At the beginning of July the ship came into hazy weather with light falls of rain in the night and a small northern swell. At sunrise on the morning of the second, Thurso took an observation of the amplitude and was surprised at the extent of the compass error – it was customary to allow no more than a half point of deviation in these waters. He began to suspect that he was on a course eastward of the Grand Canaries but found it difficult to believe that he could be so far out in his reckoning on a relatively short run and in this continual fine weather.
Some degree of uncertainty he was long accustomed to, navigation being a chancy business at this time. Latitude could be known with reasonable accuracy by measuring the height of the sun at noon; but to establish longitude Thurso had to depend for direction on his compass and for distance travelled on the log – a small board drawn astern by which the ship’s speed could be measured. This was not an accurate instrument, allowance having always to be made for drifting to leeward and for the action of currents, so the reckoning was frequently wrong. It was seldom that the master of a ship at sea knew exactly where he was. But the error here was greater than usual. It began to seem to Thurso now that they had come between Madeira and Port Santo, though without seeing either. If that was so, he was a good fifty leagues eastward of his reckoning. The suspicion troubled Thurso and darkened his mood. He sat alone in his cabin with a bottle of brandy, brooding on the malignant current that had carried them thus far out, seeking to understand whence it had come and to guess what offence on the ship had set it in motion.
Another man flogged today, Paris was writing in his journal some hours later. This for fouling his bedding after due warning by Haines, the boatswain, who I believe is generally hated. Thomas True, the man’s name. He was given a dozen lashes by our accomplished captain and unlike Wilson cried out almost from the beginning. When it was over he was not able to stand unsupported. That such cruel punishment can overcome engrained habits of uncleanliness or perhaps symptoms of some deeper disorder of mind, I do not believe. Indeed, it seems too savage a question even to speculate upon; and it is one in any event I could not pursue with anyone on board the vessel, my position as an officer of the ship preventing frank speech among us.
I went forward to do what I could for True’s lacerations. I have also lately treated a member of the crew named Cavana for an inflamed condition of the eyelids which I suspect is venereal. I got it from True that he had come as a youth to Liverpool, to better his condition, as he says, after working from the age of ten in a stone quarry in north Wales. Having spent what money he had, he was given credit by a tavern-keeper and afterwards threatened with the magistrates unless he signed on for a slaver. He was also obliged, in the event of his death, to bequeath his wages for the trip to this same tavern-keeper.
Since then he has been on several slaveships. He says he would not choose a Guineaman, notwithstanding the higher wages – it appears the men get two shillings a month above the normal rate as an inducement. This does not seem much to me in view of the bad conditions on these ships and the dangers of disease on the Guinea Coast. But the fact is, they cannot choose. All these men are driven by the direst poverty. I do not think there is one of them who would not quit the sea tomorrow if they could, except perhaps Hughes, who is savagely misanthropic and seems happiest when up in the rigging alone. He too has been on slaveships before, or so I think. It seems to me there is a difference, in the aura they carry about them, between these men who have sailed on Guinea ships before and those who are new to it, however experienced they may be as seamen. I would be hard put to describe this difference; they are rough and reckless men almost all, yet I feel that it exists, and is indeed one of the elements determining the constitution of this floating commonwealth. Some are always alone, like Hughes and a man called Evans, who never speaks; but most have made alliances of one sort or another. The strong have their satellites who also have theirs, in a chain of being like the order of creation which we are told governs the universe. Haines has Libby for attendant and Libby a man named Tapley, a most unpleasant vicious fellow to all appearance, who in his turn lords it over poor Charlie, the cabin boy. At the apex there is Captain Thurso with Barton as his messenger and voice; and Thurso carries a passenger nobody sees but himself, a kind of divine supercargo who relays messages from some more abstract deity, some wielder of wind and current. I am growing convinced that our captain interprets the universe as a system of signals addressed to himself, which is what many do who end in Bedlam; but he has this world of the ship to govern, he has people to judge and punish, he can force the shape of things to suit his sickness. How many of our governors and judges would end poor frothing Bedlamites without this resource, I wonder? And perhaps it is natural so to force the world, if one has the power to do so. We know so little of it in any case – we are so little skilled at reading the evidence. We see appearance only. Then, if we are in a dream, why not be our own interpreters, like Thurso, and turn madness to good account?
