Fort Picolata, the site chosen for the conference, was some twenty miles distant, on the east bank of the St John River. It was a stone tower within wooden palisades, built by the Spanish during the war as an outpost against the Indians.
Watson and Campbell, accompanied by Erasmus and escorted by a detachment of troops, rode over in the morning. The headmen of the Creeks left their horses on the west bank and crossed the water by canoe with a hundred warriors. An open pine-log pavilion had been put up inside the palisade and the white men awaited their Indian visitors sitting within this. Branches of pine had been laid over the roof and sides to give protection from the sun and there was a long table in the centre to act as a speaker’s podium. Vari-coloured beads on long strings of leather lay coiled on the table like snakes. On either side poles wrapped round with blankets were laid for the chiefs to sit on.
They did not immediately take up position here, however. The whole company of Indians assembled before the pavilion at a distance of some hundred and fifty yards and formed silent ranks behind their chiefs. To Erasmus, sitting unobtrusively to one side in the shade of the pavilion, this forming of rank was strangely like a movement – and a stillness – of the sea; the white plumes of the headdresses swayed and came to rest like foam on the eddy of a dark red tide. Within the enclave of the pavilion colour was deepened. The colonel’s high-necked tunic was ruby-coloured, Watson’s wig stood out silver against the dark cloth of his suit and the cheap trade beads on the table glowed like gems of price.
At some signal not perceived by Erasmus the Indians began to move forward at an easy pace. He saw now that the chiefs leading the two centre files, distinguished by headdresses that fell below the shoulder and beaded armbands, were carrying feathered objects which he took at this distance for dead birds. They came on for some twenty paces, then rattles sounded among them and a wild, ragged singing, and the whole company broke into a shuffling, lunging dance, raising and lowering their heads and turning their bodies inwards towards the two chiefs carrying the feathered bundles.
In this manner, singing and dancing, they advanced until they were within twenty yards of the pavilion, when they halted and stood silent, their only movement the deep rise and fall of their chests. For perhaps a minute they stood thus, then the two chiefs came forward with a fast dancing step and Erasmus saw now that the objects in their hands were long-stemmed pipes tied with feathers.
Without hesitation, still dancing, they entered the pavilion and advanced to the white men. Erasmus watched while they stroked the faces and hands of the Governor and Superintendent, neither of whom moved a muscle, with the feathers of the pipes. Then one came to him. He felt the soft brush of the feathers and smelled the ignited tobacco in the bowl of the pipe. He met for a moment the gleaming, strangely impersonal eyes of the Indian below the beaded headband. Two braves came forward from the ranks, loaded with dressed buckskins, some of which they laid on the floor and some on the table. The remaining headmen advanced and sat in their places. A pipe was held out by the bowl and the white men smoked solemnly in turn, followed by the seated chiefs. There was a further interval of deep silence, then the Superintendent rose to his feet and began to speak in slow, deliberate tones, pausing frequently to allow his interpreter time to translate.
He declared himself happy that the chiefs and warriors had accepted the invitation for this meeting and kept their word for the hour. He believed they would be well pleased with what they were going to hear from the Governor and from himself. He introduced Erasmus as an emissary from the King of England. He requested his Indian brothers earnestly to listen and pay attention to the words that would be said to them.
At the conclusion of these remarks he took one of the strings of beads from the table and dropped it with deliberate movements on the earth floor, where it fell with a muffled crash. This ceremony, and the words which had preceded it, were greeted by the Indians with complete silence and impassivity.
The Governor now came forward to the table. Glancing keenly at the expressionless faces of the chiefs on either side of him, he began speaking in his usual brisk, direct and somehow confiding fashion: ‘Friends and brothers, the Great King, my master and your father, after driving the French and Spanish from this land, was graciously pleased to appoint me to govern the white people in this part of his newly conquered dominions.
‘I know and love the red people. I have lived long with them and I am acquainted with their customs and manners. The Great King knows that I will do everything in my power to keep up peace and harmony between his white subjects and his red children.
