On the day following his return aboard, Paris resumed his journal, which he had neglected of late, with so many calls on his time and attention. He felt in any case disinclined for any more active occupation this afternoon: his limbs were heavy and he was experiencing a slight but persistent sense of oppression above the eyes. He would have liked to sleep, but to do so with the sense of a task unfulfilled went against the grain of his nature; self-denying generations spoke in his blood against it. Hunched at his small table, aware intermittently of the foul smell from the ship’s bilges, he wrote on doggedly.
Delblanc was right when he said his purse would sufficiently recommend him. He came aboard this morning, with a small cabin trunk and a rather dressed-up, festive look. I suspect he is a man who likes changes and adventures, and perhaps especially those not much premeditated. Apparently he did not wait to see the effect of his portrait upon the governor. There is something reckless in Delblanc. I feel him to be a generous-hearted man, who might go astray in practice, though he would not behave ignobly. But he seems accountable to no one and free to follow the promptings of his nature. In this he is different from myself and perhaps it is why I feel drawn so towards him – the more now, in gratitude for his friendship and patience last evening. I am glad he is to be with us. We have had already some resumption of our discussion on the merits of heart and head; his arguments in defence of untrammelled liberty and the natural goodness of the heart are delivered with no less enthusiasm as he paces the deck of a slaveship. There is something touching in this fervour, something absurd too – like all good theorists he is not much troubled by incongruities of circumstance. Might it be true that men would live together in peace and harmony if only the coercion of authority were lifted from them? When I look into the faces of my fellows, I find it hard to credit.
With Delblanc there have come aboard two new crew members, recruited at the fort, Lees and Rimmer. The former seems a decent man enough, a cooper by trade, badly scarred with smallpox. He is a former seaman, though I understand he has been two years employed by the company here. The other man, Rimmer, has one of the most debauched and vicious faces I have seen, swollen with drink and rough living and with an ugly expression of the eyes, like a dog that would bite if it dared. He either ran from, or was abandoned by, another slaver that came earlier, and has since been living as he can here on the coast. Shortly after coming aboard he must have behaved with some insolence, or perhaps merely indifference, towards Barton, who struck him a blow with his open hand which could be heard all over the ship. I saw this incident myself. It was only a slapping blow, but Rimmer was knocked sideways. He knew better than to attempt a retaliation, but there was murder on his face. I did not see much change on Barton’s. ‘You do what I tell you,’ I heard him say, ‘and you do it prompt, or you’ll never reach Jamaica.’ Of course Barton knows that he must take such a man in hand from the outset. He is in command for these days; Thurso is gone ashore on some business of his own.
That look of the eyes is not so common among us. I saw it sometimes in prison. It belongs to men who will always be ready to do more hurt than they need. Tapley has something of it, but he is less bold than this new man; he needs the shelter and bidding of another, and his prefect, Libby, has not this wickedness in his face, but seems merely brutal and unfeeling.
It seems that I am become an expert on faces. Men like Hughes and Cavana have a savage eye, so intent in regard as to seem almost innocent, with that sort of fierce innocence which has known no chastening or softening. I saw that expression again on the faces of the Gold Coast negroes who stared at us through their bars. I do not know if the woman belonged with that group. Thurso had already looked them over and purchased them before I was stirring next morning, having apparently agreed on a price with the governor the night before. She is tall, like them, but lighter skinned, tawny rather than black, and her hair not so wiry. I am cursed with too much doubt, or compunction – I do not know what to call it. Perhaps it was only a figment of that mood of hope that came to me as I walked behind Saunders through those passages. But it was as if she waited there, in the sunlight …
Cavana came aboard mid-morning with a monkey on a rope, a bright-eyed little creature with tufted ears and a tail longer than itself, and very prettily coloured – a black crown on him and a small white face, and arms and feet pale orange colour. Cavana is very taken with it, though he does not like to appear so, at least not to me, I think out of some sort of shyness. Blair speaks to me freely since we treated Calley’s back together and he told me they had gone ashore soon after sunrise with Haines to get firewood and shoot pigeons, of which there are large flocks at present in the trees just a little back from the shore. While there they had met a party from the American grain ship in the road with us, who were on the same business. One of these had the monkey and seeing Cavana much taken with it had offered to sell it to him. Cavana had no money but he had a silver chain round his neck, his only possession. On the kind of impulse which seems common with these men when they want something that is before their eyes, he pulled this off and offered it in exchange. To my less impulsive nature this seemed extravagant, but I could tell that Blair would have done the same thing. The creature sat quite comfortably on Cavana’s shoulder, turning its muzzle to look at our faces and raising the skin on its scalp in a very comical way, as if it were constantly being surprised by the tenor of our conversation.
