Respectable Trade (3 page)

S
IKO WAS UNWILLING TO
leave the city of Oyo. He was a city boy who had sold himself into slavery with Mehuru when his parents died. He had thought that with a young man whose career was centered on the court, he would be safe from the discomfort of farming work and rural life. He was deeply reluctant to venture out into the countryside, which he regarded as a dangerous place inhabited by wild animals and surly peasants.

“For the last time,” Mehuru said abruptly. “Finish packing and fetch the horses, or I shall sell you to a brothel.”

Siko bowed his head at the empty threat and moved only slightly faster. He was confident that Mehuru would never ill-treat him, and indeed he was saving money to buy his freedom from his young master, as they had agreed.

“Should we not take porters and guards?” he asked. “My brother said he would be willing to come with us.”

“We will be traveling along trading routes,” Mehuru said patiently. “We will be meeting porters and guards on the trading caravans all along the way. If there is any danger on the roads, we can travel with them. I am on an urgent mission; we are traveling at speed. You would have us dawdling along the road and stopping at every village.”

“I would have us stay snug in the city,” Siko muttered into a saddlebag. Aloud he said, “We are packed, sir, and ready to leave.”

Mehuru nodded to him to load the bags and went into his room. In the corner were his priestly things, laid out for meditation. The divining tray made of beautifully polished wood indented with circular cups filled with cowrie shells, the little purse filled with ash, a cube of chalk, a flask of oil. Mehuru picked them up one by one and put them into a soft leather satchel, letting his mind linger on them and calling for vision.

Nothing came. Instead he saw once more the prow of a ship, rocking gently on clear tropical waters. He could see a shoal of small fish nibbling at the copper casing of the wooden hull, something he had never seen in waking life. Again he smelled the heavy, sickly smell of sugar and sepsis.

“What does it mean?” he whispered softly. “What does it mean?”

He shuddered as if the day were not pulsing with heat, as if he could feel a coldness like death. “What does it mean, this ship?” He waited for an answer, but he could hear nothing except Siko complaining to the cook about the prospect of a journey
and the chattering of a flock of glossy starlings, gathering on the rooftop, their deep blue feathers iridescent in the morning sun.

He shrugged. No ship could endanger him; his journey lay northward, inland. To the north were the long, rolling plains of savannah country, an inland river or two, easily forded or crossed by boat, and then, even farther north—at the limits of the mighty Yoruba kingdom—the great desert of the Sahel. No ship could be a threat to him; he was far from the coast. Perhaps he should see the ship as a good omen; perhaps it was a vision of a slaving ship that would no longer be able to cruise casually off the coast of his country and gather in his country’s children as greedily as a marauding hyena.

Mehuru picked up his satchel of goods and slung it over his shoulder. Whatever the meaning of the vision, he had a job to do, and nothing would prevent him. He bundled his traveling cape into a neat roll and went out into the brilliant midday sunshine. The horses were waiting, and the great city gates set deep into the mighty walls of the famous city of Oyo had been open since dawn.

“So!” he said cheerfully to Siko. “Off we go!”

T
HE QUAYSIDE COFFEE SHOP
was on the opposite side of the river from Josiah’s dock, and so he took the little ferryboat across and tossed the lad who rowed him a ha’penny. The coffee shop was the regular meeting place for all the merchants of Bristol, from the finest men to the smallest traders. When Josiah pushed open the small door, his eyes smarted at the strong, aromatic smell. The place was thick with tobacco smoke and the hot, familiar scents of coffee, rum, and molasses. Josiah, with his hat under his arm, went slowly from table to table, seeing who was there. All of the merchants were known to him, but only a few did business with him regularly. At the best table, farthest from the damp drafts from the
swinging door, were the great merchants of Bristol, in fine coats and crisp, laundered linen. They did not even glance up when Josiah said “Good day” to them. Josiah was not worth their attention.

He nodded politely in their direction, accepting the snub. When he was nephew by marriage to Lord Scott, they would return his greeting, and he would be bidden to sit with them. Then he would see the cargo manifests that were spread on their table. Then he would have a chance at the big partnerships and the big trading ventures. Then he would command their friendship and have access to their capital for his own ventures. They would invite him to join their association—the Merchant Venturers of Bristol—and all the profits and opportunities of the second-greatest provincial city in Britain would fall open to him.

