The Guineaman Read online

  Kite sighed, mastering himself. ‘Tell them gently, Mr Plantagenet, like a gentleman would…’ Plantagenet received this instruction with a kind of confused comprehension. The allusion to gentleness in such a context led him to a concept he had not previously encountered, let alone considered. His curious social pretension led him to a ridiculously exaggerated assumption of what Kite required. In any other circumstances, he would have been thought sarcastically insolent, but Plantagenet’s desire for a status he did not understand but only imagined, made his delivery a model of moderation at which the surrounding seamen only gaped with astonishment.

  ‘Will you please to be taking off your garments and washing yourselves, while the water is thrown over your heads,’ he insisted in their native tongue. ‘Then you must wash your nice clothes until they become all-clean.’

  The women went through the business of washing and Kite conducted his medical examination. For the most part these last groups of women had boarded the Enterprize unmolested. The ship’s company had slaked their sharp appetites of sexual deprivation and were, Kite learned in time, recoiling from their intimacies in a kind of disgust which was only partly directed at the slaves. As the numbers of these grew, and with the increase the risks of a rising, the seamen’s duties associated with securing and tending them made them no longer even mere objects of long frustrated human desire, but mere parcels of cargo, representations of tasks to be done and duties to be attended. That so demanding and tiresome a liability had also swiftly become a noisome obligation, distanced the white seamen from the acts of their immediate pasts.

  ‘How could I have fucked that?’ he heard Thomas say in self-disgust, though this sensation was manifested by an intimidating gesture at an adjacent male slave who barred his passage along the between deck, seeking to shield the woman to whom Thomas referred from a further violation. The dismissal and dehumanisation implicit in Thomas’s neutral pronoun, which robbed the wretched woman of gender, shocked Kite as he made his way below, following the last batch of slaves down to where Kerr and his gang were shackling them in the confined spaces allotted them.

  The smell in what were now called the slave rooms was already foul. In the five days since they began loading their human cargo there had been little effort to clean the space. With no freedom to move around and a ban on any airing or exercise on deck until the Enterprize was at sea, the slaves had been induced to use buckets to defecate into, but the numbers of these were limited, nor were they emptied properly. Despite a primitive attempt at sanitation by Kerr, the sharp stink of urine and the heavier odours of human excrement permeated the air. Kite had learned from Molloy and Kerr that a strict and not inconsiderate regimen would begin once they had cleared the Sherbro bar, but in the mean time, the restrictions made the slave decks a terrible place.

  Kite saw the girl put her hand to her mouth as she descended into the darkness from the glaring sunlight on deck. The pity he felt for all of the blacks, which he was utterly powerless to extend in any practical manner to ameliorate their condition, he now felt he should offer her. But how? Any selection of a female was clear evidence of his desire and Kite even suspected his own motives, for the strong feelings the young woman had aroused in him were unequivocally possessive.

  Captain Makepeace, who had already selected a pair of female slaves to grace his bed, had so far seduced them to his purposes that they were occasionally seen in tatty gowns, thoughtfully provided by the commander. It was clear that the tide of rape had ebbed, to be replaced during the middle passage by more regular relationships between most of the men and their chosen slave.

  Not merely was the trade well-regulated, Kite thought bitterly, it was remarkably democratic. And, he wanted to write in his journal but could not bring himself to do so, remarkably broad in its acceptance of human lust, for he had come across one of the able-seamen in the act of buggering a young black male.

  On the eve of departure, Makepeace gave a dinner in his cabin. On either side of the captain sat his black mistresses, awkward in their dresses, unused to being seated on chairs and eating with their hands. They were already half-drunk, a bizarre sight in their tawdry finery, giggling, curious and uninhibited.

  ‘I take two, Mr Kite,’ said Makepeace seeing the discomfiture of his perspiring and red-faced surgeon, ‘because they are company for one another.’ Gerard and the other two officers round the table, sweating and stinking in the heat, slapping at the buzzing mosquitoes, drank immoderately and laughed dutifully. Kite had tried to avoid the invitation, volunteering to stand the anchor watch, but Gerard had told him his presence was insisted upon and that in any case, Molloy would stand the watch with his marines.

