Once the bottom of the hold was covered with a layer of humanity, the next deck was placed in position over them, so close that they could not attempt to sit upright nor roll over. The next layer of girls was laid over them, and the next deck over them again.
To reach the lower decks meant laboriously unchaining and unloading each layer of humanity, and lifting the intervening decks. It could not even be attempted at sea. However, with the trade wind standing fair, it was a straight run down the channel, and the wind blowing in through the canvas scoops and ports, kept the air below decks breathable, and the heat bearable.
Sheikh Yussuf sighed again and lifted his rheumy eyes to the unbroken blue line of the eastern horizon.
‘This will be my last voyage,’ he decided, whispering aloud in the way of old men. ‘Allah has been good and I am a rich man with many strong sons. Perhaps this is his sign to me. This will indeed be my last voyage.’
It was almost as though he had been overheard, for the scarlet banner moved lazily, like an adder emerging from long hibernation, then slowly reared its head, and Sheikh Yussuf felt the wind on his seared and wrinkled cheek.
He stood up suddenly, quick and supple as a man half his age, and stamped his bare foot on the deck.
‘Up’, he cried. ‘Up, my children. Here is the wind at last.’ And while his crew scrambled to their feet, he took the long tiller under his arm and threw back his head to watch the sail bulge outwards, and the thick clumsy pole of the mainmast heel slowly across a horizon suddenly dark with the scurry of the trade wind.
Clinton Codrington caught the first whiff of it during the night. It woke him from a nightmare that he had lived through on many other nights, but when he lay sweating in his narrow wooden bunk the smell persisted and he threw a boat cloak over his bare shoulders and hurried up on deck.
It came in gusts out of the darkness, for minutes at a time the warm sweet rush of the trade wind brought only the iodine and salt smell of the sea, then suddenly there was another curdled whiff of it. It was a smell that Clinton would never forget, like the smell of a cage full of carnivorous beasts that had never been cleaned, the stench of excrement and rotten flesh, and his nightmare came rushing back upon him in full strength.
Ten years before, when Clinton had been a very junior midshipman aboard the old Widgeon, one of the very first gunboats of the anti-slavery squadron, they had taken a slaver in northern latitudes. She was a schooner of 300 tons burden, out of Lisbon, but flying a Brazilian flag of convenience, with the unlikely name of Hirondelle Blanche,the White Swallow. Clinton had been ordered into her as prize-master with orders to run her into the nearest Portuguese port and deliver her to the Courts of Mixed Commission to be condemned as a prize.
They had made the capture a hundred nautical miles off the Brazilian coast, after the Hirondelle Blanche and her five hundred black slaves had almost completed the dreaded middle passage. Under orders, Clinton had turned the schooner and sailed her back to the Cape Verde Islands, crossing the equator to do so and lying three days becalmed in the doldrums before breaking from their suffocating grip.
In the harbour of Praia, on the principal island of São Tiago, Clinton had been refused permission to land any of his slaves, and they had lain sixteen days waiting for the Portuguese president of the Court of Mixed Commission to reach a decision. Finally, the president had decided, after strenuous representation by the owners of the Hirondelle Blanche that he had no jurisdiction in the case, and ordered Clinton to sail her back to Brazil and submit the vessel to the Brazilian courts.
However, Clinton knew very well what a Brazilian court would decide, and instead set a course for the British naval station on St Helena Island, once more crossing the equator with his burden of human misery.
By the time he dropped anchor in Jamestown roads, the surviving slaves aboard had made three consecutive crossings of the terrible middle passage. There were only twenty-six of them still alive, and the smell of a slaver had become part of the nightmares which still plagued Clinton ten years later.
Now he stood on the darkened deck and flared his nostrils, the same smell coming to him out of the tropical night, horrible and unmistakable. He had to drag himself away with a physical effort to give the orders to fire Black Joke’s furnace and work up a head of steam in her boilers, ready for the dawn.
Sheikh Yussuf recognized the dark shape with a sense of utter disbelief, and the dismay of one finally deserted by Allah.