Paris paused, and laid down his pen. Perhaps it was wrong to think of systems, to seek coherent principle in this random human community of the ship. The words of his revered Maupertuis came back to him: One constructs for oneself a satisfactory system only when one is ignorant of the characteristics of the phenomena to be explained … What was one left with then but isolated phenomena, fast losing distinctness – the look in a man’s eyes, the start of blood on the pale skin, the patter of drops on the deck. So to what end do I pass distractedly from observation to speculation to some wild call to take on sufferings not my own? I have enough with my own. As if in the duress of a dream it came to him again: my blood, my pain. And now, clamouring for inclusion, there was Thomas True, who soiled his bedding and was flogged for it, and Cavana, with his confiding air and the putrid discharge of his eyes …
It was with a sense of fleeing that he rose, passed out of his cramped cabin and mounted until he could see the rail of the quarterdeck and the dark figure of the helmsman beyond and a scattering of stars. He became aware again of the ploughing ship, the endless complaint of the timbers. With this the familiar sense of unreality descended on him; he was adrift among strangers, set on no purpose that he could call his own. And yet they were not strangers, like him they were captives here; fellow-captives can never be strangers though one knows nothing of them but this – it was one of the lessons of his prison days.
As he stood there he heard eight bells sounding, signalling the end of the watch. Mounting to the deck, he saw a figure he thought was Barton come down the ladder and disappear below. Two or three men stood talking in low tones at the forecastle, having just come off the watch. It was time for him to present himself in the small stateroom adjoining the captain’s cabin where, in company with Barton and Thurso when the business of the ship allowed it, he was accustomed to take his evening meal.
He found the two men at table already, presenting the attitudes that in the course of these weeks at sea had come to seem heraldic to Paris, the one heavy-set and fearsomely immobile, with a face the colour of dark brick and eyes that looked always furious at not being able to burrow further in; the other servile, watchful and jaunty, with a habit of raising his narrow face as if sniffing.
‘Well, sir,’ Thurso said, ‘I believe you have had a busy day.’
Paris saw a faint grin come to Barton’s face, just enough to show the edges of his sharp upper teeth. It was a regular joke with both captain and mate that his days were not much occupied; but in this present remark he thought there was a hint at his ministrations to the man who had been flogged. ‘I do what comes in my way,’ he said.
‘Aye, do you? More will come in your way yet.’
Paris made no immediate reply to this and so was saved from having to reply at all, as Charlie entered at this moment with a tray from the galley. Morgan had that day killed one of the pullets they had brought on board with them and boiled it with onions and black pepper – his invariable way with a winged creature. It lay glistening on its platter now, flanked by a mash of turnip and potato and a jug of oily gravy of Morgan’s own devising. Charlie, who had been promised some of the soup, was bearing himself – and the food – with some ceremony until Thurso growled at him to look sharp, which put him in such sudden fear that he set the tray down too hard and spilled a little of the gravy, for which he was sworn at by Barton and threatened with a caning.
‘Aye, aye, the boy is a born fool, let him go,’ Thurso said with surprising mildness. ‘Mr Barton, be good enough to carve the bird for us.’
‘Why the fatted calf?’ Paris asked, risking a note of levity; he knew the captain’s moods by this time and sensed an air almost of jocularity about him, though the small eyes still ranged over objects as if searching for the cause of what made them less than satisfactory. ‘Is there something to celebrate?’ he said.
The mate, having carved and served with remarkable dexterity, had a mouth now bulging with chicken and mash, and a fork freighted with more of it already moving upward – he was a neat and voracious eater.
‘Explain the situation, Mr Barton,’ Thurso said, in his hoarse monotone.
Barton lowered his fork with visible reluctance. ‘This will be our last evening for supper in here till we have our full copplement of quashees an’ are under way for Jamaica. We are to have the samples hoisted in here tomorrow an’ laid out.’
‘Samples?’ Paris had still not understood.
