly leapt a pair of bottle-nosed dolphins, whose course for some moments lay parallel with that of the Enterprize.

  That evening, after standing his first watch with Gerard, Kite wrote in his journal:

  Today, thro’ the Kindness of Captn Makepeace, I Kept the Deck with the First Lieutenant, Mr Gerard. He was civil enough to Inform me the Names of the Spars and Sails and of the Principal Ropes which Controul them. He also appraised me of the Difference between the Standing and the Running Rigging, and How the Helm Works, Promising, should circumstances permit, to advance my Knowledge by Degrees until I have a Perfect Understanding of Matters Nautical.

  I found his Instruction Interesting and Diverting…

  To those last words, Kite owed an untroubled night’s sleep.

  Not that it was what he would have called a full night, for the Enterprize’s officers worked watch-and-watch, four hours on and four hours off duty. Having perhaps foolishly delayed climbing into his cot until he had made the entry into his journal, Kite found himself roused out again, after less than three hours rest. But he rose willingly enough, and stumbled on deck to be put on the wheel until daylight, an old seaman standing near him to admonish him every time he tried to correct the course my chasing the lubber’s line.

  ‘No, no, Mr Kite. That’ll never do, sir. See,’ the man took the helm and with a swift half turn, stopped the brig from swerving out of her track and throwing all her sails aback. ‘See, the lubber’s line there, that marks the heading of the ship and while it looks like the compass card swings in the bowl, ’tis really the ship that be swinging. Though in truth,’ the man conceded, ‘the motion of the ship does make the compass card turnabout a bit.’

  It took a moment for the laws of physics to sink in at such a chilly, dark and unsociable hour, but when Kite had grasped the fact that, despite appearances, the compass card effectively remained stationary and the ship revolved around it, he had little trouble holding the Enterprize on her headlong course to the south-westwards. That morning established a pattern for all the days they ran south. Kite quickly picked up the rudiments of sailing a ship and even began to tackle the greater challenge of understanding the art of navigation. By the time Makepeace backed Enterprize’s maintopsail off Funchal and sent a boat thither for fresh fruit and some casks of Madeira wine, Kite could work a traverse, box the compass in quarter-points, join two ropes in a short splice, lay an eye-splice and knew a dozen common knots and hitches. He had, moreover, taken his place on the yards when shortening down and knew the perils of passing gaskets. All this raised his status in the eyes of the crew so that they were less free with their comments and began to recognise that while he remained a neophyte, he nevertheless possessed the qualities of a potential officer. Not that Kite appreciated any of this, he was far too self-conscious of his short-comings and ignorance. But he was keen to learn and discovered for himself that here was something that, all unknowing, he had an aptitude for. However, while the crew might approve of him, they had yet to test him and on the fifteenth night at sea, a few moments after he had gone below and was in the act of undressing, a soft knock came at his cabin door.

  Opening it, Kite was confronted by a young able-seaman named Thomas. He was a short, wiry man, not much older than Kite himself but with the sun-burnt skin of an experienced sailor.

  ‘Beg pardon, Mr Kite, but I’ve got a problem. Not the first time, but I’ve caught a dose of the clap.’

  ‘Ah…’ said Kite, conscious that he had been saved the ignominious task of attempting a diagnosis. ‘You’ve had it before, then?’

  ‘Scarce rid of it, sir, to be truthful, but a body can’t pine forever an’ there always are them promptings by way of nature, sir.’

  Kite frowned, caught between genuine interest, fear of the infection and of being exposed as a fraud. ‘It is an, er, intractable condition,’ he bluffed, aware only of the pertinacity of the infection. ‘Er, what did the last surgeon prescribe for you?’

  ‘That purple stuff…’

  ‘Permanganate of potassium,’ Kite said hurriedly, keeping his voice matter-of-fact as he grasped the passing straw. ‘And you, er, did the application yourself?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Thomas said leering, ‘bit awkward to get another fella to do it, even aboard this bleeder, eh? But it works out all right when we get the blackamores aboard…’

  ‘You mean…’

  ‘You know, Mr Kite,’ Thomas confided with obvious relish, ‘ask one them black wenches to get it up and you can pour the stuff down dandy-oh. We make a joke of it, telling them they’ll all beget mulatto pickaninnies and the perm… the purple stuff is white magic.’

  Kite dismissed the disturbing image Thomas’s words conjured up. ‘What do you use to apply the solution?’