‘You are apprehensive and have been told that the white people are desirous of getting possession of your hunting grounds. Your fears are ill-founded for my sentiments with regards to the hunting ground of an Indian nation are well known. Such of you as have been in the Cherokee nation must know and all of you must have heard that in the Treaty signed at Charleston after their defeat I spoke against taking their ancestral lands and I prevented it. If I did that for a people with whom I had been at war, who had been prevailed upon by the French to strike their English brothers, you may be sure I will do nothing to the harm of your people who have always been our friends …’
Erasmus listened to this with feelings of distinct approval. He had heard a lot of speeches in his time, and this was a good one, though it was difficult to read anything in the set faces of the Indians. Campbell spoke with a kind of gritty dignity that was native to him and made his appeal to matters that lay within the knowledge of his audience. And the accent of sincerity in his words was unmistakable; his voice had grated with feeling when he spoke of his defence of the beaten and demoralized Cherokee. Once again it came to Erasmus that Campbell would be an excellent man to head his Florida Land Company.
The Indians who sat beyond the pavilion were motionless, their eyes fixed on the speaker. The sun was high now; these preliminary ceremonies had taken up the morning. Sunlight lay on the white feathers and the beaded ornaments and the smoothly muscled bodies. Campbell paused to take up a string of beads and drop it from shoulder height to the floor.
‘Your profession is hunting,’ he said. ‘You therefore must have a large tract of country, but it is your interest to have your English brothers near you. They only can supply you in exchange for your skins with clothes to cover you and your wives and children, with guns, powder and ball for your hunting and with a number of other things which you cannot make for yourselves though you cannot exist without them. To induce the white people to live in your neighbourhood you will no doubt think it reasonable to assign them a certain district of country to feed cattle and raise provisions, for without lands they cannot maintain themselves, much less supply you.’
He ended on this with another ceremonial dropping of beads. The Superintendent spoke again briefly, emphasizing that a boundary had to be ascertained, leaving them to determine the limits but recommending them to behave in such a manner as would show their gratitude to the Great King, by whose permission they enjoyed the advantages of trade.
A profound silence followed these words. None of the headmen seated in the pavilion said anything at all. But for the fiery expression of the eyes, their faces might have been cast in stone. After perhaps ten minutes – though it seemed much longer to Erasmus – a young man in the front rank of those outside the pavilion stood up and advanced to the table. In vehement, broken-sounding sentences, strangely at odds with the hesitant English of the interpreter, he began to complain of the high prices the dealers were asking for trade goods. The Superintendent, he said, had promised to lower the rates at a meeting with his people at Pensacola six months before. He was Sempoiaffe, he was a leading man of his nation, but he was not the mouth of his nation and was not seeking to answer the Governor’s talk, he left that to the chiefs, but he wanted to say that this thing had been promised and had not been done. Also, it was his opinion that if all the country was going to be settled by white people his people would find nothing but rats and rabbits to kill. Would the white people give them trade goods in exchange for rats and rabbits?
Throughout this the chiefs had remained silent but short grunts of approval had come from the men seated in the open. The speaker dropped a string of beads to the floor and looked full at the white men before returning to his place. His eyes flashed and Erasmus saw the deep intake of his breath and realized that he was moved, though whether by anger or some other emotion he could not tell.
In reply, Watson said that he had not promised to lower the trade as it was not in his power to do so and that he had said the same thing at Pensacola. He appealed to Tallechea and Captain Aleck and the other chiefs who had been present at that meeting whether they had not heard him say so, and Erasmus saw that some of the seated inside the pavilion nodded in agreement.
No other speaker now presented himself and after a further period of unbroken silence and immobility on the part of the Indians, the Superintendent declared the meeting adjourned till the following day.
Not much was said by either Watson or Campbell as they returned to St Augustine. The three men did not meet again till dinner and only then did it become fully apparent to Erasmus just how badly this opening session of the conference had gone.
‘But it seemed to me that you were listened to with respectful attention,’ he said. ‘None of them spoke in rejection of a boundary line.’