Thurso will not be back for some days yet. There is some mystery about his absence, as there is about our lingering here at all. Why trade for negroes through the fort, if prices are higher? Thurso is not a man to pay more than he needs, and it cannot be that he wishes to keep good relations for the future, as Barton once let fall to me that this is the captain’s last voyage. I believe he has come down to this stretch of coast with some private purpose, and that Barton is privy to it …
Paris laid down his pen. He was feeling distinctly unwell. The heaviness in his limbs had intensified and his temples throbbed painfully with any slightest movement of his eyes. He made himself a strong infusion of powdered cinchona bark and took to his bed, where within an hour he was experiencing the first assaults of a violent fever.
There followed a period for Paris undistinguished by passage of hours, marked only by alternations of sweating and shivering. In the lulls he continued to dose himself within infusions of cinchona and battled to repair his copious sweats with lemon water.
Sullivan, who had taken over from Charlie the duty of seeing to the surgeon’s wants – Thurso would not have given permission to a fore-the-mast man to do it – came that evening at the change of watch, found his charge muttering and tossing and conversing with shadows and ran to get rainwater from the butt so as to make cold compresses for the surgeon’s face and chest. This had been done to Sullivan by a woman somewhere in his scattered past and it had been a memory of love to him. It was all he knew of treating fevers, but he was assiduous in it, and was a devoted attendant to Paris all through his illness, sponging his brow, running to the galley with dried yarrow leaves from Paris’s stock so that Morgan could make him tea.
On the morning of the fourth day, Paris woke feeling weak but clear-headed. His restored senses brought sounds more typical of delirium, a hullabaloo above him of stamping feet, jangling chains, the jaunty persistence of the fiddle: the slaves were at their morning dance. He ate the breakfast provided by Sullivan: ship’s biscuit, in which the occasional weevil was still to be found, and some rock-hard cheddar. He enjoyed both items hugely. He felt sure now that he had been suffering from the same type of fever which had earlier attacked Johnson and True, a kind of swamp fever, he believed, transmitted by the miasmic airs of the coast. If it were the same he could expect further bouts – Johnson had suffered some return of it already, though True so far not.
He dressed slowly and made his way up on deck, where the slaves were still exercising, Libby and Tapley moving among them with whips and curses while McGann and Evans stood to the cannon on the deck above. The whole mid-part of the ship forward of the mainmast moved with this noisy, disorderly seething of the black bodies. They had been hosed down that morning, and the decks washed, and the contents of the ordinary buckets discharged over the sides; but there still came to Paris, as he stood on the side gangway, the sickening fetid smell he had grown to recognize. The timbers were becoming engrained with it. No scrubbing could remove it entirely – they would carry it back with them to Liverpool …
The women and girls moved like sleepwalkers about the deck, sometimes raising their arms and swaying their bodies as if listening to some music more remote than that transmitted by Sullivan’s quick elbow. The men jumped and lumbered in their shackles. Cries and groans and wavering phrases of song came from both men and women, mingling with the cracking of the whips and the heavy stamping of feet and rattling of chains, so that the notes of the fiddle were only intermittently audible. To Paris, with that deceiving clarity that comes after fever – a clarity in which there is still a sort of languid disorder – there came the fancy that Sullivan was sawing at the negroes’ chains. At this moment, with the same sense of heightened but unreliable perception, he saw that some of the younger boys, though moving to the music in apparent dance, were playing a game of ambush and kidnap in among the moving bodies of the adults. They were taking captives, he realized suddenly … With a lurch of feeling he recognized among the dancers the woman who had looked at him in the dungeon of the fort. Her face was lowered now, expressionless. She must have been brought aboard while he lay ill. He looked among the men but could not for the moment make out the Corymantee negroes. The woman had been given the same cotton waistcloth as the others, covering the pudenda but leaving the sides of the thighs bare. The muscles of her haunches flexed smoothly as she turned in the motions of the dance.