‘Stock the place out,’ Barton said indistinctly – he had resumed eating while Paris hesitated.
‘We are approaching Africa, Mr Paris,’ Thurso said. ‘Within ten days or so I expect to be sighting Sierra Leone. This room will be our showplace, our shop, sir. The caboceers who come aboard with slaves for sale will be able to see a selection of our goods. It is important they get a fair view of what we are carrying. The negro is appealed to through his eyes, Mr Paris. I know these people. I was dealing for slaves before you were born.’
‘Their eye is caught by shine an’ shimmer,’ Barton said, pausing to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Bright colours is what they likes, an’ jewelly, glittery things. It is no use in the world to explain or describe anythink to them – they have no patience to listen, they cannot hold it in their minds.’
‘Perhaps it is that they don’t believe us,’ Paris said, and was surprised to see a sudden gleam of humour come to the mate’s face.
‘Not believe us?’ Thurso said. The idea seemed completely new to him. ‘I am known on that coast,’ he added after a moment.
‘Bigob, sir, I believe you are,’ Barton said. ‘So the captain thought,’ he added, turning to Paris, ‘since this is our last occasion here for a good bit, we had better have one of the fowl. An’ a very good thought, say I.’
Thurso turned his head slowly. ‘My thoughts are not in your province, Mr Barton. Good or bad, they are beyond your ken.’
‘Aye-aye, sir.’ The mate looked aside with his accustomed expression of wariness. He did not, however, seem particularly chastened by the rebuke, though he had fallen silent.
‘So they come out to the ship, then?’ Paris asked. ‘Those selling slaves, I mean. We do not go into harbour?’ But he saw instantly that he had once again given occasion for the conspiracy of contempt Thurso had such relish for, saw it in the way the captain leaned stiffly forward in his chair and glanced to include the mate.
‘Harbour?’ Thurso said. ‘Off the coast of Sierra Leone? Where is your geography?’
‘Haw, that’s a good ’un,’ Barton said, permitting himself a subservient echo. ‘Show me a blessed harbour there, I would like to see one.’
‘We may get through the surf with the longboat to trade downriver,’ Thurso said, ‘but we cannot stand inshore, not in those seas, Mr Paris. You are talking about the Windward Coast of Africa.’
‘I see, yes,’ Paris said. ‘My ideas of the coast are vague, I will admit.’ He looked from the one to the other. They were united now in knowledge, but he sensed an understanding between them much older. They had known each other before this voyage, his uncle had said so. Thurso had asked for Barton as his mate. Something there was between them, though friendship it could hardly be called. It seemed more in the nature of a shared secret …
‘You and Mr Barton have sailed together before, I believe, sir?’ he said. He saw the look of satisfaction disappear from the captain’s face and his brows draw together suddenly.
‘Sailed together?’ Thurso looked at the man before him, noting again the big, slightly awkward frame, the deeply marked face, touched by the sun now, showing the paleness of the eyes by contrast. These eyes were regarding him steadily and they did not turn away from his frown. He was being stared at aboard his own ship and with eyes that contained some impertinent, some hateful quality of perception, of understanding. He caught sight of Barton nodding and turned his rage that way. ‘Damn you, do you sit there agreeing against me? I sail together with nobody.’ He turned his eyes back to Paris and said less violently, ‘The captain sails together with nobody. Mr Barton has been my first officer on a previous voyage, so much is true. You have a lot to learn, Mr Paris.’
‘I know it, sir, and I am doing my best,’ Paris said.
‘I fancy you will understand things a deal better when we have slaves aboard. At present you think yourself superior to the business, I can tell. You are one of those who despise the money that is made from it. But mark my words, sir, you will go with a whip in your hand and a pistol in your belt like every other man aboard. Depend upon it, the keeper will very quickly decide which side of the cage he is on.’
‘Will he so?’ Paris spoke without pause for reflection, impelled by pride and a passionate sense of opposition. ‘You are admirably clear in your mind, if I may say so, as to who is caged and who is free. I know something of the matter, having seen both sides, but still cannot always see the difference.’