‘Sir,’ Watson said, ‘they are devious, they set their meanings out by a system of signals. None of the principal men spoke at all, which is a bad sign to begin with. He who spoke is a leading warrior among the Kasihta Creeks, but not of headman rank. What he said about trade prices was a mere piece of bravado and fabrication. Everybody knows I made no such promise.’
‘He knew it perfectly well,’ Campbell said. ‘He wanted to put us on the defensive. I have seen it before often enough – they argue from emotion more then you might suppose. What he said about rats and rabbits was just as much beside the point. That fellow’s town is on the east side of the Chattahoochee River, up in Georgia. He was talking about Georgia, not Florida.’
‘It is all one land to them,’ Watson said. ‘They have not yet learned to think in terms of state boundaries.’
‘What is likely to happen tomorrow then?’
‘We shall see,’ Watson said, with deepened gravity. ‘Tomorrow the chiefs will speak and then we shall see. But I am afraid it will not be easy. The signs are bad. We must hope that with God’s help they will be brought to see reason.’
After dinner Redwood asked Erasmus for the favour of some words in private. The major had come from his quarters on foot; it was a fine evening and Erasmus offered to walk some way back with him.
At this hour the streets were almost deserted. Sand and dust had drifted thickly, muffling their steps. The houses were shuttered and silent for the most part. The concrete of sand and ground shell with which they were built had crumbled with time, giving their outlines a softened, abraded appearance in the faint moonlight.
‘I have been making enquiries among the Indians here, as I promised you,’ Redwood said as they walked along together. ‘I am afraid I have not been able to find anyone with knowledge of a settlement in the south of the peninsula. In a way, the times are against you. Some might have known of it who left with the Spanish. As you know, the region is depopulated at present. There are practically no Europeans and the Indians that remain are a sedentary sort of people, who scrape a living here, God knows how.’
‘Well, it cannot be helped.’ Erasmus had not allowed himself to hope for much from the major’s enquiries, but he was none the less disappointed. ‘I am grateful for your efforts on my behalf,’ he said.
‘There is no point even in trying to engage a guide from among them,’ Redwood said. ‘However, I have not failed altogether.’
They were passing a tall, deep-balconied house, which showed some light behind the shutters. As they went by a sound of voices and laughter came from somewhere on the upper floor.
‘These are about the only places which show any sign of life,’ Redwood said. ‘The whores didn’t all follow the Spanish to Cuba.’ He stopped on this, as if suddenly struck by an idea. ‘We are about halfway now to my quarters,’ he said. ‘It might be rather long for you to walk back the whole way. What do you say to breaking a bottle inside here? I don’t suggest we try the girls. I could head you in the direction of something much better if you were ever interested in that line. These have been worked pretty hard by the Spanish and some of our men use them, though there is a brothel nearer the barracks. No, but the Mother Superior here, Mama Rosalita, knows me. I have been here on occasion to deal with affrays and pay for damage. She will give us a room out of the way and serve us a bottle and we can talk in peace. What do you say?’
‘I say yes.’ He had no particular desire for more to drink but Redwood had not told him everything yet, he had paused at a crucial point, perhaps by design. It came to Erasmus that there was some loneliness about the major for all his conviviality.
They passed through the overgrown garden, knocked, were admitted by the massive Señora Rosalita. It was at once clear from her manner that Redwood was a highly regarded visitor. They were shown without delay to a room at the back of the house and served by the señora herself with a sweetish, dark red wine.
‘That’s better.’ Redwood unbuttoned his tunic and stretched his long legs before him. ‘I don’t know how it is,’ he said, following some train of thought of his own, ‘but that preachy fellow Watson sets my teeth on edge, for all I might drink at dinner. Anyway, as I was saying, I did not find anyone in St Augustine, but I have been given the name of an Indian who lives at Matanzas, about fifteen miles away. He is a Lower Creek, the same breed as those you saw today, but he lives solitary. His name is Nipke, though he seems also to be known as the Young Soldier. I am told he knows the southern regions well, having taken part in raids against the Timucua Indians during the war. We paid them a bounty for the scalps of any Indians friendly to the Spanish, you know.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘Any that were not with us were regarded as being against us. It was part of the policy of terror adopted by our forces to unsettle the region. You couldn’t always tell who the scalps had belonged to, but the bounty was paid all the same. The point is that this Nipke has worked for the English before and so he knows the clink of guineas, which makes him easier to talk to. He may not know of your fugitives, but he knows the terrain and will be skilled at following tracks and moving quietly.’