He removed his eyes from her to see Cavana come up from the forecastle with the monkey crouched on his shoulder and disappear in the direction of the latrines at the heads. At the same moment Thurso emerged on the starboard side of the quarterdeck with a scowling look of bad temper, Barton immediately behind him. ‘Glad to see you recovered,’ the captain said, though nothing in his face showed pleasure. ‘What the devil was that?’ he said to Barton.
‘A monkey, sir.’
‘Tell the fiddler to stow his noise, will you? They have had enough of his infernal scraping and so have I.’
‘Aye-aye, sir.’
Barton bawled across the intervening space of deck. Libby, who had been waiting for it, nudged the heedless fiddler. The music stopped and the dancing with it. The slaves were herded into their allotted space amidships by the men guarding them, who were eager now to finish and get below – it was close on eight bells.
‘I won’t have that confounded animal running loose on my ship,’ Thurso said. ‘Tell Cavana that.’
‘It sticks pretty close to him from what I have seen,’ Paris said, taking some steps towards the captain. ‘You must have returned while I was ill, sir?’ he said.
He encountered the small, beleaguered eyes, saw in them the usual fury at being questioned. It was clear that Thurso was in the grip of some feeling stronger than the irritation caused by the sight of the monkey. ‘I returned to find that we have got a case of the bloody flux aboard,’ he said. ‘I returned to find that, sir.’
‘I did not know of it.’ Paris had sensed some accusation in the captain’s words. ‘I have been confined to my cabin these last few days.’
‘He is only twelve or so,’ Thurso said, ‘so it is not as bad as it might be, but it is still a loss of forty bars. That is not the worst of it, however. We will be obliged now to leave the coast early. I could have taken a dozen more that now I cannot wait for. We must get out to sea and trust we can be blown clean of it.’
‘He is dead then?’
‘Dead? He is shitting blood. He may die or he may recover, it makes no difference, he must be got off the ship.’
‘Got off the ship? You mean simply set down ashore?’ Thurso’s monstrous simplicity, as always, had taken him completely by surprise. ‘But he could be treated,’ he said hastily. For a moment, absurdly, he was under the impression that Thurso had overlooked this possibility. ‘I can make up a panegoric,’ he went on eagerly. ‘Tincture of opium has often been found efficacious in cases of severe diarrhoea, with a preparation of fennel that I know of; fennel is an excellent –’
‘Good God,’ Thurso broke in with a sudden violence of fury that made Paris flinch. ‘Must I waste my breath arguing with a damned landsman who knows nothing but country remedies? I am talking about bloody flux. If it gets a hold on us here, we can lose half our cargo. Do you know what that means in money? Am I to wait on the chance that you will cure him with your damned brews? And if you fail? No, sir, not another word.’ Thurso paused, visibly struggling with his passion. All his detestation of the surgeon came out in this moment. He advanced his face, darkly congested with rage, and said in his hoarse monotone, ‘I command on this ship. I will have you muzzled like a dog and sent to kennel below if you argue another syllable with me.’
Paris was silent, looking down before him at the deck. Brought to this pass, Thurso would do as he threatened. Owing perhaps to the weakness consequent upon his fever he could feel no saving fury now as he had on previous occasions, only an immense weariness and discouragement. It was not the other’s brutality that was too strong for him, but his logic. There was no answering it. It was why they were all there. ‘I do not argue further,’ he said. ‘May I have your permission to go ashore with the boy and take the linguister?’
‘You need no linguister with you to leave the boy on the beach,’ Thurso said. However, after a moment’s pause, he gave his consent in an indifferent mutter. The punt was lowered, the shivering boy fetched up and soon Paris found himself making for shore with Jimmy beside him in the stern and four men to row them.