“Josiah!” a voice called. “Over here!”

Josiah turned and saw a table crowded with men of his own class, small traders who shared and shared again the risks of a voyage, men who scrambled over each other for the great prizes of the trade and yet who would be wiped out by the loss of one ship. Josiah could not reject their company. His own father had been an even lesser man—trading with a fleet of flat-bottomed trows up and down the Severn: coal from Wales, wheat from Somerset, cattle from Cornwall. Only at the very end of his life had George Cole owned an oceangoing ship, and she had been a broken-down privateer that had managed one voyage for him before she sank. But on that one voyage she had taken a French trading ship and claimed all her cargo. She had shown a profit of thousands of pounds, and the Cole fortune had been made and the Cole shipping line founded. George Cole had put up his sign “Cole and Sons,” and bequeathed the business to his son and daughter. They had made it their life’s work to expand yet further.

Two men seated on a bench moved closer to make space for Josiah. Their damp clothes steamed slightly in the warmth, and there was a prevailing smell of stale sweat and wet wool.

“Good day,” Josiah said. He nodded at the waiter for coffee, and the boy brought him a pot with a cup and a big bowl of moist brown lump sugar.

“You did well on the
Daisy,
then,” the man who had called him commented. “Prices are holding up for sugar. But you get no tobacco worth the shipping.”

Josiah nodded. “It was a good voyage,” he said. “I won’t buy tobacco out of season. I’ll only take sugar. I did well on the
Daisy,
and we turned her around quickly.”

“Do you have a partner for your next voyage?” the man opposite him asked. He spoke with a thick Somerset accent.

“I am seeking a partner for the
Lily.
She will be in port within two months.”

“And who commands her?”

“Captain Merrick. There is no more experienced master in Bristol,” Josiah said.

The man nodded. “D’you have the accounts for her last voyage?”

Josiah shook his head, lying with easy fluency. “They are with the excise men,” he explained. “Some trouble over the bond last time. But the
Daisy
is a better example in any case. She was fresh into port and showed a profit of three hundred pounds for each shareholder. You won’t find a better breeding ground for your money than that!”

“Could be,” he said uncertainly.

Josiah dropped two crumbling lumps of thick brown sugar into his coffee, savoring the sweetness, the very scent of the trade, and signaled for a glass of rich, dark rum. “As you wish,” he said casually. “I have other men that should have the offer first, perhaps. I only mentioned it because of your interest. Think no more about it.”

“Oh, no,” the man said quickly. “What share would you be looking for?”

“A quarter,” Josiah replied coolly. He looked away from the table and nodded a greeting at another man.

“And how much would that be?”

Josiah seemed to be barely listening. “Oh, I couldn’t say. . . .” He shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps a thousand pounds each, perhaps nine hundred. Say no more than nine hundred.”

The man looked rather dashed. “I had not thought it would be so much. . . .”

Josiah turned his brown-stained smile on him. “You will not regret it being so much when it shows a profit of twenty or thirty percent. Eh?”

“And who will be the ship’s husband? You? You will do all the fitting and the orders?”

“Myself,” Josiah said. “I always do. I would trust it to no other man. But I should not have troubled you with this. There is Mr. Wheeler now. I promised him a share in the
Lily.
”

“No, stay,” the man protested. “I will take a share, Josiah. I will have my share in her.”

Josiah nodded easily. “As you wish, Samuel.” He held out his hand, and the other grasped it quickly. “Come to my warehouse this afternoon, and bring your bond. I will have the contract for you.”

The man also nodded, half excited and half fearful. He rose from the table and went out. He would be busy from now until the afternoon, scouring the city for credit to raise his share.

“I had not thought he had nine hundred pounds to outlay,” one of the others remarked. “You had best see your money before you sign, Josiah.”

