Volume 1 Chapter 5 - The Maroon by Mayne Reid
The Slaver
A hot West Indian sun was rapidly declining towards the Caribbean Sea—as if hastening to cool his fiery orb in the blue water—when a ship, that had rounded Pedro Point, in the Island of Jamaica, was seen standing eastward for Montego Bay.
She was a three-masted vessel—a barque—as could be told by the lateen rig of her mizen-mast—and apparently of some three or four hundred tons burden.
As she was running under one of the gentlest of breezes, all her canvas was spread; and the weather-worn appearance of her sails denoted that she was making land at the termination of a long ocean voyage. This was further manifest by the faded paint upon her sides, and the dark, dirt-coloured blotches that marked the position of her hawse-holes and scuppers.
Besides the private ensign that streamed, pennon-like from her peak, another trailed over her taffrail; which, unfolded by the motion of the vessel, displayed a blue starry field with white and crimson stripes. In this case the flag was appropriate—that is, in its stripes and their colour. Though justly vaunted as the flag of the free, here was it covering a cargo of slaves: the ship was a slaver.
After getting fairly inside the bay, but still at a long distance from the town, she was observed suddenly to tack; and, instead of continuing on towards the harbour, head for a point on the southern side, where the shore was uninhabited and solitary.
On arriving within a mile of the land she took in sail, until every inch of canvas was furled upon her yards. Then the sharp rattling of the chain, as it dragged through the iron ring of the hawse-hole, announced the dropping of an anchor.
In a few moments after the ship swung round; and, drifting till the chain cable became taut, lay motionless upon the water.
The object for which the slaver had thus anchored short of the harbour will be learnt by our going aboard of her—though this was a privilege not granted to the idle or curious. Only the initiated were permitted to witness the spectacle of which her decks now became the theatre: only those who had an interest in the disposal of her cargo.
Viewed from a distance, the slaver lay apparently inert; but for all that a scene of active life was passing upon her deck—a scene of rare and painful interest.
She carried a cargo of two hundred human beings—“bales,” according to the phraseology of the slave-trader. These bales were not exactly alike. It was, as her skipper jocularly styled it, an “assorted cargo”—that is, one shipped on different points of the African coast, and, consequently, embracing many distinct varieties of the Ethiopian race. There was the tawny, but intelligent Mandingo, and by his side the Jolof of ebon hue. There the fierce and warlike Coromantee, alongside the docile and submissive Pawpaw; the yellow Ebo, with the visage of a baboon, wretched and desponding, face to face with the cannibal Moco, or chained wrist to wrist with the light-hearted native of Congo and Angola.
None, however, appeared of light heart on board the slaver. The horrors of the “middle passage” had equally affected them all, until the dancing Congese, and the Lucumi, prone to suicide, seemed equally to suffer from dejection. The bright picture that now presented itself before their eyes—a landscape gleaming with all the gay colours of tropical vegetation—was viewed by them with very different emotions. Some seemed to regard it with indifference; others it reminded of their own African homes, from which they had been dragged by rude and ruffian men; while not a few gazed upon the scene with feelings of keen apprehension—believing it to be the dreaded Koomi, the land of the gigantic cannibals—and that they had been brought thither to be eaten!
Reflection might have convinced them that this would scarcely be the intention of the Tobon-doo—those white tyrants who had carried them across the ocean. The hard, unhusked rice, and coarse maize corn—their only food during the voyage—were not viands likely to fatten them for the feast of Anthropophagi; and their once smooth and shining skins now exhibited a dry, shrivelled appearance, from the surface coating of dandruff, and the scars of the hideous cra-cra.
The blacks among them, by the hardships of that fearful voyage, had turned ashy grey and the yellows of a sickly and bilious hue. Males and females—for there were many of the latter—appeared to have been alike the objects of ill-usage, the victims of a starved stomach and a stifled atmosphere.
Some half-dozen of the latter—seen in the precincts of the cabin—presented a different aspect. These were young girls, picked from the common crowd on account of the superiority of their personal charms; and the flaunting vestments that adorned their bodies—contrasting with the complete nudity of their fellow-voyagers—told too plainly why they had been thus distinguished. A horrid contrast—wantonness in the midst of woe!
On the quarter-deck stood the slave-skipper—a tall, lathy individual of sallow hue—and, beside him, his mate—a dark-bearded ruffian; while a score of like stamp, but lower grade, acting under their orders, were distributed in different parts of the ship.
These last, as they tramped to and fro over the deck, might be heard at intervals giving utterance to profane oaths—as often laying violent hands upon one or other of their unfortunate captives—apparently out of the sheer wantonness of cruelty!
Immediately after the anchor had been dropped, and the ropes belayed and coiled in their places, a new scene of this disgusting drama was entered upon. The living “bales,” hitherto restrained below, were now ordered, or rather driven, upon deck—not all at once, but in lots of three or four at a time. Each individual, as he came up the hatchway, was rudely seized by a sailor, who stood by with a soft brush in his hand and a pail at his feet; the latter containing a black composition of gunpowder, lemon-juice, and palm-oil. Of this mixture the unresisting captive received a coating; which, by the hand of another sailor, was rubbed into the skin, and then polished with a “dandybrush,” until the sable epidermis glistened like a newly-blacked boot.
A strange operation it might have appeared to those who saw it, had they not been initiated into its object and meaning. But to the spectators there present it was no uncommon sight. It was not the first time those unfeeling men had assisted at the spectacle of black bales being made ready for the market!
One after another were the dark-skinned victims of human cupidity brought from below, and submitted to this demoniac anointment—to which one and all yielded with an appearance of patient resignation, like sheep under the hands of the shearer.
In the looks of many of them could be detected the traces of that apprehension felt in the first hours of their captivity, and which had not yet forsaken them. Might not this process be a prelude to some fearful sacrifice?
Even the females were not exempted from this disgusting desecration of God’s image; and they too, one after another, were passed through the hands of the rough operators, with an accompaniment of brutal jests, and peals of ribald laughter!