He had no plan of action; he did not believe there was any action to take. His request had been involuntary almost, an impulse to hurt himself, to share in what was being done to the boy. But it occurred to him now that they might find some help ashore for him or some shelter at least. ‘Ask him where he comes from,’ he said to the linguister. ‘Perhaps he comes from this part of the coast.’
‘He not belong here,’ Jimmy said. ‘Dis boy Vai people, I think so.’
He spoke a few words to the boy, who turned deep-set eyes on him, straining and imperfectly focused, as if he were staring through a screen of mist or flame. After a moment he replied in a soft mumble, raising a thin hand in a vague pointing motion.
‘He say he comes from over dere.’ Jimmy repeated the vague gesture. He smiled with pity and scorn. ‘Dis boy don’t know where he is,’ he said. ‘So he can’t say where he come from. He points anywhere comes into mind. Point up at sky, all same-same ting.’
‘I don’t believe you understand a word of what he is saying,’ Paris said. ‘You are only pretending.’
‘Pretendin’ part of linguister’s job,’ Jimmy said with dignity. ‘Dis boy speak one Vai language. Nobody unnerstan’ what dis boy says ’cept mebbe few hunnert people round the Gallinas River. Dat ten-twelve days’ sail from here, sir.’
The boy looked at their faces with his wide, strained stare, in which, however, there was something of appeal. He knew he was being discussed. He was quite naked. His teeth were chattering faintly and Paris could see the rise and fall of his thin chest. With an austere avoidance of Jimmy’s gaze, he took off his shirt and placed it round the boy’s shoulders.
Their departure had been witnessed by several people and it formed a subject of discussion among a group, clustered together forward, below the jib boom.
‘Thurso never does owt without a reason,’ Wilson said. ‘An’ there’s nobbut one reason why he would put a slave ashore an’ lose the price. The boy has got sommat wrong wi’ him.’
‘The flux or the smallpox, them is the two worst,’ Cavana said. The monkey sat on his shoulder, turning its black muzzle to watch their faces, and repeatedly raising the loose skin on its scalp. Cavana was making a cage for it, constructed out of bamboo canes which he had cut ashore.
‘Why is that animal always makin’ faces,’ Libby demanded, his solitary eye fixing the monkey with a look of dark disapproval. ‘Monkeys spread the pox. I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t him that is spreadin’ it now.’
Cavana split one of the canes down the middle with his knife. He was clever at making things, all the movements of his hands were neat and certain. ‘He don’t do it so much when he is just with me,’ he said. ‘Bein’ in a crowd unsettles him.’
Blair winked at Sullivan. ‘What it is,’ he said, ‘he does it when he gets to windward of bleddy great farts like those you’ve been lettin’ go of, Libby. If I had a loose scalp, I would do the same.’
‘He is clever,’ Cavana said with pride. ‘He knows what’s goin’ on. He knows me already. He won’t go to no one else.’
The monkey, aware of being the centre of attention, retracted its head and tucked in its chin shyly. After a moment, with a languid and fastidious gesture of one reddish arm, strangely human and hairless on the inside, it reached out, fumbled gently in Cavana’s matted hair, found something there, peered at it closely with wise, amber-coloured eyes and then swallowed it.
‘Ha, ha!’ Calley said. ‘He found somethink. He found a nit.’ His eyes were round. ‘You are full o’ nits, Cavana,’ he said with delight. ‘What is his name?’
‘I’m callin’ him Vasco,’ Cavana said. There was a certain quality of defensiveness in his tone. ‘That’s a sea-goin’ name I’ve heard tell of. He’s a regglar sailor – the feller that sold him told me he will eat salt beef and biscuit.’ He had begun binding the cross-pieces with strands of yarn and he lowered his head over the task to conceal his pride in the versatile and omniverous Vasco.
‘A monkey can be the savin’ of a ship,’ Sullivan said, glancing round with his usual haunted expression. ‘They have the gift of second sight. I knew of a monkey once, he was kept on a bit of rope like this one; the ship was standin’ off the Bahama Bank. She was a two-masted ship with a square rig, like this one. Same type of monkey, same type of ship. That’s a funny thing now … But she wasn’t carryin’ slaves.’