  Although Gerard had taken his pleasure of the women, he had not retained any exclusively for himself and it was only the captain who used his privilege to sport his harlots so shamelessly. The remainder of the seamen were expected to keep their selected victims shackled, except when they were required for carnal purposes. Former experiences of the slaves getting their hands on the seamens’ knives prohibited too great a freedom, even for those slave women who, for whatever reason, became compliant. During the middle passage, Molloy had told Kite, he would be surprised how many of the black women acquiesced to their circumstances and could be seen squatting washing their new masters’ clothing in buckets of sea or rain-water.

  ‘Of course,’ Molloy had explained, adding detail to this picture of nautical domesticity, ‘we never let them on deck without leg-irons.’

  The dinner, which consisted of a deliciously baked pig, seemed set to end in riot, but Makepeace, despite appearances to the contrary was far from being a man in the throes of unbridled lust. After about two hours, when the plates had been cleared and the company was slumped in amiable disarray, he ordered Gerard, Kite, Kerr and the gunner, a man named Mitchell, to fill their glasses. They dutifully drank a loyal toast to ‘His Majesty King George’ and in view of the war, ‘Damnation to His Majesties Enemies’. This done Makepeace roused his drowsy mistresses and signalled to Gerard. Taking the hint, the first lieutenant rose and the officers clumsily and noisily withdrew.

  ‘Until dawn, gentlemen,’ Makepeace said, ‘when we shall get under weigh, I wish you a good night.’

  Kite did not go immediately to his cabin, but as was his habit climbed on deck. Molloy, however, was not his usual friendly self. Piqued at not being able to indulge himself at the cabin table, tortured by his own confused feelings, the second lieutenant was short tempered and a little in liquor.

  ‘So, you’ve been enjoying yourself, eh? Sporting with our gallant commander and his black whores. Now you want to come and salve your tender conscience with old Frank Molloy, the dependable bog-Irish fool who’ll stand a watch while you wallow in filth…’

  ‘That’s neither true, nor just…’

  ‘Don’t speak of justice aboard here,’ spat Molloy.

  ‘Look, I volunteered to stand the anchor watch…’

  ‘Oh, go to the devil, damn you, Kite.’

  Kite stared at his friend. ‘The devil,’ he said quietly, ‘aye, ’tis surely hell below.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake stop your prating, you pious bastard!’ Molloy turned away, calling in a loud voice, ‘Sentries report!’

  Kite made for the companionway as the voices of the dutymen responded in the darkness.

  ‘Fo’c’s’le; all’s well!’

  ‘’Tween deck forrard; all’s well!’

  ‘’Tween deck aft; all’s well!’

  Kite descended into the greater darkness of the slave deck. This was lit by the dim gleam of lanterns set at intervals on the stanchions, but these burnt fitfully in the mephitic air, failing to penetrate the gloom to any extent. The thick atmosphere was filled with the groans, snores and miserable whimpers of the sleeping slaves; occasionally a leg-iron chinked as a slave moved in his or her restless slumber.

  Kite paused, his eyes slowly adjusting. The slight high-lighting of the lamps upon a sweat-moistened shoulder, th
igh, breast or buttock, created the impression that he gazed out over a calm sea on a dark and impenetrable night. The occasionally stirring of the slaves added to this effect, looking like the slow movement upon the black tide’s surface. The sentries’ cries of ‘all’s well’ echoed ironically in his ears; how in God’s name could anything be well in this hell-hole?

  Utterly dejected, Kite turned aft towards the bulkhead door that led to the officers’ accommodation, walking carefully down the narrow lane between the recumbent bodies. At the gunroom door the sentry manning the after station in the between deck stirred, the steel of his musket just discernible as he moved.

  ‘Kite, the surgeon,’ he identified himself.

  ‘Very good, sir.’ It was Thomas.

  Kite paused again, looking forward across that black sea of limbs and bodies. ‘What d’you think of it, Thomas?’ he asked in a whisper.