‘Both sides?’ Thurso’s voice had no register for feeling; it came as hoarse and uninflected as ever; but his eyes were fastened on the surgeon’s face. ‘How do you intend that remark?’
Not caution but enmity restrained Paris now. He was silent for some moments then said more calmly, ‘There are many would think the keeper is behind bars too, sir, for all his pistol and his whip.’
Thurso compressed his lips and looked aside. It was clear that he regarded this as not worth answering. Delivered now from the rage that had possessed him, he maintained an unbroken silence for the rest of the meal and Barton, out of prudence or inclination, followed suit, though Paris felt the mate’s eyes on him from time to time.
He was relieved when he was able to get to his feet and bid the others goodnight. Somewhat to his surprise Barton rose with him and the two men left together. Up on deck they stood for a while at the stern. The moon had risen and stood clear of the sea to eastward in faint wreaths of cloud.
Barton seemed disposed to linger. He took a short-stemmed clay pipe from his pocket. ‘Fair weather,’ he said, nodding towards the faint track of moonlight on the dark sea. ‘When the clouds look singed-like round a low moon I allus find it follers with good weather. I don’t know why it is, but I have allus found it so.’
‘Well, I hope it proves so this time again,’ Paris said.
There was silence between them for some moments, then Barton said in accents of sympathy, ‘By God, he is a tartar, though, our captain. The way he shot up at you tonight! An’ you give him no cause. He has done the same with me, many’s the time, but you are a man of learnin’ an’ scallership, so you are bound to feel it more.’
‘I did not mind so very much.’ Paris spoke coolly, warned by Barton’s flattering tone. He knew the mate for a cunning fellow and in a way dispassionate – a dangerous combination. He said, ‘He seemed in good enough spirits to begin with. Something in my question annoyed him.’
Barton puffed at his pipe in silence for some moments, looking down at the track of the moon, which was broader and brighter now. ‘It was not in the question,’ he said. ‘It was in the way you looked at him. Captain Thurso does not like to be looked at. He sets himself above it, if you get my meanin’. But ’tis all bound up with the ship. He was put out of temper by our bein’ so far eastward of the reckonin’, which as we have had fair winds and weather, must be owin’ to a demon of a current settin’ to eastward, an’ out of all nature strong, sir, it cannot be supposed less than twenty mile per diem from the time we passed the parallel of Cape St Vincent. That is what put him out, Mr Paris. Men like you and me, we take a broad view. Rain or shine, what’s the difference?’ Barton paused, raising his face and smiling. The moon was clear of the cloud now, less blanched, more radiant. Light from it fell on the mate’s face. ‘What is a current?’ he said. ‘It is just a settin’ of the water. It is like any thin’ else in this world, tempery. Everythin’ is tempery in this world, whether it is the toothache or the love of wimmin. But he takes it all personal. Now we have had a sightin’ of Tenerife to the west of us, so we knows where we are again.’
‘Well, it is strange,’ Paris said. ‘We can observe the movements of the heavenly bodies, we can chart the course of the planets, but not that of our own ship in a little stretch of water.’
‘By God, that is true.’ Barton spat over the rail and laughed with apparent delight. ‘It never come to me in quite that way before,’ he exclaimed. ‘That is wit, that is what it means to be a man of education. But you have been in the school of life too, haven’t you, Mr Paris? You have seen both sides of the cage.’
Paris remained silent for a short while, looking out to sea. The African coast lay somewhere to the east of them, in the direction of the moon – it seemed to him now that the ship was keeping to the broad track of moonlight. The sails were blanched. He made out a dark figure sitting alone in the cross-timbers of the mainmast and wondered if it were Hughes, who often sat there at night. He sensed the attentiveness of the man waiting beside him. The mate’s question had come concealed in praise. Barton had a nose for weakness, for the festerings of spirit; and he was subtle enough to know that dislike is no impediment to confidences, that men of a certain cast of mind will confide even where they distrust, because not to do so shows fear or shame.
‘Them was your words, I think,’ the mate said softly.
‘Yes,’ Paris said, ‘a physician sees a good deal of life, you know.’