‘I wish you’d keep to the bleddy point,’ Blair said irritably. ‘What the jig does it matter what type o’ ship she was?’
‘Thim channels are dangerous for any vessel,’ Sullivan said, ‘let alone a square-rig merchantman that can’t keep close to the wind. Anyway, they are sailin’ into the wind when the monkey slips his rope an’ makes a dart for the riggin’. He climbs up to the crow’s nest before anyone can stop him, looks out to sea, then starts gibberin’ an’ pointin’. No one can see anythin’. There is nothin’ to see. The monkey is goin’ frantic an’ frothin’ at the jaws. He runs down an’ gets the captain’s telescope from his cabin an’ brings it to him, but the captain can’t see anythin’ wrong. Then the monkey starts swingin’ from side to side, hangin’ to the rat-lines by his tail, pointin’ down at the water.’
Carried away by his narrative, Sullivan twisted his head to a grotesque angle and made stabbing gestures with a long forefinger down at the deck. “ ‘What the divil’s upsettin’ the craytur?” everybody’s askin’. Nobody knows. The captain doesn’t believe there is anythin’ amiss but he decides to take a soundin’. He can hardly believe his eyes. They are in seven fathom water an’ movin’ in to the bank. Five minutes more an’ they would have been grounded there, with a rising sea. They put about just in time an’ it was all due to that monkey.’
‘What was the point o’ fetchin’ the telescope?’ Wilson said, after an appreciable pause. ‘There were nowt to see.’
‘Aye, I grant you it made a mistake there,’ Sullivan said. ‘There was limits to its sagacity, I’m not the man to deny that.’
‘How did the monkey know?’ Calley said.
‘Ah, there is the question,’ Sullivan said. ‘There is things in nature very difficult to explain.’
There was a short silence. No one but Calley had completely believed this story. ‘Weel,’ McGann said, ‘coming back to this blacky they hae shipped ashore, I’ll lay even saxpences it is a case o’ bloody flux. He didn’t look to hae much fever. Libby, ye can find out from Haines. Wha’ll tak the bet?’
‘Will you listen to that now?’ Sullivan said. ‘You still owe me that shillin for standin’ up to Thurso. Billy, you was me witness.’
‘He cannot witness to what he never heard. How do we know what ye said to Thurso? Ye might hae gone in there an’ said any trumped-up thing.’
‘I told you the truth of it,’ Sullivan said. ‘Are you makin’ to call me a liar, McGann?’
McGann looked at him with pity. He shook his head. ‘Truth or lies doesna’ come into it,’ he said. ‘This is a question o’ money.’
Paris returned bare-chested and barefoot, having left his shirt with the sick boy and his shoes – for the sake of their silver buckles – with an old woman in a thatched hut on the shore above the beach, whom he thought must have mothered children in her time. Squatting on thin hams at the entrance, smoking a clay pipe, she had listened impassively while Jimmy said what Paris had told him to say. This child was sick in the stomach by sovah monou. He was under the special protection of the Great Fort. The Governor himself took a particular interest in this child, as he did in all the weak and helpless. The Governor and his redcoats would be watching from afar to make sure that this child was well treated. The Governor had a mighty telescope up in the sky, right at the top of the fort, and through his telescope he could see everything that happened.
The woman chewed briefly on bare gums then replied at some length in a high-pitched, querulous voice.
‘What does she say? Does she undertake to care for the child?’
‘She say she don’ believe the Governor have any interes’ in dis boy. He too busy sellin’ healthy boy to bother ’bout one small boy with sovah monou belly. She say to redcoats kiss my arse, pardon me, sir. She talk big mouth,’ Jimmy said in scornful aside. ‘Nobody take ol’ hag for slave. She say also, she don’ believe in no telescope. But if you give the shirt an’ also silver buckle off your shoe, she will look after dis boy.’
Paris, whose distress was mounting, hastily assented. He had taken his clasp-knife to cut off the buckles when the old woman spoke again. Having noted his alacrity, she was now asking for the shoes entire. He pulled them off and handed them over, together with a small quantity of powdered quassia in a paper packet that he had brought with him from the ship.