Josiah shrugged. Despite himself, his eyes strayed to the table at the top of the room. The men had called for a pie, a ham, and some bread and cheese for their breakfasts. They were drinking port. They were joking loudly, and their faces were flushed. They did not have to haggle over some small man’s life savings to finance a voyage. They carved up the profitable voyages among themselves; they shared the profits from the docks—even the barges that plied up and down the Avon paid them a fee; the little ferryboat and even the lighthouses paid them rent.

“I have some news,” Josiah said. “I am to be married.”

There was a stunned silence at the little table.

“To the niece of Lord Scott of Whiteleaze,” Josiah went on. “His lordship will be calling on me soon, and we will settle the marriage contract.”

“My God! Josiah!” one exclaimed.

“Wherever did you meet the lady?” one of the others asked. The rest simply gaped.

“She called on us,” Josiah lied convincingly. “She knows a friend of my sister’s. They were at school together.”

The men could hardly find words. “I had thought you would be a bachelor forever!” one of them said.

“And with Sarah to keep house for you! I never thought you would marry.”

“I was waiting for the right lady,” Josiah said precisely. “And for my fortunes to be on such a rise that I could offer her a proper position in life.”

The men nodded. The news was too staggering to be taken in all at once. “I had not thought he was doing
that
well,” one of the men muttered.

“I shall move from the warehouse,” Josiah said. “I shall take a new house for my wife.”

“Where will you live?”

“I shall buy a house in Queens Square,” Josiah said. Again he glanced toward the top table. The men there owned Queens Square outright; it had been built by the corporation, to their design. They could choose whether or not to sell to him. Money alone could not buy him into their neighborhood; but with Lord Scott’s niece on his arm, he would be welcomed in the elegant, brick-faced square. Josiah would call them “neighbor,” and his new wife would visit their wives.

The men at the table nodded. “And the lady . . . ?”

“Shall we return to business?” Josiah asked with a small, triumphant smile. “I think that is enough about the lady who is to be Mrs. Cole.”

They nodded, as impressed by the triumph of his marriage as by his quiet dignity.

“About this voyage of the
Lily,
” one of them said. “I think I’ll take a share after all. Will his lordship be coming in with us?”

Josiah smiled slightly. “Oh, I should think so,” he said.

M
EHURU
’
S MISSION WAS GOING
well. He went from town to town and even stopped at the councils of the larger villages as he worked his way northwest across the great rolling plains of the Yoruba nation. The villagers knew that he was talking nothing more than sense. For all the profits that could be made from the slave trade—and they were beyond the dreams of most farming communities—there were terrible stories, garbled in the telling, of rivers where no one dared fish and woods where no one could walk. Whole villages were desolate, hundreds, thousands of women and children abandoned and starving in fields that they could not farm alone. It was a blight spreading inland from the coast, a plague that took the young men and women, the fittest and the strongest, and left behind the ill, the old, and the babies.

This plague of slavery worked unlike any other. It took the healthy, it took the adventurous, it took the very men and women who should command the future. The guns and gold and fine cloth could not repay Africa for the loss of her brightest children. It was the future leaders who were bled away, along the rivers, down the trade routes.

“This is where it stops,” Mehuru said firmly in one town council after another. “One nation has to refuse. One nation has to throw up a wall and say that it must end here. Otherwise what will become of us? Already the trade routes running north are unsafe, and the wealth of this nation depends on our trade. We send our leather goods, we send our brassware, we send our rich luxuries north, across the Sahel Desert to the Arab nations, and we buy our spices and silk from them. All our trade
has always been north to south, and now the slavers are cutting the routes.

“The coastal forests and plains are becoming deserted. Who will fish if the coast is abandoned? Where shall we get salt if the women cannot dry it in the salt pans? Where shall we get food if we cannot farm? How can a country be strong and safe and wealthy if every day a hundred, two hundred men are stolen?”

The men in the village councils nodded. Many of them showed the profits of the slave trade, with ragged shirts of cotton woven in Manchester and guns forged in Birmingham. But they were quick to notice that the vivid dyes of the cottons bled out after a few washings and the guns were deadly to the users as well as to the victims when they misfired. No one could deny that the slave trade was an unequal deal in which Africa was losing her brightest sons in exchange for tatty goods and shoddy wares.