He saw Barton relax his shoulders as if in some release of tension. The mate paused a moment, then said in a different tone, ‘All the same, he was right, the captain was right.’
‘In what way?’
‘There is nothin’ like fear for keeping men together. Nothin’ else will do it, not on a slaveship. It is one of the chief snags of the trade that the merchandise has a tendency to rise on you. You wait till we have got upwards of two hundred negroes chained between decks, all of ’em ready to dash your brains out if they gets a chance, an’ twenty men to guard ’em, feed ’em, wash ’em down, exercise ’em up on deck. By God, Mr Paris, then you will see what fear can do to a man of learnin’ an’ scallership. It will bring him down to the level of the lowest scum aboard what can’t write his own name.’
Barton’s pipe was finished. With a gesture curiously dandified he took a silver thimble from his waistcoat pocket, fitted it on his little finger and pressed out the last spark in the bowl. The tone of these last words had been hostile – perhaps through disappointment at his failure to draw Paris out; but he now raised his face again in the peering way characteristic of him, almost benevolent-seeming. Moonlight caught the thimble in a running gleam as he returned it to his pocket. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you will know which side you are on, whatever you meant in there. You will live in fear like the rest.’ He nodded, still smiling, and turned to go below. ‘It smells of hexcrement,’ he said. ‘You will get to know the smell, because them two hundred or so blacks will be shittin’ in fear too.’
Paris stayed alone on deck some minutes longer, then returned to his cabin. He was too disturbed in mind to think immediately of sleeping. It seemed to him that he had grown more impressionable in these last weeks, more easily affected by what he felt emanating from others. He looked more closely and saw more – not by conscious intention but somehow helplessly. Increasingly of late he had felt drawn into conflict with Thurso, a struggle too mortal for their short acquaintance: it was as if they had recognized each other as heirs to some ancient feud. Just now, on deck, Barton’s rhetoric had oppressed him, and the moral vacancy he felt behind it. The mate had a sort of degraded subtlety about him, a scavenger’s instinct for scents of weakness. And Paris felt himself that it was a weakness, this vulnerability to impression, this too-strong sense of other human beings – almost like a failure of manhood. He blamed it on his isolation. In the removal of all that was customary in his life, some customary skin of protection also had gone, it seemed.
He found solace for the spirit now in De Motu Cordis. The Latin text acted on him these days with the power of incantation. He had earlier been labouring to do justice to Harvey’s paean to the heart’s pre-eminence towards the end of chapter eight: Just as the sun deserves to be called the heart of the world, so is the heart the sun of the microcosm and the first principle of life, whose virtue quickens the blood and keeps it free from all taint of corruption …
It was not, he reflected, that the analogy was original; the notion of the heart as the sun of man’s being was an ancient one, deriving from Aristotle; but if you are about to demonstrate, for the first time, the difference between veins and arteries and explain how the blood is transferred from the vena cava to all parts of the body, you may be allowed to borrow your comparisons at least. There were other great men, of course, who didn’t. Paris thought while preparing for bed of Newton and that confession of ignorance in which he compares himself to a small boy playing with pebbles by the shore of a great unknown sea.
This led him, by a leap he did not pause to examine, to thoughts of his cousin Erasmus and that lonely struggle of the eight-year-old boy to make the elements conform to his will. Memory of it came first in a wide perspective – the empty beach, the grey sea, the small, intent figure. Then, in one of those swooping approaches sometimes experienced in dreams, he drew near, saw the white face, the bloodied fingers … There was nothing in common here with Newton’s image of human limitation. Erasmus had wanted to subdue the world. Paris recalled what Barton had said of Thurso a short while ago: he takes it all personal. But that staring child had no world to command, no ship, no community of men to wrench to the shape of his obsession.
Perhaps because of his quickened thoughts, sleep did not come to him, despite the cradling motion of the vessel. He lay staring up through a darkness so profound that it cancelled all sense of confine; the deck above him was no nearer than the spaces of the sky beyond and the planets in their obedient courses. Docile these too, he thought, as subject to law as the motions of my heart, the flight and homing of the blood. Even in its rages nature was always captive. Man too, led in shackles from the womb. Death is a corruption which befalls by defect of heat, so Harvey defined it. Between the warm and the cold the body flushes a certain number of times. Ruth’s body corrupted by defect of heat prematurely. Again he was harrowed by the thought that it was the unborn child that had nourished the mother.