Jimmy transmitted instructions as to the preparation of this emetic. The woman took the packet into her hand but did not look at it. The boy watched everything with the same strained, hallucinated stare, his thin form lost in the folds of the shirt. Shame prevented Paris from meeting his eyes or saying any words to him. But he laid his hand on the boy’s head for a moment before turning away. At the shoreline he looked back: the diminutive figure was still hunched there, but the shirt that had draped him was gone.
Next day Thurso took advantage of a Liverpool brig recently arrived in the offing, fully loaded with camwood and ivory and on the way home, to leave letters for Kemp announcing his intention to quit the coast immediately with a total of one hundred and ninety-six slaves.
Most of the following week was spent in preparations for departure. More yams and rice were taken on board and the water casks replenished. The crew were employed mending the sails, which had been much damaged by rats during this long stay on the coast. These were very numerous now and ravenous, so emboldened by hunger that they would bite at people they found sleeping and had even taken to gnawing the cables.
Things were not made easier during all this time by the strong winds from land and the continual high swells which caused the vessel to labour a good deal, especially at the change of the tide. In the worst of this the ship was made to ride so hard that on successive days she broke one of her main shrouds on the larboard side and a main topmast stay. The purchase of two women slaves was frustrated when the canoe bringing them off was smashed in the surf and they were lost by drowning, having their arms bound behind them. Then a woman slave who had wandered from the others was dragged below and raped by two men who hooded her with a square of sail-cloth. She could not say who the men were and if others of the crew knew it they did not come forward to say so.
These various irritations darkened Thurso’s mood considerably and he scowled through the days. It was a time of grievance generally, compounded by impatience to be gone from the coast and its humid, sapping airs. The boatswain was out of temper at being saddled with the repairs to the rigging, and he drove the men hard. The crew grumbled at the work and at the constant labouring of the ship, which made the footing precarious. Even Vasco, the monkey, seemed affected by the prevailing mood. Cavana had killed a rat with a lucky throw of a mallet and, wishing to show off his pet’s adaptability, gave it to him to eat; but Vasco threw the limp and scaly creature from him in unconcealed bad temper. ‘He would have ate it if it had been cooked,’ Cavana said. But he had found that what Vasco liked best was a mixed diet of flies and beetles and boiled plantains mashed with coconut, and he was continually badgering Morgan to make this last dish for him.
For Paris too it was a bad time. The fever had reduced him and depressed his spirits. He did not recover quickly from his abandonment of the diseased boy and kept to himself below as much as he could. He was surprised to find his face in the looking-glass unchanged, when he had so betrayed his profession. What worse was there that he could assent to now? In the cramped and heaving confines of his cabin he was haunted by the knowledge that he had not paid his score yet, there was worse to come.
Only Delblanc seemed unaffected by the prevailing mood. He was often to be seen on deck, dressed with careless elegance, conversing in his frank, unstudied fashion with anyone free to listen, not seeming at all inconvenienced by the heaving of the ship. Paris, emerging from his penitential cell, would find himself accosted with some theory of sentiment as the source of knowledge or the arbiter of action. On the very eve of departure Delblanc detained the captain some minutes with an ingenious metaphor derived from the workings of the ship. Feeling was the pilot, the passions alone could fill the sails and drive the ship forward, even if their excess might overwhelm it … Thurso meanwhile, constrained to politeness by the other’s status as passenger, looking as if excess passion might overwhelm him at any moment.
In the early hours of the day following, they weighed anchor and stood off from the south as the wind allowed, with all sails set. Stealthily, in the dark, the Liverpool Merchant began to make slow way against the head swell on the first leagues of its journey to the West Indies. But departure was not so stealthy and way not so slow that the slaves packed close in the hot darkness between decks did not feel the change and raise a cry of despair that echoed over the water and was the only farewell of the departing slaver.
