I had him! The knowledge was like a warm bath — with these papers at my command I could, when I got home again, turn the screw on the little shark until he hollered uncle. No longer would I be the poor relation; I would have evidence that could ruin him, commercially and socially, and perhaps put him in the dock as well, and the price of my silence would be a free run through his moneybags. By gad, I'd be set for life. A seat in the House? It would be a seat on the board, at least, and grovelling civility from him to me for a change. He'd rue the day he shanghaied me aboard his lousy slave ship.
Chuckling happily, I sewed it all up again in its oilskin, and stitched this carefully into the lining of my coat. There it would stay until I got home and it could be employed in safety to my enrichment and Morrison's confusion, I reflected, as I went back on deck later, that it all came from my act of Christian kindness in listening by Comber's deathbed and comforting his last moments. There's no doubt about it; virtue isn't always just its own reward.
Comber wasn't buried the next day, because one of the slaves died during the night, and when the watch found him at dawn they naturally heaved the body overside to the sharks. For some reason this sent Spring into a passion; he wasn't having a white man buried at sea on the same day as a black had been slung over, which seemed to be stretching it a bit, but a lot of the older hands agreed with him. It beats me; when I go they can plant me in with the whole population of Timbuctoo, but others see things differently. Spring, now, was mad about little things like that, and when eventually we did come to bury Comber on the morning after, and his body had been laid out on a plank by the rail, all neatly stitched up in sail-cloth, our fastidious commander played merry h—l because no one had thought to cover it with a flag. This on a Dahomey slaver, mark you. So we all had to wait with our hats off while Looney was despatched to get a colour from the flag locker, and Spring stamped up and down with his Prayer Book under his arm, cursing the delay, and Mrs Spring sat by with her accordion, She was wearing a floral bonnet in honour of the occasion, secured with a black scarf for mourning, and her face wore its usual expression of vacant amiability.
Looney came back presently, and you wouldn't believe it, he was carrying the Brazilian colours. We were wearing them at the moment, this being the Middle Passage,26 so I suppose he thought he'd done right, but Spring flew into a towering passion.
"D—n your lousy eyes!" cries he, "Take that infernal Dago duster out of my sight — would you bury an Englishman under that?" And he knocked Looney sprawling and then kicked him into the scuppers. He cursed him something fearful, the scar on his head bright crimson, until one of the hands brought a Union Jack, and then we got on with the service. Spring rattled through it, the shotted corpse went over with a splash, Mrs Spring struck up, we all sang "Rock af Ages", and the "amen" hadn't died away before Spring had strode to the unfortunate Looney and kicked his backside again so hard that he went clean down the booby hatch to the main deck. I've often thought how instructive it would have been for our divinity students to see how the offices for the dead were conducted aboard the Balliol College.
However, this was just another incident which I relate to show you what kind of a lunatic Spring was; I suppose it stands out in my mind because the next few weeks were so uneventful — that may seem an extraordinary thing to say about a slave voyage on the Middle Passage, but once you are used to conditions, however remarkable, you start to twiddle your thumbs and find life a bore, I had little to do beyond stand my watches, help dance the slaves, and continue the instruction of Lady Caroline Lamb. She took to following me about, and had to be made to wear a cotton dress that the sailinaker ran up, in case Mrs Spring caught sight of her — as though she'd never seen naked black wenches before, by the hundred, Lady Caroline Lamb didn't care for this, and whenever she was in my berth she used to haul the dress off, and sit stark by the foot of my cot, like a black statue, waiting to be educated, one way or the other.
One other thing I should mention, because it turned out to be important, was the behaviour of Looney. Whether Spring's hammering had driven him even more barmy I can't say, but he was a changed man after Comber died. He'd been a willing, happy idiot, but now he became sullen, and started if anyone spoke to him, and took to muttering to himself in corners. I cuffed him smartly to make him stop it, but he wouldn't; he just blubbered and mowed and shuddered if Spring's name was even mentioned. "He's the Devil!" he whined. "The b––y Devil! He bashed us, for nowt. He did, the ––." And he would crawl away, whimpering obscenities, to find a place to hide. Even Sullivan, who was softer with him than most, couldn't prevail on him to do his duties aft as steward, and the cook's Chinese mate had to serve in Spring's cabin.
So we ran westward, and then north-west, for about a month if I remember rightly, until one morning I learned that we were out of the Atlantic and into the Caribbean. It all looked alike to me, for the weather had continued fine the whole way and I'd never worn more than my jersey, but now a change came over the ship. Each day there was gun drill at the long nines and twelves, which struck me as ominous, and you could sense a growing restlessness among the hands: where men off watch had been content to loaf before, they now kept watching the horizon and sniffing the wind; either Spring or Sullivan was always at the after rail with the glass; whenever a large sail was sighted Spring would have the guns shotted and their crews standing by. As the weather grew even hotter, tempers got shorter; the stench from the slave-deck was choking in its foulness, and even the constant murmuring and moaning of the cargo seemed to me to have taken on a deeper, more sinister note. This was the time, I learned, when slave mutinies sometimes broke out, as more of them died — although only five perished all told in our ship — and the others became sullen and desperate. You'd been able to feel the misery and fear down on the slave-deck, but now you could feel the brooding hatred; it was in the way they shuffled sulkily round when they were danced, heads sunk and eyes shifting, while the hands stood guard with the needle-guns, and the light swivel pieces were kept armed and trained to sweep the decks if need be. I kept as well away from those glowering black brutes as I could; even the sharks which followed the ship didn't look more dangerous — and there were always half a dozen of them, dark sinuous shapes gliding through the blue water a couple of fathoms down, hoping for another corpse to come overside,
I wasn't the only one in a fine state of nerves on the last week's run along the old Spanish Main; apparently even Spring was apprehensive, for instead of running up north-west to the Windward Passage and our intended destination — which was somewhere on the north side of Cuba — he held almost due west for the Mosquito Coast, which if anything is a more God-forsaken shore than the one we had left in Africa. I saw it only as a far distant line on our port beam, but its heavy air lay on the ship like a blanket; the pitch bubbled between the planks, and even the wind seemed to have come from a blast furnace door. By the time we stood into the bay at Roatan, which you'll find on the map in the Islas de la Bahia, off the Honduras Coast, we were a jittery, sun-dried ship, and only thankful that we'd come safe through with never a Yankee patroller or garda costa in sight.27