Q: What’s the difference between a dog and a fox?
A: About four drinks.)
But Cringle kept his distance; the competition to prove the purity of one’s gender, I’m guessing, made him uncomfortable, even melancholy, and this cost him the respect of the others, who claimed the mate, at age twenty-nine, was a virgin. Little wonder then that he was relaxed only when alone, there on watch, or reading, or talking with me once he learned that I’d grown up in the household of a (Thomist) theologian.
“They can’t feel it,” he said the night before we sighted land, looking back from the rail to where two men were carousing around a lantern. His gaze drifted from me back toward row after row of white-maned, foamy waves. That night the sea was full of explosions, rumblings deep as the earth tremors I’d learned to fear in southern Illinois, like the Devil knocking on the ground’s thin crust. “Three quarters of the world’s surface,” said Cringle, “is covered by that formless Naught, and I dislike it, Calhoun, being hemmed in by Nothing, this bottomless chaos breeding all manner of monstrosities and creatures that defy civilized law. These waters are littered with wrecked vessels. And I’ve seen monsters, oh, yes, such things are real down there.” He laughed bleakly. “Down there, reality fits more the dreams of slugs and snakes than men. ’Tis frightening to me sometimes,” he added, looking from me to his feet, “that all our reasoning and works are so provisional, so damned fragile, and someday we pass away like the stain of breath on a mirror and sink back into that from whence we’ve come.” He fumbled through his pockets for his pipe, then puffed hard to get it going. “They skim along the surface, the others; they have no feeling for what the sea is”. He gave a slow, Byronic sigh. “Sometimes I envy them for their stupidity.”
When he talked like this he frightened me. I wondered if the others were right about his being weak, or enfeebled somehow, and I hardly knew how to reply. “We’ll be on land soon enough. I heard Squibb say we’d put to at the factory within the week.”
The mate smiled gently as if I’d said something stupid. “We’re taking on Allmuseri tribesmen, Calhoun. Not Ashanti. Nor even Kru or Hausa — them, at least, I can understand. Have you ever seen an Allmuseri?”
I had to admit that I had not.
“Don’t feel bad.” His smile vanished. “Few men have. Arab traders will bring them from the interior, I’m told, because no European has been to their village and lived to tell of it. They are an old people. Older, some say, than the!Kung Tribe of Southern Africa, people who existed when the planet — the galaxy, even — was a ball of fire and steam. And not like us at all. No, not like you either, though you are black. In all the records there is but one sentence about these Allmuseri, and that from a Spanish explorer named Rafael García, whose home is now an institution for the incurably insane in Havana.” He was silent again, biting down hard on the stem of his pipe. “I do not feel good about this cargo, Calhoun.”
“That sentence,” I asked him. “What did Garcia say?”
Cringle stared back to the sea, leaning on the rail, his voice blurred, then obliterated by the wind; I had to strain to hear him. “Sorcerers!” he said. “They’re a whole tribe — men, women, and tykes — of devil-worshiping, spell-casting wizards.”
Entry, the third JUNE 23, 1830
Forty-one days after leaving New Orleans, we coasted in on calm waters, a breeze at our backs, and the skipper set all hands to unmooring the ship, bringing her slowly like a hearse to anchorage alongside the trading post at Bangalang. It was a rowdy fort, all right. Cringle told me the barracoons were built by the Royal African Company in 1683—one of several well-fortified western forts always endangered by hostile, headhunting natives nearby, by competing merchants, and over two centuries residents at the fort had fought first the Dutch, then the French for control of Negro slaves. Lately, it had fallen into the soft, uncallused hands of Owen Bogha, the halfbreed son of a brutal slave trader from Liverpool and the black princess of a small tribe on the Rio Pongo. He was a sensualist. A powdered fop and Anglophile who dyed his chest and pubic hairs blond and, as did other men of the day plagued by head lice big as beans, shaved his pate and wore perfumed wigs. Educated in England, this man Bogha, who greatly enjoyed wealth and the same gaming tables played by Captain Falcon in Paris, returned to take advantage of his father’s property and mother’s prestige in Bangalang, overseeing from his great hilltop home the many warehouses, bazaars, harems, and Moslem caravans that crawled from the interior during the Dry Season. The skipper stayed at his home most nights, consuming stuffed fish and raisin wine, and giving Bogha news of “civilization” back in England and America — he was starving for news, claimed Bogha, in this filthy, Godforsaken hole. And Cringle, being an officer, was invited too, but said he couldn’t abide flesh merchants; in fact, he abhorred everything about Bangalang, and slept instead with the rest of the crew on deck in the open air to escape the heat below.
As for myself, I was simply glad to be ashore. It had been unsettling and claustrophobic, out there with the ship cleaving waves the color of root medicine, soughing wind that broke the spider-web tracery of rigging like thread, and the sky and sea blurred together into a pewter gray gloom without a stitch, without outlines, without a bottom to their depths, and sometimes, when we could not see the horizon and sailed through endless fog and shifting mist, I’d felt such dizzying entrapment — of being deprived of such basic directions as left and right, up and down — that I screamed myself awake some nights, choking on the rank male sweat that hung around my hammock like wet clothing. I ached from cleaning pots in the cookroom, and I’d grown tired of my clothes being so perpetually wet from deckwash, the slap of rainwind, and leaks in the orlop that once I had the feeling that the toes on my left foot were webbed. On top of that, Cringle had shouted at me so often for being slow, or asleep during my watch, that I could tell you which of his teeth had been worked on in Boston or Philadelphia, pulled in another city or by a dentist in New Orleans. I wished in vain for dry breeches, floorboards that didn’t move, a bowl of warm milk at bedtime, and sometimes — aye — for Isadora. Worse, I kept a light cold, and my incessant coughing gave me headaches. Even so, I could not join the others in their banter after we lowered anchor, or even drink with much gusto — stale beer gave me the johnnytrots — but simply lie quietly in my bunk, wondering if in a single fantastic evening I had become Captain Ebenezer Falcon’s shipboard bride.