  ‘There’s plenty of straw in the manger forward…’

  ‘You must clean it first,’ said Kite with sharp authority, in his first original contribution to this one-sided medical discussion. It was a fundamental principle he had learned from his father, that no object should be introduced to any sub-cutaneous part, wound or orifice of the human body that had been in any contact with another such place. Using a straw from the filth of the live animals’ manger as a pipette to insert drops of specific into the canal of the male member, seemed a most disquieting method. ‘Salt water will do, but don’t neglect this precaution and use neither the straw twice, nor neglect this whenever you take up a piece of the stuff. I shall make you up a preparation in the morning. Now, you had better let me see…’

  The tone of Kite’s short lecture to Thomas obscured any early havering on the former’s part, while Kite’s inspection of the errant seaman’s organ convinced Thomas of Kite’s professional ability. Kite’s own morbid fascination threatened to keep him awake after Thomas had gone. Terrible things, it seemed, lurked between the thighs of human beings. But he forbore commenting upon his first medical task and instead, as he lay
back in his cot he forced himself to enumerate the ropes that controlled the fore topsail. Before he had followed through the procedure for taking in a double reef, he was fast asleep.

  Thus passed Kite’s days as the Enterprize sailed southwards from Madeira. Passing the magnificent peak of Tenerife she skimmed before the north-east trade wind under a sky of unsurpassable blue. The puff-ball clouds that accompanied their passage were unthreatening, but a metaphorical cloud was growing in Kite’s mind. The dominating terror of Susie’s death and the aftermath that followed, had disposed Kite’s mind to imaginings of deep-seated worry. He had become an obsessive, and had had to develope techniques to divert his mind and to prevent himself dwelling upon the horrors he associated with those terrible few moments in the Hebblewhite barn. Thus the trick of going over Gerard’s lessons to superimpose his own memories had helped him manage this inclination to worry, but also acted as a maturing process, moulding the turn of his mind into deep ruts of preoccupation. Thus Thomas’s crude reference to ‘the blackamores’ and ‘those black wenches’ combined with certain oblique references of Gerard and others, to prompt him to consider the next few weeks, when they would arrive ‘on the coast’ and take up their lading of slaves. The notion of slavery was one that Kite considered as Biblical, most naturally associating the state of enslavement with the Israelites. This historical plight seemed remote, so remote that it involved the active participation of the Jewish God who was, most emphatically, on the side of his unfortunate if occasionally wayward children. Jehovah’s rescue of the Hebrew tribes was the triumph of good over evil and their delivery out of the hands of the Egyptians a satisfying confirmation of ultimate justice.

  If we are to take on Board Numbers of Slaves, that they are Black seems not to be the Matter for Consideration, he wrote in his journal. That they are not Free and are to be Sold into Servitude seems the Chief Concern in this Age of Enlightenment. That we Traffick in Them places Us in the like Case as that of the Egyptians who, for Their Wickednesses, were afflicted by Seven Plagues and Drowned in the Red Sea.

  Life, it seemed then to Kite, had every prospect of being one long series of moral dilemmas compared to which the acquisition of a sea-officer’s skills was a simple matter, and moreover, a far more enjoyable one. Therefore he threw himself into an understanding of meridian altitudes, parallel sailing and stellar recognition. He learned how to determine the latitude by the elevation of Polaris and it has to be said, entirely specious methods of determining the ship’s longitude. Despite this progress, Makepeace made no attempt to share the secrets of command, to show Kite, nor any of his officers, the Enterprize’s progress on a chart. The descending value of the parallels of latitude therefore meant little to Kite who could not relate them to their progress across the earth’s sphere, no matter how much he longed to as he recalled the large globe in the grammar school at Cockermouth. Nor did Gerard or his colleague in the Second Lieutenant’s berth, evince the slightest curiosity in this regard. For them the swift progress of the ship was all that mattered, and while they took those observations that were necessary, they seemed to work the figures out as a matter of rote, handing them to Makepeace for inscription upon the chart in the privacy of the commander’s cabin. Kite was somewhat confounded by this apparent secrecy; it was only long afterwards that he discovered that the chart, such as it was, was Makepeace’s private property and bore all the secret notations of the captain’s collected experience. Indeed, the printed chart was almost valueless without these superscriptions, bare of any but the most basic geographical information and produced speculatively by a company of self-styled cartographers in the city of London.

  But these esoterica did not concern Kite in those last weeks of their outward passage to Guinea. Among a few sprains, bruises and one rupture, he dealt competently with a number of cases of venereal infection. His patients reported relief from the painful symptoms of the infliction by the lavish application of permanganate of potassium. Kite caught them once, a circle of half-ashamed, half-amused seamen, squatting by common consent within the ampitheatre of the coiled anchor cables in the orlop, their pipette-straws applied to their private parts. They had a guard, designed to keep out the mockery of their unaffected shipmates, though Kite himself was suffered to pass as the Enterprize’s medical officer. Despite this privilege, he beat a hasty retreat, musing on the willingness of the men to share their common misfortune in so public and demeaning a way.

  Somewhat shocked, he mentioned this to Gerard, as they stood upon the quarterdeck that afternoon as the Enterprize doubled Cape Verde, distant somewhere far to the east. Gerard merely chuckled.