  ‘What, the cargo, Mr Kite?’

  ‘Yes, the cargo…’

  ‘Well, it’s money, sir… An’ it’s up to you to see they all gets to Antigua,’ he added.

  Kite did not reply, though he remained staring forward. He knew the impact of this sight would dull, he had learned that much already, but he remained a moment longer, unaware of Thomas’s fidgetting beside him. So, by the lights of the times in which we dwell, he thought to himself, all is well in such a well-regulated trade.

  Then he felt his leg touched. It was the merest sensation, offering no threat of seizure, so brief and so light that it might have been an insect bite. Looking down he thought he saw, though he could not be sure, the face of the girl staring up at him.

  Part Two

  Iron

  Chapter Six

  The Middle Passage

  During the five days they had spent embarking the slaves, Kite’s duties had kept him, if not constantly busy, then constantly preoccupied. Superficial and inept though his so-called medical examinations had been, they had served to cast him more firmly in the role of the Enterprize’s surgeon and, coupled with his treatment of the ‘cable tier rangers’, established him credibly enough in his adopted profession, leaving only Captain Makepeace in possession of the truth. Moreover, while Makepeace had revealed a side of his character that Kite considered distinctly unpleasant, he had done so without lasting hostility to Kite himself. True, the captain had expressed himself with a veiled threat, but Kite found Makepeace thereafter resumed his usual smooth cordiality, even if he was accompanied by a black trull, a somewhat disconcerting sight on the quarterdeck.

  Kite accepted the threat as little more than a rebuke, given like any other reprimand by the commander of a vessel maintaining his authority and the establishment of his will over that of his subordinates. If, Kite mused unhappily, there had been any real alteration in their relationship, it had been on his own part, for it was clear from the asides of Molloy and Gerard, that his own attitude had changed perceptibly: the nick-name of ‘Quaker’ had stuck.

  Oddly, Kite did not mind. In a sense it pleased him to stand against the slave trade, as a genuine Quaker would have done. Quaker opinion was not unknown in the Lakeland of Kite’s boyhood, roots of the philosophy lay in adjacent Lancashire and his father had spoken of them in admiration. But Kite could not claim any moral superiority; he was motivated less out of a general compassion for the mass of the unfortunate blacks, and more out of a specific pity for the young woman.

  In the first days of the middle passage Kite found himself busy in the establishment and supervision of the regimen laid down for the slaves by Makepeace. Amid the stink of vomit and the groans of the chronically sea-sick, the adopted routine went some way to maintaining a semblance of cleanliness. The day began when those women who had become the concubines of the sailors and were therefore to be trusted to a degree, went to the galley and brought the pots of manioc and rice to the slave deck where it was doled out under the watchful eye of Mr Kerr and his mates. These men were the immediate regulators of the slaves. Thereafter the decks were sluiced down and, if the weather was not too boisterous, the ventilating ports were opened. While this was in progress, the first batch of slaves were let loose and, still in leg irons, allowed up on deck, where they walked in a circle round the waist, circling the chocked boats on the booms amidships. From the forecastle, they clinked aft along the larboard gangway, turned across the forepart of the quarterdeck and, passing the carriage gun aimed at their accommodation below, then went forward again, along the starboard gangway.

  Having been specially constructed for the carriage of slaves, the Enterprize had a slightly elevated quarterdeck. This was raised at the hance and fenced with an athwartships rail which mounted two swivel guns. This arrangement, gave a clear path across the beam of the ship to facilitate the exercise of the slaves, but, if an uprising were to occur, it provided a defensible position to be taken up aft by the ship’s company. Standing at the forward end of the raised quarterdeck, his hands on the rail before him, allowed Makepeace to review the condition of his cargo from a position of advantage. Makepeace undertook this duty seriously and never permitted the presence of his whores on deck at this time, which he would have considered improper. Instead he stood with his surgeon and the lieutenant of the watch, while the marines with loaded muskets, gunners manning the swivels and the midships carriage gun, and the watch on deck, all took up positions of vantage and vigilance. This show of force acted as a mild, though ever-present, act of passive, though potent intimidation. Kite’s dutiful attendance at these inspections filled the forenoon of every day as the Enterprize scudded westwards across blue seas and beneath a clear sky that sported the white and fluffy clouds of fine weather.