She was still five miles distant, indistinct in the dusty pink light of the dawn, but coming up swiftly, a thick column of black smoke smearing away on her beam, carried low over the green waters of the inshore channel by the boisterous trade wind. The same wind spread out her ensign to full view from the poop of the dhow, and in the field of Sheikh Yussuf’s ancient brass and leatherbound telescope it snapped and flickered, the snowy white field crossed by bold bright scarlet.
How he hated that flag, the symbol of an arrogant, bullying people, tyrants of the oceans, captors of continents. He had seen gunboats like this one in Aden and Calcutta, he had seen that same flag flying in every far corner of every sea he had ever sailed. Very clearly he knew what it all meant.
He put up the helm, in that gesture acknowledging the final end to a disastrous voyage, the dhow came around reluctantly, creaking in every timber, the great sail flagging before it could be trimmed to take the wind over the stern.
There had seemed to be so little risk, he thought with weary resignation. Of course, the treaty that the Sultan had made with the Zanzibar consul of these dangerous infidels allowed his subjects to trade in the black pearls, between any of the Sultan’s possessions, with the proviso that only Omani Arabs loyal to the Sultan could indulge in the lucrative traffic. No person of Christian European extraction, not even a converted Muslim, could sail under the Sultan’s flag, and not even an Omani Arab might trade beyond the borders of the Sultan’s possessions.
The Sultan’s African possessions had been very carefully defined in the treaty, and here was he, Sheikh Yussuf, with a cargo of three hundred and thirty living, dying and dead slaves at least one hundred and fifty miles south of the furthest of the Sultan’s borders with a British gunboat bearing down upon him. Truly the ways of Allah were wonderful, passing the comprehension of man, Sheikh Yussuf thought with only the slightest taste of bitterness in his throat, as he hung grimly on to the tiller and made his run for the land.
A gun thumped from the gunboat’s bows, powder smoke flew bright as a seabird’s wing in the first rays of the low sun, and Sheikh Yussuf spat passionately over the lee bulwark and said aloud,
‘El Sheetan, the Devil,’ using for the first time the name with which, in time, Captain Clinton Codrington would be known throughout the length of the Mozambique channel, and as far north as the great Horn of Africa.
The bronze screw under Black Joke’s counter thrashed out along wide wake behind her. She still had main and jib set, but Codrington would shorten to ‘fighting sail’ just as soon as he had made the adjustment to counter the dhow’s turn away towards the land.
Zouga and Robyn were on the quarterdeck to watch the chase, infected by the restrained businesslike excitement which gripped the vessel so that Zouga laughed aloud and called, ‘Gone away! Tally-ho!’ as the dhow turned, and Clinton glanced at him with a conspiratory grin.
‘She’s a slaver. Apart from the stink, that turn-away proves it beyond doubt.’
Robyn strained forward to watch the filthy little vessel, with its discoloured and patched sail, the unpainted timbers of the hull striped with zebra stripes of human excrement and other wastes. It was her first view of a slaver actually carrying on its grisly trade, and she felt herself filled with a new purpose; she had come so far for this moment, and she tried to capture every detail of it all for her journal.
‘Mr Denham, give him a gun, if you please,’ ordered Clinton.
The bow-chaser thudded, but the dhow held to her new course.
‘Be ready
to round up and send the boat away on the instant.’ Clinton’s excitement had given way to obvious anxiety. He turned to look across at his boarding party. They had been issued with cutlass and pistol, and waited now in the waist under the command of a young ensign.
Clinton would dearly have liked to command the boarding-party himself but his arm was still in its sling and the stitches still in the wound. To go aboard a dhow in a rough sea, and fight its crew required both hands and the agility which his wound denied him. Reluctantly he had put Ferris in charge of the boarders.
Now he looked back at the dhow, and his expression was grim.
‘He is going to beach.’
They were all silent now, staring ahead, watching the slaver run in towards the land.
‘But there is a coral reef.’ Robyn spoke for them all, pointing to the black points that broke the surface a quarter of a mile short of the land itself, they looked like a necklace of sharks’ teeth, and the surf broke and swirled about them as it was driven in upon the trade wind.
