Saint Barthélemy took no notice of the farewell we were preparing. The colony bustled as ever. It did not take long for Jarrick to procure a buyer for Cul-de-Sac. The thought of Johan Axel in captivity was like a vise on my heart, but Ceton did what he could to comfort me: “Your cousin is a clever man, Erik, wiser than us two combined. Leave yet another letter for him with Davis, and make it a wedding invitation! With luck, he will join us at home in Sweden on the day when Linnea Charlotta becomes your wife. Who would be a better choice to take your father’s place by your side at the altar?”
Our trip home was arranged, and on an overcast morning we stood in front of the vessel, the crew busy unfastening her moorings. It seemed to me that there was no one left on Saint Barthélemy to whom I owed a goodbye, but as I stood on the Carenage awaiting my turn to board, I caught sight of Samuel Fahlberg. He saw me at the same time and we walked over to each other and shook hands.
“So young Erik is leaving us so soon.”
“You at least I leave with my best wishes, Doctor.” We spoke for a while to dissipate the melancholy we shared. Somewhat distraught, I put my hands in my pockets and found one of the strange stones I had collected. I took it out and showed it to Fahlberg. “Would you happen to know what this is?”
I held it out to him, but he did not make the least attempt to take it from me. Still he nodded in the affirmative.
“Yes. But I don’t know if you really want to know the answer, Erik. You who are a child of Rousseau and surely a proponent of the concept of the noble savage.”
I insisted, and he shrugged.
“I have spent many years here on Saint Barthélemy. I also have gathered my share of strange objects. One often finds these on the beach here by the Carenage. I have shown them to the old ones on neighboring islands, and they gave me an answer.” He sighed heavily before continuing. “Many hundreds of years ago this island was home to a people who called themselves the Arawak. One day another tribe came in canoes out of the west. They were famished after their long journey. They brought all of the Arawak men and boys to the beach, where they made a meal of them. Of the women and girls, they made provisions. They roasted the bodies in pits filled with red-hot coals. The stones you have collected are their cracked bones, turned to stone with the passage of time. The marks they bear come from the teeth that once gnawed them free of flesh.”
At first I did not know what to say, and simply stood with the little stone in my hand, this innocent object whose nature had so suddenly taken on a different meaning. I was struck by a thought, and for a few short moments found it was a comfort to me. “Are we not then better than that, Doctor? Slavers we may be, but never cannibals.”
He smiled sadly and shook his head. “You’ve never visited the sugar fields, Erik. The Antilles are one big slaughterhouse, one that would not have been possible without our assistance. The profit is so large and the slaves so cheap that many choose to let them starve. When they collapse, they buy new ones, and greet them with the spade they must use to bury those they have just replaced; men, women, and children, joined in a mire of rotting flesh to make a bed for others when next the grave is opened.”
He turned away and raised a hand to his face, overcome with emotion. “Maybe the savage was never noble. Maybe mankind was blighted from the very beginning. Maybe the world becomes older but never better. Maybe all these advances we call civilization only allow us to practice our evil on a scale never before seen. Everywhere on these islands, sugar blooms by the ditches of the dead. We use it to sweeten our food. God help us, Erik, would we not have shown the greater mercy if we had simply gone straight to Africa and eaten the negroes?”