  ‘There are few secrets in a ship, Kite, that is why we maintain the social distinctions of rank, or all would soon tumble down.’ His face became serious and he turned towards his younger companion. ‘You may find greater surprises in store for you. You should not judge us. Just as you will find the ways of the blackamores curious because of the country in which they dwell and the tribal society in which they live, you must regard seamen in a somewhat similar fashion. We are, after all circumscribed by the limits of our ship, cooped up upon the raging main and subject to all the powerful vicissitudes of nature… Well, you shall see and you are not now a man apart; you are now – well almost,’ Gerard grinned again, ‘one of us.’

  Kite only partially understood these oblique remarks, but he was pleasantly surprised by the acceptance of the Enterprize’s second-in-command whom, despite his earlier sarcasm, had proved a willing instructor and an affable companion.

  ‘Oh, by the way,’ Gerard went on, ‘are you much of a shot?’

  For a second Kite was drawing imaginary sights on a lofting grouse rising above his native fells. ‘I can shoot, yes,’ he said.

  ‘Good. Fencing is not required, but can you handle a blade?’

  ‘Well, I was tolerably able with single-stick.’

  ‘A hack and slash man, eh,’ grinned Gerard. ‘That will do nicely, I daresay.’

  The following day at the change of watch at noon, Makepeace summoned all hands. By a process of elimination, with all the seaman shooting at empty wine bottles hauled out to the lee fore topgallant yard arm, a platoon of ‘marines’ was enlisted from the most able shots. These were placed under the command of the second lieutenant, Francis Molloy, a heavily built Liverpool-Irishman whose acquaintance Kite had hardly made, since he was on the opposite watch.

  The officers too, including Kite, enjoyed a few shots by way of target practice. On completion, Makepeace told the mustered company that within a few days they would arrive off their destination, the coast of Guinea. ‘We shall anchor off York Island,’ he announced, ‘in the mouth of the Sherbro River, and determine the state of trade. It is not my intention to linger if we can complete our lading, though I must seek the best prices for the goods we have brought with us. In the mean time I shall not countenance any drunkenness among you. Most of you know well the native liking for liquor and most of you have indulged yourselves to excess in Liverpool. Any man found half-seas-over runs a great risk from apprehension by the negro chiefs whose kings are not only important to themselves but to the prosperity of our trade. Therefore I consider any man among you who loses himself to drunkenness to be opposed to the profit of our voyage and he can expect little mercy from me. I can always ship mulattoes as seamen…’ Makepeace paused to let the inference of abandonment sink in and the men shifted uncomfortably; Kite knew from his associating with Gerard and the men, that Makepeace was both admired and feared.

  ‘As for licentiousness,’ Makepeace resumed, ‘I cannot properly ask you to be continent, but I can advise you to be wise. As you indulge yourselves in liquor in Liverpool, you are best to whore in the Indies…’

  ‘Where the dagoes have poxed all the women…’ a voice queried loudly from the crowd, ‘not me, captain, nor you if I know your liking…’

  A laugh passed through the old hands and it was Makepeace’s turn to look discomfitted as he braced himself and called for
silence.

  ‘Belay there! D’you mind my words!’

  ‘Aye,’ murmured someone behind to Kite, ‘not thy deeds.’

  Makepeace called out: ‘Now dismiss!’

  Kite turned and caught Molloy’s eye as the men dispersed. The big Irishman was shaking his head. ‘What did…?’ Kite began, but Molloy cut his question short.

  ‘He shouldn’t moralise on that score,’ Molloy muttered.

  ‘The commander is a womaniser?’ Kite asked, stealing a glance at the figure of Makepeace as he descended the companionway to his cabin.

  ‘Womaniser, profligate, whore-master, bugger, but a most successful slaving commander withal. So, my friend, our Cap’n Makepeace is not altogether a bad fellow.’

  This news shocked Kite. Up until this revelation he had assumed Makepeace to be a gentleman, if engaged in a trade of some moral dubiety. Exposure to the world beyond the lakes and valleys of his former life, suggested to Kite that the extent of human activity and endeavour was almost incredibly diverse. Much might run contrary to one’s private opinions, but that did not arm one with an incontrovertible righteousness. Judgement and Vengeance, Kite confided to his journal later, are matters for the Divine Disposer of All Things. It was not for him to do more than make the best of his circumstances. In the eyes of parts of the world, he recalled with a shudder, he was himself far beyond the moral Pale. But Molloy’s confidence deprived Captain Makepeace’s invitation to dinner of any pleasurable anticipation.

  It was difficult to square Molloy’s evaluation of Makepeace’s character with his host. The Enterprize was heading south-east, parallel with the Guinea coast, and the captain presided at his table with the westering sun gilding the heaving seas astern of the ship. Occasional twinkling points of light stabbed the incautious eye as it was drawn beyond the dark outline of the captain to the mighty ocean beyond the glass of the windows. The wake streamed out, a marbled roil of water given a curious personality, Kite thought inconsequentially, by the groaning of the rudder beneath them. It was odd that although the passage of the ship seemed stately from the vantage point of the quarterdeck, the escape of water running out from underneath the stern was surprisingly fast.