‘Yes,’ Clinton agreed. ‘They will run it up on the coral and escape across the lagoon.’
‘But, what about the slaves?’ Robyn asked, horrified, and nobody answered her.
Black Joke rushed on purposefully, but with the wind almost dead astern the dhow trained her long boom around to go on to her best point of sailing. The boom was longer than the hull itself, and the huge triangular mainsail bulged far out, almost touching the surface of the water as she hurled down upon the reef.
‘We may just cut her off,’ Zouga said loudly, but he did not have the seaman’s eye for bearing and speed, and Clinton Codrington shook his head angrily.
‘Not this time.’
But it was very finely run. Clinton held his course up until the very last moment, and the dhow passed a mere two hundred yards ahead of his bows. So close that they could clearly make out the features of the helmsman on the vessel’s poop deck, a skinny old Arab in long, flowing robe and with the tasselled fez on his head that declared that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. On his belt glittered the gold filigree hilt of the short curved dagger of a sheikh, and his long scraggling white beard fluttered in the wind as he leaned on the long tiller and turned his head to watch the high black hull bearing down on him.
‘I could put a bullet through the bastard,’ Zouga growled.
‘It’s too late for that,’ Clinton told him, for the dhow had passed beneath their bows and the gun boat was as close to the menacing fangs of coral as she dared go. Clinton called to his quartermaster at the gunboat’s wheel, ‘Heave to! And bring her head to wind.’ Then, spinning on his heel, ‘Away, the boarding-party!’
There was a squeal of davits as the crowded whaler dropped out of sight towards the choppy green sea alongside, but already the dhow was pitching wildly in the lines of seething white surf that guarded the reef.
It was two days since that dead flat calm had broken, and since then the trades had worked up a goodly swell. It came sweeping in across the inshore channel, in low green humps with dark wind-scarred backs, but as soon as they felt the tilt of the land, they peaked up eagerly, the crests turning opaque as green jelly, shivering and wobbling, and then collapsing on themselves and surging in tumultuous white water up on to the black fangs of the reef.
The dhow caught one of the taller swells, threw up her stern and went racing down upon it like a surf boat, with the skinny old Arab at the tiller prancing like a trained monkey on the stick of the tiller to hold her in the wave, but the dhow was not built for this work, and she dug her shoulder rebelliously into the sliding, roaring chute of green water, breaching so fiercely to the wave that the water poured aboard her in a green wall and she wallowed broadside, half swamped before she took the reef with a force that snapped off her single mast at deck level and sent yard and sail and rigging crashing over the side.
In an instant she was transformed into a broken hulk, and clearly the watchers on Black Joke’s deck could hear the crackle and rending of her bottom timbers.
‘There they go!’ Clinton muttered angrily, as the dhow’s crew began to abandon her, leaping over the side and using the swells to carry them over the reef into the quieter waters of the lagoon, thrashing and kicking until the beach shelved up beneath them.
They saw the old Arab steersman amongst the survivors. He waded ashore, beard and robe plastered against his body with seawater, and then lifted his robes to his waist, exposing skinny legs and shrunken buttocks as he scampered up the white beach with the agility of a goat and disappeared amongst the palm groves.
Black Joke’s whaler pulled swiftly into the first line of breakers, the Ensign in the stern peering over his shoulder to judge the surf, and then catching his wave taking her in with a rush, swinging sharply into the lee of the dhow’s stranded hull where there was calmer water.
They watched the Ensign and four of his men go up over the side, pistols and cutlasses drawn, but by this time the last of the Arab crew were staggering up the beach and into the sanctuary of the palm grove a quarter of a mile away across the lagoon.
The Ensign led his men below decks, and they waited on Black Joke’s quarterdeck, watching the abandoned dhow through the telescope. A minute passed before the Ensign appeared on deck again. He crossed quickly to the dhow’s rail and leaned against it to vomit over the side, then straightened up and wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve, before shouting an order down to the oarsmen in the whaler.