On the second day after this Paris found three cases of fever among the negroes. Thomas True, who had seemed recovered, though much reduced by his illness, was taken again by a raging fever, this time accompanied by vomiting. The wind lessened, almost ceased, obliging them to tack for the advantage of what breeze there was. But the ship was now so foul that she did not feel a small breeze and by noon she had lost steerage way. The days that followed showed the same pattern of light airs and calms, the ship tacking when she could and loitering for long hours almost motionless. One of the sick slaves died and was thrown overboard into the sluggish, shark-ridden wake. And with this wind failed altogether.
The hysteria that lay deep within Thurso was roused by such enforced inactivity. He would rather have had storms to deal with. He had the spare sails aired, the yawl turned and coated with brimstone and pitch, the cables repaired from the ravages of the rats. Still the listless weather continued. After six days of sailing, they still had Mount Daro to the north, with the Guinea Current running at two knots against them and not enough headway to get clear. Under the stress Thurso’s temper deteriorated. He sat alone in his cabin, a bottle of brandy before him, brooding on his conspiracy of the elements, seeking to understand the reason. No counsel came to him, he sat in silence, abandoned by his helpers. A reason there must always be, he knew that, something done or left undone … The brandy did not make him drunk but it rendered his mood violent and unpredictable.
Emerging in early evening on to the quarterdeck, his sight somewhat confused by brandy and by the splendour of the light – the sun was setting and had cast a wide swathe of flame across the surface to landward – he had a brief impression that there was a deformed, two-headed man at the helm. Then he saw that it was Cavana with the monkey at his shoulder. And at that moment his counsellor spoke to him at last: It is the monkey.
‘Get that animal out of my sight,’ he said.
‘Aye-aye, sir.’ Cavana’s eyes started wildly. He sensed the danger to Vasco but could not leave the wheel. ‘Out o’ sight, sir? Where can I put him? Beg permission to be relieved at the helm, sir, there is no steerage to speak of, while I take him –’
The hesitation and bewilderment of the seaman was enough for Thurso. ‘Do you dither there and debate with me, you dog?’ he said. ‘I’ll get rid of him for you. Give me the rope.’ The monkey, perhaps sensing the captain’s rage, had begun raising and lowering his scalp in alarmed interrogation. Thurso stepped forward and slipped the loop from Cavana’s wrist. Taking good hold of the end of it, he swung the animal clear over the side with a single sweep of his arm.
Cavana, standing rigidly at the helm, heard the splash the beast made but was spared the sight of its struggles. But Hughes, high up in the mainmast top setting the small sails, and Morgan, who was standing outside the galley to get some air, and Wilson and Sullivan smoking on the forecastle, and those of the slaves who happened to find themselves against the starboard rail, saw the monkey’s brief trajectory, saw him land face down in the bright water and sink and rise again. Because of the bright surface, it seemed to these spectators that Vasco fought for life in very shallow water, a few inches only, a zone shot through with light, agitated with his struggles – all the rest, the dark fathoms beneath him, seemed a different arena. They saw the monkey raise his thin neck, gulp for air. They saw him strike out with his arms as if set on swimming across that great track of light, saw his heavy tail lie briefly on the surface, slick as a snake. Then he thrashed and turned in the water, the black muzzle opened widely and Vasco yearned up at the sky. This brief struggle over, the monkey sank again, and they had a last glimpse of his orange-coloured arms and feet vividly refracted below the surface, dangling like roots. Then the ship had cleared him, he was lost to view.
Thurso said nothing more. He stood with feet planted on the deck. After a while he raised his head and sniffed for a wind. Cavana waited some minutes, looking straight before him, hands gripped tight to the wheel. Then, very slowly, he turned his head and studied the captain’s face in profile as if trying to memorize the features.
Later that evening Thomas True died. A man of few words and unclean habits, he had had no friends aboard. Libby sewed him into his blanket and within half an hour of his last breath he was consigned to the sea, Thurso officiating in his usual hoarse mutter, barely audible except to those nearest him. As usual he omitted the lesson, confining himself to the short final office: ‘We therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body, when the sea shall give up her dead, and the life of the world to come …’
Thurso paused here before continuing. It was the briefest of pauses but every member of the crew knew the reason for it. Startling in the silence, unmistakable, there had come a long fluttering sigh through all the ship’s canvas, first breath of a rising wind.