In prison I was subject also to defect of heat, he thought, remembering the stone floor, the bare walls. At this interval of time Norwich Jail had assumed the shape of a pit in his mind, with descending levels of damnation. At the lowest level were those who had no money at all and small means of obtaining any. He had been one week here, on the orders of the outraged cleric who owned the prison, as punishment for printing seditious views concerning God’s creation. Here men and women fought with rats in damp cellars for scraps of food thrown down to them through a trap-door, and huddled together for warmth upon heaps of filthy rags and bundles of rotten straw. Lunatics stumbled about here, women gave birth, people died of fever or starvation.
These were people yielding no profit. Higher in the scale were those who could pay for food and a private room and it was here that Paris, until redeemed by his uncle, had found lodging. Two shillings a week had provided him also with writing materials and given him access to the prisoners’ common-room, where there were newspapers, and a fire in the coldest weather; but it had not been enough to free him from the stench of the place, nor the brutalities of some of his fellow-inmates – thieves and pimps mingled with debtors here. Higher yet, serenely above all this and freed from unpleasant associations, were the rich prisoners, who lived as the bishop’s guests and entertained on a lavish scale.
Norwich Jail had given Paris his notion of hell, and its workings afforded an example of docility to law every bit as absolute as the motions of the blood postulated by Harvey. Money regulated every smallest detail of the place, from the paupers in the cellars to the profligate feasters above. All rents went to the bishop, who had spent a thousand pounds to acquire the prison and was laudably set on making his investment as profitable as possible, this being a time when the individual pursuit of wealth was regarded as inherently virtuous, on the grounds that it increased the wealth and well-being of the community. Indeed, this process of enrichment was generally referred to as ‘wealth-creation’ by the theorists of the day. The spread of benefits was not apparent in the prison itself, owing to the special circumstances there and particularly to the very high death-rate.
The keepers at their lower level sought to emulate the governor, pursuing wealth diligently through the sale of spirits, the purveying of harlots and the extortionate charges to visitors. The visits had been an ordeal for Ruth, he remembered now. She was prone to nausea in the first period of the pregnancy and the smell of the place had sickened her. She came with a handkerchief soaked in vinegar and held it from time to time to her nostrils. He remembered her face on the last of these visits, angry and distressed: she had been searched and subjected to indignities by the foul-mouthed viragos in the prison lodge on the pretext she was a whore, and robbed by them of a scarf. He had told her to keep up her courage, told her he would be free soon.
Wide-eyed in the darkness, he saw, or feared to see, the distress on Ruth’s face turn to reproach. He sought for a shield and found one in the absurd and terrified appearance of a young debtor called Deever whose head had been thrust through the legs of a chair by his fellow-inmates of the common-room for his inability to pay chummage – the obligation to buy spirits for the company that was laid on all new arrivals. In this place of misery and shame, they aped the manners and adopted the ritual of those who had condemned them. Witnesses were sworn with due ceremony, counsel made their pleas on one side and the other. A burly thief with a towel tied up in knots in imitation of the judge’s wig solemnly pronounced the sentence … It was Deever’s face that Paris saw now as a refuge from Ruth’s, ashamed and fearful, looking from his cage at the tormentors who were his fellow-prisoners too …
So he lay sleepless, trying out versions of the past that might be tolerable to his imagination, while the deck above him lay awash with moonlight and the ship made steady way with all sails set and a following sea. In this warmer weather some of the crew found sleeping space on the deck. Calley, huddled in his blanket amidships, groaned in his sleep, beset by horrors. He started up at last, to stare affrighted across the moonlit deck, his face dewed with sweat. He had woken Deakin, who hissed at him, but Calley was still in the toils of nightmare and could not properly hear.
‘What is wrong with you?’ Deakin asked. ‘Why don’t you sleep and give us some peace? There, get under your blanket.’
