Chesapeake (93 page)

But now came the significant part of the exercise, the symbolic moment which justified the establishment of the barracoon and its more or less humane management. The bishop extended his arms to their widest and cried, ‘In the name of Jesus Christ, I baptize you into the Holy Christian Church. If perchance you should die on the journey you are about to undertake, you will be received into heaven and sit upon the right hand of God.’

When he had finished making the sign of the cross, seven priests hurried through the massed slaves, anointing them with holy water and assuring them of life eternal. When this was completed, the bishop gave the entire assemblage his blessing, wished the ship’s crew a safe passage, and climbed down off the bales of cotton. As soon as he was gone, Mr. Goodbarn shouted, ‘Now get these black bastards on board. Quick!’

The slaves were turned about, to face the ocean, and for the first time they saw the ship that would carry them to the blessings of which the bishop had spoken, but they were permitted to inspect it for only a moment, because members of the ship’s crew began thumping them in the back and shouting, ‘Move on! Move on!’

They ran a gauntlet of sailors and slavers, all urging them toward the ship, up whose gangplank they were rushed. On deck stood Captain Turlock, his red beard flecked with gray, his silver fist shining in the hot sun. With sure eye he studied the slaves to check whether sickly substitutes had been inserted, and with a heavy swipe of his metaled hand he moved the unchained slaves toward the hold.

There Mr. Goodbarn supervised their allocation to one of the four compartments, taking pains to ensure that powerful men and possible troublemakers were sent to the lowest hold. Belowdecks a Mr. Jenkins
supervised the welding of such chains as had come below, and when these men were finished with their tasks, four hundred and sixty slaves were stowed in quarters that might have accommodated sixty men in reasonable decency. The grating at the mainmast was bolted shut. The passageway between the two levels was locked. The white men climbed out on a ladder, which they drew up behind them. And the hatch leading to the deck was bolted from the outside. In gloom, and seasickness, and filth the blacks would sail.

Meanwhile, on deck, Captain Turlock was trying to do something he had never done before: find space for fifty-seven men and women, most of them in chains. These he bolted to the bulwarks, port and starboard. The others he ordered to huddle forward, with a guard instructed to shoot them if they gave trouble.

‘It’s our last trip,’ he told Goodbarn. ‘See it goes well.’

It started poorly. Father João’s false signal had sent the
Bristol
on a wild chase to the north, but as soon as the priest realized he had been tricked and that the
Ariel
had slipped into shore, he boldly unfurled a large sheet, which alerted the
Bristol
to the invasion. Now it came rushing south, determined to intercept the slaver before it could get out to sea.

‘Bristol
coming!’ Captain Turlock’s lookout cried.

‘All hands!’ Turlock shouted, and no other orders were necessary, for each American sailor knew that he must get this clipper out of Luanda or risk years in a London jail.

With astonishing speed the crew had the
Ariel
ready, and while Portuguese wharfmen, eager to keep slavers coming to their port, threw off the lines, Mr. Goodbarn supervised trimming ‘the slaver’s delight,’ as the hermaphrodite rigging was called. ‘If’n a morfidite can’t get you goin’ in light airs, nothin’ can.’

The
Bristol,
already under way, would enjoy an advantage, especially with her formidable guns, but the
Ariel
did not propose to allow her within range, and in the early stages of the contest nullified the
Bristol’s
running start by catching an offshore breeze which carried her well out to sea. Father João, watching the two ships, prayed the breeze would drop so that the slaver might be taken. But his prayer was not answered. The breeze maintained and Captain Turlock cleared the harbor.

‘Raise the topsails,’ he told Mr. Goodbarn, and when they were aloft, the ship leaped forward, but it had to keep to a course which brought it close to the
Bristol,
which had swung its guns into position.

Among the slaves bolted to the deck topside were Cudjo and Luta, and the former, always alert to what happened about him, deduced that the disciplined behavior of the American crew meant that they faced some kind of danger, so he pulled himself erect, as far as his chain would allow, and peered over the gunwale. ‘Oh!’ he gasped, for there,
not far away, he saw a much larger ship, its sails rounded with wind.