Immediately the whaler shot out from the lee of the hull, and pulled lustily back through the surf towards Black Joke.
The boatswain came in through the entry port, and knuckled his forehead to his captain.
‘Mr Ferris’s compliments, sir, and he needs a carpenter to get the slave decks open, and two good men with bolt cutters for the chains.’ He had gabbled this out on a single breath, and he paused to refill his lungs. ‘Mr Ferris says as how it’s fierce bad below decks, and some of them is trapped – and he needs the doctor—’
‘I’m ready to go,’ Robyn cut in.
‘Wait,’ Clinton snapped, but Robyn had gathered her skirts and run.
‘If my sister goes, I’m going too.’
‘Very well, then, Ballantyne, I’m obliged for your assistance,’ Clinton nodded. ‘Tell Ferris we have an incoming tide, full moon tonight, so it will make springs. There is a twenty-two foot tidal fall on this coast. He will have less than an hour in which to work.’
Robyn appeared on deck again, lugging her black leather valise, and she had exchanged skirts for breeches once more. The seamen on deck gawked at her legs curiously, but she ignored them and hurried to the ship’s side. The boatswain gave her a hand and she scrambled down into the whaler with Zouga carrying her valise behind her.
The ride in through the surf was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time; the whaler tilted forward at an alarming angle, the water hissing and creaming alongside, with a belly-swooping rush that ended alongside the dhow’s heavily canted side.
The deck was running with water and listed so steeply that Robyn had to crawl up it on her hands and knees, and each time a wave struck the hull, it quivered and shook and more water came streaming down over the deck.
The Ensign and his boarding party had ripped the hatches off the main hold and as she reached them, Robyn gagged and choked with the solid stench that came out of that square opening. She had believed herself hardened to the smell of death and corruption, but never had she experienced anything like this.
‘Did you bring the bolt cutters?’ the Ensign demanded, white-faced with nausea and horror.
The bolt cutters were heavy duty shears, used for cutting the shrouds and halyards from a dismasted vessel. Two men wielded them now, as they lifted a bunch of small black bodies through the hatch, all of them fastened together at wrist and ankle by the clanking black steel links. It reminded Robyn of the cut-out paper dolls she had amused herself with as a child, fashioning with scissors a single figure from the folded sheet, and
then pulling out a chain of identical dolls. The cutters crunched through the light chain and the limp little bodies fell apart.
‘They are children,’ she cried out aloud, and the men around her worked in grim silence, dragging them out of the hatch, cutting them free and dropping them on to the tilted wet deck.
Robyn seized the first of them, a skeletal stick figure, crusted and streaked with dried filth, vomit and faeces, head lolling as she lifted it into her lap.
‘No,’ There was no life. The eyeballs had dried already. She let the head drop and a seaman dragged it away.
‘No,’ and ‘No,’ and ‘No again.’ Some of them were already in an advanced state of putrefaction; at a word from the Ensign, the seamen began dropping the wasted corpses over the side, to make room for those still coming up from below.
Robyn found her first live one, there was feeble pulse and fluttering breath, but it did not need a physician’s instinct to tell that the hold on life was tenuous. She worked swiftly, apportioning her time to where the chance of life seemed greater.
Another taller wave struck the dhow, and it tilted sharply, the timbers crackled and snapped deep inside her.
‘Tides flooding. Work faster,’ shouted the Ensign. They were into the hull now. Robyn could hear the thud of sledge hammers and the rip of irons as they began to tear the slave decks out of her.
Zouga was in there, stripped to the waist, leading the attack on the wooden barricades. He was an officer, with the easy way of command and his natural leadership was swiftly acknowledged by the seamen around him.
The hubbub reminded Robyn of a rookery at sundown, the shrieks of the returning birds and the answering cries from the chicks in the nests. The mass of black girls were aroused from the lethargy of approaching death by the dhow’s wild antics, the crash of breaking timbers and the flood of cold salt water into the hold.
Some of those lying in the bilges were already drowning as the hold flooded, and some of them had realized that there was a rescue team aboard, and cried aloud with the last strength of waning hope.