‘It came out my mouth,’ Calley said. He was shivering. ‘Comin’ out an’ never stop.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘This white worm come out my mouth.’
‘What worm?’
‘Africa worm. Long white un’. You swallers it in the water; you can’t see it when you drinks, it is too little. It gets bigger in your stomick an’ it fills up with eggs an’ it comes out to lay the eggs in the water. It can come out anywhere, it can come out your nose, it can come out your belly-button.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘They tol’ me.’ Calley never mentioned names. His eyes started round the deck. ‘It knows when you go near the water,’ he said with wonder – he was calmer now. ‘One come out his eye, that’s why he only got one eye. It can come out your ear, it can –’
‘Keep your voice down,’ Deakin said. ‘You ought to have more sense, Dan’l. They were only trying to frighten you with them stories. You don’t drink standing water anywhere in those parts where we are going. You stick by me, you won’t get no worms.’ He looked across the deck for some moments in silence. Then he said, ‘We will run, Dan’l. You and me. First chance we get. We will get clear of this ship.’ He had never included anyone else in his plans before. Since the day of his quarrel with Libby he had known that he would have to run. No ship ever left harbour with a crew that could all be trusted. Haines or Libby or someone else would turn him in for the bounty as soon as they came up with a navy ship. Or the captain would hand him over in the West Indies to save wages on the voyage home. Once they had unloaded the negroes there would be no need for so many men. There might be a naval frigate at anchor in Kingston harbour. In any case, he could not wait to find out. For desertion he could expect two hundred lashes and he did not believe he could survive so many. He would rather take his chance ashore. ‘When we get the chance,’ he said. ‘When we get to Africa, you and me will run. But you must keep mum about it.’
‘It can come out your arse,’ Calley said. Fear had receded now but he was unwilling to part with the horror of the worm altogether. ‘It can come out your nose,’ he whispered, round-eyed in the moonlight.
‘Leave off that tack, will you? You and me will run. We will wait for our chance. Don’t you talk about this to anybody.’
‘Will we get some o’ them black cunnies?’
‘You’ll get nothing if you blab. You will get a flogging. Do you hear me, Dan’l?’ As always he saw himself breaking through. But this time not alone. There would be a place, dark among trees, where they could hide until all search was over. This would part like a screen and they would pass into the open, into light … ‘I will look after you,’ he said. ‘But you will get nothing if you blab. You will get a flogging.’
‘I won’t blab,’ Calley said. He struggled for a moment with the idea of it. ‘What will we do there?’
‘Do? We will get into trade, we will set up for ourselves.’ He did not care, really, he was occupied only with thoughts of parting the screen, stepping through into the open, taking possession of the space. He spoke in whispers to the round-eyed Calley. There was a trade in ivory and camwood and gold dust. With money they could take passage from Sierra Leone to Georgia or Carolina …
His whispers went on, lulling Calley to sleep again, becoming briefly part of the life of the ship, the play of shadows over the decks, the slow creak of the boom, the faint language of the canvas and ropes. To these sounds the captain, released for a while from his demon, slept in his cabin; Hughes the climber slept wrapped in his blanket in the fore topmast staysail and Thomas True in his hammock in the forecastle, lying face down to save his torn back. Sullivan dozed under the punt and was discovered and kicked awake by the second mate, whose watch it was. Wilson, ordered forward on lookout, set his saturnine face to the glimmering horizon and thought of ways of broaching the rum in the storeroom. In the darkness between decks Evans and Johnson found each other.
The moon rode clear in the sky now and the ship’s sails were the colour of bleached bone. Moonlight, falling through this high pyramid of sail, made of the deck another sea, with a trailing, glinting weed of rat-line and shroud, and shoals of moonbeams flickering across her as the ship rose and fell. The real sea was unbroken, luminous to the horizon. With the utmost regularity, like a sleeper breathing in the deepest vale of sleep, the Liverpool Merchant dipped into her moonlit reflection and rose and dipped again, as if she could never have enough of her own image, the curving headrails, the full cheeks of the bows, the bosomy wraith of the Duchess of Devonshire yearning up to meet her and endlessly falling away.