‘He sounds just the man.’
‘If you are interested, we might ride over to Matanzas tomorrow and see if we can find him. I could spare an hour or two in the morning. Things are at an awkward pass here but there is no danger while the treaty is under discussion. It is the only way, if you want to come to terms with this Nipke. If we send for him, he may come next week or next month or he may not come at all.’
Erasmus hesitated. ‘I should like it of all things,’ he said. ‘I am anxious to get the matter settled. But I am due to attend the conference tomorrow.’
‘As to that, I fancy Watson and the Governor will not mind your absence, quite the reverse in fact, they will be able to put it to good account.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Things have not gone well today, I gather, and they seem likely to go even worse tomorrow. It will be found necessary to sow dismay among the Indians, for that is the surest way of disuniting them – that and the jealousies among them and their fears of being left out when it comes to the presents. The ships have been sighted, by the way, did you know?’
‘No.’
‘They are expected to cross the bar some time tomorrow morning. That will strengthen our hand considerably. Watson will simply tell the Creeks that the envoy of their Great White Father has not seen fit to be present.’
‘Yes, I see.’ Erasmus was silent for some moments. ‘It is like dealing with opponents in business,’ he said. ‘You seek to unsettle them and divide their counsels. Quite lawful, of course.’
‘Oh, quite.’ Redwood drank some wine. His eyes were partially concealed under lowered lashes – long lashes for a man, Erasmus noticed now, and giving a certain delicacy to the fair-skinned, careless, rather sensual face. ‘That was the idea behind our paying bounties for the scalps,’ the major said. ‘It unsettled the Timucua and divided their counsels very considerably.’
‘I cannot say that I see much similarity.’ Erasmus spoke rather coldly. He had not liked this joking repetition of his own words. There was a sort of arbitrary quality about Redwood’s style of speech which he was beginning to find irksome. He felt that he understood now that grimace of irritation, resembling pain, that would sometimes come to Campbell’s face. All the same, Redwood was doing him a favour, and it was obvious now that he was the worse for drink. His colour was high and his voice had thickened slightly. ‘However it may be,’ Erasmus said in more friendly tones, ‘I thank you for your offer of tomorrow and I would be glad of your company.’
‘Good, that is settled then. Tell me, what did you think of the business today?’
‘Much of the time was taken up with ceremony. It was interesting for me, of course, who have not seen these Indian customs before. They were all decked out in their best beads and feathers.’ He laughed a little saying this.
‘So were you I suppose?’
‘What do you mean?’ Erasmus said, staring.
‘Campbell in his dress uniform, Watson in his best broadcloth and his silver wig and you, as always, irreproachably turned out. Just a question of fashion, really. Theirs suits the climate better.’
Obscurely displeased at this comparison, Erasmus made no immediate reply. Redwood waited a moment, then said, ‘You were talking of the Calumet ceremony, the peace pipes. I have seen it often. They have come singing and dancing to their ruin with those pipes in their hands all over America.’
‘It is hardly ruin, Redwood – you are exaggerating. They will be left in possession of large tracts of land, as I understand the matter from Colonel Campbell.’
‘For how long? We daren’t do otherwise at present, or they will rise against us and sweep us into the sea. Campbell is a reasonable man in his way. He knows the Creeks and has a feeling for them. But he is set on getting a favourable treaty – his career hangs on it, and that makes him wonderfully single-minded. That Indian who spoke today, who complained of trade prices, he wasn’t so wide of the mark.’
‘Not wide of the mark? He accused Watson of breaking promises he had never made. He wasn’t even talking of Florida, but of Georgia.’