Till this day he had never seen a ship, so he could not understand its characteristics, but he knew intuitively that this other vessel was the cause of the apprehension he saw in the faces of his captors. For only a brief moment was he able to study the relative position of the two ships, for Captain Turlock bellowed, ‘Mr. Jenkins, get that big one down!’ And Jenkins clubbed Cudjo with a belaying pin. But after he fell to the deck Cudjo was able to shout to the other blacks, ‘That one is trying to capture this one!’

Slaves in both gangs scrambled to their feet to see what Cudjo meant, and this concerted movement of the blacks terrified the white sailors, for they had been taught from their first day aboard the
Ariel:
‘The thing to fear is not storms or British cruisers, but a rebellion. Stamp it out before it gets started.’

‘Mr. Jenkins,’ Mr. Goodbarn shouted, ‘knock those slaves down!’

With belaying pins the sailors swept along the gunwales, knocking the slaves away, then belaboring them as they lay on the deck. The white men had no reluctance to break heads, for they knew that a certain number of deaths could be expected, and they might have killed Cudjo except that Captain Turlock shouted, ‘Mr. Jenkins! Back to the lines.’

The savage beating silenced the blacks, but Cudjo continued to watch the British ship as the
Ariel
rolled in the open sea, disclosing a brief glimpse now and then, and he was delighted to see the other ship moving closer. But now puzzling things began to happen. A series of clever maneuvers by the man with the silver fist began to move his ship away from the pursuer. A gun, much bigger than any ever used by Abu Hassan, was fired and a bullet of immense size, judging from the sound it made, whistled through the ropes overhead.

One of the slaves chained directly to Luta looked over the gunwale and saw what was happening. ‘They’re firing a big gun at us!’ he shouted.

‘Get him down!’ the captain shouted.

Deprived of their lookout, the cowering blacks could no longer follow the action, and their desire to know became so great that Cudjo defiantly stood erect—in time to see the British ship give up the chase. It fired two cannon at the fleeing
Ariel,
but the shots fell harmlessly into the ocean, and the American sailors broke into a cheer.

Cudjo knew that the chase was over. He knew that this red-bearded man had unusual powers. Above all, he knew that any chance for escape was lost.

Once the
Ariel
cleared Africa and the lurking menace of the British cruisers, the daily routine was established. Each dawn some sailor threw several buckets of salt water over the chained blacks. About an hour later
buckets of swill were placed where the slaves could feed themselves. Toward noon the covers leading to the fetid hatches were removed and a work party consisting of unchained slaves from the forward contingent was sent below to collect the bodies of any who had died during the preceding twenty-four hours. These were thrown into a rope basket, which was hauled aloft and emptied over the side of the ship; on several occasions young men and women chained aft would spot the corpses of their parents.

At dusk the swill buckets were again brought out, but the constant motion of the ship was so sickening to the slaves that most of them, including Cudjo, became violently ill at each sight of food. They vomited and excreted and then lay in the filth until the morning bucket of water sluiced at least some of it away. Cudjo, growing constantly thinner, wondered what the conditions below must be. He found only two clues: at noon, when the hatch covers were removed, the heated stench was so awful that the white sailors kept wet rags about their noses, and once when the slaves forward went down to drag out the corpses, they passed Cudjo and he asked, ‘What’s it like?’ and an old man said, ‘Let them kill you up here.’

Sick as he was, Cudjo followed with intense interest everything that happened on deck. He began to appreciate Captain Turlock’s capacities, and how he varied the set of his sails. He understood the duties of the helmsman and even learned the English words used to direct his actions: ‘Steady on’ when the ship’s wake showed indecision, or ‘Hard starboard’ when the great boom was to be swung to the other side in order to catch the breeze more efficiently. He was able to determine the relative importance of the sailors, and who it was that took command when the captain slept. He learned the bells and spent many fruitless hours trying to determine what was in the black box before the tiller that the captain and the helmsman studied so attentively. It did not yet occur to him that this had to do with direction, for he always knew where north was except when fog settled upon the ocean, but he did notice that the white men consulted this box much more frequently at those times when he himself was disoriented, and from this observation he reached one conclusion: the black box had something to do with preventing the ship from becoming lost. Abu Hassan had once brought to the Xanga villages a trading product that had stupefied and delighted them: a magnet with a collection of iron filings. Only once had Cudjo been allowed to work the magnet before the filings were lost, but its mystery had stayed with him. He now concluded that in the secret box there must be a magnet which pulled the ship in the right direction.

