The steamship African Blackbird plowed westward across the Atlantic. Thirteen days had passed since the ship had pulled away from the rocky bone of the English coast at Liverpool. She was making eight knots and bound for New York.
Deep within the bowls of the rusty hulk, the steam engines hissed and grumbled as they strained to spin the screw that drove the ship. A school of several hundred mullet, frightened by the unnatural noise, scooted away through the green, rolling waves. A shark that had been on the verge of striking the mullet leisurely followed their smell and noise in the water.
On the fantail of the steamship, Mathias Rowley led the evening service for the Mormon converts. His face held a smile as he described the land of Zion in the mountain heartland of America. He focused his attention for a second on one of his followers after another, assuring that person with his eyes that he spoke the total truth.
Caroline sensed the magic of the Mormon missionary, for she too, was caught up in his words. However, there was more to his power over the people, especially the women, than his words. He was very handsome, tall and fair. His manly appearance, as well as his complete conviction of the rightness of the faith of the Latter-day Saints, drew and held the converts. Caroline turned to study the spellbound congregation around her.
The people sat on blankets brought from their beds below deck. The fifteen men with their wives and children were on the edge of the gathering. The single women occupied the rest of the ship’s stern. Caroline saw the people’s rapt concentration, their eyes never straying from the face of Mathias. She judged that nearly every unmarried woman was in love with the man. He had said that he intended to marry when he returned home. Each woman hoped that he would choose her as his wife.
Caroline wondered what her answer would be if Mathias should ask her to marry him. She glanced back to the front. Mathias was looking straight at her. Her cheeks reddened with a blush, even though she knew he could not read her thoughts.
She dropped her sight to the deck of the ship as Mathias continued to speak to the congregation. He spoke of the Church’s tenet of Celestial Marriage, a marriage for earth and beyond, for all eternity. Her mind began to stray, for she had heard it all before. Was religion merely a restatement of the same dogma over and over again? Her eyes drifted off to the side toward a pair of sailors working on the lifeline that rimmed the ship.
From the first day the Mormons had boarded the ship, the crew of sailors had found various reasons to come and go near the stern of the ship where the women often gathered. They would walk slowly past the women, clustered in groups to talk or to wash and mend their clothing. The two young sailors working so casually nearby were especially daring. It seemed they always had a vantage point from which they could see the women.
The two seamen—hardly more than boys, with soft, sparse beards—did not appear to be the kind that would be part of a crew of slavers. For indeed the African Blackbird was a slave ship. The Mormons had not known that at first. Had they been wiser, the name would have alerted them, for slave ships were called blackbirders.
The ship that George Cluff originally had contracted had run aground just outside the harbor of Liverpool during the severe storm that had thrashed the English coast. It was badly damaged. Repairs would take weeks. The shipping company had no other vessel bound for America for another month. Cluff had demanded the return of the money that he had paid for the ocean passages of his charges. Grudgingly the sum had been given back.
Cluff and Rowley had searched the waterfront for another ship to transport the converts to America. They’d found a ship that was leaving in a reasonably short time and had space available for the large number of passengers. Varick, captain of the African Blackbird, agreed to alter his usual course to Africa and make a port call in New York. Arrangements were quickly made with the captain and the Mormons boarded the ship. The African Blackbird steamed promptly out of Liverpool.
Two days later Rowley chanced upon a locker room full of leg irons, manacles, and chains. When he had asked the captain about his discovery, Varick had described the three- legged voyage his ship had made. Thousands of bales of cotton were purchased in New Orleans and transported to the spinning mills in Liverpool. Arms and other provisions were then taken aboard at London for delivery to the English garrisons in the conquered lands on the west coast of Africa. Once the holds of the African Blackbird were again empty, she would anchor off some remote African shore and Varick would lead his men inland for raids on native villages. They took many black men, women, and children prisoners. The dark holds of the ship were jammed with the black people and hauled to the slave market in New Orleans.
One of the young sailors spied Caroline looking at him. He winked at her and smiled. He seemed so much a mischievous boy that Caroline half smiled before she caught herself. It would not be wise to encourage the pair. They were brash enough.
“Timson, Hobbs, get forward and do some useful work before I take the cat to you,” Captain Varick’s bull voice roared down from the wheelhouse. The two seamen jumped, spun around, and looked toward the source of the command. They hurried forward.
The captain’s eyes bored into Caroline. She felt as if the slaver had somehow reached out and touched her with foul hands. She quickly jerked her sight back to the front.