  Each batch of slaves, their eyes downcast, shuffled four times round their circuit before passing below by way of the after companionway as the next group emerged onto the forecastle. From time to time Makepeace would stop the procession and pull a slave out of the line, concerned for the individual’s condition. Commonly he bestowed this attention on a male who had been chafing his leg iron until the man’s ankles had bled. Such injuries were pointed out to Kite. A seamen named Wilson had been designated the surgeon’s assistant. It was Wilson’s duty to daub with white lead the right shoulder of any affected slave. After the last batch of slaves had gone below, Kite and Wilson followed them, applying tallow to their chafed ankles.

  By the time this lengthy routine had been completed, it was approaching apparent noon, when the vessel’s latitude was determined. At Makepeace’s suggestion, Kite took upon himself the task of acting for whichever of the two lieutenants was watch-below, and thus, with Makepeace and the watch-keeping officer, was party to this navigational ritual. For this, the Enterprize was well furnished with no less than four quadrants, each of the officers being require by the owners to provide their own, while Kite was loaned an instrument that had belonged to a former, long-dead lieutenant. The man had had no relatives and therefore his belongings were not auctioned off for the benefit of his widow; instead most were given away in trading deals with the lançados who were always eager for odds and ends of apparel and artefacts with which to dignify their persons. Makepeace had with-held the quadrant on account of its value and its uselessness to the ignorant.

  On the fourth morning of the passage Kite stood beside Makepeace as the slaves disconsolately circled the deck. It was a fine day, the ship was making seven knots and Makepeace was in an expansive mood.

  ‘Well, Mr Kite,’ he said waving his right hand over the passing slaves in, Kite thought, a gesture of devilish benediction. ‘I think you may take some credit for the condition of these blacks.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Kite replied in a subdued tone which caused Makepeace to turn and look at him.

  ‘Come sir, you are still not moping over the immorality of this trade, are you? I hear you are against it, and doubt its morality. If so it is really too depressing.’ Kite said nothing. The young woman had just emerged forward, where he had been watching for her and he felt his heart quicken as she blinked in
the sunshine and then stared straight at him. Though the slaves often looked about them as they came up on deck into the sunshine, by now only a few met the eyes of the white men who stood guard over them. They had long been accustomed to the presence of guards, whom they called vultures in their own tongue, and they had learned how to avoid drawing attention to themselves.

  But Makepeace was unaware of Kite’s preoccupation with observing the approaching woman, taking his demeanour for continuing disapproval. He let out his breath in a sigh audible above the clinking shuffle of the slaves and the moan of the wind in the rigging.

  ‘You know, do you not, that these blacks were already prisoners long before we sought to buy them…’

  The young woman had turned aft and was approaching the quarterdeck down the larboard gangway. He could not see her breasts, they were hidden by the shoulder of an older woman in front of her, but he noticed a ring was missing from her left ear.

  ‘Their condition was abject before we took them aboard and, mark you, the women would not have been spared any horrors by the black tribes that captured them. What they are receiving now is a degree of care that they cannot have imagined possible when they were cooped up in the stockadoes of the King of Bulum… Why, Mr Kite, look at them; they are in the very pink!’

  Kite did not hear the inept and insulting jibe, for just then the young woman turned and walked across the deck. Kite could see, so close and just below him, the glossy, upward sweep of her breasts and the slight, seductive movement of them as she walked. She had held his gaze all down the ship’s side and only dropped it now, as she passed him, secure in the knowledge that he was watching her. Her long, delicate arms hung down and she lowered her head so that he saw the graceful line of her neck. She had worn a ring only in her left ear, and this was turned away from him, but as he stared down at her, he noticed the bloody graze on her ankle and, interrupting Makepeace said, ‘By your leave, sir… Wilson, daub this woman…’