But as he became familiar with the operation of the ship, he also became obsessed with what must be happening belowdecks, and once when the covers were removed so that six corpses could be hauled out,
he strained at his chains, hoping to catch at least a glimpse of the horror he knew existed, but he could see nothing. However, his act did not go undetected, for Captain Turlock saw what he was doing and ordered Mr. Jenkins to strike him down.

As he lay unconscious on the deck, Turlock stood above him and said to the trembling slaves, ‘You want to see what’s going on below. Damn me, you’ll see, right now.’

He ordered the forward hatch opened and had his men throw all the unchained blacks below. If their friends caught them, fine. If they broke their backs, to hell with them. He then commanded his carpenter to unbolt the chains holding the two groups aft, and when this was done he ordered his men to throw those blacks below; the two men chained to Cudjo were responsible for dragging him along.

He awoke in the bowels of the ship. Darkness and horror reigned, and when a storm arose, the shapeless mass of arms and legs and torsos rolled back and forth. The free-moving older slaves from the forward part of the deck found what space they could in the area, which was so cramped that standing erect was impossible; they had to lie flat day after day.

The chained slaves faced a more difficult problem. Since they had to move as a unit, all they could do was crouch miserably in corners vacated by the numerous dead, but during the first night below, Cudjo was able to move close to Luta, and for the only time since their capture they had a chance to talk.

‘I wanted to come down here,’ he told her.

‘Why?’

‘Because I know how to sail this ship.’

‘What good?’

‘Because we shall take this ship away from them and sail home.’

‘How?’ She pointed to the stifling hold filled with emaciated shadows.

‘We will take this ship!’ he repeated stubbornly, and during the long, sick night he moved among the others in this upper hold, whispering to them. One told him a remarkable thing: ‘In the hold below, which is worse, a man from another village, he calls himself Rutak, has been saying the same thing.’ The informant led him to a gap in the planking; Cudjo lay prone, his chains forcing the men nearest him to lie down with him, and he whispered, ‘Is Rutak there?’ and after a while a heavy voice replied, ‘I am Rutak.’

They talked for nearly half an hour, and in the upper hold at least six slaves could hear what Cudjo was saying, while in the lower the same number could overhear Rutak, so that before the night was over, all the blacks were aware that Cudjo and Rutak intended something.

Among those in Cudjo’s chain gang who could not help but hear what was being said was Akko, the young man whose trickery had been responsible for Cudjo’s capture. As the son of a village leader, he had
always known preferment, so that the experiences as a chained slave on the march from the Congo, and the indignity of the barracoon, and now the horror of this ship had a deeper effect on him than on most of the others. He was shattered; his deepest sensitivities were profaned and he was prepared to avenge them.

Shifting his chains, and dragging his two arm-companions with him, he approached Cudjo and said in the dark, ‘I will help you take the ship.’

This offer, so unexpected, presented a difficult dilemma. Two months ago Cudjo had wanted to kill this man; now the arrival of worse agonies had obliterated from Cudjo’s mind any thought of mere revenge for personal wrong. But could he trust a man who had betrayed him? In the darkness he could not see Akko or estimate his sincerity, but he did know from his own case that the events of slavery were so compelling as to force a change in any man or woman. He jerked his chains and took Akko by the hands. ‘We will need you,’ he said.

At noon on the next day, when the hatches were opened, the bright sunlight illuminated the upper hold in which Cudjo and his companions huddled. The space was four feet ten inches high, with no ventilation. One corner was set aside as a latrine, but the urine filtered through onto the heads of the blacks below. Any who died within a twenty-four-hour period were piled in another corner. When the hatch to the lower hold was opened, Cudjo saw that it was sheer hell. He shuddered. Every detail was worse.