Mathias finished his sermon and the congregation began to break up. He moved through the milling crowd and approached Caroline. He stroked his short beard in a contemplative manner.
“Caroline, I noticed you were restless during the evening service. Your thoughts seemed on other things. Is something the matter that I can help you with?”
“No, Mathias. It is the strangeness of the ship and the ocean. And the crew is a rough lot, except for the two young seamen.”
“Would you like to talk? We can sit over there near the rail of the ship.”
“All right.”
Caroline was somehow pleased that Mathias had sorted her out. She knew several other women watched as she and Mathias found a place and spread her blanket. She did not care if they envied her.
Mathias allowed her to seat herself and then dropped down to face her from the opposite side of the blanket. She folded her legs and spread her dress over them.
“What would you like to talk about?” asked Mathias.
“You have told me about the wonders of the place you call Zion. I understand it is called Utah Territory by the United States government.”
“Yes. That is what non-Mormons, and also some Mormons, call it. Salt Lake City is the center of it. Our people are expanding outward in every direction, making settlements in one mountain valley after another. There they level the land and dam the streams for irrigation water. Grain fields and vegetable gardens and orchards are started. They are reaping bountiful harvests.”
“Can women own land? Can they be self-sufficient?”
“What do you mean? There are many men. Those of you women who want to marry can easily find husbands. Every young woman marries. You are quite pretty, and men will ask you.”
Mathias’s answers were not satisfactory to Caroline. She wanted to own land in her own right. However, she let the subject go and went back to her original comment. “I understand the United States government sent an army to invade Utah a year ago. What happened?”
“An army was sent. We were ready to fight the soldiers and there were skirmishes, but our leader, Brigham Young, is a wise man. He met with leaders of the United States government and the invasion was halted. We agreed to have a United States judge installed to hold court in Salt Lake City. He is there now. But that was a small price to pay for the right to peacefully go on with our life as we like.”
“Tell me of our leader, Brigham Young,” Caroline said.
Mathias smiled at Caroline’s use of the words our leader. “He is our high priest, a truly great Saint,” Mathias began.
***
Caroline sat on her thin cotton mattress, which lay upon the steel deck of the ship. She removed the sturdy shoes John Bradshaw, the baker, had bought for her. She ran her hand over the tough leather as she thought of the old man. He had proved to be a kind and generous person.
She had worked with John in the bakery for six days, helping to mix the bread and cake dough and tend the oven. In the evening they sat and talked while she nibbled on a sweet roll or drank tea with him. She had never been hungry once in all those days.
He had spoken briefly about a daughter, and asked her about her family. He especially wanted to know whether or not her family had green eyes, as she did. She had told him all their eyes were shades of brown and that she must be a throwback to some ancient ancestor.
John had nodded at those words and his eyes had glistened with moisture. He always called her daughter thereafter.
Caroline routinely walked to the docks to inquire of the missionaries whether or not the ship had arrived that would carry them to America. One day she returned to the bakery with the news that a ship was ready to sail and that the Mormon converts should assemble on the waterfront with their possessions. John had asked her to remain in England and help him in the bakery.
Caroline had declined the kind offer, explaining she must continue on the journey with the Mormon converts. That she must see this fabulous land of America. John had said no more. He took her to a clothier and purchased boy’s heavy shoes, pants, and shirts for her. “To wear when you begin the trip through the wilderness of America,” he had said. He gave her several shillings.
Caroline had waved from the deck of the ship as it left the dock in Liverpool. The old baker had shed tears, which he’d tried to hide with his hand. Caroline also had cried at their parting.
Now she set her shoes aside and reclined on her bed. The flames of the single oil lantern that lit the compartment waved and flickered as the ship rolled steeply to a beam sea. Shadows, distorted black caricatures of the women preparing for bed, moved on the steel bulkheads. The women were unnaturally quiet as they let down their hair and spread their blankets.
The family groups had been given cabins on the port side of the ship. The single women were assigned five large compartments on the starboard side, aft of the smokestacks.
Caroline shared the space of one compartment with nineteen other girls. She slept near the rear and farthest from the hatchway that opened out into the main starboard passageway of the ship. A smaller hatchway, locked and never used, was near her feet. That exit led into a cargo storage area.
One of the women pried up the globe of the lantern and blew out the flame. A Stygian darkness engulfed the compartment. Caroline heard a few calls of good night between friends. Then the only sound was of low stirring as the women settled down to sleep.
Caroline lay staring upward into the blackness for a long time. Now that the women were quiet, she could hear the creaking noise of cargo shifting in the hold beyond the hatchway. That noise had begun the first day the ship had left harbor and caught the taller waves of the open sea.
