♦ ♦ ♦
Mungo was in luck. He arrived in Pisania on June 12, 1797, with one thought in mind: booking passage to England on any boat that would have him. But the monsoon season was settling in with its rot and pestilence, and he was afraid he’d have to wait it out before another boat landed on the Gambia. It could be months. He drew a bill on the African Association through Dr. Laidley, paid Karfa Taura handsomely, and settled in for a long, anticlimactic wait. But on the third day of his vigil, by purest coincidence, an American slaver sailed up the river to exchange a cargo of rum and tobacco for men, women, and children. The Charlestown was bound for South Carolina, departing on the seventeenth. Without hesitating, the explorer signed on: better to take a circuitous route home than wait out the rains in a leaky back room in Pisania. After two years on the Dark Continent, he was aching for some light.
On the morning of the seventeenth the explorer shaved, slipped into the clothes Dr. Laidley had provided him, and climbed aboard The Charlestown. The deck creaked under his feet as he set his valise down and tried to ascertain where his cabin might be located. He could see nothing. Fog hovered over the water like the underside of a dream, catching at the rigging, dissolving the quarterdeck. Vague forms glided ghostlike through the haze, mosquitoes whined. It was hot as an iron foundry. Puzzled, the explorer stood rooted to the deck and watched two figures gesticulating like Punch and Judy through a curtain of mist.
“We got to wait till the soup clears off, Cap’n,” said the shorter of the two.
“Draw the anchor, Mr. Frip. We sail immediately.”
“But—” (there was the sound of mosquito slapping and a guttural, heartfelt curse).
“But me no buts, Mister. Stay here in this fetid shithole another ten minutes and half the crew’ll be down with the shivers and the black vomit.
Haul that anchor, I say!”
The smaller figure drew off into the gloom, mumbling and swatting: “Can’t even find the fuckin’ thing in this shit. . Ouch! Sonofabitchin’ moskeeters. .”
It took two weeks to get down the river to Fort Goree, held up as they were by heavy fog, snags and contradictory winds. Four seaman, the ship’s surgeon and three slaves died of fever along the way. At Goree the Captain informed Mungo that the ship would be unavoidably detained because he was unable to obtain provisions for the crossing. “Detained?” said Mungo, his heart sinking. For two months now — lying at Kamalia, struggling through the Jallonka Wilderness — he had been sustained by visions of the eager, attentive faces ranged round the conference table in Soho Square, of Ailie in her underwear, of his book and burgeoning celebrity. He’d survived disease, humiliation, exhaustion and despair, and now he was ready to reap his reward. “For how long?” he asked.
The Captain pulled on his dogskin gloves and offered the explorer a Raleigh cigar. “There’s a relief boat due in at Goree in mid-September,” he said. “We can stock up then and be on our way.”
Mid-September! He couldn’t believe it. Three months more in this pest-ridden hole, three months more bobbing in a rotten berth off of a last-chance garrison maintained by the dregs of London. He may as well have stayed at Pisania, with Dr. Laidley. There at least he could have had a glass of wine, some intelligent conversation, a room to himself. Here he had convicts for companions, a hold full of moribund black faces, cockroaches longer than a man’s finger, and the incessant creeping rot that made Goree one of the world’s more pestilential spots. So near and yet so far. He gave way to depression, lay in his berth and watched the ship rot around him.
The Charlestown finally set sail on October first, the explorer having been pressed into assuming the role of the late surgeon. He hadn’t made much use of his medical knowledge in the interior, but summoned up all Dr. Anderson had taught him in order to deal with the frightening conditions aboard ship. The American slavers, because their crews were smaller, were far less humane than the British. For fear of mutiny the slaves were kept in irons throughout the voyage. They lived in the dark, damp and cold, wallowing in their own waste, prey to consumption, typhus, hepatitis, racked with malarial fevers. The irons wore the flesh from wrists and ankles; maggots hatched in the wounds. Mungo did his best. He let blood, applied leeches, forced vinegar down their throats. Eight died at Goree, eleven more at sea. The stiffened corpses were dragged from their irons and tossed into the spume, where quick pelagic sharks fought over the remains.
The crew didn’t fare much better. Three died at Goree, another two at sea. But as it turned out, this was the least of the Captain’s worries. A far more pressing problem was the leaks that had developed in the hull while the ship sat at anchor off Goree. Now, on the high seas, these leaks had become critical. So critical in fact that the most able-bodied slaves were released from their irons in order to man the pumps. Fourteen-hour shifts, the whip cracking over their heads. They pumped, fainted from exhaustion, were lashed to consciousness, and pumped again. Still, the boat was taking on so much water it became clear that it would never make South Carolina. It became clear to some, that is.
“Cap’n — you’ve got to make for the West Indies or before you know it we’ll be treading water in the company of them sharks out there.”
“You’re an educated man, Mr. Frip. Take a look over the gunwale and read me what’s writ along the bow: I think you’ll find that it says The Charlestown, does it not? Well, Sir, that’s where I’ve been paid to take her and that’s where she’ll go.”
“Begging your pardon, Cap’n, Sir, but me and the crew has been talking amongst ourselves, Sir, and we’ve unanimously decided to break out our seamen’s dirks and ventilate your domineering hide till you look like one of them fountains in downtown Richmond, Sir, if you don’t change course for Antigua within thirty seconds by my pocketwatch, with all due respect, Sir.”
♦ ♦ ♦
From Antigua, the explorer was able to catch the Chesterfield Packet, which had stopped at St. John’s for the mail on the return voyage from the Leeward Islands. The ship sailed on the twenty-fourth of November, and drew within sight of Falmouth on the morning of December twenty-second, 1797. Shorebirds wheeled in the sky, the wind flung spray over the decks. There was ice on the rail, and a thin watery snow added sting to the gusts. The crew was invisible, the Captain in bed, the cook’s terrier huddled beneath the stove. But Mungo Park, after two years and seven months in exile, stood beside the helmsman with a grin on his face as the distant rocky isle rode up over the waves.
♦ COLD FEET ♦
A year is nothing: a feather in the breeze, a breath of air. Turn around and it’s gone. Ice, bud, leaf, twig. Geese on the pond, stubble in the field. Three hundred sixty-five mornings, three hundred sixtyfive nights. Minor lacerations, a sprained ankle, runny nose, the death of a distant relative. There’s a squirrel in the attic, a tree down in a storm. The clock in the hallway cranks round seven hundred and thirty times. Windows are raised, shades drawn, dishes, cups and spoons dirtied and scrubbed, dirtied and scrubbed. Thunder hits the hills like a mallet, snow climbs the fenceposts, sunlight burnishes the windows like copper. A year. One of how many: fifty? sixty? The days chew away at it, insidious.
♦ ♦ ♦
Ailie huddles in the corner of her bed, head buried in her hands. The window is gray with dawn and the cold slashing rain that began just after dark. Katlin Gibbie lies beside her, breathing easily, her nine-month-old boy curled into her breast. Betty Deatcher, a cousin from Kelso, snores on a pallet in the corner. The coals in the fireplace have turned to ash.