‘That is the point. He has seen thousands of land-hungry white settlers pouring into the Georgia back-country from Virginia and the Carolinas. Many of them have crossed the treaty line and fenced the land on the other side. Nothing has been done to stop it and nothing will be done. And why? You know the answer as well as I do, Kemp. I suggest you know it much better. You have been having a look round, haven’t you? This is prime land, there are fortunes to be made out of it – but it is worth a lot more with no Indians on it.’
Redwood sat back, smiling with the slightly bitter carelessness characteristic of him. There were brief sounds from above them, voices, steps on the stairs; then silence. ‘And it is hardly necessary for us to use force of arms,’ he continued. ‘They are prevailed upon to cede their lands by treaty. Trade is the thing that has undone them, this great blessing of trade. Watson tells them they should be grateful for the advantages of trade. Campbell tells them they should give up land to their English brothers for the sake of the trade goods they will get by it. They have hunted over these lands for centuries without ever knowing that what they needed for happiness were muskets and looking-glasses and beads and bits of printed cotton. Now they are persuaded that they cannot live without these things. Strange, is it not?’
Erasmus smiled, but without much warmth. He found himself caring less and less for the other’s company. What he had taken for a good-natured, rather thoughtless expansiveness, seemed quite other to him now: Redwood obtruded his views more than a man should, without first making sure they were welcome. And what he was saying was perverse, subversive even. Trade brought benefits to both sides – so much was common knowledge. Erasmus had always disliked people who took a view contrary to what was broadly agreed by men of sense. ‘If the Indians want blankets and guns, that is their business,’ he said. ‘They should try to get them on the best terms. Our business is to supply their wants on terms as favourable to ourselves as we can secure. This is bound to be mutually beneficial in the long run. It is only common sense. You take a very negative view of things, if I may say so, Redwood.’
There had been a curtness of reproof in this which Redwood obviously noticed, as his smile faded and his brows drew together slightly. ‘In the long run, you say? But we have only got the short run, Kemp – you and me and the Creeks. If you had fought alongside Indians as I have, and seen what they will do for friendship’s sake, you might take a more complicated view. Campbell knows it too, none better, but he is a wonderfully single-minded fellow, that’s the difference. You are a single-minded fellow too, aren’t you? Let’s see now. Months taken from your business, a chartered schooner awaiting your pleasure in the harbour, fifty troops to maintain, a hazardous journey before you into wild country. And all for an old loss that is unlikely to be recovered now. Yes, I would call that single-minded. I do my duty, at least I hope so, and I put my King and country first, but I have always found it plaguey difficult to be single-minded.’ He paused for a moment then in a very passable imitation of the Governor’s soft voice and brisk manner he said, ‘They have a confounded division in their skulls, sir, I know not what to call it.’
He did not look at Erasmus to see the effect of his mimicry; some quality of warmth had passed from their relation, never to be recovered. And it was as well he did not, or he would have seen on the other’s face a degree of displeasure he might have felt bound to answer – he was not a man to overlook such things. ‘I know not what to call it either,’ he said, as if to himself. ‘But it is the reason I shall end my days as a half-pay major.’
Only his sense of obligation and his knowledge that the major was slightly drunk held Erasmus back from angry words. Redwood’s presumption had come too close to the doubts that would sometimes attack him in the midst of all his plans, as he was riding round the countryside or sitting with the others at meals or walking alone in the garden of the Residence, a sense of wonder edged with panic at the strangeness of his presence here, at the time and money he was spending. What could be gained from it now? Then he would remember his high purpose, his mission of justice … Of course, Redwood was after all an ignorant fellow, with a very partial view; his remarks about trade had shown that. All men of sense knew the benefit of trade. The major was simple-minded, that was it – not single, simple. The conceit pleased Erasmus and restored his calm. ‘Just enough left for a toast,’ he said, smiling full at the other man though with narrowed eyes. ‘Here is to the benefits of trade – and to single-mindedness!’
The major raised his glass. ‘What was the other thing?’ he said. ‘Ah yes, justice. Here’s to justice – long-term, of course, I mean!’