She let her mind drift back to recall the years her family worked the small rocky farm on the side of a hill in England. Those long years had been bad, a time of backbreaking labor and near starvation. The future, perhaps, would be better. She had been told there was land, rich land, without limit in America. That people could claim all the land they could plow and sow. She would need a husband to help with the work. She was eighteen years old, and no one had ever asked her to be his wife. Maybe no one ever would. What then? She went to sleep with that worrisome thought in her mind.
***
Caroline jerked awake. Something was wrong. She breathed lightly through her mouth, listening.
The creaking noise from the cargo hold was louder; that was what had awakened her. She rose up silently. In the total darkness she could see nothing. She cocked her ear, straining to hear.
A hand swept across her bed. The fingers touched her leg just above the knee. The hand hesitated but for an instant only, and then long, callused fingers closed like a vise nearly encircling her leg. The other hand of the man shot out and caught her by the neck. Quickly it shifted up and clamped tightly over her mouth. The scream in Caroline’s throat was stifled to nothing.
The hand that held her leg released its grip and jumped to catch hold of the front of her clothing. The man began to crawl upon her. Before his body could block the lifting of her knees, Caroline bent her legs and jerked them up. She kicked out with all of her strength, driving her feet at the place where she judged the man’s head would be.
One of her heels crashed into the face of the man. She felt the crush of flesh and the coarse beard. The hold upon her loosened slightly. She tore free and began to scuttle backward on her rump.
The man uttered not a sound as he struck out. His hard hand caught Caroline a stinging blow to the side of the face, rolling her like a doll.
Caroline added her own impetus to her roll, tumbling over the girl that slept beside her. She rolled again and came to a stop against a second sleeper.
Caroline sobbed as she sucked in a breath of air. Her heart was nearly bursting as it pumped large pulses of blood.
A startled cry, swiftly cut off, came out of the darkness. There was a dragging sound that went out through the hatchway into the cargo hold. Caroline heard clothing rip. A low, rhythmic thumping sound began.
“Light the lantern,” Caroline screamed at the top of her voice. “A man’s broke in. He’s taken one of the girls.”
An instant hubbub of voices arose. “What’s happening?” an excited voice demanded to know. “You’re tramping on me,” another girl cried out. Others yelled. “Shut up.” “Get off me.” “Who yelled?”
“Light the lantern,” Caroline shouted into the bedlam of noise.
No light came to life. Fearfully Caroline crawled to the hatchway. Just barely out of her reach in the darkness, the tempo and violence of the thumping increased. Now she heard a grunting sound, like a hog rooting.
“Make a light!” she cried out in desperation. “For God’s sake, make a light.”
The thumping ceased. There was a moment’s pause, and then a large body moved away in the blackness of the cargo hold.
The lantern flared to life. Was lifted. The hubbub slackened.
“Over here,” called Caroline. “Hurry!”
A girl crawled in through the hatchway on her hands and knees. Her face was bloody and her eyes filled with a horrible fright.
The woman holding the lantern pushed through to stare down at the girl on the floor. “Oh! My God! What happened?”
“He raped me!” cried the girl as she huddled on the floor. “A man pulled me in there and raped me.” She pulled a blanket over her half-naked body and began to sob.
“Here’s Mathias,” someone said.
“I heard the screaming,” Mathias said, hurrying into the compartment. “What’s wrong?”
“A man came through there,” said Caroline, pointing at the small hatchway. “He hit and raped Esther.”
Mathias’ face took on an angry expression. “Damnation. Do what you can for her,” he said. “I’ll get the ship’s doctor and the captain.” He hastened out into the passageway.
The doctor and the captain arrived as Caroline talked and tried to comfort Esther.
“Move aside, young woman, and let me take a look,” the doctor said to Caroline. He bent over Esther.
“Bad blow to the cheek,” said the doctor. “Come down to sick bay so I can treat you and get you cleaned up. Can you walk?” he asked her.
“Yes, I think so,” said Esther.
“Very well,” said the doctor. “Lean on me as much as you need to.” Supporting the shaken young woman, he left the compartment.
“Caroline, did you say the man came in through that hatchway?” asked Mathias.
“Yes, and then he dragged Esther out the same way.”
The captain spoke. “That hatch is supposed to be secured on the other side by a padlock. Only the storekeeper has a key. I’ll get to the bottom of this. Someone will pay.”
Looking neither left nor right, the captain strode from the women’s compartment.